book reviews 2022 uk

Book reviews: 47 of the best novels of 2022

New releases include The Singularities by John Banville and Saha by Cho Nam-Joo

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1. The Singularities by John Banville

2. saha by cho nam-joo (trans. jamie chang), 3. bournville by jonathan coe.

• 4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

5. Darling by India Knight

6. the passenger by cormac mccarthy, 7. demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver, 8. liberation day by george saunders, 9. lucy by the sea by elizabeth strout, 10. the romantic by william boyd, 11. the marriage portrait by maggie o’farrell, 12. carrie soto is back by taylor jenkins reid, 13. lessons by ian mcewan, 14. the ink black heart by robert galbraith, 15. haven by emma donoghue, 16. trust by hernan diaz, 17. the last white man by mohsin hamid, 18. a hunger by ross raisin, 19. acts of service by lillian fishman, 20. the twilight world by werner herzog, 21. the exhibitionist by charlotte mendelson, 22. vladimir by julia may jonas, 23. to paradise by hanya yanagihara, 24. joan by katherine j. chen, 25. the house of fortune by jessie burton, 26. the seaplane on final approach by rebecca rukeyser, 27. the young accomplice by benjamin wood, 28. the sidekick by benjamin markovits, 29. nonfiction: a novel by julie myerson, 30. you have a friend in 10a by maggie shipstead, 31. very cold people by sarah manguso, 32. trespasses by louise kennedy, 33. elizabeth finch by julian barnes, 34. the candy house by jennifer egan, 35. companion piece by ali smith, 36. young mungo by douglas stuart, 37. sell us the rope by stephen may, 38. french braid by anne tyler, 39. good intentions by kasim ali, 40. the school for good mothers by jessamine chan, 41. pure colour by sheila heti, 42. a previous life by edmund white, 43. a class of their own by matt knott, 44. our country friends by gary shteyngart, 45. scary monsters by michelle de kretser, 46. free love by tessa hadley, 47. the fell by sarah moss.

As the author of three trilogies, John Banville is “no stranger to using recurring characters”, said Ian Critchley in Literary Review . But The Singularities takes this to extremes: so stuffed is it with “old Banville protagonists” that it is close to being a “literary greatest-hits collection”. The setting is Arden House – the crumbling Irish country house from Banville’s 2009 work The Infinities . Various characters from that work are joined by William Jaybey (from The Newton Letter ) and Freddie Montgomery (from The Book of Evidence ), among others. One doesn’t begrudge Banville his “game with his readers”: The Singularities is a “pleasure to read”.

With its “assembly of characters” and country house setting, this novel seems to have the “makings of a whodunnit”, said Tom Ball in The Times . But “no one dies”, or even falls out; and, in fact, little of consequence happens. Fortunately, “you don’t read Banville for his taut plots”. You read him because, every few pages, there’s a sentence “so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street”.

Knopf 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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The South Korean writer Cho Nam-Joo is best known for her 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper . A story of “everyday sexism”, it sold more than a million copies in South Korea and sparked a national conversation about the status of women. Cho’s latest novel, Saha , is “just as political” – though this time the focus is on class. Set in a dystopian future, the novel follows a disparate group of characters who live in some dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of “Town”, a fiercely hierarchical “privatised city-nation” where all aspects of life are tightly controlled. Offering a powerful critique of “plutocracy, systemic inequality” and “gendered violence”, the novel is “utterly captivating”.

Cho’s dystopia is “not particularly original”, and her plotting can be “surprisingly loose”, said Mia Levitin in The Daily Telegraph . But the novel’s characterisation is “touching” – and its themes are certainly powerful. At a time of rising global inequality – South Korea’s economy is dominated by “mega-corporations” – this is a book that “resonates widely”.

Scribner 240pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state-of-the-nation novel,” said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman . But one who can is Jonathan Coe. His latest charts 75 years of British history, following the lives of a single family, headed by matriarch Mary Lamb, who live on the outskirts of Birmingham, near the Bournville factory. Coe covers so much ground in just 350 pages by alighting only on key moments: VE Day in 1945; the Queen’s coronation; the 1966 World Cup; the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The result is a “piercing” satire on Englishness that is “designed to make you think by making you laugh”. This is a warm and comforting book, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times – like a “mug of hot chocolate”.

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The final section, set during Covid-19, is very moving, said J.S. Barnes in Literary Review . But much of this novel is “flat and formulaic”. The use of hindsight is clunky: when Mary visits The Mousetrap in 1953, she thinks: “I imagine it will be closing before very long.” It feels like a “procession through well-worn territory”, rather than something designed to “excite or entertain”.

Viking 368pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn is a “fine prose stylist, able to evoke the past with vivid immediacy”, said Alex Preston in The Observer . His ninth novel is a sweeping epic that consists of three interlinked sections. In the 1780s, Laura Merrymount – daughter of the Gainsborough-esque portraitist William Merrymount – strives to escape from her father’s shadow and become a painter herself. In Chelsea a century later, we meet the young artist Paul Stransom and his sister Maggie – who abandoned her own dreams of becoming an artist to care for their dying mother. And finally, in 1980s Kentish Town another artist, Nell Cantrip, suddenly acquires late-career fame. Marked by its “intricate”, immaculate plotting, this novel is a “rollicking read”.

I found the plotting a bit predictable, and the characterisation heavy-handed, said Imogen Hermes Gowar in The Guardian . But the book has interesting things to say “about women’s work and talent, and the life cycle of art”; and it is deftly put together by a writer who delights in the “granular details of an era”, while also understanding its broad sweep.

Abacus 432pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

India Knight’s new book is a “contemporary reimagining” of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love , said Christina Patterson in The Sunday Times . Updating “such a beloved novel” certainly isn’t easy – but Knight has pulled off the task with aplomb. In her version, the four Radlett children – Linda, Louisa, Jassy and Robin – are not the progeny of an English lord, but of an ageing and reclusive rock star. Desperate to protect his children from “modern life”, he has purchased a “vast Norfolk estate” – and it’s there that we first encounter Linda and her siblings, through the eyes of their cousin Franny. The narrative tracks their passage to adulthood, and their romantic entanglements – centred on “Linda’s pursuit of love”.

Darling works because, as in Mitford’s original, the details are so “bang on”, said Emma Beddington in The Spectator . Sometimes, Knight artfully tweaks them: she replaces hunting with swimming, and gives her adult characters jobs (Linda runs a café in Dalston). Mitford “diehards can rest easy: your blood vessels are safe with this faithful, fiercely funny homage”.

Fig Tree 288pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years explores “the very boundaries of human understanding”, said Nicholas Mancusi in Time . Investigating a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico, diver Bobby Western discovers that one passenger is missing; soon he is being harassed by government agents. But the pretence that this is a thriller doesn’t last long: chapters in which Bobby discusses the meaning of life alternate with ones in which his maths genius sister Alice experiences schizophrenic hallucinations. It’s a deeply weird book, held together by “chuckle-out-loud” humour. A companion novel, Stella Maris , focusing on Alice, does little to explain it – but together they are “staggering”.

Sorry, said James Walton in The Times , but I can’t remember a recent novel so wildly indifferent to what its readers might enjoy, or even understand. The conversations that make up the bulk of it, ranging from nuclear physics to Kennedy’s assassination, are a complete ragbag. McCarthy’s gift for description and dialogue remains undiminished, but there’s no escaping the sense that The Passenger is “a big old mess”.

Picador 400pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel is a retelling of David Copperfield , transposed to the “valleys of southwest Virginia at the height of America’s opioid crisis”, said James Riding in The Times . Demon Copperhead, the “rambunctious hero”, is “born in a trailer to a teenage single mother”, and grows up in a world of neglectful child protection services and dubious guardians. The characters are all recognisable from the Dickens novel – but appear in new guises: “Steerforth becomes Fast Forward, a pill-popping quarterback; Uriah Heep is U-Haul, a football coach’s errand boy”. Daring and entertaining, Demon Copperhead is “shockingly successful” – “like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers”.

It’s a promising premise, not least because in its extreme inequality, post-industrial America resembles Victorian England, said Jessa Crispin in The Daily Telegraph . Yet while Kingsolver closely cleaves to the story of the original, she “breaks the most important rule of working in the Dickensian mode”: the need to “show the reader a good time”. Hers is a retelling “beset by earnestness” – and as a result it falls flat.

Faber 560pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Besides being a Booker Prize winner with his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , George Saunders is “routinely hailed as the world’s best short story writer”, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph . The American’s dazzling new collection – his first since 2013’s Tenth of December – shows why he garners such acclaim. As is customary in a Saunders collection, quite a few of the tales are “deeply strange”: in the title story, three people are kept permanently “pinioned to a wall”, enacting scenes from American history; another story is set in a theme park that has never received any visitors. Around half the tales, however, explore “recognisable social and political dilemmas”: two employees clashing at work; a mother’s despair about the state of America after her son is pushed over by a tramp. And whether Saunders is engaging with contemporary reality, or “taking us somewhere else entirely”, he never forgets that the most important duty of a writer is to make his work “winningly readable”.

Tenth of December was a “marvellous” collection, but unfortunately Liberation Day doesn’t hit the same heights, said Charles Finch in the Los Angeles Times . Although “the standard of Saunders’ writing remains astronomically high”, there are times here when he seems almost on auto-pilot, reprising themes and situations he has previously explored. It’s true that if you’ve read Saunders before, then parts of Liberation Day will sound “like self-parody”, said John Self in The Times . But then again, “it’s churlish to knock a true original for repeating himself”. When he’s at his best, Saunders’ “oblique, farcical, tragic” view of the world still has the ability to “take the top of your head off”.

Bloomsbury 256pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

“Elizabeth Strout is writing masterpieces at a pace you might not suspect from their spaciousness and steady beauty,” said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian . Lucy by the Sea is the third sequel to her acclaimed bestseller My Name is Lucy Barton . It takes place early during the pandemic, when Lucy and her ex-husband, William, leave New York for a friend’s empty beach house in Maine – for “just a few weeks”, he says. It is “a study of a later-life reunion between a man and woman who married in their 20s”. It isn’t “a tender tale”, as William isn’t an easy man to like, but it is “as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for”.

Over the course of three Lucy Barton books, Strout has “created one of the most quizzical characters in modern fiction”, said Claire Allfree in The Times . Still, even this “avid fan” found herself wondering whether this instalment is “surplus to requirements”. This, sadly, is a novel that “mistakes simplistic observation for subtle insight, bathos for pathos”, and Lucy herself is “downright annoying”. I disagree entirely, said Julie Myerson in The Observer . Lucy by the Sea is a wonderful evocation of lockdown life. It is “her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet”.

Viking 304pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

William Boyd’s 17th novel – his first set in the 19th century – is an “old-fashioned bildungsroman” that follows its “hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatetic life”, said Lucy Atkins in The Sunday Times .

After growing up in Ireland and Oxford, Cashel “impulsively joins the army” and finds himself “facing the French bayonets at the Battle of Waterloo”. He subsequently “hangs out” with Byron and Shelley in Italy, spends time in east India and New England, and becomes an opium addict, an author and a diplomat. Although the authorial winks can be groan-inducing – “Shelley can barely swim”, a friend of the poet declares – it is a “masterclass” in narrative construction and its ending is “genuinely poignant”.

Boyd is “as magically readable as ever”, said Jake Kerridge in The Daily Telegraph . But amid the non-stop action and “endless verbal anachronisms”, Cashel never quite emerges as a fully rounded character. Compared with Boyd’s previous “whole life novels”, such as Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress , The Romantic feels “glaringly synthetic”.

Viking 464pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Maggie O’Farrell’s last novel, the brilliant Hamnet , “fleshed out” the lives of Shakespeare’s children, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Daily Telegraph . Her latest brings another neglected historical figure into the light – the noblewoman Lucrezia de’ Medici. In 1560, a 16-year-old Lucrezia left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso d’Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. “Within a year, she was dead”; it was rumoured Alfonso had killed her. Taking these “suggestive details” as inspiration (as Robert Browning did in his famous poem My Last Duchess ), O’Farrell “constructs a convincing human drama”.

O’Farrell is a master of visual description, said Claire Allfree in The Times . A tiger moves “like honey dripping from a spoon”; through a window, the sound of sobbing drifts upwards “like smoke”. Yet the “headily perfumed” prose proves oddly dulling: rather than “springing forth messily alive”, Lucrezia seems “trapped beneath the weight” of the “relentless” description. Although it sets out to bring Lucrezia back to life, it ends up being a “bloodless book”.

Tinder Press 438pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a TikTok phenomenon, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . Thanks in part to BookTok – the social media app’s books community – her novels about glamorous women finding fame and fortune have sold in their millions. Continuing with that “winning strategy”, her latest centres on a “hotshot American tennis pro”.

Carrie Soto is a former world No. 1, who has won a record 20 grand slams. Now in her late 30s, she mounts an “unlikely comeback”, prompted by the emergence of a new star, Londoner Nicki Chan. This is a “compulsive, soapy page-turner” with “more substance than the average beach read”. In short, it’s an “ace” of an “escapist romp”.

Jenkins Reid has a “nose for a cultural moment”, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . And so this book’s appearance so soon after the retirement of Serena Williams – clearly an inspiration for Carrie – is “coincidental but not surprising”. Don’t expect “psychological depth”; “fundamentally, this is a sports story”, with whole chapters devoted to single matches. But it’s certainly very “fun to read”.

Hutchinson Heinemann 384pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Ian McEwan’s novels are often “lean, controlled enquiries” into specific historical moments, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman : 1950s Germany in The Innocent ; the Thatcherite 1980s in A Child in Time . But his 18th is very different – “baggier and more protean” than any of its predecessors. It’s also, “to my mind, McEwan’s best novel in 20 years”. His protagonist, Roland Baines, is a baby boomer who bears a strong resemblance to his creator, were his creator “not a hugely successful novelist”. Roland spends his childhood in Libya, then “attends a state-run boarding school” in England. And like McEwan, he discovers as an adult that he has a long-lost brother. Yet his life is notable for its lack of direction: he “scratches out a living as a hotel lounge pianist, an occasional tennis coach and a hack”. Humble and wise, Lessons is “an intimate but sprawling story about an ordinary man’s reckoning with existence”.

As is often the case for McEwan’s protagonists, Roland’s life “hinges” on a single traumatic episode, said Edmund Gordon in the TLS . Aged 14, he begins an affair with his piano teacher, Miss Cornell – a relationship which, while he “isn’t exactly a reluctant participant”, nonetheless wounds him. A second trauma follows in his 30s, when Roland’s German-born wife, Alissa, abandons him and their baby son to pursue her ambition of becoming a novelist, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . While Roland is left a single parent, Alissa – somewhat implausibly – becomes “Germany’s greatest writer”. As the decades pass, the “social and domestic cavalcade of Roland’s life” plays out against the backdrop of “momentous global happenings” – from 9/11 to the Covid lockdowns. A “vividly detailed lifetime chronicle”, Lessons is a “tour de force”.

Yet it has its problems, said Claire Lowdon in The Spectator . This is a novel full of dropped storylines and non sequiturs, and McEwan can’t resist those “overbearing news bulletins” that have peppered his recent work (“The Profumo affair was only a year away” etc.). Still, Lessons is consistently enjoyable, and there’s something to be said for the “novelty” of reading a McEwan novel that feels more like “a Jonathan Franzen”. At the age of 74, his desire to try new things is impressive. “Despite the rambling and the rushed patches, here is a whole, unruly life between the covers of a single book: a literary feat of undeniable majesty.”

Cape 496pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

This new crime novel by J.K. Rowling, using her Robert Galbraith pseudonym, has Cormoran Strike, her Afghan-War-veteran-turned-private detective, getting to grips with the world of online trolls, said Joan Smith in The Sunday Times .

Strike and his partner Robin are called to investigate the stabbing to death of a woman named Edie. She was the co-creator of a YouTube cartoon featuring “ghoulish” characters cavorting in a cemetery, and the finger of suspicion falls on a gamer known as “Anomie”, who had subjected Edie to a “torrent of lurid accusation” after claiming that she’d ripped off his ideas.

While the novel works as a “superlative piece of crime fiction”, its subject matter also feels highly pointed: Rowling has herself faced accusations of plagiarism, and she has been subjected to savage online abuse for arguing that aspects of trans ideology lead to the “erasure of the word ‘woman’”.

Sphere 1,024pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set in early 7th century Ireland, and centres on a trio of monks who build a monastic community on a tiny island, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . The men set out in their “precarious boat” after their leader Artt – a “legendary holy man” – has a “vision of an island in the western sea”. When they reach a “large rock” covered in “birds, guano and little else”, Artt is convinced it’s the place from his dream – and resolves that he and his companions will never leave. Haven may sound like a work that “few readers have been praying for”, but it proves “transporting, sometimes unsettling and eventually shocking”.

There are some “striking formal similarities” between this novel and Donoghue’s 2010 bestseller Room , inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, said Paraic O’Donnell in The Guardian . Both are works of “radical minimalism”, about people who “struggle to preserve their humanity in utter isolation”. Although Haven is “created in a muted palette”, this is a work of impressive “narrative sustenance” – and is “crowded with quietly beautiful details”.

Picador 272pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated first novel, In the Distance, centred on a “penniless young Swedish immigrant” in California, said Jonathan Lee in The Guardian . His second concerns a “character at the other end of the economic scale” – a “Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York” named Andrew Bevel. Rather than tell Bevel’s story straight, Diaz embeds it in four “interconnected narratives”: a fictionalised novel based on Bevel’s life; Bevel’s unfinished autobiography; a memoir by his ghostwriter; and fragments from his wife’s “long-withheld diary”. It sounds tricksy, but it’s surprisingly readable – like a “brilliantly twisted mix” of Borges and J.M. Coetzee, with “a dash” of Italo Calvino.

The “knotty ingenuity” of this novel makes it deserving of its place on this year’s Booker longlist, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . It is “destined to be known as one of the great puzzle-box novels”. I doubt that, said John Self in The Times . Parts are “original and surprising”, but overall it’s “well behaved and dull”, and consumed by its own cleverness. Like the tycoon at its centre, it’s “all smart, no heart”.

Picador 416pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel begins with a transformation, said Alex Preston in The Observer : Anders wakes up one morning to find his skin has changed from white to black. This metamorphosis is not explained; instead, the focus is on its impact on the people around Anders. When he goes out, he feels “vaguely menaced”; his boss tells him he’d have killed himself had it happened to him. But then Anders finds that similar transfor­mations are taking place across the US, until eventually there is “just one white man left”. Written in “incantatory” sentences, The Last White Man is a “strange, beautiful allegorical tale”.

Mysterious transformations can be “fertile terrain” for fiction, said Houman Barekat in The Times : one thinks, most obviously, of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But while that work resists easy interpretation, Hamid’s aims are all too obvious: this is “yet another liberal parable” about the “psychic underpinnings of racial prejudice”. Ultimately, it’s a book that says more about the “publishing industry’s anxious scrabble for topicality” than about “the human condition”.

Hamish Hamilton 192pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

Most books billed as telling us “what it means to be human” really do no such thing, said John Self in The Observer . Ross Raisin’s A Hunger is an exception. The tale of a London “sous chef in her mid-50s”, this is the fourth novel by this talented writer – and it is his most “ambitious” yet, encompassing “work and family, desires and appetites, responsibility and identity”.

Raisin has always excelled at portraying working lives, said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian : Waterline , his second novel, centred on a Clyde shipbuilder; A Natural , his third, was about a lower league footballer. Here, he captures the rhythms of kitchen life so skilfully that it “makes one realise the degree to which work is still under-charted territory in literary fiction”. Yet the novel is about much more than cooking: Patrick, Anita’s husband of 30 years, has recently developed early-onset dementia, forcing her to combine the stresses of her job with a new role as a carer “changing incontinence pads”. The result is a “deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy” novel about the “conflicting demands of work and care”.

I wasn’t impressed, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Although Raisin’s gifts for “startling descriptive prose” are evident – notably in a bravura opening set in a walk-in fridge – the novel overall is let down by “wooden dialogue”, characters who don’t seem real, and a clumsy structure in which Anita’s present-day travails are juxtaposed with “rushed and skimpy” scenes from her early life. It may not be perfect, but this is a deft exploration of “the guilt that accompanies female ambition”, said Amber Medland in the FT . Daring in what it sets out to achieve, A Hunger is equally “impressive in its execution”.

Jonathan Cape 464pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

Lillian Fishman’s debut is one of the most “searching and enthralling” novels about sex I’ve read in years, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman . “Eve is a 28-year-old barista from Brooklyn in a long-term relationship with Romi, a paediatrician.” Although Eve considers herself a lesbian, she has fantasies about sleeping with a “wild number of people”. When she posts nude pictures of herself online, they catch the attention of an artist called Olivia – who proves to be acting on behalf of a “tall, wealthy man in his 30s” named Nathan, who makes Eve his sexual “toy”. “Part erotic Bildungsroman, part melancholy comedy of manners”, Acts of Service is “startlingly accomplished”.

Well, I found it thoroughly tedious, said Jessa Crispin in The Times – less a novel than a crude allegory. Nathan is “basically Christian Grey from Fifty Shades rendered in marginally better prose”. Fishman’s reflections on the corrupting effects of “patriarchy” and “capitalism” have been far better expressed elsewhere. Overhyped and unoriginal, this is a disappointing addition to the “library of endless want”.

Europa Editions 224pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

For 29 years after the end of the Second World War, a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda held out on a small island in the Philippines, believing his comrades were still fighting, said Anthony Gardner in The Mail on Sunday . Now the great film director Werner Herzog, who befriended Onoda in 1997, has written an imaginative reconstruction of his experiences. Steeped in the atmosphere of the jungle, it’s an “enthralling” novel that explores the nature of time and warfare with great mastery.

Onoda’s single-minded intransigence makes him an archetypal Herzog hero, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and this “Hemingwayesque” novella is highly cinematic, with short chapters and vivid scene-setting. But its refined prose gives it a sculptural quality too: its descriptions of the natural world are radiant. Herzog manages to inhabit the soldier’s mind, and to create a “visionary” narrative, said Peter Carty in The i Paper. Moral issues – Onoda killed a number of islanders – are somewhat sidelined, but this beautifully crafted book is a “literary jewel” nevertheless.

Bodley Head 144pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Charlotte Mendelson’s “riotous, prize-winning novels” tend to be about messy, dysfunctional families, said Leyla Sanai in The Spectator . Her fifth centres on a “monstrous” artist named Ray Hanrahan and his downtrodden wife, Lucia. Narcissistic, abusive and controlling, Ray has “quashed” Lucia’s own artistic ambitions for decades, forcing her to minister to his needs and look after their (now grown-up) children.

With an “ostentatious private view” of his work about to open, he has summoned friends and family to their north London house. The result is a “glorious ride” of a novel – one in which “Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist”.

There is a lot going on in this novel – “at times, too much” – but the overall “effect is exhilarating”, said Susie Mesure in The Times . Moving between perspectives, Mendelson cranks the drama up to a “fiery climax”. There’s a “hint of HBO’s Succession ” in this tale of a “family in thrall to a despotic patriarch”, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph . Mingling “eroticism, absurdity and pathos”, it’s “electric”.

Mantle 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

At first glance, this debut novel seems to be yet another post-#MeToo book “dissecting sexual trauma and queasy power dynamics”, said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times . At a US liberal arts college, John, a senior English professor, finds himself accused of sexual impropriety by “seven students with whom he has had affairs”. But rather than adopt their perspective, the novel is narrated by John’s wife – who is anything but sympathetic towards them. She laments the fact that young women today seem to have “lost all agency”, and admits to having “enjoyed the space” that her husband’s infidelities provided. With its bracing take on sexual politics, Vladimir is an “astonishing debut”.

In its second half, the novel becomes primarily about “female appetite”, as the narrator develops an obsessive crush on a “gorgeous new junior professor”, said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . May Jones’s “quietly captivating” voice dazzles until the end, when the novel is let down by a “heavy-handed denouement”. Still, in its willingness to tackle “complex”, provocative themes, this is “an engrossing and clever debut”.

Picador 256pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel is the “keenly awaited” follow up to A Little Life , her “devastating story of irreparable human damage”, said David Sexton in The Sunday Times . It consists of three sections all set in the same New York building and taking place, respectively, in 1893, 1993 and 2093.

Part one re-imagines 19th century New York as a “liberal breakaway nation in which gay marriage is normal”. Part two, set in the “time of Aids”, focuses on a wealthy white lawyer and his young Hawaiian lover. Part three envisages an America that has been ravaged by “successive waves of viruses, every few years from 2020”. While a “less bludgeoningly powerful” work than A Little Life , it’s still “highly affecting”.

This is in many ways a “wantonly strange” work, said Claire Allfree in The Times : the convoluted narrative can be “frustratingly opaque”, and there’s a complete absence of humour. Yet there’s no denying Yanagihara’s skill at immersing us in the “emotional world of her characters”. For all its flaws, To Paradise is “frequently magnificent”.

Picador 720pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

The story of Joan of Arc – a 15th-century peasant girl from northeast France who became a national heroine – has been told many times before, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . But in her second novel, the American writer Katherine J. Chen offers a “fresh and utterly enthralling take”. Her Joan is not a religious icon – “gone are the visions” – but primarily a “woman of action”: she’s a child of remarkable physical gifts who, through a series of “serendipitous events”, becomes a key ally of the dauphin (later King Charles VII), helping to lead his armies against the English. “Vivid, visceral and boldly immediate”, the novel has already earned comparisons with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

At once a “mystic, martyr and war hero”, Joan is a largely “incomprehensible” figure today, said Jess Walter in The New York Times . Chen, however, has a “lively stab” at making her seem relevant – in part by imagining her as an “abused child” who uses her anger to become an “avenging warrior”. “Rich” and “visceral” in its descriptions, Joan is “stirring stuff”.

Hodder & Stoughton 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

In 2014, Jessie Burton’s debut novel The Miniaturist – about 18-year-old Nella Oortman’s coming of age in 17th century Amsterdam – became a global bestseller, said Gwendolyn Smith in The i Paper . Now Burton is back, with a “beguiling, tender sequel”, set 18 years later. Nella, now 37, is a widow (The Miniaturist climaxed with her husband’s execution for sodomy), who still lives in the “same grand address on Amsterdam’s Herengracht canal”. A “cold, austere place” in the previous book, the house is now suffused with “warmth and familiarity” – though it still “thrums with secrets”. “Wise and fabulously immersive”, this book, if anything, surpasses its predecessor.

I disagree, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph . Burton remains a “lovely writer”, who can craft “startlingly sculptural” sentences. But “where The Miniaturist was alive with spooky mystery”, this book lacks an “animating spirit”: characters, events and even the language seem contrived. “In seeking to bring more life to the characters in The Miniaturist, The House of Fortune somehow diminishes them instead.”

Picador 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Set in the Alaskan wilderness, Rebecca Rukeyser’s “wistful and sardonic” first novel is part adventure story, part coming-of-age tale, said The Irish Times . Seventeen-year-old Mira is working for the summer at a guest house run by a married couple, Stu and Maureen, alongside two other girls and a troubled chef. Much of her time is spent fantasising sexually about a boy she met the year before. Rukeyser’s descriptive prose is assured and elegant, and the story becomes increasingly tense, as Stu’s predatory behaviour towards the girls becomes apparent.

Mira’s adolescent yearning is well captured in this quirky, wry debut, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Rukeyser provides a “deftly juggled” mixture of merciless judgement and gentle compassion for her characters’ failings. There’s also plenty of comedy, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Sunday Telegraph, though the story becomes more “mature and melancholy” as it progresses. The Seaplane on Final Approach is about how “desire ruins everything”. And when the finale arrives, it is “catastrophic” – but it also provides “lengthy, gruesome fun”.

Granta 288pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

“Few people outside the literary world” have heard of 41-year-old novelist Benjamin Wood, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . That’s a shame, because he’s “wonderful”. Already the author of “three richly layered novels”, he has now written a fourth, The Young Accomplice , which is “his most original yet”. Set in the 1950s, it centres on Arthur and Florence Mayhood, “childless architects in their 30s” who, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, dream of creating a communal-living project on their Surrey farm. To help them realise this ambition, they invite a pair of borstal leavers – brother and sister Charlie and Joyce Savigear – to live with them; unsurprisingly, things go wrong.

Compared with Wood’s previous novels, which blended “storytelling punch with literary sensibility”, this book at times feels muted, said John Self in The Times . Wood spends a lot of time in his characters’ heads; you wish for a bit more action. Still, there are compensations: the characters feel like “real people”, who you miss when they’re gone. This is a book that “digs its claws into you and sticks there”.

Viking 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Benjamin Markovits’s latest novel is a “compelling account of relative failure”, said Joseph Owen in Literary Review . Brian, the narrator, is a “big fat slow” Jewish kid from Austin, Texas, who becomes childhood friends with Marcus Hayes, his high school’s basketball star. Marcus is black, and from a broken home – for a while he lives with Brian’s family – but in adulthood, when Marcus becomes an “NBA superstar”, Brian is merely a “semi-successful” sportswriter. The novel convincingly portrays Brian’s “inhibited world-view”, which is “tainted by jealousy” of his friend. The result is a “bleak, amusing, ultimately absorbing read”.

This is a novel with the “topography of a classic American story”, said Stuart Evers in The Spectator : “sport as a metaphor for the fracture of the US; friendship as a microcosm of race relations”. It feels a little dated – a bit “male and white” – and the “detailed descriptions of basketball” could put some people off. In the final act, though, when Markovits unveils “his A-game”, the novel “ignites into something compelling and emotionally resonant”.

Faber 361pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

In 2009, the novelist Julie Myerson found herself at the centre of a media storm after publishing a non-fiction account of her eldest son’s addiction to marijuana, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . The episode, she has said, drove her to a “kind of breakdown”, and she has never directly addressed it in her writing. Except that now, in a way, she has. This, her 11th novel – entitled Nonfiction – is all about “teenage drug addiction”. The narrator is a once “happily married” writer, who is looking back on her attempts to save her heroin-addicted daughter “from self-destruction”. Given her own backstory, Myerson is risking a lot with such a novel – but “the results are nothing less than incandescent”.

The title is confusing, and deliberately so, said Alex Peake-Tomkinson in The Spectator . This is Myerson’s “squarest attempt so far at autobiographical fiction”. Yet in other ways, it seems a typical work: she has always explored “her worst fears in her novels”. Although I hope she will “look beyond her own life” in future, I found this a “satisfyingly propulsive” read.

Corsair 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Maggie Shipstead’s “thrilling” historical epic, Great Circle , not only earned her a place on last year’s Booker shortlist, but also “proved a huge hit with readers”, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times . So it’s “savvy” of her publisher to bring out this collection of her short stories, written over the past 13 years. The tales vary widely in tone and setting – they transport us “from the catacombs of Paris, via an Olympic Village, to a guano island in the middle of the Pacific” – but taken together, they forcefully illustrate the “remarkable scope of Shipstead’s imagination and talent”.

While one or two of these stories seem a bit “too self-conscious”, most are superb, said Lizzy Harding in The New York Times . In the “sure standout”, “La Moretta”, a young couple’s honeymoon in Romania “transforms into folk horror à la The Wicker Man ”. Shipstead has an “unnerving ability to capture a character’s inner life in a few choice phrases”, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . “It’s a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel.”

Doubleday 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “creepy coming-of-age tale” unfolds like a “darker version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda ”, except with “no Miss Honey coming to the rescue”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Observer . Set in an “icy” Massachusetts town in the 1980s, it is narrated by Ruthie, an only child whose family is “on the edge of poverty”. Ruthie is an assiduous cataloguer of “everything she sees” – her mother’s lumpy body, her awkward dinners with richer school friends – but she doesn’t always understand the significance of what she sees. Marked by its “pitiless, minutely observed prose”, Very Cold People is a work that “will stay with me for a very long time”.

Manguso is especially good at evoking the “constraints and cruelties” of Ruthie’s home life, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times . So successfully does she portray “boring old daily pain” that it almost seems redundant when “more dramatic plot-turns arrive” towards the end of the book. Very Cold People is at its best simply as a “compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived”.

Picador 208pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

The Irish writer Louise Kennedy only began writing aged 47, but her rise has been meteoric, said Madeleine Feeny in The Spectator . The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, her debut short story collection, was “fought over” by nine publishers. And now, with this first novel, she has written what promises to be another hit. Plot-wise, Trespasses doesn’t break new ground, said Kevin Power in The Guardian: set near Belfast in 1975, it’s about a young Catholic primary school teacher who falls in love with a posh Protestant barrister. What distinguishes it is its “sense of utter conviction”. This is a story “told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event”.

Kennedy is a superbly visual writer, and her “idiomatic dialogue gives her prose real verve”, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer : the protagonist’s mother, catching sight of Helen Mirren on a chat show, describes her as a “dirty article”. Combining “unflinching authenticity” with a “flair for detail”, this is a “deftly calibrated” and ultimately “devastating” novel.

Bloomsbury 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Julian Barnes’s latest is that “old-fashioned thing, a novel of ideas”, said John Self in The Times . It is narrated by Neil, a former actor, but is really all about Elizabeth Finch, the “lecturer on a course on culture and civilisation that Neil took decades earlier”. Finch, who is “probably inspired” by Barnes’s friend, the late novelist Anita Brookner, is remembered as an inspirational teacher, someone “who obliged us – simply by example – to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness”. Neil recalls their sort-of friendship – they occasionally met for lunch – and describes his quest, in the present day, to find out more about Finch in the wake of her death. Very much a “thinky” novel, Elizabeth Finch may be “rather less fun” than most of Barnes’s books, but it “offers plenty to chew on”.

“Part of the challenge of rendering a brilliantly inspirational teacher is making them sufficiently brilliant and inspirational,” said Sameer Rahim in The Daily Telegraph . Despite Neil’s insistence on Finch’s originality, “what she actually says tends to fall flat”. “She told me that love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters,” a classmate of Neil recalls. The novel is further let down by its baffling middle section, which consists of Neil’s “stolid student essay” on the fourth century Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, whom Finch regarded as a kindred spirit, said Sam Byers in The Guardian .

It all adds up to a “work stubbornly determined to deny us its pleasures”. I disagree, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . As a teacher, Finch “blazes with vividness”, and Neil’s essay is a “bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition”. Elizabeth Finch “celebrates the cast of mind” – subtle, sceptical and ironic – that “Barnes most prizes”.

Jonathan Cape 192pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a “sibling novel” to A Visit From the Goon Squad, her bestselling 2010 novel about rock music, “Gen-X nostalgia” and the “digitalisation of everything”, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times . Consisting of interrelated short stories which zigzag about in time, it resembles its predecessor in structure – and features many of the same characters. But at its centre is a new figure: the “Mark Zuckerberg-like” Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, has created an “implausible” device known as Own Your Unconscious, which lets users upload their own and other people’s memories, and “watch them all like movies”.

The sci-fi aspects of the book are neither new nor “particularly fully realised”, said Andrew Billen in The Times : memory uploads have been tackled better elsewhere. But this is essentially a book of short stories, and most of them are excellent and “brain-stretching”. What “really astounds is the visual brilliance of Egan’s writing across these disparate tales”. She won a Pulitzer for A Visit From the Goon Squad; I hope this book “wins another”.

Corsaid 352pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Ali Smith’s first novel since her “extraordinary Seasonal Quartet ” has a fitting title, said Alex Preston in The Observer , as it “springs from the same source as its predecessors”. Like them, it was “written and published swiftly”, to cram in recent events. It’s 2021, and Sandy, an artist, is “struggling through lockdown”. Her father is in hospital following a heart attack – and she “only has his dog for company”. Smith skilfully evokes the grim monotony of pandemic life, said Catherine Taylor in the FT – from the “regularity of testing” to “the exhaustion of medical staff”.

Much of the plot concerns Sandy’s “renewed acquaintance” with an old university friend Martina, who gets in touch to tell her about her recent interrogation by UK border police, said Philip Hensher in The Daily Telegraph . This leads to Sandy meeting Martina’s twin daughters, Eden and Lea, who are full of “millennial” rage and entitlement. Covering a “lot of contemporary ground”, Companion Piece offers an entertaining portrait of the “world we live in, by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences”.

Hamish Hamilton 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Douglas Stuart’s debut, Shuggie Bain – the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize – was a “bleak autobiographical novel about a young boy caring for his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . His follow-up is “cut from the same cloth”.

Fifteen-year-old Mungo lives with his mother and two older siblings in Glasgow’s East End. “His brother, Hamish, is a Faginesque Protestant gang leader; his sister, Jodie, is a do-gooding fallen angel; and their mother, Mo-Maw, is a woman ruined by alcohol.” As the novel opens, Mungo is shooed off by his mother on a fishing trip with two menacing strangers from her Alcoholics Anonymous group, who promise to teach him “masculine pursuits”.

Interspersed with this “gruesome excursion” are chapters set a few months earlier, detailing Mungo’s first love affair, with a Catholic neighbour called James. Although this “alternating timeline” feels forced at times, this is still a “richly abundant” work packed with fine writing and “colourful characters”.

It may be felt – with some justification – that Stuart has written the same book twice, said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph . Yet he “makes small differences count”. Because Mungo is older than Shuggie, he is able to see in his sexuality “not just a source of difference and alienation, but a possible route to escape and emancipation”. And Stuart widens his focus beyond family life, taking in the “Jets and Sharks world” of Glasgow’s sectarian politics.

Like its predecessor, this “bear hug of a new novel” has a “yeasty whiff of the autobiographical” about it, said Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times . If you adored Shuggie Bain , this book “will please you on every page”.

Picador 400pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Joseph Stalin “never spoke or wrote” about the two months he spent in London in the spring of 1907, attending the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, said Alasdair Lees in The Daily Telegraph . Into this “psychological aperture” steps Stephan May, whose sixth novel is an “openly confected” retelling of those “few overlooked weeks”.

It begins with a 29-year-old Stalin – then known by his nickname, Koba – landing at Harwich, fresh from “a campaign of terror and banditry” in his native Georgia. In London, he stays in a dosshouse in Stepney, while better-off attendees – including Lenin – lodge in Bloomsbury. May’s Stalin is a “figure of fascinating contradictions” – an “idealist and a thug” – and the novel a “captivating thought experiment”.

Sadly, it often falls “disappointingly flat”, said Simon Baker in Literary Review . There are “samey descriptions” of London’s “awful” pubs, and May makes too much use of summary. Despite having the makings of an “exciting political thriller”, the novel isn’t convincing enough for May’s story to really grow.

Sandstone 288pp £8.99; The Week Bookshop £6.99

Anne Tyler virtually created the “family novel” genre, but has “strayed into more diverse territory recently”, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times . Fans will be delighted by the 80-year-old’s 24th novel, which marks a return to type. Set, almost inevitably, in Baltimore, it’s a multi-generational saga spanning six decades, about a “comfortingly average” family. Mercy and Robin Garrett “enjoy a smoothly conventional life” running a hardware store and raising their three children. But theirs is a family in which “certain things must never be said”, and as the decades pass, this creates division. French Braid is “Tyler at her most Tyler-ish: pleasant and inoffensive, yet surprisingly deep and moving”.

Near its end, the novel does take an unexpected turn, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . Its final chapters are set during Covid – a topic Tyler suggested she’d never write about. Typically, however, she emphasises not the pandemic’s harrowing side, but its “potential to occasion reunion and reconnection”. This book may fall short of her best work – but “at this point any Tyler book is a gift”.

Chatto & Windus 256pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “eagerly awaited” debut is being hailed as “part of a wave of novels by young men of colour exploring race, romance and mental health problems”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . Nur, a 25-year-old online journalist from Birmingham who regularly suffers panic attacks, has been with Yasmina for four years. But he has yet to tell his Pakistani parents about the relationship: Yasmina’s family is Sudanese, and Nur has never got over his “mother’s disgust when she saw him hanging out with a black girl at school”.

On the surface a “poignant romance” about the barriers standing in the way of two young lovers, Good Intentions gradually reveals itself to be a deeper novel – about how an obsession with vulnerability can “make you forget your responsibility to others”.

Ali’s characters are “well-drawn”, and “what a tonic” to have a book about race in Britain set outside the capital, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Unfortunately, though, the unnecessarily complex structure necessitates a lot of darting “between points on the timeline” – and this, alas makes the novel rather “confusing”.

4th Estate 352pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Jessamine Chan’s “crafty and spellbinding” debut is set in a terrifyingly plausible dystopian America, said Molly Young in The New York Times . Frida Liu is a 39-year-old single mother with an 18-month-old daughter and a stressful job. One day, in a “spell of insomnia-induced irrationality”, she leaves her daughter unattended at home while running a work errand.

Neighbours hear the toddler crying, and alert the police. Frida is sentenced to a year in an “experimental rehab facility”, where women are moulded into better mothers by practising their parenting skills on AI dolls. The school continually berates Frida for her actions: her kisses, instructors tell her, “lack a fiery core of maternal love”.

It’s no surprise that this book has been “making waves” in the US, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph : “questions of how we define and evaluate motherhood pervade contemporary culture”. Beautifully lucid and elegantly written, this is a “must-read” novel, said India Knight in The Sunday Times – “a Handmaid’s Tale for the 21st century”.

Hutchinson Heinemann 336pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

The Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s latest is “an original”, said Anne Enright in The Guardian . It’s a short novel about grief in which plot often gives way to “mystical” digressions that are “earnest, funny and sweet” – “a bit mad”, but in a good way.

Mira, a solitary woman in midlife, falls in love with Annie, a fellow student at their school for art criticism. Then Mira’s father dies, and his spirit joins her own inside a leaf, where they converse about “art, God, love and the transmigration of souls”, before Mira returns to “the pursuit of love”, her faith in “family and tradition” strengthened.

Billed as “a philosopher of modern experience”, Heti is known for her auto-fictional novels such as How Should a Person Be? (2010). Pure Colour is more like a fable, said Mia Levitin in the FT , in which God is an artist, and this world is his “first draft”, now “heating up in advance of its destruction”. Sadly, the book’s “meditations on grief” left me cold, and I found the prose “clunky” and “perilously close to kitsch”, with a naive, fairy-tale quality ill-suited to a story about middle age.

Harvill Secker 224pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Edmund White’s novels “forever enlarged what gay writing might do”, said Neil Bartlett in The Guardian . His latest book – “his 30th, by my count” – is an “elegant, filthy” work that “crackles with a heartfelt insistence that the old and hungry” still have much to tell us about “the dynamics of sex”.

In the year 2050, a married couple in a remote Swiss chalet decide to entertain each other by recounting their “previous sexual careers”. Constance, in her early 30s, is an “African-American orphan”, while Ruggero, her husband, is an elderly bisexual Sicilian aristocrat who is “legendarily well-connected (not to mention well hung)”.

As you’d expect, this novel is “elegantly written”, and contains many “arresting images”, said Peter Parker in The Spectator – but it’s fairly “preposterous”. The leap forward in time is merely a device allowing Ruggero to reminisce about his affair 30 years earlier with the now-forgotten writer Edmund White, then old and infirm: a “fat, famous slug”, he calls him. It is, however, all very entertaining.

Bloomsbury 288pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Unsure what to do after graduating, Matt Knott alighted on tutoring as an “easy way to make money”, said Georgia Beaufort in The Daily Telegraph . He duly joined an agency that specialised in finding “study buddies” for the children of the super-rich. With his “Cambridge degree and his floppy hair”, Knott proved a big success – and in this “very funny memoir”, he recounts his three years in the job.

His first assignment was in a house in Mayfair, where each day he sat in a “holding pool” of tutors waiting to see if he’d be picked to help a five-year-old with his homework. Other families were considerably friendlier: half servant, half family member, Knott accompanied his charges on various exotic holidays.

This amusing book sheds light on a ridiculous world of “butlers in very tight trousers” and “helicopter trips from Tuscan villas to smart restaurants in Rome”, said Roland White in the Daily Mail . In this milieu, five-year-olds eat lobster tempura for supper, and “PJs” stands for private jets instead of pyjamas. With his pleasing turn of phrase (these days he works as a screenwriter), Knott is a witty, observant guide.

Trapeze 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Gary Shteyngart’s fifth novel is set during the far-off-seeming “early days” of the Covid pandemic, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Sasha Senderovsky, a successful Russian-born US novelist (like his creator), has retreated to his large house in upstate New York, accompanied by a group of friends. Their plan is to ride out lockdown together but, predictably, things go wrong.

Various housemates fall out with one another; “plenty of partner-swapping” occurs. If the basic conceit owes a lot to Chekhov, the novel’s boisterous, madcap comedy owes at least as much to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Shteyngart has brilliantly captured the “almost maniacal aliveness” of the early pandemic. If anyone writes a funnier lockdown novel, “I will eat my face mask”.

There’s so much going on in this somewhat “messy” novel that at times it’s exhausting to read, said John Self in The Times . A “little more stillness” would have been welcome. Still, it exhibits Shteyngart’s trademark “feverish energy” – and the result is “often funny” and “sometimes moving”.

Allen & Unwin 336pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Michelle de Kretser’s slyly intelligent sixth novel pairs two first-person narratives,” said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . One is set in “dystopian near-future Melbourne” and follows Lyle, an immigrant who works for a sinister government agency created to deport immigrants. The other is set in 1981, and follows Lili, a 22-year-old Australian, during a carefree sojourn in the south of France. The link between the two narratives is mysterious – and even the order you read them in is “up to you”, on account of the book’s “reversible, Kindle-defying two-way design”.

The publisher has been “fastidious” in cooperating with de Kretser’s conceit, said Sam Leith in The Daily Telegraph : there are two front covers, two copyright pages, two sets of acknowledgements, and so on. “It’s sort of magnificent, and it’s also sort of gimmicky” – and it left me unsure if I was actually reading a novel, or simply two novellas yoked together. Perhaps, though, it doesn’t really matter. Filled with “apt quick literary brushstrokes and the gleam of humour”, both halves are equally “terrific”.

Allen & Unwin 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Tessa Hadley is justly lauded for “elevating the domestic novel to literary fiction” in her stories about the “shifting geometries” of middle-class families, said Mia Levitin in the FT . Free Love , her eighth novel, “adds a Sixties twist to Anna Karenina ”. Set in 1967, it centres on 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer, a well-off suburban housewife married to Roger, a senior civil servant. One summer night, twenty-something Nicky – the son of a family friend – comes to supper. He and Phyllis steal an “illicit kiss” – and embark on an affair. Leaving home without a forwarding address, Phyllis swaps her cosy life with Roger for “then-bohemian Ladbroke Grove” (where Nicky occupies a squalid bedsit). Hadley’s style is as “sumptuous” as ever, and her characterisations are superb. While this isn’t perhaps her best novel, its publication is a “cause for celebration”.

Hadley has been criticised for the “narrowness of her social concerns – her incorrigible preoccupation with Cecilias, Harriets and Rolands”, said James Marriott in The Times . So it’s gratifying that in this “beautiful and exciting” novel, she contrasts the bourgeois world with the “supremely undomesticated” 1960s counterculture.

Yet there’s a problem, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times : Hadley is far more at home among herbaceous borders than in the “pot-smoking” milieu of Nicky and his friends. Her depictions of the Swinging Sixties rarely rise above cliché – and “when she tries to capture the life of a black nurse whom Phyllis befriends, the writing becomes laboured”. You sense Hadley “itching to get back to the bourgeois suburbs” – and as this disappointing novel progressed, I wished I was back there with her.

Jonathan Cape 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth , imagined an out-of-control virus, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . She returns to similar terrain with her latest novel – only this time with less need for invention. Set in November 2020, The Fell centres on Kate, a forty-something single mum, who “finally snaps” during a two-week quarantine period, and goes for a solitary walk in the Peak District. It’s “destined to be an ill-fated expedition”: the night draws in, Kate doesn’t return – and her absence is noticed by her teenage son Matt. With its vivid sense of “accumulating dread”, this is an “intense time capsule of a tale”.

Moss moves “gracefully” between various perspectives, said Sarah Ditum in The Times : that of Alice, an elderly neighbour; and Rob, a member of the mountain rescue team. Elegantly written and concise, The Fell is a “close-to-perfect” novel. Even though Moss has said it was written fast, the prose here feels “precision-tooled”, said Roger Cox in The Scotsman . Remarkably, in only 180 pages, she has captured “all of lockdown life”.

Picador 180pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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The best books of 2022

From Hanya Yanagihara’s epic novel to a brilliant memoir by Bono … Guardian critics pick the year’s best fiction, politics, science, children’s books and more. Tell us about your favourite books in the comments

Hanya Yanagihara’s follow-up to A Little Life, Percival Everett’s biting satire and Ali Smith’s playful take on lockdown – Justine Jordan reflects on a year in fiction. Read all fiction

Children’s books

Imogen Russell Williams picks the best titles for children and teenagers, from a spooky tale by Philip Pullman to the long-awaited new novel from SF Said – plus books for young readers by Oliver Jeffers and Maggie O’Farrell. Read all children’s books

Crime and thrillers

Cosy crime from Ajay Chowdhury, a new Rebus novel and a handful of excellent debuts – Laura Wilson rounds up the best page-turners. Read all crime and thrillers

Science fiction and fantasy

A verse novel written in Orcadian Scots, a unique UFO story and a distinctive time-travel tale from the author of Station Eleven – Adam Roberts selects five of the best science fiction and fantasy books. Read all science fiction and fantasy

Biography and memoir

Fiona Sturges chooses the best memoirs, from Alan Rickman’s posthumous diaries to Michelle Obama’s follow-up to Becoming, as well as compelling biographies of Agatha Christie and John Donne. Read all biography and memoir

History and politics

Reflections on the British empire, urgent stories of deadly migrant routes and a Nobel peace prize-winner’s thoughts on the future of democracy – Alex von Tunzelmann ’s choice of books about our past and present. Read all history and politics

Jonathan Liew picks five of the year’s best books about sport, including a thought-provoking history of Black footballers and a fascinating biography of Geoffrey Boycott. Read all sport

With subjects ranging from the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic to the potential of digital virtual worlds, Alok Jha selects the year’s top science books. Read all science

Black and queer communities are centred in much of this year’s poetry, including Joelle Taylor’s account of butch lesbian counterculture and Warsan Shire’s captivating take on home and identity – Rishi Dastidar chooses the best collections. Read all poetry

Graphic novels

James Smart picks out the finest comics and graphic books, from thoughtful memoirs to vividly illustrated fiction. Read all graphic novels

Bono’s autobiography, oral histories of hip-hop and heavy metal and a smart reflection on Black women in pop – Alexis Petridis ’s pick of books about music and musicians. Read all music

Rachel Roddy on the best food books of the year, from stories of growing up in a Chinese takeaway to pressure cooker recipes and a guide to snacking. Read all food

To browse all of the Guardian’s best books of 2022 visit guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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British Book Awards 2022 shortlist is in, and these are the novels to read next

The nibbies line-up offers an exciting range of literature, article bookmarked.

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The British Book Awards – also known as the Nibbies – 2022 shortlist has been announced.

As one of the leading literary awards, founded in 1990 by The Bookseller , it has become known as “the Baftas of the book world” and honours the best UK writers and their work across fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books.

Judges – Gabby Logan, Rob Rinder, Ugo Monye, and Giovanna Fletcher – have the near-impossible task of deciding the book of the year winners by category, which will be announced today, 25 May.

So, if your reading pile is looking a little low on the ground, the announcement of the shortlist should provide all the inspiration you need.

There’s an incredible range of talent among the shortlisted titles this year. In the fiction categories alone you’ll notice some well-established names (Kazuo Ishiguro and Sally Rooney), as well as newcomers ( Women’s Prize for Fiction nominee, Meg Mason , and Obama’s favourite, Raven Leilani ), so there are lots to get your teeth stuck into.

• The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 longlist is here
• Costa Book of the Year Awards winner and previous top titles
• International Booker Prize longlisted novels to know

In honour of the British Book Awards shortlist 2022, we’re here to bring you the lowdown on the fabulous fiction categories. It’s time to get reading!

Fiction of the Year shortlist

‘the passenger’ by ulrich alexander boschwitz, published by pushkin press: £7.37, amazon.co.uk.

Set in 1930, Boschwitz’s novel provides an account of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany and is said to provide an almost unbearable and suspenseful story of a fight for survival.

‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ by Anthony Doerr, published by Fourth Estate: £16.40, Whsmith.co.uk

Landing a spot in Barack Obama’s 2021 reading list , Cloud Cuckoo Land was noted as a “literary feat” when it was reviewed by The Independent owing to being more than 600 pages long. It tells the lives of five characters – that each form a sub-story to the main plot – and how they are each connected by a copy of a mysterious ancient text.

‘Klara and the Sun’ by Kazuo Ishiguro, published by Faber: £8.36, Bookshop.org

Ishiguro’s eighth novel is a luminous journey through the mind of Klara, an artificial friend who has been built to keep lonely children company. Using Klara’s voice, Ishiguro explores themes of power, status. and fear among humans, as well as the implications of AI and human relationships. Klara and the Sun was also longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize .

‘Empire of the Vampire’ by Jay Kristoff, published by HarperVoyager: £13.75, Blackwells.co.uk

This dark fantasy epic is the story of a lone warrior who has been captured by vampires, and it’s said to be a visceral account that is unputdownable.

‘Sorrow and Bliss’ by Meg Mason, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson: £12.99, Waterstones.com

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction award 2022, Sorrow and Bliss also took the top spot in our guide to the best books of 2021 thanks to being an “exciting, funny, and thought-provoking novel”. It tells the story of 40-year-old Martha and her dysfunctional family, a failed marriage, and depression. While it “sounds like a truly awful misery read”, our writer noted that “it’s the funniest book of the year, with the most recognisable characters”.

‘Beautiful World, Where are You’ by Sally Rooney, published by Faber: £14.99, Waterstones.com

The author’s eagerly anticipated third novel, Beautiful World, Where are You is set in Ireland and does what Rooney’s other titles do well – explores the lives and loves of its characters. This one focuses on two best friends, Alice and Eileen, and their relationship with each other and those around them.

Debut Book of the Year shortlist

‘open water’by caleb azumah nelson, published by viking: £7.05, amazon.co.uk.

Gaining the “first novel award” in the Costa Book Awards 2021 , Open Water touches on themes of love and race in contemporary society. It’s said to be a tender and emotional story about two young black British artists who form a relationship after meeting in a south east London pub.

‘Assembly’ by Natasha Brown, published by Hamish Hamilton: £12.99, Waterstones.com

Brown’s eagerly anticipated debut was lauded by The Independent for being a “completely captivating read you won’t be able to put down”. Narrated by a British black woman, it’s said to be a “hauntingly accurate novel about the stories we construct for ourselves and others”.

‘Mrs Death Misses Death’ by Salena Godden, published by Canongate Books: £7.37, Whsmith.co.uk

Death is tired of her job and is desperate for someone to talk to, but she befriends a young writer, who is able to write her memoir. Interspersed with poetry, Godden’s debut is said to be a thought-provoking read.

‘Luster’ by Raven Leilani, published by Picador: £9.29, Bookshop.org

Having featured in our review of the best debut novels , Barack Obama’s reading list of 2020 , and the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist in 2021 , the hype for Luster has been real. It tells the story of 23-year-old Edie and her awkward journey through modern life – it touches on themes of womanhood, sexuality, power dynamics in relationships and race, as well as notions of loneliness and loss. Leilani’s writing is pacy and piercing.

‘How to Kill Your Family’ by Bella Mackie, published by Borough Press: £14.99, Waterstones.com

How To Kill Your Family “depicts Grace’s mission to avenge her mother, which sees her tracking down numerous relatives, including her famous billionaire father, and picking them off one by one”, noted our reviewer . It was praised by The Independent for being a “deliciously addictive” and “very entertaining read”.

‘She Who Became the Sun’ by Shelley Parker-Chan, published by Mantle: £12.75, Amazon.co.uk

Set in the backdrop of famine-stricken China in the mid-1300s, She Who Became the Sun was described by The Independent as being a “brutal, war-strewn epic” that is “beautiful and detailed with queer re-imaginings of history”.

Crime and Thriller Book of the Year shortlist

‘girl a’ by abigail dean, published by harperfiction: £8.36, bookshop.org.

Dean’s first novel took the top spot in our guide to the best debut novels of 2021 , and also featured in our review of the best fiction books . It tells the story of Lex Gracie, the “Girl A” of the title, who “is one of seven abused and neglected children who grew up in a home dubbed the House of Horrors”, noted our writer . They also said that after they put it down they couldn’t “stop thinking about it, harrowing though its subject matter is”.

‘The Appeal’ by Janice Hallett, published by Viper Books: £7.37, Amazon.co.uk

Set in the sleepy town of Lower Lockwood, a production and fundraiser leads to a murder, The Appeal is said to be filled with many twists and turns. Turning traditional storytelling on its head, Hallet reveals all by presenting a series of different emails, messages, and transcripts.

‘A Slow Fire Burning’ by Paula Hawkins, published by Doubleday: £6.25, Amazon.co.uk

Hawkins’s third novel is “set on a London canal where a man is found stabbed to death in his houseboat”. In our review of it, we said it “pays huge attention to detail in the light and shadows of the canal and its surroundings”, this makes it an “atmospheric tale” and a “good page-turning thriller”.

‘1979’ by Val McDermid, published by Sphere: £5.35, Waitrose.com

Set in Scotland, 1979 tells the story of reporter Allie Burns who’s on a mission to get her first big scoop. It sees Burns and her colleagues expose a series of criminal offences and risk making powerful enemies.

‘The Dark Remains’ by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin, published by Canongate Books: £17.99, Waterstones.com

A prequel to the original DI Laidlaw stories, The Dark Remains is set against the backdrop of Glasgow in the Seventies – where poverty, high unemployment, alcohol and domestic abuse, and violence are rife. And it’s Laidlaw’s first case. The book was first written by McIlvanney and finished off by Rankin after his death.

‘The Man Who Died Twice’ by Richard Osman, published by Viking: £9.49, Whsmith.co.uk

A follow-up to his debut, The Thursday Murder Club (£5, Theworks.co.uk ), this title is about the “same group of ageing sleuths as they are embroiled in murders, mysteries, stolen diamonds, and a mugging”. Our review mentioned how “they plot to take on a Columbian drug cartel and the mafia – all from their sleepy Kent retirement village” and praised Osman’s “wit and humour” for making it “a joy to read”.

Pageturner of the Year shortlist

‘small pleasures’ by clare chambers, published by weidenfeld & nicolson: £7.49, waterstones.com.

Not only has this tome landed itself a spot in the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist , but it also took the top spot in our guide to the best new books to read in 2020. This “compassionate tale is exquisitely written and entranced us from the very first page”, praised our writer.

‘Worst Idea Ever’ by Jane Fallon, published by Michael Joseph: £5, Amazon.co.uk

Centred around Georgia, her friend, and her friend’s husband, Worst Idea Ever is about how a fake Twitter account unravels their lives. It is said to be a witty and gripping novel.

‘The Wolf Den’ by Elodie Harper, published by Head of Zeus: £7.37, Amazon.co.uk

Set in Pompeii’s brothels, The Wolf Den tells the story of enslaved Amara. Harper’s historical novel is a tale of survival and determination. It’s the first in the trilogy.

‘The Party Crasher’ by Sophie Kinsella, published by Bantam Press, Transworld: £16.99, Waterstones.com

A well-composed family drama, The Party Crasher is centred around Effie, while also allowing each character to have their own story. Effie gatecrashes a family party, and the novel is said to serve as a reminder that everyone around us has things bubbling under the surface.

‘The Summer Seekers’ by Sarah Morgan, published by HQ: £6.21, Amazon.co.uk

This uplifting, feel-good novel is about one of the most unconventional of road trips with the oddest of couples. The key message is no matter what your age, you should always follow your dreams.

‘The Last House on Needless Street’ by Catriona Ward, published by Viper Books: £6.29, Whsmith.co.uk

Ward’s novel “tells the story of a missing child and her sister’s quest to find her”, noted our review . And our writer praised the author for creating “a rare work of fiction that explores the human will to endure – no matter the cost”.

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Looking for more recommendations? Read our guide to the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 longlist

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Israel’s Descent

W hen Ariel Sharon ​ withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli...

Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever more committed to its colonisation project and contemptuous of international criticism, ruling over a people who have been transformed into strangers in their own land or helpless survivors, awaiting the next delivery of rations.

Adorno's Aesthetics

Owen hatherley.

A dorno ​ is easily parodied. Photos on social media show him frog-like, myopic and bald, denouncing the willing consumption of dross, the personal embodiment of a refusal to ‘let people enjoy things’. Another meme features Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons derisively brandishing a copy of Minima Moralia : ‘You ever sat down and read this thing?’ (In the original,...

Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided for his wildly ignorant essays on jazz, but these are by no means all there is to know about his views on the culture industry.

Desperate v. Stolid

James butler.

If the ITV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was exceptional, it was only for its inanity. Two men, neither of them with much stage presence or prone to thinking on their feet, traded prepared barbs and crowbarred in their key messages. Each made sure to name audience members, Janet – or was it Paula? – as an empathetic consolation prize for dodging their actual questions. Be honest about when – or if, or how – we’ll fix the NHS? Not on your life.

Back to Bouillon

Patrick mcguinness.

I was made ​ in the small industrial town of Bouillon, in the Belgian Ardennes, where my mother came from and most of the family still lives. One aunt and uncle lived opposite, another lived forty kilometres away on the Luxembourg border, and our cousins lived next door. My mother was the only one of her siblings or close relatives to leave, but when she did she went far enough away to make up...

In any gentrified area, it’s the local that costs more: the honey from the Camden rooftop, the sausages from three miles away, the micro-brewed beer from Adlestrop. Gentrification sells you back the local it destroyed, but as a fetish object at fetish object prices.

What was the ghetto?

Erin maglaque.

I n his book ​ 16 ottobre 1943 , Giacomo Debenedetti describes the deportation of Rome’s Jews to the death camps. When the soldiers came in the early evening, everyone in the neighbourhood was at home.

The Jews of the Regola quarter were still in the habit of going to sleep early. Shortly after dark they were all in their homes. Perhaps the memory of an ancient curfew is still in their...

Historians argue that the Venetian ghetto was both an open-air prison and a bright spot in the darkness of early modern European antisemitism. The government confined Jews to a ghetto, but did not expel them; they were forced to wear a yellow head-covering, but allowed to worship. The ghetto is both a symbol of persecution and a symbol of tolerance, at least insofar as the attitudes of the time allowed.

Primordial Black Holes

David kaiser.

F or ​ more than fifty years, physicists have been stumped by dark matter. Careful measurement of a range of phenomena, from the motion of enormous clusters of galaxies to the rate at which individual galaxies spin, have indicated that all the stuff astronomers can see – the trillions of stars dotted across the night sky – contributes just a fraction of the total mass of the...

What if dark matter is just ordinary matter locked inside black holes – from which, after all, light cannot escape. Such massive, dark objects would trundle around the cosmos, nudging the motion of visible matter while themselves evading direct detection.

Don’t take our word for it

Subscribe to the  LRB  – perfect for anyone with an interest in history, politics, literature and the arts.

On the ‘Village Voice’

Vivian gornick.

I n the ​ mid- 1960s , the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of...

The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting. Write it up persuasively and we’ll publish it.

Keeping Up with the Toynbees

Stefan collini.

H ave Britain ​’s leading intellectuals all been related to one another? While the answer to the question in that bald form is clearly no, a suspicion persists that in the past 150 years a higher proportion of intellectual figures of note in this country have been interconnected by ties of blood and marriage than has been the case elsewhere. It is not easy to turn this suspicion into a...

Have Britain’s leading intellectuals all been related to one another? While the answer to the question in that bald form is clearly no, a suspicion persists that in the past 150 years a higher proportion of intellectual figures of note in this country have been interconnected by ties of blood and marriage than has been the case elsewhere.

Trouble with the Troubles Act

Daniel trilling.

A ndy Seaman ​ felt out of place when, on 26 May 2022, he walked into the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith. Andy has little connection to Ireland; he’s from East London and his family’s roots are in Dominica. But earlier that day he had heard on the radio that the centre was hosting an event run by the organisation Troubles, Tragedy and Trauma. He told me that he felt...

The Troubles Legacy Act has been unilaterally imposed by the UK. Almost everyone hates it. Northern Ireland’s largest political parties all oppose it, though not for entirely the same reasons.

Georgie Newson

O n ​ 23 May , the day after he called a general election, Rishi Sunak said in a radio interview that his government’s flagship Rwanda deportation scheme will only go ahead if the Tories are re-elected on 4 July. This admission came as a surprise: many had assumed that part of the rationale for calling an early election was to get a campaign boost as the flights got underway. For anyone...

One English slang term that has survived from the original Calais jungle is ‘the game’, used to refer to crossing attempts. Without a legal route of entry, refugees focus on reaching a place from where they can progress to the next level, taking ever more extreme risks along the way. The Rwanda scheme was just one more obstacle in the game.

Cuba Speaks

Rachel nolan.

I n ​ 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling...

After its fall, outsiders speculated that the Cuban regime would collapse and the island would transition, quickly or slowly, to capitalism. But then interested countries have always persuaded themselves that revolutionary Cuba would collapse if it came under enough pressure.

Colm Tóibín’s ‘Long Island’

Blake morrison.

N ovelists ​ don’t usually care for screen adaptations of their work. But the film versions of Atonement, The Remains of the Day and The English Patient do no great disservice to the books. And Colm Tóibín wasn’t unhappy with Nick Hornby’s screenplay for Brooklyn , despite two big changes to the ending. In the novel, when the insidious Enniscorthy shopkeeper Miss...

So much in  Long Island  goes unsaid. It’s a world in which people speak knowledgeably (and sometimes bitchily) about others but reveal little of themselves. As well as secrets, there are problems of articulation: stutters and stammers, an inability to express feeling. Whatever you say, you say nothing.

‘In My Life as a Visiting Lecturer I Meet Various and Sundry People or, Another Way to Think of This, Here Are All the Novels I Never Wrote and You Are Welcome to Them’

Anne carson.

Julio Julio likes to ask a good question in a bad way. Do most of your students fall in love with you? He is a recovering addict but he does not see himself as a statistic, here I am quoting. He describes his novel, which is about the 65th Infantry of Puerto Rico. I watch the clothesline out back, bouncing on the wind with its four frozen shirts.

Long Long talks about waking beside a man bleeding...

On the Nightingale

Mary wellesley.

W e walked ​ in the darkness beneath beeches and hornbeams until, suddenly, we heard the sound of birdsong, an ethereal noise, a sound associated with daytime. What bird would sing the song of day two hours after dusk? Only a creature of myth, a night-singer, the nihtegala – from the Old English nihte and galan, to sing, call, enchant .

For thousands of years this night-singer’s song...

The nightingale’s song is punctuated by rich, almost painful pauses. In the silence, one imagines the bird has come to the end of a verse and is considering, with the ease and confidence of a seasoned performer, where to take the song next.

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj mishra.

I n ​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments...

Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been built. Universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist.

From the blog

‘the restless one’, marina warner.

A brass ring concealed under a rug lifts to lead to a hidden world; a neglected door behind a curtain open onto a parallel universe; Lewis Carroll’s  . . .

Battle of the Caribbean

Colin douglas.

Connie Mark, who joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in Jamaica (the women’s branch of the army) remembered the attacks: ‘If a boat  . . .

If the ITV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was exceptional, it was only for its inanity. Two men, neither of them with much stage  . . .

Oxford Action for Palestine

Miyo peck-suzuki.

The police have been regular visitors at Oxford’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment since we set it up outside the Pitt Rivers Museum on 6 May. The  . . .

Send Back the Money

Fraser macdonald.

After the 1843 Disruption, when the Free Church of Scotland split from the Church of Scotland, some of its leaders tried to raise money from  . . .

Sunak’s Choice

It is difficult to explain Sunak’s decision to call an election now. The Conservatives’ chief electoral strategist has stressed the ‘enthusiasm  . . .

Liberation Day in Lebanon

Loubna el amine.

Last Saturday, 25 May, was Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon. It commemorates the date when the south of the country was freed from Israeli  . . .

‘The Last Days of Franz Kafka’

Sam kinchin-smith.

The coincidence of the centenary of Kafka’s death, on 3 June, and the publication of the first complete, uncensored English translation of  . . .

Forecasting D-Day

The D-Day planners said that everything would depend on the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days'. But who would make the forecast? The Meteorological Office? The US Air Force? The Royal Navy? In the event, it was all three. In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence...

The D-Day planners said that everything would depend on the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by...

On Satire: 'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope

Clare bucknell and colin burrow.

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and  The Dunciad  is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mock-epic tells the story of the...

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary...

On J.G. Ballard

Edmund gordon and thomas jones.

J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the  Daily Mail  and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appealing to both Spielberg and Cronenberg. In a recent piece, Edmund Gordon unpicks the contradictions and contrarianism in Ballard’s non-fiction writing, and he joins Tom to continue the dissection. They explore Ballard’s...

J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the  Daily Mail  and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appealing to both Spielberg and...

Lawrence Hogben

The D-Day planners said that everything would hang on the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days'. But who would make the forecast? The Meteorological Office? The US Air Force? The Royal Navy? In the event, it was all three. In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence...

The D-Day planners said that everything would hang on the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by...

Political Poems: 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Seamus perry and mark ford.

Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members...

Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local...

Women in Philosophy

Sophie smith and thomas jones.

The recovery of history’s ‘lost’ women is often associated with the advent of feminism, but, Sophie Smith writes, women’s contributions to Western philosophy have been regularly rediscovered since at least the 14th century. She joins Tom to discuss what we can learn from the women who held their own alongside Plato, Descartes and Hume.Sponsored links:Find out more about...

The recovery of history’s ‘lost’ women is often associated with the advent of feminism, but, Sophie Smith writes, women’s contributions to Western philosophy have been...

Human Conditions: ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul

Pankaj mishra and adam shatz.

In  A House for Mr Biswas , his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore...

In  A House for Mr Biswas , his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first...

Collections

52 ways of thinking about kafka.

Links to the original pieces for the chorus of voices that inspired our Kafka-themed Diary for 2024, which in turn inspired a special one-off event at the 2024 Hay Festival.

Marvel Years

Childhood memoirs in the LRB archive by Hilary Mantel, Richard Wollheim, Lorna Sage, Edward Said, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Rosemary Dinnage, David Sylvester, Jenny Diski, Sean Wilsey, Lorna Finlayson, Yun Sheng...

Living by the Clock

Writing about time by David Cannadine, Perry Anderson, Angela Carter, Stanley Cavell, Barbara Everett, Edward Said, John Banville, Rebecca Solnit, David Wootton, Jenny Diski, Malcolm Bull, Andrew O’Hagan...

In Hyperspace

Writing about science fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Fredric Jameson, Jenny Turner, Tom Shippey, Colin Burrow, Stephanie Burt, Thomas Jones, Margaret Anne Doody, Nick Richardson, Sherry Turkle and Rachel...

LRB Winter Lectures 2010-2023

Judith Butler on who owns Kafka; Hilary Mantel on royal bodies; Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange; Mary Beard on women in power; Patricia Lockwood on the communal mind of the internet; Meehan Crist...

Missing Pieces I: The je ne sais quoi

Writing about mystery, the unintelligible and that for which no words can be found by Jenny Diski, Jacqueline Rose, Adam Phillips, John Lanchester, Alice Spawls and Hal Foster.

Missing Pieces II: What was left out

Writing about obsolete objects, missing words and anonymous writers by Andrew O’Hagan, Amia Srinivasan, Irina Dumitrescu, Lucia Berlin, Lawrence Rainey and Sheila Fitzpatrick.

Missing Pieces III: Alchemical Pursuits

Writing about cognitive gaps, stolen artworks and missing the things you never had by Hilary Mantel, Michael Neve, Rosa Lyster, Clancy Martin, James Davidson and Malcolm Gaskill.

Analysis Gone Wrong

Unorthodox psychoanalytic encounters in the LRB archive by Wynne Godley, Sherry Turkle, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Nicholas Spice, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jenny Diski, Brigid Brophy, Adam Phillips, D.J. Enright...

Gossip and Notes on Work and Reading

For the first time since 1982, there is no annual Diary by Alan Bennett. He says his life is so dull he won’t inflict it on LRB readers. If it suddenly gets more interesting he promises he’ll let us...

Writing about drinking by Victor Mallet, Anne Carson, John Lanchester, Wendy Cope, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Jaine, Jenny Diski, Marina Warner, Clancy Martin and John Lloyd. 

War on God! That is Progress!

Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.

Suffering Souls

Writing for Halloween by Leslie Wilson, John Sturrock, Thomas Jones, Michael Newton, Marina Warner and Gavin Francis.

Ministry of Apparitions

Writing about superstition by Matthew Sweeney, Hilary Mantel, Malcolm Gaskill, Patricia Lockwood, Theodore Zeldin, Katherine Rundell, Peter Campbell, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Angela Carter, Ian Penman...

The day starts now

Summer morning reading from the LRB archive by Angela Carter, Eleanor Birne, Steven Shapin, Tom Crewe, Patrick McGuinness and Jenny Diski. 

Summer lunchtime reading from the LRB archive by James Meek, Penelope Fitzgerald, Bee Wilson, Colm Tóibín and Rosa Lyster. 

Oh What A Night

Summer evening reading from the LRB archive by Anne Carson, Rosemary Hill, John Gallagher, Zoë Heller, Anne Diebel and Patricia Lockwood.

World Weather

From June 2022 to June 2023, the LRB has been collaborating with the World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts organisations in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland,...

Writing about thinking up other worlds by Glen Newey, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Pedersen, David Trotter and Anthony Pagden. 

In the Classroom

Writing about teaching and learning by William Davies, Ian Jack, Jenny Turner, Thomas Jones, Lorna Finlayson, Paul Foot, Wang Xiuying, Marina Warner and Stefan Collini.  

Close Readings 2024

In our pioneering podcast subscription, contributors explore different areas of literature through a selection of key works. This year it’s revolutionary thought of the 20th century, truth and lies in the ancient world, and satire.

Partner Events, Spring-Summer 2024

The latest LRB Screen , a special event marking the centenary of Kafka’s death at the Hay Festival, an evening of screenings of Sarah Maldoror’s films at the Garden Cinema, and more – check back for seasonal announcements.

James Shapiro & Sarah Churchwell: The Playbook

Lauren elkin & octavia bright: scaffolding, leah cowan & lola olufemi: why would feminists trust the police.

In the next issue : Ange Mlinko on Rachel Cusk; Tom Crewe on the Tories; Adam Phillips on Freud and pragmatism.

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World Book Day: These are 34 of the best books that everyone is reading in 2022

By Lucy Morgan

We're calling it: 2022 will be (and has already been) a phenomenal year for new books. Whether you've set yourself an ambitious reading target on Goodreads , or you're browsing for a bookworm friend, there's plenty of exciting literature to look out for in the new year. 

And what better day to get stuck into all the literary newness around than today: World Book Day. 

World Book Day changes lives through a love of books and shared reading. Their mission is to promote reading for pleasure, offering every child and young person the opportunity to have a book of their own. Their website explains that reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success – more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income. Designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, World Book Day is marked in over 100 countries around the globe.

So, we've rounded up the best books out there right now, or available shortly, to add to your collection. As well as the highly-anticipated releases from literary giants, such as Monica Ali's Love Marriage and Isabel Allende's Violeta , there's also some cracking debut novels to keep an eye on, from Isaac and the Egg by Bobby Palmer to The Dictator's Wife by Freya Berry.

If you enjoyed Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams' bestselling debut, you'll be pleased to know her second novel, People Person , will be released in Spring 2022. Likewise, if you're a fan of Bethany Rutter's young adult novels, her first adult novel Welcome to Your Life is expected in March. 

We're also very excited about Why Did You Stay? by Rebecca Humphries, exploring how she was “forced into victimhood” by a Strictly Come Dancing scandal in 2018 before becoming an advocate for helping women end toxic relationships. Another celebrity book we highly recommend is Reclaiming by Love Island 's Yewande Biala: a moving collection of essays about protecting your sense of self as a marginalised person. 

So, donate to World Book Day here , then pick up a book, grab a cup of something comfortable, and settle in for a few pages, we promise your day will be all the better for it. 

Ready to get stuck in? Here are GLAMOUR's top 34 books to read (and fall in love with) in 2022:

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

Jean Chen Ho’s debut collection is a blazing depiction of all the highs and lows of female friendship. Taking place across two decades, Fiona and Jane follows two young Taiwanese American women, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen, as they fight to maintain their fierce friendship amidst the ever-changing cultural landscape of North America. 

You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston

This collection of provocative essays (highly-anticipated ahead of its launch) from one of the world's most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston spans three decades and was written of the shadow of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration. Hurston's writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. 

Collectively, these essays showcase the roles enslavement and Jim Crow have played in intensifying Black people's inner lives and culture rather than destroying it. She argues that in the process of surviving, Black people re-interpreted every aspect of American culture, modifying the language, mode of food preparation, the practice of medicine, and most certainly religion. The essays also cover the trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing her lover, a white doctor.

A Million Quiet Revolutions by Robin Gow

A Million Quiet Revolutions is an important story, told through the medium of verse, about two trans boys growing up alongside one another and falling in love. Aaron and Oliver are from a small town with few queer people, let alone trans men, and having each other to share milestones with has made things a little easier for them both. 

But just as their romantic relationship has begun, Aaron has to move away, leaving both boys feeling alone and isolated. So, they begin to delve into America's past to distract themselves and uncover the existence of two Revolutionary War soldiers whom they believe to have been two trans men in love. The story follows the two boys as they dig into America's history, discovering countless untold queer stories.

Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi

Ahead of its release in Mid-February, Bitter was the much-anticipated companion novel set in the world of author Akwaeke Emezi's Stonewall Award-winning novel Pet . And it hasn't disappointed now it's here. This fantasy novel follows the titular character Bitter as she attends a school for creative teens called Eucalyptus, where she gets to focus on her painting with other creative kids like herself. However, outside the walls of the school, the streets of the town of Lucille are filled with protesters rallying against the town's many injustices. 

These rallies cause internal conflict for Bitter and the book deftly charts the impact this has on her as she grapples with her moral compass and wishes for safety. 

The Last Suspicious Holdout by Ladee Hubbard

Critically acclaimed Rib King author Ladee Hubbard returns with The Last Suspicious Holdout , a collection of stories about Black people navigating a post-racial period. The 12 gripping tales told here deftly chronicle poignant moments in the lives of an African American community located in a “sliver of southern suburbia.” Spanning from 1992 to 2007, the stories represent a period during which the Black middle-class expanded while stories of "welfare Queens," "crack babies," and "super predators" abounded in the media. 

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades

A cracker of a first novel, Brown Girls offers an endlessly witty insight into the powerful friendships between young women of colour via Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, and Angelique, who live in Queens, New York. 

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

Olga and her brother Pedro are big names in their hometown of New York City, where their grandmother raised them. However, their familial history is embedded with trauma after their mother abandoned them to devote herself to a militant political cause. What follows is a powerful, intra-cultural reckoning with the very notions of sacrifice and survival. 

Wahala by Nikki May

Ronke, Simi, and Boo are three Nigerian-British friends living in London who are seriously worried about what the future holds for them. Enter Isobel, a (not-so) charming blast from the past who wreaks havoc on their close-knit friendship group. What follows is a fast-paced, crime-thriller-esque tale that will have you screaming at the page…in a good way. 

By Anna Bader

By Lian Brooks

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

Love Marriage is the first new novel in a decade from Monica Ali, the bestselling Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Brick Lane . It follows Yasmin, a successful doctor, and her fiancé, fellow doctor Joe. On the surface, they appear to have it all; but when their families meet, and their cultures collide, Yasmin is forced to rethink whether she wants a ‘love marriage’ after all. 

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

This riveting debut novel traces the terse relationship between two siblings, Byron and Benny, who reluctantly come together in the wake of their mother's death. At the heart of the matter? Their mother's traditional Caribbean black cake and a mysterious voice recording. Secrets spill from every page, as Byron and Benny are forced to reckon with the price of their inheritance. 

Again, Rachel by Marian Keyes

Rachel is officially back. And honestly? She can't come soon enough. Again, Rache l is the hugely-anticipated follow-up to Marian Keyes' hit Rachel's Holiday; it rejoins Rachel as she scrambles to stop her life from falling apart following the return of an old flame. 

Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski

"How do women live their lives knowing that men can hurt them?" is the question at the root of this novel, which is set within the shady parameters of the strip club industry. Real Easy tackles the stigma around sex work head-on while uncovering the gritty details behind a complex murder and missing person investigation. 

Thirty Things I Love About Myself by Radhika Sanghani

Radhika Sanghani's latest novel follows a highly-successful career in journalism, in which Radhika has written powerfully about everything from biohacking to singledom and self-love. Thirty Things I Love About Myself explores the latter, following Nina, a thirty-year-old woman on a mission to love herself. It may take an impromptu overnight stay in a prison cell to kickstart Nina's journey, but it's one we can all learn from. 

Send Nudes by Saba Sams

An ode to the women you drunkenly befriend in club toilets, Send Nudes is an astonishing selection of short stories charting the ebb and flow of girlhood. Saba Sams' authoritative yet witty tone of voice shines through, rendering this one of the most exciting books to come out of 2022. 

Violeta by Isabel Allende

The latest offering by Isabel Allende charts the epic chronicles of Violeta del Valle, a woman who was born as the ramifications of the First World War unfolded, endured the terror of the Spanish Flu, and survived the chaos of the Great Depression.

Mona by Pola Oloixarac (translated by Adam Morris)

We meet the eponymous protagonist of Mona as she prepares to attend a literary festival in Sweden, where she's been nominated for the illustrious Basske-Wortz prize. Violence hangs heavily over the novel (where are Mona's bruises from?), but she uses a lethal cocktail of self-medication, cynicism and err, porn, to avoid confronting it. The result? Total oblivion. 

The Dictator's Wife by Freya Berry

In one of the most compelling literary debuts of the year, Freya Berry tells the wanton tale of a dictator's wife, who is seemingly on trial for the crimes of her husband. The story is told through the eyes of a junior law associate on her defence team, who soon discovers she's far from immune from the defendant's charms – a sumptuously written story, which demands to be devoured in one sitting. 

Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz

This timely collection of essays explores the intersection of queerness with core moments in pop culture (from Orange Is The New Black to Taylor Swift ) – all through the lens of the endlessly-witty Jill Gutowitz.  

Girls Can Kiss Now will be released on 8 March 2022. 

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head , Warsan Shire

Warsan Shire's first full-length poetry collection is a landmark achievement. A vivid exploration of the love-strewn dynamic between mothers and daughters, this book is an aching recollection of all we have to gain – and lose – as we grow up.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head will be released on 10 March 2022.

Careering by Daisy Buchanan

Just over a year after releasing Insatiable: A Love Story For Greedy Girls (already a cult-favourite amongst young women), Daisy Buchanan is back with another love story. However, this time, the love interest is a glittering career in the magazine industry, and the relationship quickly becomes toxic. 

Careering will be released on 10 March 2022.

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

“How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas?” is the question that Melissa Febos grapples with in this piercing – yet tender – reflection on what we can learn from memoirs (and how we write about ourselves). Prepare to rave about this book to everyone you've ever met, seriously. 

Body Work will be released on 17 March 2022.

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

Lydia, the tortured star of this blistering tale, is what you might call a vampire. While she's constantly lured by human food (Japanese cuisine, in particular, has a starring role), her body can only digest blood. Her story is one of rapacious hunger. What's more, Lydia's fantasies of physical satiety can tell us a lot about the ways we're all searching – in one form or another – for belonging. 

Woman, Eating will be released on 24 March 2022.

Welcome to Your Life by Bethany Rutter

We meet Serena, the protagonist of Bethany Rutter's first adult novel, in a pub – glass of wine in one hand, ice cream sundae in the other – where she's reflecting on her decision to abandon her fiancé…on their wedding day. What follows is a meaningful (and funny) journey of self-love, in which, as Bethany explains, “a fat girl gets to be the protagonist of her own story, rather than a silly footnote in someone else's.” We've waited a long time for this. 

Welcome to Your Life will be released on 31 March 2022.

Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones

In a searingly powerful memoir, Chloé Cooper Jones inspects and reclaims the spaces in which disabled bodies are either denied access from or constrained to. In a society replete with beauty standards that increasingly seem to operate on averted gazes and unspoken (yet ever-narrowing) rules, this book demands to be looked in the eye. 

Easy Beauty will be released on 7 April 2022.

None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka

As we adapt to our increasingly online lives, Catherine Prasifka's debut is the antidote we never knew we needed. We meet Sophie, Prasifka's ultra-relatable protagonist, at a precarious time in her life: leaving university. What happens next is a worthy reminder that Instagram /= reality. 

None of This Is Serious will be released on 7 April 2022.

People Person by Candice Carty-Williams

The follow-up to Candice Carty-Williams bestselling Queenie , her second novel centres around Dimple Pennington and her relationship with her half-siblings, Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie and Prynce. United only through their shared understanding of their father (and his love for his gold jeep), a dramatic event forces Dimple and her newfound family to get reacquainted. 

People Person will be released on 28 April 2022. 

An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie

Moses McKenzie's coming-of-age tale begins on the streets of inner-city Bristol. It follows Sayon Hughes, a young Black man, as he struggles to reconcile his desire for a new life with his loyalty to his lawless – but lovable – family. 

An Olive Grove in Ends will be released on 28 April 2022.

Reclaiming by Yewande Biala

Following her appearance on Love Island in 2019, Yewande Biala has spoken about the racist “microaggressions”* she's encountered, from people refusing to pronounce her name correctly to highlighting the lack of diversity in TV. Reclaiming – her collection of essays about identity – is the natural next step. 

Yewande expertly examines the barriers that exist to marginalise Black women and women of colour, while envisaging a world where these barriers can be overcome and, better yet, dismantled. 

*In an article for The Independent , Yewande noted, “Microaggression has the prefix of “micro” attached, but anyone who has experienced this type of aggression will tell you that it feels anything but small.”

Reclaiming will be released on 12 May 2022.

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

In 1973, Civil Townsend, a newly-qualified Black nurse, joins a family planning clinic in post-segregation Alabama with the best of intentions: to empower women to make their own decisions about their bodies. However, her new patients, at just eleven and thirteen years old, are children. She doesn't know it yet, but the decisions she makes now will have a lasting impact on the rest of her life. 

An utterly gripping tale from start to finish, Take My Hand is storytelling at its finest. 

Take My Hand will be released on 12 May 2022.

These Bodies of Water by Sabrina Mahfouz

Sabrina Mahfouz's poetic talents come to the forefront in this lyrical meditation on the influence of the British Empire in the Middle East. Part memoir, part history, These Bodies of Water defies categorisation in favour of a lucid, tumbling narrative that sweeps you along for the ride. Like all truly brilliant books, it's impossible to put down while you're reading, and impossible to forget about when you've finished.

These Bodies of Water will be released on 12 May 2022.

Sex Bomb by Sadia Azmat

Sadia Azmat is a hijab-wearing British-Indian Muslim woman, a proud comedian, and a “very horny woman in tune with her sexual desires.” This memoir is a testament to embracing who you are – sexual fantasies and all – regardless of the (often patriarchal) societal expectations placed upon us. 

Sex Bomb will be released on 26 May 2022.

Why Did You Stay? by Rebecca Humphries

After her partner cheated on her during his (mercifully short) stint on Strictly Come Dancing in 2018, the media eagerly anticipated Rebecca Humphries' response. Needless to say, it was magnificent: a steady yet eviscerating statement rejecting the victimhood imposed on her and shedding light over the oft-neglected realities of emotional abuse. 

Still, Rebecca was asked, ‘If he was so bad, why did you stay?’ Her first book gently (and with deft humour) unpacks the complexities behind this loaded question, as well as authoritatively answering it. Honestly? It's just a magical, magical book. 

Why Did You Stay? will be released on 7 July 2022.

Until I Met You by Amber Rose Gill

If anyone is placed to write a story about a romance in the tropics, it's undoubtedly Love Island 2019 winner, Amber Gill. Her debut novel follows newly-single Samantha, who grudgingly forms a friendship with Roman, who has just left his corporate job for a fresh start in Tobago. Sparks (not to mention secrets) fly between the pair in what is surely one of the most charming stories to come out of 2022.

Until I Met You will be released on 7 July 2022.

Isaac and the Egg by Bobby Palmer

Bobby Palmer's debut novel follows Isaac, an illustrator stricken with the most loathsome ailment of them all: grief. As he makes half-hearted attempts to keep up with the impossible reality of living after a loved one has died, Isaac forms an unlikely friendship with an egg-like creature, whom he names Egg. 

An extraordinary story ensues, brimming with magic and – perhaps most importantly – hope. 

Isaac and the Egg will be released on 18 August 2022.

For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan , follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra .

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The 10 Best Books of 2022

On a special new episode of the podcast, taped live, editors and critics from the books desk discuss this year’s outstanding fiction and nonfiction..

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Heads up! The Book Review podcast returns with a new episode this week, recorded Tuesday during a live event in which several of our editors and critics discussed the Book Review’s list of the year’s 10 Best Books. (If you haven’t seen the list yet and don’t want spoilers before listening, the choices are revealed one by one on the podcast.)

In addition to the 10 Best Books, the editors discuss on this episode some of their favorite works from the year that didn’t make the list. Here are those additional books the editors discuss:

The Passenger and Stella Maris , by Cormac McCarthy

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow , by Gabrielle Zevin

Avalon , by Nell Zink

If I Survive You , by Jonathan Escoffery

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2022: Fiction

Featuring jennifer egan, emily st. john mandel, ian mcewan, celeste ng, olga tokarczuk, and more.

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We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction; Nonfiction; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; and Literature in Translation.

Today’s installment: Fiction .

1. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf) 28 Rave • 9 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Emily St. John Mandel here

“In  Sea of Tranquility,  Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and her ability to project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart. As in Ishiguro, this is not born of some cheap, made-for-television, faux-emotional gimmick or mechanism, but of empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language … It is that aspect of  Sea of Tranquility, Mandel’s finely rendered, characteristically understated descriptions of the old-growth forests her characters walk through, the domed moon colonies some of them call home, the robot-tended fields they gaze over or the whooshing airship liftoff sound they hear even in their dreams, that will, for this reader at least, linger longest.”

–Laird Hunt ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (Scribner)

27 Rave • 13 Positive • 11 Mixed • 4 Pan Read an interview with Jennifer Egan here

“… a dizzying and dazzling work that should end up on many Best of the Year lists … The Candy House requires exquisite attentiveness and extensive effort from its readers. But the work and the investment pay off richly, as each strain and thread and character reverberates in a kind of amplifying echo-wave with all the others, and the overarching tapestry emerges as ever more intricate and brilliantly conceived. Enacting the book’s dominant metaphor, Egan is presenting a version of Collective Consciousness: the blending and extension of selfhood across shared experience and identity. One of the book’s most fascinating implications, less patent but pervasive, is how this alternative model of perception does and doesn’t undermine traditional notions of literary consciousness … As we follow the pebbles and crumbs Egan so cannily lays out, readers may feel at times as disoriented or wonderstruck as children making their way through a dark forest, at others electrifyingly clear-sighted, ecstatically certain of the novel’s wisdom, capacious philosophical range, truth and beauty. Charged with ‘a potency of ideas simmering,’ The Candy House is a marvel of a novel that testifies to the surpassing power of fiction to ‘roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.'”

–Pricilla Gilman ( The Boston Globe )

3. Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead)

26 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed

“ Pond is so unusual, and so unsettlingly pleasurable, that I thought it would be greedy to hope Bennett’s new novel, Checkout 19 , would be better. Lucky me: it is … Bennett is too committed to the oddity and specificity of her again-nameless narrator’s ideas to ever fall into the worn grooves of other people’s. Indeed, the novel is explicitly committed to the privacy of thought … Not many people are able to live this way; not many women or working-class characters get written this way. For the rooted among us, reading Checkout 19 can be utterly jarring. It is a portrait, like Pond; it’s also a call to come at least a little undone. Yes, really. It really is.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

4. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead)

26 Rave • 9 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan

“ The Books of Jacob is finally available here in a wondrous English translation by Jennifer Croft, and it’s just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed when they praised Tokarczuk for showing ‘the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding.’ In terms of its scope and ambition, The Books of Jacob is beyond anything else I’ve ever read. Even its voluminous subtitle is a witty expression of Tokarczuk’s irrepressible, omnivorous reach … The challenges here—for author and reader—are considerable. After all, Tokarczuk isn’t revising our understanding of Mozart or presenting a fresh take on Catherine the Great. She’s excavating a shadowy figure who’s almost entirely unknown today … As daunting as it sounds, The Books of Jacob is miraculously entertaining and consistently fascinating. Despite his best efforts, Frank never mastered alchemy, but Tokarczuk certainly has. Her light irony, delightfully conveyed by Croft’s translation, infuses many of the sections … The quality that makes The Books of Jacob so striking is its remarkable form. Tokarczuk has constructed her narrative as a collage of legends, letters, diary entries, rumors, hagiographies, political attacks and historical records … This is a story that grows simultaneously more detailed and more mysterious … Haunting and irresistible.”

–Ron Charles ( The Washington Post )

5. Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Grove)

27 Rave • 5 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan

“… moving … Stuart writes like an angel … masterful … if Stuart has not departed much from the scaffolding of his debut novel, he has managed to produce a story with a very different shape and pace … The raw poetry of Stuart’s prose is perfect to catch the open spirit of this handsome boy, with his strange facial tics … The way Stuart carves out this oasis amid a rising tide of homophobia infuses these scenes with almost unbearable poignancy … Stuart quickly proves himself an extraordinarily effective thriller writer. He’s capable of pulling the strings of suspense excruciatingly tight while still sensitively exploring the confused mind of this gentle adolescent trying to make sense of his sexuality … The result is a novel that moves toward two crises simultaneously: whatever happened with James in Glasgow and whatever might happen to Mungo in the Scottish wilds. The one is a foregone calamity we can only intuit; the other an approaching horror we can only dread. But even as Stuart draws these timelines together like a pair of scissors, he creates a little space for Mungo’s future, a little mercy for this buoyant young man.”

6. Lessons by Ian McEwan (Knopf)

23 Rave • 10 Positive • 4 Mixed • 3 Pan

“Nobody is better at writing about entropy, indignity and ejaculation—among other topics—than Ian McEwan … One of McEwan’s talents is to mingle the lovely with the nasty … McEwan can make a reader feel as though she has bent forward to sniff a rose and received instead the odor of old sewage … McEwan’s use of global events in his fiction tends to be judicious and revealing … These all serve as reminders that history is occurring. And maybe some readers do, in fact, require that reminder. But Roland is so passive that one gets the sense he’d be exactly the same guy in any other century, only with a different haircut … One way to read Lessons is as a self-repudiation of the maneuver at which McEwan has become virtuosic. More authors should repudiate their virtuosity. The results are exciting.”

–Molly Young ( The New York Times )

7. Either/Or by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press)

18 Rave • 12 Positive • 3 Mixed Read an interview with Elif Batuman here

“The book gallops along at a brisk pace, rich with cultural touchstones of the time, and one finishes hungry for more. I reread The Idiot before reading Either/Or and after almost 800 cumulative pages, I still wasn’t sated. Batuman possesses a rare ability to successfully flood the reader with granular facts, emotional vulnerability, dry humor, and a philosophical undercurrent without losing the reader in a sea of noise … What makes a life or story exceptional enough to create art? What art is exceptional, entertaining, and engaging enough to sustain nearly a thousand pages? Selin’s existential crisis within the collegiate crucible haunts every thoughtful reader … The novel stands on its own as a rich exploration of life’s aesthetic and moral crossroads as a space to linger—not race through. Spare me sanctimonious fictional characters locked in the anguish of their regretful late twenties and early thirties: May our bold heroine Selin return to campus and stir up more drama before departing abroad again.”

–Lauren LeBlanc ( The Boston Globe )

8. Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin)

21 Rave • 5 Positive • 4 Mixed

“Stunning … One of Ng’s most poignant tricks in this novel is to bury its central tragedy…in the middle of the action. This raises the narrative from the specific story of a confused boy and his defeated father to a reflection on the universal bond between parents and children … Our Missing Hearts will land differently for individual readers. One element we shouldn’t miss is Ng’s bold reversal of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It is the drive for conformity, the suppression of our glorious cacophony, that will doom us. And it is the expression of individual souls that will save us.”

–Bethanne Patrick ( The Lost Angeles Times )

9. Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead)

22 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Hernan Diaz here

“[An] enthralling tour de force … Each story talks to the others, and the conversation is both combative and revelatory … As an American epic, Trust gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money … Diaz’s debut, In the Distance , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Trust fulfills that book’s promise, and then some … Wordplay is Trust ’s currency … In Diaz’s accomplished hands we circle ever closer to the black hole at the core of Trust … Trust is a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery … He spins a larger parable, then, plumbing sex and power, causation and complicity. Mostly, though, Trust is a literary page-turner, with a wealth of puns and elegant prose, fun as hell to read.”

–Hamilton Cain ( Oprah Daily )

10. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

20 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an interview with Ling Ma here

“The strangeness of living in a body is exposed, the absurdity of carrying race and gender on one’s face, all against the backdrop of an America in ruin … Ma’s meticulously-crafted mood and characterization … Ma’s gift for endings is evident … Ma masterfully captures her characters’ double consciousness, always seeing themselves through the white gaze, in stunning and bold new ways … Even the weaker stories in the book…are redeemed by Ma’s restrained prose style, dry humor, and clever gut-punch endings. But all this technical prowess doesn’t mean the collection lacks a heart. First- and second-generation Americans who might have been invisible for most of their lives are seen and held lovingly in Ma’s fiction.”

–Bruna Dantas Lobato ( Astra )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Max Jeffery, Melanie McDonagh, Matthew Parris, Iain MacGregor and Petronella Wyatt

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Max Jeffery reports on the rise of luxury watch thefts in London (1:18); Melanie McDonagh discusses the collapse of religion in Scotland (5:51); reflecting on the longevity of Diane Abbott and what her selection row means for Labour, Matthew Parris argues that shrewd plans need faultless execution (10:44); Iain MacGregor reviews Giles Milton’s book ‘The Stalin Affair’ (17:30); and, Petronella Wyatt ponders her lack of luck with love (21:49). Presented and produced by Patrick Gibbons. 

The Farage factor

45 min listen

This week: The Farage factor. Our cover piece looks at the biggest news from this week of the general election campaign, Nigel Farage’s decision to stand again for Parliament. Farage appealed to voters in the seaside town of Clacton to send him to Westminster to be a ‘nuisance’. Indeed, how much of a nuisance will he be to Rishi Sunak in this campaign? Will this boost Reform’s ratings across Britain? And could it be eighth time lucky for Nigel? The Spectator‘s political editor Katy Balls joins the podcast to discuss, alongside former Clacton and UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell (2:32). Then: Gavin Mortimer reports from France ahead of the European and local

Those magnificent men and their stargazing machines

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The English lieutenant’s Frenchwoman: the tragic story of Adèle Hugo

In 1882, a sneaky reporter from the Figaro managed to track down Victor Hugo’s only surviving, long-forgotten child to an expensive mental asylum on the edge of Paris. He stalked her as she was being taken for a walk in the local park. She had the ‘profile of a duchess’, ‘staring black eyes’, a perilous hopping gait and odd compulsions. According to the reporter’s inside source, ‘Mme Pinson’ had spent a month removing all the rocks from the asylum’s long driveway and then replaced them one at a time. Thirty-three years later, she could still play the piano and claimed to be writing an opera titled Venus in Exile. She

Bayes’s Theorem: the mathematical formula that ‘explains the world’

Here’s a profound question about beards: is the number of acrobats with beards the same as the number of bearded people who are acrobats? Go with your gut instinct. It’s not a trick question. If you answer ‘yes’, then you’ve understood the central idea behind Bayes’s theorem. If you’re one of those people who likes to titter about how bad you are at mathematics, stop it. Retake your GCSE, learn how to pin this obviousness down in symbols, and you can produce artificial intelligence, forecast stock market collapses and understand this: P(A|B) = (P(B|A)∙P(A))/(P(B)) This is Bayes’s equation, the formula which, as Tom Chivers insists in this remarkable, bold book,

Second life: Playboy, by Constance Debré, reviewed

Playboy is part one of a trilogy that draws on the life of its author, Constance Debré. Part two, Love Me Tender, was published in Britain last year. The trilogy was inspired by Debré’s experience of leaving her husband, abandoning her career as a lawyer, and then losing custody of her child when she re-emerged as a lesbian (and a writer). In Love Me Tender we met a womaniser who referred to girls by numbers rather than their names; in Playboy, via her first female lovers, we witness her transformation into a queer Casanova. The novel is bold and brash and at the same time quietly controlled. Take this line:

Why must we be in constant battle with the ocean?

I recently learned to dive in the bay of Dakar. It was exciting. I’d started learning in a Leeds swimming pool and though I knew the ocean would feel different, I didn’t expect it to feel comfortable. It shouldn’t. It is not my element, and humans have long since left it to the rest of the ocean’s creatures. I also didn’t think the ocean would sound like my neck when I roll it during yoga: that same crackle. With their remarkable sonar, dolphins can even tell when a human is pregnant That the ocean is not quiet is one of the most pleasing revelations of the past century (I mean

‘A group of deranged idiots’ – how the Soviets saw the Avant-Gardists

The Avant-Gardists tells the story of the small group of brilliant, punky outsider artists who, after the Bolshevik coup in 1917, to everyone’s amazement suddenly found themselves holding important posts in government (as if Sid Vicious were made minister of education). They were soon demoted, and by the end of the 1920s persecuted or driven abroad. Yet news of their breathtaking originality spread internationally, playing an important role in transforming not only our understanding of art, but the aesthetics of modern life, from buildings to household objects, textiles to the printed word. Sjeng Scheijen has written an exhilarating history of the movement, illuminated by new research and insights, and with

A Native American tragedy: Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange, reviewed

‘You will ask the librarian what novels are written by Indian people and she will tell you that she doesn’t think there are any,’ reflects Victoria Bear Shield, a Native single mother in Tommy Orange’s polyphonic second novel. It is 1954, in America, and she is working out how to rear her baby daughter so that the child is not puzzled, as she herself was, by being ‘the brownest person in every room’. Seventy years later, one would hope that the librarian’s knowledge of indigenous writers would include at least Orange’s own work and that of Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich. Orange is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho

The ordeal of sitting for my father Lucian Freud

The frontispiece of this book is Lucian Freud’s portrait of his daughter Rose naked on a bed. Rose says that when her father asked her to sit, which she had long hoped he would do, she naturally assumed he would want her naked, but asked him not to paint her hairy legs. He, in turn, asked her to remove her mascara, but she refused. When she saw the canvas she was shocked at how much it focused on her vulva, but she did not object. She sat for him at night – he had other sitters during the day – and he sometimes gave her purple hearts to keep awake.

Did the Duchess of Windsor fake the theft of her own jewels?

On 16 October 1946, the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII, and his wife Wallis were visiting England for a short period. They were staying with their friends the Dudleys at Ednam Lodge in Surrey, and felt sufficiently comfortable not to store Wallis’s impressive collection of jewellery in the house’s safe room, but instead kept it – with almost breathtaking carelessness – under the bed. It is unsurprising, then, that an opportunistic thief was able to break into the house while the Duke and Duchess were dining in London, steal the jewels and make good his escape without detection. If this was all there was to the story, it

When Stalin was the lesser of two evils

‘We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime… Any man or state who fights against Nazism will have our aid.’ These words were spoken by Winston Churchill in a BBC radio broadcast to the nation from Chequers on the evening of 22 June 1941. Churchill detested Stalin – but he needed him to destroy Hitler That morning, Operation Barbarossa had begun, with Hitler’s armed forces launching the biggest invasion in modern history into the heart of a country whose very existence Churchill detested: the Soviet Union. This cataclysmic invasion by the Nazi regime, however, created an ally the British leader had never envisioned. For the

Haunted by the past: Winterberg’s Last Journey, by Jaroslav Rudis, reviewed

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Richard Flanagan: Question 7

40 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan, talking about his extraordinary new book Question 7. It weaves together memoir, reportage and the imaginative work of fiction. Flanagan collides his relationship with his war-traumatised father and his own near-death experience with the lives of H G Wells and Leo Szilard, the Tasmanian genocide and the bombing of Hiroshima. He talks to me about the work fiction can do, the intimate association of memory with shame, and the liberations and agonies of thinking of non-linear time.  

Peter Parker, Wayne Hunt, Nicholas Lezard, Mark Mason and Nicholas Farrell

33 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Peter Parker takes us through the history of guardsmen and homosexuality (1:12); Prof. Wayne Hunt explains what the Conservatives could learn from the 1993 Canadian election (9:10); Nicholas Lezard reflects on the diaries of Franz Kafka, on the eve of his centenary (16:06); Mark Mason provides his notes on Horse Guards (22:52); and, Nicholas Farrell ponders his wife’s potential suitors, once he’s died (26:01). Presented and produced by Patrick Gibbons.  

The wry humour of Franz Kafka

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China’s role in Soviet policy-making

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A tragedy waiting to happen: Tiananmen Square, by Lai Wen, reviewed

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The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown

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My summer of love with God’s gift

When the author and podcaster Viv Groskop first visited Ukraine, she travelled there from Moscow, on a long train that ran eventually beside a field of sunflowers. They were, she recalls in her lovely and modestly scaled memoir, like a ‘blast of sunshine screaming: “Welcome to Ukraine! You are no longer in Russia!”’ The year was 1994, and Groskop had been in the former USSR for a little under a year. A modern languages undergraduate at Cambridge, she had decided to take her year abroad in St Petersburg. Until she got there, she had barely thought of Ukraine. It was one of a bunch of newly independent states; it hadn’t

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20 Best Book Club Books for 2022 (New & Anticipated)

If you’re book club is looking for some great new releases to read, here are some of most-anticipated Best Book Club Books for 2022 . This book list is limited to new and upcoming books that are being published in 2022.

When it comes to book club selections, I generally try to recommend books that have enough substance so that the group will have plenty to discuss but are still accessible reads with general appeal. And of course you want books that are just good books!

For more great book club picks, be sure to check out the 100 Best Book Club Books of All Time .

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Fantastic list! I have several titles on my TBR. I have already finished The Christie Affair and I highly recommend it. Next in like is Dolen Perkins Valdez’ Take My Hand.

I like the list here. Thanks for sharing with us!

Can you recommend me some book about trucks or truck driver in the chapeter?

ces livres que nous lisons doivent repousser les limites de la compréhension…

Several offerings here for our next bookclub meeting. Thanks for compiling! Mary

It seems you just increased my reading list. Lol! I hope I can read some of these soon. Thanks for recommending these!

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The Book of Mormon Tickets

About The Book of Mormon

Say hello to the Mormons and become an all-American prophet at this raucous comedy musical at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London’s West End. The Book of Mormon tickets are available on London Theatre now.

The Book of Mormon , a boldly irreverent and satirical musical

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, known for their daring approach to pushing the boundaries on controversial topics, teamed up with Robert Lopez to co-write The Book of Mormon . Development began in 2003 when they conceived the idea of writing a musical based around Joseph Smith, the Church of Latter-Day Saints founder.

What is The Book of Mormon musical about?

Follow the journey of two missionaries who dream of serving in Orlando, only to be told they must serve in Uganda. While in Africa, they share their scriptures with the local community. The locals don’t care about what they have to say: AIDS, famine, and warlords pose a more significant threat. Join Elder Price and Elder Cunningham as they spread the gospel and attempt to make every day a latter day.

While The Book of Mormon satirises the Christian denomination, it accurately sheds light on Mormon ideas and practices. It’s common for young men to serve a two-year mission and spread their faith worldwide — just like Elder Price and Elder Cunningham.

Why is The Book of Mormon musical so popular?

The Book of Mormon has delighted audiences for years with its irreverent humour and unapologetic wit. The show bravely tackles complex social commentary and dives into topics often considered taboo, set to catchy songs that you’ll be humming long after the curtain call.

After winning nine Tony Awards on Broadway, The Book of Mormon opened in the West End at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 2013. The show arrived in London to instant success, winning four Olivier Awards, including Best New Musical. Find out more about The Book of Mormon in London.

Tickets to The Book of Mormon in London are available now

Book your The Book of Mormon tickets on London Theatre today.

2hr 30min. Incl. 1 interval.

15th November, 2021

5th October, 2024

Musicals , Comedy , Satire , West End

Prince of Wales Theatre

Ages 17+. Everyone must have their own ticket. Under 16s must be accompanied and sat next to an adult (18+). No under 3s.

2K+ Reviews

Holly H 2090

See it if You like south park, and or you like no pc humour

Don’t see it if You are delicate and can’t take a joke

See it if You like hilarious provocative musicals.

Don’t see it if You’re very religious and easily offended by attacks on religion.

Izzy Oliver

See it if You love a great time full of laughs , camp tap dancing, amazing vocals and naughty hilarious ness. Belly laughing for 2.5 hours !

Don’t see it if Your easily offended or with children. Several moments your holding your breath wondering how they get away with it all.

Elliott Westhoff

See it if you love the humour of South Park and rude musicals.

Don’t see it if you’re easily offended! It’s v rude!

The Book of Mormon London Review

The book of mormon cast and creative team.

By : Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, Matt Stone Music : Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, Matt Stone Director : Casey Nicholaw and Trey Parker Choreography : Casey Nicholaw Cast list : Blair Gibson (as Elder Price), Conner Peirson (as Elder Cunningham), Beatrice Penny-Toure (as Nabulungi), Colin Burnicle (as Elder McKinley), Richard Lloyd-King (as Mafala Hatimbi), Ron Remke (as Joseph Smith/Jesus/Price's Dad/Mission President), Edward Baruwa (as General/Satan) Design : Scott Pask Costume : Ann Roth Lighting : Brian MacDevitt Sound : Brian Ronan

Location: West End Railway station: Charing Cross Bus numbers: (Haymarket) 3, 6, 12, 13, 19, 23, 38, 88, 139 Night bus numbers: (Haymarket) 6, 12, 23, 88, 139, N3, N13, N18, N19, N38, N97, N136, N550, N551 Car park: Leicester Square, Whitcomb Street (1min) Directions from tube: (2mins) Take Coventry Street and the theatre is be past the London Trocadero on your right.

More information about The Book of Mormon

Book tickets to The Book of Mormon, or sign up to receive the latest news and show alerts.

Show schedule

Frequently asked questions

What is the book of mormon about.

Music, missionaries, and mischief combine in one of the best-loved comedy musicals of all time from the creators of South Park. Mormon missionaries find themselves in over their heads in Africa in a satirical but sweet story about finding who you really are. Check out tickets to The Book of Mormon at the Prince of Wales Theatre today.

How long is The Book of Mormon?

The running time of The Book of Mormon is 2hr 30min. Incl. 1 interval.

Where is The Book of Mormon playing?

The Book of Mormon is playing at Prince of Wales Theatre. The theatre is located in 31 Coventry Street, London, W1D 6AS.

How much do tickets cost for The Book of Mormon?

Tickets for The Book of Mormon start at £25.

What's the age requirement for The Book of Mormon?

The recommended age for The Book of Mormon is Ages 17+. Everyone must have their own ticket. Under 16s must be accompanied and sat next to an adult (18+). No under 3s..

How do you book tickets for The Book of Mormon?

Book tickets for The Book of Mormon on London Theatre.

What are the songs in The Book of Mormon?

Some of the more popular songs in The Book of Mormon are “I Believe,” “Hello,” and “You and Me (But Mostly Me).” Find a complete list of all the songs featured in The Book of Mormon in our complete guide to the show.

Who wrote The Book of Mormon?

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the animated television series South Park , collaborated with Robert Lopez to write The Book of Mormon .

Who directed The Book of Mormon?

Casey Nicholaw and Trey Parker co-directed The Book of Mormon . The pair won the Tony Award for Best Direction, and Nicholaw was also awarded a Tony for his choreography.

When did The Book of Mormon open in the West End?

The Book of Mormon opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End on 21 March 2013. At the Olivier Awards 2014, the musical won the Best New Musical award.

Is The Book of Mormon appropriate for kids?

Due to adult themes and strong language, parental guidance is advised. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Is The Book of Mormon good?

The Book of Mormon is a hilarious award-winning musical that is constantly one of London’s hot tickets. Read our five-star review of The Book of Mormon here.

Latest The Book of Mormon News & Features

Top 10 london musicals, a complete guide to all the songs in 'the book of mormon', here's why you need to see 'the book of mormon' in london, everything you need to know about ‘the book of mormon’ in london, more shows you may like.

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The best ereader for 2024: top ebook readers from Kindle, Kobo and more

The best ereaders are perfect for reading and productivity too

• Best overall
• Best budget
• Best mid-range

Best Kindle

• Best large screen
• Best premium
• Best compact
• Best durable

Best for kids

• Best Android
• How we test

The list in brief 1. Best overall 2. Best budget 3. Best mid-range 4. Best Kindle 5. Best large screen 6. Best premium 7. Best color screen 8. Best compact 9. Best durable 10. Best for kids 11. Best Android

When it comes to choosing the best ereader for you, you are no longer restricted to Amazon 's Kindles. There are more choices to explore, with competition from Kobo, Onyx Boox and PocketBook.

There was a time when ereaders did one thing – let you read without any distractions from other apps. Today, however, you get ereaders that do more, and not just jot notes. For example, most of the higher-end Onyx Boox devices give you access to the Google Play Store, so you can use a plethora of apps on the e-paper tablet. So how do you choose the best ereader for you?

You do that by answering a few questions, questions like: is waterproofing important to you? Do you prefer to hold and operate your ereader in one hand? Do you need to borrow library books (particularly if you live outside the US)? Do you read a lot of comics and graphic novels that are better on a color screen? Do you scribble notes in margins or require something for research and journaling?

Once you've figured out what exactly you want from your reading device, you can use our list of the best ereaders below to find what's right for you and your budget. We also have suggestions for the best tablets and best Kindles , if you have a more specific idea in mind.

Whatever your needs, all ereaders use similar E Ink technology which, at the time of writing, is the Carta 1200 screen for black-and-white models, although the next-gen E Ink Carta 1300 display is making it to market. This display is responsive, and text on the screen has good contrast to make reading in any lighting condition easy. The best color display is the E Ink Kaleido 3 screen technology, although colors appear slightly muted compared to what you'd see on your phone or tablet. A new display called E Ink Gallery 3 was supposed to debut a while back that would add more saturation and sharpness, but that seems to have run into issues unknown. Until then, below are your best options.

Recent updates

May 1, 2024: With new products hitting the market, we've updated some of the categories in this buying guide with the latest ereaders where necessary. This means we have a new pick for the best overall ereader, and we've added a couple of new categories for the best compact and best large-screen ereaders too.

Sharmishta is TechRadar's APAC Managing Editor and spends most of her free time buried in a good book. It's how she got into ereaders in the first place – going digital due to a lack of space to store her books and being able to carry her entire library with her wherever she went. She's been testing ereaders for about six years now and has appeared on Singaporean radio twice to speak about these underrated tablets.

The quick list

Want to cut to the chase and find out which ereaders are the absolute best? Take a look below. You can also jump to a more detailed review of each ereader further down the page, and our price comparison tool will help you find the best deals.

Best for most people

Keeping everything that made the Kobo Libra line our pick of the best ereader for years, the Kobo Libra Colour adds a color screen to mix, plus stylus support. And at a price that's not all that much more than its predecessor, it's excellent value for a full-featured ereader.

Read more below

Best budget ereader

The 2022 edition of the Amazon Kindle base model ereader is lighter than any previous iteration. But it's not as cheap as its previous siblings. Still, despite a small markup in price, it's the best ereader for anyone on a tight budget or looking for a small, pocketable Kindle.

Best mid-range ereader

With a body made mostly from recycled plastic and a 6-inch screen that's clear, crisp and responsive, this ereader also offers waterproofing that the base Kindle model doesn't. There's also audiobook support here. In fact, it's a very worthy upgrade to the original Kobo Clara HD.

Released in 2021, the latest Kindle Paperwhite is bigger and better than any that came before. It boasts a bigger 6.8-inch screen and a bigger battery. It was also the first Kindle to get a USB-C charging port. And, if you have the extra cash, the Signature Edition also gets you wireless charging.

Best large-screen ereader

A 10.3-inch note-taking ereader is expensive, but a large screen is not just great for reading, but writing on as well. You'll find it useful if you're a student, researcher or do a lot of journaling. You can scribble in the margins of books or create notes from scratch, with a plethora of writing tools at your disposal.

Best premium ereader

It's that screen! Amazon has used the same E Ink Carta 1200 screen on its first ever note-taking ereader and yet made it look brighter than any others. It's got a 300ppi resolution as compared to the 227ppi on competing ereaders. A metal finish rounds up the luxurious reading experience on a large screen. 

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Best color ereader

It may not have all the bells and whistles of some of the other ereaders on this list, but if it's a color screen on a budget you're after, the Kobo Clara Colour is it. This compact 6-inch package is arguably the cheapest color ereader on the market, but you won't get any writing features here.

Best compact ereader

It looks remarkably like a phone but it won't make any calls. It will, however, allow you to download Android apps from the Google Play Store and read in black and white without as much eye fatigue. It's not cheap, but there's really nothing like it on the market right now.

Best durable ereader

It's got a great design that makes it stand apart from the crowd and boasts a speaker too. While the latter doesn't have great sound quality, it's the screen that's the standout here. It's got an anti-scratch coating that not a lot of other ereaders boast, in addition to the IPX8 waterproofing rating.

While the obvious choice for a kid-friendly ereader would be the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Kids, it isn't available in all markets. The Kobo Nia, however, is more widely available and is cheaper too. Borrowing books is easy if OverDrive support is available at your local library, but keep in mind the Nia is not waterproof.

A 7.8-inch color display, a stylus in the box and full access to the Google Play Store makes the Onyx Boox Tab Mini C one heck of an e-paper tablet. It's heavy, but that's only because of its massive battery. It's also expensive, but this Android 11 tablet will let you take notes, read and even play mobile games.

The best ereader for 2024

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Below you'll find full write-ups for each of the best ereaders in our list. We've tested each one extensively, so you can be sure that our recommendations can be trusted.

The best ereader overall

1. Kobo Libra Colour

Our expert review:

Specifications

Reasons to buy, reasons to avoid.

✅ You want a mid-range ereader with plenty of features:  The balance between price and feature set is really good, offering good bang for buck.

✅ You want to operate your ereader in one hand:  The page-turn buttons and asymmetrical design makes it easy to hold and use the Libra Colour in one hand. 

✅ You want a relatively open ecosystem:  Other than its audiobooks, Kobo doesn't lock you into its own platform, allowing you to easily sideload files or borrow from a library.

❌ You plan to make a lot of notes:  The 7-inch screen feels too small to take full advantage of Kobo's Advanced Notebooks. A larger screen would be better for that.

❌ You don't need a color display: You can save money by opting for a grayscale ereader if color content isn't important to you.

Announced in April 2024, Kobo has replaced its Libra 2 ereader with a color version and also added stylus support. Launching at a price not all that much more than its predecessor, the Kobo Libra Colour takes over as our best overall ereader by offering a good balance between price and feature set.

Like the previous two Libra ereaders before it, the Libra Colour is the right size for the average reader – not too small, not too large – and it retains the asymmetric design that makes it handy to use single-handed. In fact, it's a touch lighter than its predecessor, coming in at 199.5g compared to the Libra 2's 215g.

The color screen is the headline here, though. Even if you don't read much color content like comics or graphic novels, just seeing a book cover displayed the way it's meant to be can enhance the reading experience. 

Plus you now get writing features on Kobo's mid-range ereader. You need to buy the Kobo Stylus 2 separately though, but considering the Libra Colour is launching at a price only slightly higher than the previous model, we'd say that's a fair bargain.

And not only is 85% of the ereader body made with recycled plastics, the packaging it ships in is fully recycled and recyclable, with the ink used to print the images and text on the box made from soy, which makes it biodegradable. It's also IPX8-rated waterproof.

Kobo is also hoping to make this device repairable in the near future, partnering with iFixit to provide users with repair kits and guides to extend the lifespan of the device. There's still no information on how this will work or what kind of kits are going to be available, but it's still a change in the right direction.

Everything else we love about the more premium Kobo devices is here – 32GB of storage, access to OverDrive, Pocket and Kobo Plus directly from the tablet, plus cloud file transfer via Google Drive and Dropbox. File and font support is also still pretty good.   

Read our full Kobo Libra Colour review

• ^ Back to the top

The best budget ereader

2. Amazon Kindle (2022)

✅ You want a compact ereader:  At 6 inches, the Kindle can fit into any bag, even a large pocket, so you can take it anywhere.

✅ You're budget-conscious:  It might be more expensive than its predecessor, but it's still well priced considering it's got more features than the older model.

❌ You want a larger screen:  As portable as it is, you may find a 6-inch screen too small as you could be turning pages frequently, thus eating into the battery life.

❌ You don't want to spend extra on a case:  There's not a lot of grip here, which could make this small ereader feel insecure in your hand. A case will help add that grip.

It took Amazon about five years to update the base Kindle model, but what an absolutely fantastic upgrade the 2022 edition is! A different blue color than the usual black is an option and, like the Kobo Clara 2E, is partially made from recycled plastics. 

A slight design refresh aside, the screen is way better now than the older Kindle models, with the E Ink Carta 1200 tech adding snappier responses, clarity and, more importantly, a 300ppi resolution (a massive jump from the older 167ppi) that really makes everything on screen pop. The display even supports a dark mode.

However, there's still no way to change light temperature here, and it also misses out on any kind of waterproofing. We also found that the smooth rear panel makes the 2022 Kindle a little insecure in the hand, and you'd likely want a case to get some grip. Plus the 6-inch screen could be too small for anyone who likes the font size on the larger side, which means you're turning pages quite often, eating into the battery life. Still, the small size makes it very portable indeed.

While we think the waterproofing and the additional features of any Kobo ereader make the Clara 2E a more worthwhile option for a small-sized ereader, the Kindle is cheaper in comparison and it would be remiss of us to leave it out of this buying guide.

Read our full Amazon Kindle (2022) review and find out how it compares in our Amazon Kindle (2022) vs Kobo Clara 2E guide

The best mid-range ereader

3. Kobo Clara 2E

✅ You like eco-friendly products:  Environmentally-conscious readers will be glad to know this ereader is made from a lot of recycled plastic, including some that were bound for our oceans.

✅ Features matter to you:  It might be another 6-inch ereader, but you get waterproofing, Pocket and OverDrive support, and much more for your money. 

❌ You want good battery life:  While you can get up to four weeks of battery life between charges, its performance can be a little inconsistent.

The Kobo Clara 2E is a worthy upgrade over its predecessor, the Clara HD, getting the E Ink Carta 1200 screen tech, plus double the internal storage space to 16GB. Where the predecessor had no waterproofing, the 2E carries an IPX8 rating, so you can read in the bath or the pool and not worry too much. 

Kobo says the body is made out of recycled plastic, 85% of it to be precise, 10% of which were ocean-bound plastics. It was the first eco-conscious ereader to hit shelves.

Other updates over the older model include the now standard USB-C charging port and Bluetooth connectivity so you can listen to audiobooks (albeit only those purchased from the Kobo Store).  All the other usual Kobo perks are here: adjustable light temperature, OverDrive support for library books, wide font and file support, and a very streamlined user interface that makes it easy to navigate through the device's features.

While we found the battery life a little inconsistent, it could just have been teething issues on our review device only, or easily fixable via a firmware update. Overall, though, it's a huge upgrade over the older Clara HD and worth every penny if you're after a very portable and capable ereader that isn't caught up in a closed ecosystem like Amazon's.

Read our full Kobo Clara 2E review

The best Kindle

4. Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2021)

✅ You predominantly source titles from the Kindle Store:  If you're already locked into Amazon's ecosystem, the Paperwhite offers a good balance between price and feature set.

✅ Screen size matters:  A bright and larger screen means your reading experience is better any time and anywhere. 

❌ You have your own collection of ePUBs:  While you can sideload the epub file format now to a Kindle, you still have to jump through a hoop or two.

❌ You've got a tight budget:  Opting for a smaller screen will save you money and get you similar features too.

We still think the Kindle Paperwhite is the best Kindle you can buy, thanks to its water-resistant design and crisp, bright E Ink display. The basic Kindle 2022 is catching up fast, but the Paperwhite's 6.8-inch display is a great size for reading on as compared to a 6-inch tablet.

We like the adjustable warm light for reading in the dark, and the slim design with a flush screen is appealing and easy to read.

At launch this only had 8GB of storage, but in 2022 Amazon added a 16GB model to the mix, making it all the more desirable. Or you can shell out for the 32GB Paperwhite Signature Edition if you have the cash to spare. The Signature Edition also adds wireless charging, a unique ereader feature. We don't think that's terribly necessary though, so we rate the standard Paperwhite higher once you factor in the price. 

Even the standard Paperwhite is a little pricey for a Kindle, but perhaps a refreshed model will see more features added without the price hiking up, thus adding more value for money. Even so, the Paperwhite is an excellent ereader, and our pick of the best Kindle, particularly if you're already embedded in Amazon's ecosystem (aka already subscribed to Kindle Unlimited and Audible).  

Read our full Amazon Kindle Paperwhite review

The best large-screen ereader

5. Kobo Elipsa 2E

✅ You take a lot of notes or are into journaling:  The note-taking features here are par excellence, particularly the Advanced Notebook option, which makes it the perfect replacement for pen and paper.

✅ You want your scribbles exported as typed text: While handwriting recognition is available on other models, Kobo does it well... just as long you're not scribbling badly.  

✅ You want a rechargable stylus: Kobo's updated stylus can be charged via USB-C, making it lighter and longer lasting.

❌ Writing is a superfluous feature:  Considering its feature set, the Elipsa 2E offers good value for money, but only if you will make full use of its writing capabilities.

❌ Looks matter:  It might have great features, but the Elipsa 2E is just another plastic tablet.

If you can't decide between a tablet or an ereader, the Amazon Kindle Scribe might be a tempting option, but Kobo Elipsa 2E wins here for a few simple reasons.

It offers a bit more open ecosystem than a Kindle, with plenty of file and font support, plus the usual Kobo perks of Dropbox connectivity (to transfer your notes and ebooks wirelessly), OverDrive support (to borrow library ebooks) and the baked-in Pocket app to read long-form web articles offline. 

And, if you will make full use of its extensive writing tools, there's a lot more value for money here than the Kindle Scribe or the Onyx Boox Note Air series tablets.

Its 10.3-inch screen is great for reading, particularly if you're into comics and graphic novels (albeit displayed in black and white), and an upgraded processor means it's a lot faster and more responsive than its predecessor (we're replacing the original Kobo Elipsa with the new model on our best ereader list for that reason).

Our only gripe with the new Elipsa 2E is that it no longer ships with a sleepcover like the older model did, meaning you're spending a little extra to ensure the redesigned Kobo Stylus 2 – which is also better than the older pen Kobo made – is stowed away securely at all times.

Read our full Kobo Elipsa 2E review

The best premium ereader

6. Amazon Kindle Scribe

✅ You want a bright screen:  With an ambient light sensor on board, the Scribe's screen is hands-down the best ereader display on the market.

✅ You deal with a lot of MS Word and PDF files:  You can edit both Microsoft Word files and PDFs easily, then export back to your computer. 

❌ You need a full writing suite:  As lovely as the screen is to write on, the Scribe's writing features are comparatively limited.

❌ Money is tight:  Getting the best reading experience possible means shelling out a decent chunk of change, especially if you throw in the optional sleepcover too.

If money is no object and you want the most luxurious reading experience a digital ebook reader can give you, then the Amazon Kindle Scribe takes over from the Kindle Oasis . That's because the Oasis is now aging, lacking the speed of the newer, larger model.

The metal body of the Kindle Scribe is reminiscent of the Oasis, but lacks the two page-turn buttons on the larger bezel, but that 10.3-inch screen is just beautiful to read on. Admittedly it's not quite as portable and can feel heavy when held in one hand, it's still marvelous to use... and write on.

Yes, like the Kobo Elipsa 2E, the Scribe ships with a stylus for writing and drawing. At launch, its writing capabilities were very limited, but Amazon has slowly but steadily been expanding its flagship ereader's features, so much so that you can actually read Microsoft Word documents on it. Signing on documents in PDF format is a breeze – just email it to your associated Kindle email address. And the stylus glides beautifully over that bright screen – it's hands-down the best writing experience according to our review. That said, we'd still recommend the Kobo Elipsa 2E as the better writing tablet because of its Advanced Notebook feature.

No matter how wonderful the writing experience and how great it is to read on, the Scribe is expensive. So you could still opt for the Kindle Oasis for a premium reading experience if your main criteria is digital reading and portability, but there's no getting away from the fact that the large screen has some serious oomph.

Read our full Amazon Kindle Scribe review

The best color ereader

7. Kobo Clara Colour

✅ You want an affordable color ereader: Arguably cheaper than any other color ereader out there, the Clara Colour is making color content more accessible.

✅ You want to borrow library books:  Whether ebooks or digital magazines, if your local public library supports OverDrive, you can save money by borrowing titles.

❌ You want a stylus:  This is an entry-level ereader, with no writing features.

❌  You need a larger screen:  A 6-inch display isn't for everyone. If you think you need more screen real estate, opt for a 7-inch ereader instead.

When it comes to color ereaders, it's hard to recommend any particular one as the displayed colors on all of them look slightly washed out. That's not the fault of the ereader; that's just the tech. However, if you ask us, we'd pick the Kobo Clara Colour as arguably the cheapest mainstream color ereader available right now.

While the 6-inch color display may not be ideal for comics or graphic novels, it's still a good entry point to making color content accessible. In fact, we think it would be a good first ereader for someone looking to get started with digital reading. Sure, there are cheaper grayscale options available, but something has got be said about seeing a book cover displayed in color on an ereader.

And, as a Kobo ereader, it's got a lot more going for it with a relatively more open ecosystem than Amazon's Kindle, plus good file and font support. 16GB of onboard storage, Bluetooth connectivity to pair wireless headphones for audiobook enjoyment and IPX8 waterproofing rounds up its other important features. 

Importantly, it gets an upgraded processor that improves performance over the Clara 2E and the Kindle base model significantly.

Like the Libra Colour (listed above) it was launched alongside, the Clara Colour has also been made with recycled plastic and comes in fully recycled and recyclable packing. It's also supposed to be repairable but we're still waiting on confirmation on how exactly Kobo's new partnership with iFixit will work.

Read our in-depth Kobo Clara Colour review

The best compact ereader

8. Onyx Boox Palma

✅ You want a phone-sized ereader: The only e-paper device to mimic the look and size of a phone, the Palma easily slips into a pocket.

✅ You want access to Android apps:  From reading apps to mobile games, you get full access to the Google Play Store as the device runs Android 11.

❌  You need a larger screen:  A 6.13-inch display with a 2:1 aspect ratio isn't for everyone.

❌  You want something cheaper: Being an unique device and boasting a lot of features makes this a rather expensive – and novel – purchase.

The Onyx Boox Palma is a unique device that can easily be mistaken for a phone. Except it won't make any calls and it's got an e-paper screen. It's even lighter than some of the phones it mimics, making it the perfect device for anyone looking to move away from reading on an LCD or OLED screen to a more comfortable E Ink display.

It also has a lot of onboard storage, but if 128GB isn't enough for you, there's also a microSD tray to expand the capacity. That means you can load up thousands of ebooks, several audiobooks, music files (yes, there's a player app built in) and anything else you can think of to take on your travels without affecting your baggage allowance. It lacks waterproofing, though.

Like any phone today, there's a built-in speaker and, also like a phone, it sounds better if you use the Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity to pair wireless headphones to enjoy your music and audiobooks.

Running a fat-free version of Android 11, the Palma gets you access to the Play Store and, with a pretty powerful CPU and decent graphics, you can actually play some mobile games – it really is impressive how well the screen handles graphics... albeit in black and white only.

There really is a lot to recommend the Palma, but it would have been a better device if Onyx had added stylus support too. It would also make it easier to justify the high price tag as there are 6-inch ereaders that are a lot cheaper than it. However, there's nothing quite like it on the market and that alone could be justification enough for some users.

Read our in-depth Onyx Boox Palma review

The best durable ereader

9. PocketBook Era

✅ You want a good-looking ereader:  With cut-off corners and a metallic trim, the Era is a fine-looking tablet with a design that no other brand can offer.

✅ You don't want to spend on a case:  Sleepcovers can protect your screen from scratches, but this ereader allows you to save that little bit of money.

✅ You don't like wearing headphones:  There's a built-in speaker that can be useful for listening to audiobooks without pairing a set of Bluetooth headphones.

❌ You live outside of the European Union:  Purchasing content from the device is difficult if you live outside of select European countries, so you will need to source your books from elsewhere and sideload.

❌ You want a streamlined UX:  PocketBook's user interface can be a little clunky if you've experienced setups on other ereaders before.

The PocketBook Era is our favourite ereader from the brand. It looks gorgeous and far nicer than other ereaders. And although it feels heavier than other 7-inch ereaders, the weight is well-distributed. The display looks good with an additional layer on the latest E Ink Carta 1200 display also adding scratch-resistance to its IPX8 waterproofing. Low on-screen contrast is a downside but you learn to live with it and, honestly, it won't bother you for the most part.

Elsewhere, the PocketBook Era has a built-in speaker that you'll probably rarely use, although Bluetooth connectivity will let you pair a set of wireless headphones if you're listening to audiobooks (or music – yes, you can load it up with MP3 files but this takes up a lot of storage). We're big fans of its long-lasting battery life, although decent performance is mildly hampered by a clunky interface. 

There are four physical buttons on this device, sitting right at the edge of the larger bezel, and they're snappy enough to work well. However, the positioning of the buttons can be a little tiring on the fingers when used one-handed.

Its unique chassis shape and metallic trim make PocketBook Era an attractive ereader, even if it's flawed, and it would be remiss of us to not include it here as an alternate to the likes of the Kobo Libra 2 or the Kindle Oasis. 

Read our full PocketBook Era review

The best ereader for kids

10. Kobo Nia

✅ Affordability is important:  It's one of the cheapest ereaders on the market today.

✅ You live outside the US:  Considering the Kindle Paperwhite Kids can be purchased in some markets and will allow you to borrow books from an American library, the Nia is the better choice where the Amazon option isn't available. 

❌ Waterproofing is important:  Accidents can happen and if you think that's a big possibility with your kids, you might want to get an ereader with an IPX8 rating.

It might be getting a little long in the tooth now but the Kobo Nia is a good option if you want your kids to get into digital reading. While Amazon has a Kindle designed specifically for kids, our pick goes to the Kobo as it's more widely available. Moreover, like with any Kobo ereader, the option to borrow library books is built in, as long your local public library has OverDrive support.

With Amazon having replaced its base Kindle model in 2022 with a more expensive (but improved) upgrade, it makes the Kobo Nia one of the more affordable ereaders on the market today. 

That said, the Nia isn't as full featured as new ereaders. It lacks waterproofing, which could be an important consideration if you're shopping for your kids (you could opt for the Kobo Clara 2E if this is important), and there's no Bluetooth support for audiobooks.

It also has older screen technology, but don't hold that against it. It still boasts a decent 212ppi resolution with good contrast, so text is clear. And, if you'd like to get your kids access to Kobo Plus, that can be done directly from the device itself as well.

The best Android ereader

11. Onyx Boox Tab Mini C

✅ You read a lot of comics and graphic novels:  Sometimes you really just need a color screen to appreciate a particular title.

✅ You want access to the Google Play Store: Running Android 11, you can download apps from the Google Store, including mobile games and other reading applications. 

✅ Note taking is important to you: It might be overkill but Onyx's note-taking native app is arguably the most full-featured option available.

❌ You want an easy-to-use interface:  There's a plethora of customizations available here and that can get overwhelming.

❌  You already own a multimedia tablet:  Fans of comics and graphic novels who already own an iPad or a Samsung Galaxy Tab won't enjoy a color ereader as much.

With a color screen, stylus support and running slimmed-down version of (the now dated) Android 11, there's a lot going on with the Onyx Boox Tab Mini C. But it's the operating system that makes it easy to recommend. Not only does it come with some decent native apps for reading, note-taking and browsing the internet, you can download any Android app you deem useful onto the device. This includes YouTube if you want to watch videos... in black and white and looking like the moving pictures from a newspaper in the Harry Potter movie franchise.

You can always download the Kindle or Kobo app to read your existing library if you already have one, or opt to use any note-taking application you might like. 

The 7.8-inch display is a good size for comics and graphic novels, although the device itself is rather heavy to hold for long reading sessions. And it gets heavier if you opt to use a sleepcover for it, which you will need to ensure the stylus is securely stuck to the side of the tablet as the magnet isn't very strong.

The weight, though, is mostly due to the 5,000mAh battery pack that gives you 8-10 weeks of use on a single charge – that's a lot! Even when multitasking with it, the battery performance is quite impressive. 

The one thing to note here is that because of its larger screen size compared to the two other color ereaders on this list, the pixel density is lower, meaning the colors appear less saturated. If you already own a multi-media tablet like an iPad or a Samsung Galaxy Tab, you're better off using those instead if saturated colors are important to you.

There's even built-in speakers here, so you can listen to music – there's a native player here too – or audiobooks. The sound quality isn't great, but there aren't too many ebook reading tablets with speakers.

As good as the Tab Mini C is as an e-paper tablet, it is expensive and not widely available, which is a real shame. But we appreciate how wonderful the contrast on screen is, making it a pleasure to read, even in the brightest of sunlight.

Read our in-depth  Onyx Boox Tab Mini C review

Ereader FAQs

What is an ereader.

It might look like a boring tablet, but an ereader is designed specifically only for digital versions of books, whether novels or comics, fiction or non-fiction. All ereaders – also called ebook readers – use a special display that makes reading in any kind of ambient lighting condition easy. These displays have a look that resembles the texture of paper (not the feel), and that's easy on the eyes.

Since they perform only a single task – display ebooks – they don't use powerful processors and can be slow to refresh. However, this doesn't affect the performance of an ereader and, in fact, allows the battery life to go on for weeks on a single charge.

An ereader typically comes with 8GB of storage, if not more, and can store hundreds of titles. That means you can carry your entire library with you on holiday.

Do you really need an ereader?

Whether you need a dedicated ereader will depend on how much you read books and whether you're comfortable spending the extra money on a reading device. If you're an avid reader and keep buying new titles, you'll find that going digital can help you save on storage space for your books as well as save you money in the long run as ebooks are typically cheaper than the printed versions. Admittedly you'll be spending a decent chunk of change on the ereader itself, but you'll find that it pays for itself soon enough. Moreover, some ereaders allow you to borrow library books, which can save you even more. 

And if you have the habit of reading during your morning commute, an ereader is a lot lighter than carrying an actual book.

It can be argued that reading on your phone or tablet is just as good, and while that's true for the most part, the e-paper screen on an ereader is designed to reduce eye strain. So if you read a lot before bed, it's definitely worth considering an ereader, particularly one that allows you to adjust its frontlight's temperature to warmer hues.

Kindle vs Kobo: what is the difference?

While the devices themselves are largely similar, there are a few differences between Kindles and Kobo ereaders. For starters, the former is widely available in any market Amazon operates in, but Kindles can lock you into Amazon's ecosystem by pushing you to purchase titles only from the Kindle Store.

Kobo also has its own bookstore accessible via its ereaders, but the ecosystem is a lot more open and sideloading books you already own is a lot easier. Kobo's file support is wider, as is its font support. In fact, you can even sideload Amazon's dedicated fonts like Bookerly and Ember if you prefer them. 

Then there's borrowing library books – while both devices give you that option, Kindle users can only do so if they live in the US. If you happen to reside elsewhere, you might want to consider a Kobo, provided your local library has OverDrive support (you can ask them before you decide to buy an ereader). 

Kobo devices are typically a little more expensive, but then you also get more device choices from the Japanese-Canadian ereader brand. And if you're after a note-taking device, we think Kobo is the way to go.

Find out more about how to choose between a Kindle and a Kobo ereader . 

Kindle vs Kobo: which one should you buy?

Pretty much everything about the two platforms is competitive, including pricing, so the choice of device ultimately rests on where you live and how you plan on getting your books. 

If you plan on buying books from the device maker's service, both are great. We like the Kobo hardware and software a bit better here at TechRadar, but the Amazon Kindle Store is much larger. 

If you'd like to borrow free books from your library, the Kobo is the better choice for more regions. Kindle devices can borrow from public libraries, but that service only works in the US currently. Kobo devices can borrow in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore (be sure to check with the library of choice first though). 

Moreover, at the time of writing, there are more Kobo models to choose from than Kindle, although there's no arguing that the latter is, hands down, the most popular brand and is synonymous with the word 'ereader'.

Which ereader is better for library books?

If your main source of reading material would ebooks from your local library, then it's best to opt for a Kindle or a Kobo device. Both with allow you to access your local library's ebook catalogue from anywhere (as long as you are connected to a Wi-Fi network), but keep in mind that Kindles only support borrowing from American libraries. If you live outside of the US, a Kobo would be a better option.

Kobo devices work with the OverDrive service that lets you borrow in regions including the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore (amongst others). If you want to own your books, the Amazon marketplace is much larger than Kobo, and has a huge self-publishing component for finding independent authors. 

Can I listen to audiobooks on an ereader?

As long as an ereader has Bluetooth connectivity, you should be able to pair a set of wireless headphones to listen to supported audio files. While brands like Onyx and PocketBook will allow you to sideload audio files, including audiobooks, Kindle and Kobo devices only support those purchased from their respective stores.

In fact, some Onyx and PocketBook ereaders have built-in speakers, so you may not even need headphones to listen. However, don't expect great sound quality from them because, like your phone, they're small drivers and the sound would be better via a connected pair of headphones.

Also keep in mind that audio files are typically larger than ebook formats, so if you're storing a lot of these on your device, you'll need to keep an eye on how much space you've got left. 

What fonts can my ereader support?

Most ereaders will support some basic fonts natively and you won't need to tinker with them at all. However, if you do want to change things up, a Kindle or a Kobo is a good idea as they both make it easy to change fonts on the device.

You'll find that the Kindles have some custom fonts designed by Amazon, with Bookerly and Ember being the most popular ones. We found that the list of fonts on Kindles is extensive enough that we didn't find the need to sideload more, but you can if you need to.

Kobo devices also have their own set of default fonts, but there's no rule against sideloading more, including Amazon's own custom ones like Bookerly. And sideloading is as easy as plugging your Kobo ereader into a computer and moving your desired font to the device's fonts folder.

What is the difference between an ereader and a tablet?

If you already own a tablet – whether an iPad or an Android – do you really need another device for reading digital books? An ereader has limitations, but for reading it can be far superior to a more extensible tablet.

1. E Ink technology The main difference between an ereader and an iPad you will notice immediately. The ereader screen is almost always grayscale, using special E Ink technology that is very crisp and specialized for fonts and text. It refreshes relatively slowly and it sometimes leaves a trace (ghosting) that needs to be refreshed. 

E-ink screens also don't flicker like a normal screen, making it more comfortable to read for a longer period of time.

2. Battery life While you might hope to get a day of use out of your iPad, an ereader tablet measures battery life in weeks. Because the screen only refreshes when you turn the page, it draws very little power. Our favorite ereaders have a backlit screen, but those LED lights don't use much battery. If you read for 30 minutes a day or so, you can get a few months of battery life with our top pick devices. 

3. Blue light filter While dark mode has become quite common in recent times and many modern electronic screens automatically adjust their displays depending on ambient lighting, there's no filter to reduce blue light. The best ereaders, however, use front lights with a white to yellow hue that's  better for the eyes (and your sleep pattern) as compared to phones and tablets.

4. Affordable and convenient If you are mostly reading books, an ereader tablet is a bargain over an iPad. The base model Amazon Kindle 2022 is a bare fraction of the price of an iPad or a Samsung Galaxy Tab, while large-screen ereaders like the Kindle Scribe and Kobo Elipsa can be had for an equivalent price or for not that much more than a base model iPad (depending on where you live). If books are your main thing, stick with an ereader and save money versus a tablet. 

How we test the best ereaders

There might be ereaders aplenty in some markets, but not all of them are available extensively. So our first step in testing an ereader is to determine whether it can be purchased by a wider audience than just a single market, even if it's an import. 

If an E Ink tablet meets that criteria, we then test ereaders based on the display and specs – aka the responsiveness of the touchscreen as well as clarity, plus things like storage and Bluetooth connectivity. This, in combination with its price tag, will determine its value-for-money rating, which is quite important in our books.

We follow that up with how user-friendly the interface is and whether there's easy access to ebooks and audiobooks via a native store or third-party apps. We also take into consideration file support for each device, which is necessary if you already have an existing library of digital books.

With several years under the belt in testing ereaders in all shapes and sizes, we're confident that our star-rated reviews are the best indication of quality and usefulness of the ereaders in this list. There are no sales/marketing teams involved in our verdicts, which means if we don't like it, we simply won't recommend it. 

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While she's happiest with a camera in her hand, Sharmishta's main priority is being TechRadar's APAC Managing Editor, looking after the day-to-day functioning of the Australian, New Zealand and Singapore editions of the site, steering everything from news and reviews to ecommerce content like deals and coupon codes. While she loves reviewing cameras and lenses when she can, she's also an avid reader and has become quite the expert on ereaders and E Ink writing tablets, having appeared on Singaporean radio to talk about these underrated devices. Other than her duties at TechRadar, she's also the Managing Editor of the Australian edition of Digital Camera World, and writes for Tom's Guide and T3.

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Best Android Phone 2024: Our favourite iPhone alternatives

Finding a new Android phone can be quite the task in 2024, with so many tempting options available at a variety of price points.

That’s where we at Trusted Reviews come in. Our team of experts has meticulously reviewed a wide range of Android phones, from budget blowers to top-end temptations. Our comprehensive testing process involves thorough real-world and benchmark testing covering performance, battery life, camera performance, and much more. Testing lasts at least a week, but often longer.

Based on our findings, we assign each phone a rating out of five, with the highest-scoring devices considered for inclusion in our esteemed list. Only the very best Android phones on the market in 2024 make it into this list, so you know whatever you decide on will deliver a great experience.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to Android smartphones. Some are better at capturing those Instagram-worthy snaps, while others deliver blisteringly fast performance for top-end mobile gaming. There’s also form factor to consider, from compact smartphones to big-screen foldables. That’s why we’ve assigned each product with a specific award, helping you find the best for your needs.

If you have a more specific craving for your smartphone, then it’s worth checking out our best camera phone , best gaming phone and best mid-range phone guides which offer more tailored recommendations. And if you want to see how the very best Android phones compare to Apple’s iPhones, then have a look at our best phone roundup.

Best Android phones at a glance

• Best camera: Google Pixel 8 Pro – check price
• Best display: Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra – check price
• Best battery life: Honor Magic 6 Pro – check price
• Best flip-style foldable: Motorola Razr 40 Ultra – check price
• Best for gaming: Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition – check price
• Best small Android phone: Asus Zenfone 10 – check price
• Best mid-range Android: Google Pixel 7a – check price
• Best value: Motorola Edge 40 Neo – check price
• Best book-stye foldable: OnePlus Open – check price

How we test

All the phones included in our Best Android phone list have been thoroughly tested and used by one of our expert reviewers. We will never review a phone based purely on specs and benchmark scores. We use them as our everyday device for the review period, which is usually at least five days but often a lot more. Whenever you read a phone review published on Trusted Reviews, you should be confident that the reviewer has put their personal SIM card into the phone, synced across their most-used apps and logged into all their typical accounts. We do this so you’ll feel confident in our review and trust our verdict. Our review process includes a mixture of real-world tests, along with more than 15 measured tests and industry-standard benchmarks. We believe this gives the most rounded view of a device.

• The bright, flat screen is stunning
• Often incredible camera performance across all sensors and lenses
• AI features offer unique software tricks
• 7 years of updates
• Uncomfortable to hold
• Temperature sensor is pointless
• Performance not as strong as similarly priced phones
• Notable price increase over 7 Pro

• Genuinely useful AI features
• Versatile camera setup
• All-day battery life and then some
• Seven years of OS upgrades
• Very expensive
• Average ultrawide camera

• Premium, eye-catching design
• Brightest display around at 5000nits
• Impressive camera performance from all lenses
• Snapdragon-powered performance
• MagicOS 8 is basically an iOS dupe
• MagicPortal is pretty barebones at the moment
• No charger in the box

• Premium clamshell foldable design
• Genuinely useful 3.6-inch exterior display
• Great camera performance from main 12MP sensor
• Top-end 6.9-inch pOLED foldable display
• Battery could only last about a day
• Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is a year old

• Blazing fast gaming performance
• Smaller design with improved waterproofing
• Camera has been upgraded with 3x optical zoom
• Still packed with excellent gaming features
• Rear gets scratched very easily
• Downgraded speakers
• Camera still not as good as the competition

• Top-end performance
• All-day battery life
• Six-axis gimbal stabilisation steadies photo and video capture
• Pocketable design
• Bio-plastic rear feels a little cheap
• Same main camera sensor as Zenfone 9
• Relatively slow 30W charging

• Excellent camera for the price
• Plenty of upgrades over the Pixel 6a
• Smart software
• Some nice colour options
• Middling battery life
• Achingly slow charging

• Thin, lightweight design
• Premium hardware despite the price
• Mushy, inaccurate vibration motor
• Some pre-installed bloatware

• Solid foldable hardware with minimal display crease
• Custom foldable camera tech
• Unique Open Canvas multitasking software
• True fast charging capabilities
• IPX4 water resistance isn’t the best
• Still hefty at 245g

Google Pixel 8 Pro

Best camera.

If you’re shopping for an Android phone and want the best camera experience possible, the Pixel 8 Pro is our current favourite pick. It’s not better in all respects than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, but it does cost £250/$300 less and packs a lot of clever software features our reviewer actually used.

As with any Pixel phone, the 8 Pro is mostly about two things – the Google software and the camera. The cameras remain fairly similar to what we saw on the Pixel 7 Pro , but refreshed tech brings improved performance to all three of the rear lenses. There are software tweaks too, including a bunch of updated modes – including a clever Best Take option that replaces funny/awkward faces with smilier alternatives  – you’ll actually want to use.

Photos from the phone are great in practically any scenario. They are richer and more immersive than those from the Galaxy S24 series and often better in darker situations, too, despite the much higher megapixel count on offer from the S24 Ultra in particular. The zoom might not match up to Samsung’s Ultra efforts, but if you keep it to around 5x, the results are great.

Powering the phone is Google’s Tensor G3 chipset, though like previous entries, it’s not the quickest around – many phones on this list will post better benchmark scores – with the focus being instead on AI intelligence. Many software additions here are made better by this chip, including voice transcription, and everything works very well.

Samsung has started to claw back some of that interest with Galaxy AI on the S24 series, but there’s still more to take advantage of with the Pixel 8 Pro than the S24. However, whether that’ll be the same in a year’s time is yet to be seen.

The phone impresses elsewhere too. The screen is on par with high-end options from Apple and Samsung, although battery life is starting to lag behind the competition. The Pixel 8 Pro also benefits from Google’s upgraded long-term support, boasting a whopping seven OS upgrades that’ll take it all the way through to Android 21.

Reviewer: Max Parker Full review: Google Pixel 8 Pro Review

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra

Best display.

If you’re looking for the very best big-screen experience possible, look no further than Samsung’s top-end Galaxy S24 Ultra . It’s the option to choose if you want a really high-end, luxury experience that does it all – and are happy to pay for the privilege.

The S23 Ultra may not look all that different from 2023’s S23 Ultra, but small key differences vastly change the experience. That includes a shift from aluminium to titanium for the chassis, much slimmer bezels for a true all-screen look and, of course, the move from a curve display to a flat one – a change that’ll benefit S Pen users in partoiucalr, allowing you to make the most out of the 6.82-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X screen.

That screen is one of the main reasons to opt for the Ultra, and it’s packed with premium bells and whistles with its WQHD+ resolution, dynamic 120Hz refresh rate and support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision delivering a stunning viewing experience whether you’re scrolling through TikTok or watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster on Netflix

It’s not just simply a big phone though; the S24 Ultra stands out in the camera department, particularly when it comes to zoom prowess. It’s a title that Samsung continues to hold with the S24 Ultra despite an apparent downgrade from a 10x periscope to a 5x periscope, but the inclusion of a higher-res sensor and OIS mean that performance is near-identical at the 10x level whilst vastly boosting the 5-10x mark compared to the previous gen phone.

That’s backed up by a 200MP primary camera that delivers vibrant, detailed and well-balanced images regardless of light levels and also allows for a dedicated astrophotography mode. There’s also a 12MP ultrawide and 10MP 3x telephoto rounding out the rear camera system, making it a versatile system indeed.

The S24 Ultra stands out in another way, however; Galaxy AI. While it’s not quite as well-rounded as the Pixel 8 Pro offering, elements like rewriting text, transcribing and translating recordings and limited photo editing features hint that Google’s time as the top AI phone could be running out.

That’s down to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, a custom version of the 2024 chipset that delivers top-end performance and the ability to process generative AI tasks all on-device without an internet connection.

Throw in all-day battery life with a 5,000mAh battery, seven years of OS upgrades taking it through to Android 21 and solid software from OneUI 6.1 and you’ve got a tempting – if not pricey and large – smartphone.

Reviewer: Lewis Painter Full review: Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Review

Honor Magic 6 Pro

Best battery life.

If you’re in the market for a phone with enduring battery life, the Honor Magic 6 Pro is an excellent choice. This top-tier device competes with the Galaxy S24 Ultra not just in screen and camera technology but also with its substantial 5,600mAh silicon-ion battery, which offers extended longevity and superior performance in colder climates.

The Magic 6 Pro’s 6.8-inch curved AMOLED display is a marvel, featuring curved edges, a silky 120Hz refresh rate, and numerous eye-care options, ensuring a delightful viewing experience whether you’re watching Netflix or scrolling through TikTok, all with a peak HDR brightness of 5000 nits.

Its camera system is equally impressive, with the primary 50MP camera providing a remarkable dynamic range thanks to a bespoke HDR sensor and a variable f/1.4-f/2.0 aperture. The 180MP periscope lens, boasting the highest resolution and largest sensor of its kind, delivers extraordinary zoom capabilities with minimal detail loss, even at high magnification levels.

The 5,600mAh battery is a standout feature, constructed from eco-friendlier silicon-ion instead of traditional lithium-ion, enhancing performance in low temperatures. Its capacity surpasses most competitors, ensuring all-day usage and nearly two days of battery life before needing a recharge.

Coupled with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 80W fast charging, facial recognition technology on par with the iPhone, and an appealing design, the Magic 6 Pro is a well-rounded powerhouse.

Reviewer: Lewis Painter Full review: Honor Magic 6 Pro Review

Motorola Razr 40 Ultra

Best flip-style foldable.

After years of Samsung dominating the clamshell foldable market with its Galaxy Z Flip range, Motorola has knocked Samsung off its perch with the Razr 40 Ultra.

The Razr 40 Ultra takes the clamshell experience to new heights with its large 3.6-inch pOLED exterior display, featuring a super-smooth 144Hz refresh rate.

This generous display size allows not only the use of widgets like the Oppo Find N2 Flip , but also full Android apps. You can control smart home technology, respond to messages, and even get directions from Google Maps without having to unfold the phone. This not only reduces the need to open the device frequently but also makes it comfortable to use in its folded form.

However, you won’t always rely on the external display, especially with the presence of a tall, narrow 6.9-inch pOLED display inside. This screen is incredibly smooth at 165Hz and incorporates LTPO technology, intelligently adapting the refresh rate based on your activities.

While the main 12MP camera may not sound overly impressive on paper, its combination of optical image stabilization (OIS), phase-detection autofocus (PDAF), and a wide f/1.5 aperture allows it to excel in both well-lit and low-light environments. Although it doesn’t quite match the quality of top-end flagship cameras, it’s impressive for a slimline foldable device.

Powering the phone is the ageing Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor, which may deter some users. Nevertheless, everyday performance is solid, though it tends to overheat during graphics-intensive gaming sessions.

With a 3,800mAh battery, the Razr 40 Ultra offers an improvement over the Razr (2022)’s 3,500mAh cell. It’s capable of lasting the entire day, although it might not make it through the second day. The good news is that it charges in less than an hour thanks to the inclusion of 30W fast charging technology.

Reviewer: Lewis Painter Full review: Motorola Razr 40 Ultra Review

Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition

Best for gaming.

The Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition is not the most rounded Android phone on this list, but it excels at its main point of interest: gaming. 

There are oodles of gaming-centric features here, from the AirTriggers that allow for gamepad-esque controls to the Armoury Crate software that enables you to fiddle with the performance settings and display frame rate, temperature and GPU workload figures as you play your favourite mobile games. 

Thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and a whopping 24GB of RAM, this is one of the most powerful Android phones you can buy, beating even the S24 Ultra in benchmark tests. The superb cooling system also allows the phone to maintain high performance over long stretches of heavy workloads, with our benchmark tests showing consistent gaming performance.

The 5500mAh battery may be smaller than last year’s 6000mAh cell, but our reviewer noted that it still allowed the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition to last well over a day from normal use.

That’s all well and good, but plenty of gaming phones offer similar performance-focused features. Where the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition stands out is in the design department by, well, not looking like a gaming phone at all.

Instead, the phone looks not too dissimilar from your regular flagship smartphone with a glass and matte frosted finish on the rear, slimmed down bezels and even the inclusion of a new 3x telephoto camera to bolster the rear camera setup. If you’re sick of the typical gamer aesthetic but still want a high-end gaming experience, the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition is a solid choice.  

The only major stumbling block for this phone is that it’s incredibly expensive, requiring a sum beyond the £1000/$1000 mark. As a result, it may be worth sacrificing a couple of features and opting for either the older Asus ROG Phone 7 Pro or the regular ROG Phone 8 instead.

Reviewer: Ryan Jones Full review: Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition review

Asus Zenfone 10

Best small phone.

If you’ve been looking for a handset that’s slightly smaller than the others on this list – one that you could even use with just one hand, for instance – then you can’t do much better than the excellent Asus Zenfone 10 .

The smartphone measures in at a compact 5.9 inches, but don’t let that fool you; this is very much a premium device. From the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that allows it to compete with much more premium options, to the 50MP main shooter with unique six-axis gimbal stabilisation that allows for blur-free photos and super-smooth videos, the ZenFone 10 is a capable option.

It also delivers some of the best OS customisation we’ve seen, with the option to pick and choose between Asus’ ZenUI and stock Android 13, and there are plenty of handy tweaks available too. It’s just a shame that it only offers two OS upgrades alongside its four years of security patches.

Still, if you find that your hands aren’t quite big enough to wield some of the cumbersome phablets that have been mentioned above, then the 5.9-inch screen on this device could suit you right down to the ground.

Reviewer: Lewis Painter Full review: Asus Zenfone 10 review

Google Pixel 7a

Best mid-range phone.

The Pixel 7a is a compact Android phone with an excellent camera, Google’s fantastic software and a price tag that won’t break the bank. It’s one of our favourite Android phones on the market right now.

Despite its more affordable price tag, it matches many of the essential features of the more expensive Pixel 7 and boasts several advantages over the Pixel 6a . Among these advantages are Qi wireless charging, 8GB of memory, a faster 90Hz screen (compared to the Pixel 6a’s 60Hz), and a more robust body.

The Pixel 7a also has an impressive camera with a new 64MP sensor that produces excellent images in various lighting conditions and accurately captures skin tones. At this price, there isn’t a better phone included on this list

While the 6.1-inch 90Hz OLED screen on the Pixel 7a is comparable to the slightly larger Pixel 7’s 6.3-inch display, the Pixel 7 Pro has the best screen among the Pixel phones.

The Pixel 7a is powered by the same Tensor G2 chip found in the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel Fold . This offers adequate performance for the price point and handles many of the phone’s AI features such as call screening and voice recording.

However, the Pixel 7a’s battery life is mediocre, and charging can be slow. Though the phone can typically last a day, users may need to recharge quickly on busy days with heavy screen usage – something our reviewer had to do on a few occasions. It can also take over 100 minutes for a full charge and you’ll need to provide your own charger.

Reviewer: Max Parker Full review: Google Pixel 7a Review

Motorola Edge 40 Neo

If you want an excellent and very affordable Android phone, the Motorola Edge 40 Neo is a strong pick and one of the best cheap phones around, offering an incredible amount of tech considering its £299 RRP.

We particularly liked the display, which uses the same pOLED tech as the top-end Razr 40 Ultra above. It measures in at 6.5 inches, has a smooth 144Hz refresh rate that’s faster than many flagships and great vibrancy that makes this display entrancing whether you’re watching films or playing games.

Speaking of, gaming is an area where the Edge 40 Neo does surprisingly well considering the price tag, utilising the Dimensity 7030 along with a healthy 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage to deliver solid gameplay. It won’t compete with high-end gaming phones, but it’ll power most games at medium graphics settings.

Motorola has also focused on camera tech, sporting a 50MP main camera that performed surprisingly well during testing, largely thanks to the likes of PDAF autofocus, OIS support and a larger sensor than the outgoing Edge 30 Neo that delivered impressive results both in well-lit and low-light scenarios.

It’s also just simply a good-looking smartphone with a variety of Pantone-certified colour options, a vegan leather finish and slim dimensions at just 7.76mm thick and 172g. Seriously, if you’re on a tight budget, you’ll struggle to find a more well-rounded offering.

Reviewer: Lewis Painter Full review: Motorola Edge 40 Neo review

OnePlus Open

Best book-style foldable.

If Samsung set the path for book-style foldables with its Galaxy Z Fold range, it was the OnePlus Open that finally delivered on that original vision of a fully-featured productivity device.

Learning from the issues that plagued earlier devices in this category, OnePlus made sure that the Open was a sturdy phone at launch. It has a satisfyingly premium build and almost no visible crease on the inner display, so you don’t have to stay within a precise viewing angle in order to fool your eyes into thinking it’s not there.

Speaking of displays, the inner 7.82-inch ProXDR AMOLED screen is stunning, and offers up a great viewing experience in apps like YouTube or Netflix. Even the outer 6.3-inch ProXDR AMOLED display is similar to what you’d find on a traditional flagship phone, so you won’t be settling for a lesser experience if you just want to check on some notifications.

What really cements the experience however is OnePlus’ terrific Open Canvas software. This unique bit of tech has allowed OnePlus’ OxygenOS to optimise itself for the foldable experience, allowing for multitasking that lets you jump between full-screen apps quickly as they sit just off to the side and can be accessed with a quick tap.

This is in addition to split-screen multitasking which is great for researching and typing up documents at the same time, handy for when you’re away from your laptop. In this regard, you can get far more done on the OnePlus Open than almost any other phone.

What’s surprising is that in spite of OnePlus’ focus to optimise its software, the company hasn’t fallen short in the one area where foldables tend to stumble: the cameras. With a trio of sensors on the back, led by a main 48MP wide camera, the OnePlus Open can capture some genuinely impressive shots, with tons of detail to boot.

Reviewer: Lewis Painter Full review: OnePlus Open review

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Best iPhone 2024: The best Apple phones, tested and reviewed

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Best Mid-Range Smartphones 2024: 8 excellent options tested and reviewed

While not vital, most of these phones are 5G, so they are futureproofed.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is the best Android phone available right now.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and Google Pixel 8 Pro are tied for the best all-round camera we’ve found on an Android phone, but the Vivo X100 Pro wins in low-light conditions.

We also considered…

The best small Android phone isn’t without its sacrifices

A familiar 2024 flagship with a great screen and useful GenAI capabilities, but the camera needs some TLC

The Vivo X100 Pro might be the best camera-focused smartphone around – it’s just a shame it’s hard to get a hold of.

OnePlus is back with a bang

The Xiaomi 13 fills a very specific niche in the Android phone world

We’ve reviewed

Mobile Phone

Comparison Specifications

Trusted reviews test data.

We run all the phones we review through a number of tests to gauge performance and other aspects, like screen quality and battery life.

Lewis is the Mobile Editor of Trusted Reviews with plenty of phone experience, from the Nokia 3210 to the iPhone 14 Pro Max. He has been in the tech industry writing about phones, headphones, tablets,…

Why trust our journalism?

Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.

Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.

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23 best air fryers for quick, healthier dinners

These mini super ovens make moist chicken, delicious pasta dishes and even light and fluffy cakes

In fact, this increasingly popular appliance can cook everything from chicken to cupcakes (and much, much more) in a few simple steps, making it a great multi-purpose gadget to have in the kitchen. If you want to know just how versatile they are, we suggest checking out our cooking team's favourite air fryer recipes .

Interested? Well, the Good Housekeeping Institute has tested the leading models to find the best air fryers to buy now:

Best air fryers 2024

Joint best air fryer and best dual basket air fryer

Ninja foodi max dual zone 9.5l af400uk.

Joint best air fryer and best steam air fryer

Breville halo steam air fryer.

Joint best air fryer and best single basket air fryer

Haier i-master series 5 multi air fryer.

Instant VersaZone Dual Air Fryer

Salter EK5728 Fuzion Dual Air Fryer

Instant Vortex Plus Dual Drawer 8-in-1 Air Fryer

Best air fryer for removing grease

Cosori dual zone air fryer.

Best value air fryer

Russell hobbs satisfry air & grill multi cooker 26520.

Best value Ninja air fryer

Ninja 3.8l air fryer and dehydrator af100uk.

Dualit 5.5L Air Fryer

If you’re replacing an existing air fryer, there are plenty of places for you to safely recycle your old one. Find your nearest electrical recycling point , or read our guide on how to donate or dispose of your appliances and tech for extra guidance.

How do air fryers work?

In a nutshell, air fryers use an alternative cooking method to deep frying. Rather than submerging food in oil, air fryers use very little – in our tests we used one tablespoon of oil as standard – to bake food quickly.

They work by blasting hot air around the basket or oven instead, producing crispy and fluffy chips or moist chicken that’s healthier than if the food had been coated in oil.

Are air fryers energy efficient?

You may have read that an air fryer can save you money on your electricity bills. They certainly are time and energy efficient; the cheapest when roasting a small chicken on test was the Tower T17100 Vortx Vizion Dual Basket Air Fryer , which used just 17p of electricity over 30 minutes of cooking time.

However, if you need to use an air fryer multiple times to make enough food to feed your household, you’re probably better off cooking everything in one go in the oven. Not to mention, most air fryers are an expensive initial investment, which means it will take a while for savings on your energy bill to cancel out their cost.

How to choose the best air fryer

Not all air fryers are created equal – there are a few different designs to choose between.

Basket-style air fryers have one or two drawers where you place your food for cooking. Those with two drawers are particularly handy if you want to cook different foods at the same time, but they can take up a lot more room in the kitchen than their more compact counterparts.

There are also oven-style air fryers that often come with rotisserie accessories, so you can roast a full chicken for example. Again, these tend to be fairly weighty appliances.

Some on our list, such as the Instant Pot Duo Crisp + Air Fryer , are actually multi-cookers , giving you multiple appliances in one, including a slow cooker or dehydrator as well as an air fryer. We’ve also included one machine that doubles as a health grill.

Lastly, it’s worth thinking about clean-up – most of the products on our list have dishwasher-proof baskets and air fryer accessories , while the two oven air fryers we’ve featured have removable doors to help you keep your machine as clean as possible.

What size air fryer do I need?

There’s no set rule on how many people each air fryer will serve – it all depends on what you’re cooking and, of course, how hungry you are! But, if you’re planning to use it to cook an entire meal, for example, you’ll probably need a larger capacity to prepare your main and a side at the same time.

As a rough guide, a one- to two-litre model like the Lakeland Digital Compact Air Fryer should be sufficient for one or two people, while a medium-sized model like Salter’s 4.5 Litre Digital Air Fryer should feed three to four.

If you’re catering for more, then look for a model with a larger capacity of around six litres, like our winning air fryer from Ninja – this sizeable model has two baskets for cooking plenty of portions.

The largest air fryer on our list has a 20-litre capacity, which is enough for five to six main portions or an entire three-kilogram roast chicken with room to spare.

It’s also worth noting that if you need to run your air fryer more than once for dinner, it’s probably more cost effective to cook with your oven.

Love Good Housekeeping and want more of our Triple-Tested recipes, home tips, fashion inspiration, essential consumer advice and so much more delivered to your inbox four times a week? Sign up to our FREE weekly newsletter, sit back and enjoy!

How we test air fryers

The experts at the GHI cook up a small feast to find the best air fryers. Depending on the capacity and type of fryer, they either roast a whole chicken or cook chicken Kyivs, monitoring how long it takes for the chicken to reach 75C. Then they judge (and try!) the results, looking for crispy, golden skin and moist meat.

Chips are next – they look for quickly cooked, well-browned and crunchy skins that house fluffy interiors. Finally, they make fairy cakes, to judge how well the appliance can bake and how evenly air circulates – the better baked and fluffier the cakes, the more efficient the air flow.

Each air fryer is then scored overall according to its performance, ease of use, design, instructions and accompanying information. See our top-rated picks below.

Score: 95/100

Barely dropping a point on test, this air fryer will feed a crowd quickly, and feed them well. Our fairy cakes were evenly baked and ready to enjoy in a speedy 15 minutes, while it scored perfect marks for chicken Kyivs – they were crispy on the outside yet juicy in the middle after 25 minutes. Our chips were fluffy, too.

It's a fairly hefty appliance, so if your kitchen is compact it may not be for you, but you can fill its two drawers with different foods and sync the programmes so everything is ready to eat at the same time – a process we found intuitive on test. A great family fryer.

Key specifications

Tying for the winning spot, this Breville machine combines air and steam frying to achieve healthier meals and a range of textures. Our experts tested its steam frying capabilities by popping in a whole chicken and cooking for an hour at 170C. The result? Well-cooked, nicely browned and great-tasting meat.

When air frying, all our chips had a golden, even colour with a perfectly crisp exterior and our cupcakes were a baking triumph too, emerging nicely risen in just 12 minutes.

We would have liked a viewing window to check on our dinner as it cooked and the water tank was slightly awkward to empty. But that’s nitpicking – this is a reliable, efficient buy.

Just like our other winners, this Haier air fryer delivered consistently crispy results across the board, making it a great choice for delicious fried feasts without all that oil.

It earned a perfect score for producing golden, flavourful chicken with a beautifully crisp exterior. It also baked light and fluffy cupcakes within 20 minutes. In some cases, the food needed a few extra minutes in the fryer to be perfectly cooked, but that’s just a case of trial and error.

One handy feature with this air fryer is that it reminds you to shake your food mid-cooking. Our testers found this particularly helpful for ensuring even cooking and consistent crispiness. While it isn’t quite as big as the Ninja, its 7 litre capacity should still comfortably serve up enough portions for a delicious family dinner.

Score: 94/100

This latest model from Instant was impressive on all fronts in our tests – it turned a 1.3kg whole chicken into a golden, moist and tender feast, while cupcakes came out beautifully cooked and fluffy.

What makes it unique from Instant’s other models is that it can be switched between two independent 4.25L cooking baskets to one XXL 8.5L basket simply by removing the divider. While each basket has separate controls, they can be paired with the SyncFinish function so all your food will be ready at the same time.

Our chips came out well cooked but – and we’re being picky here – about 20% lacked that golden brown shade we were looking for. The only other thing to note was that the wells in the bottom plate created an uneven surface, which led to some misshapen cupcakes, but those are minor issues.

In almost every other sense, this air fryer is an excellent buy. Our testers loved the handy alert that reminds you to turn your food at crucial cooking points and were pleased with how easy it is to use, programme, and clean (it’s dishwasher-safe).

Just like the Instant model above, this Salter air fryer has an adjustable dual basket design for added versatility – you can either cook different foods in each of the two 4L compartments or remove the divider to create one 8L basket. It also has eight pre-set cooking functions, so you’ll never be stuck in the kitchen.

It scored almost perfect marks across the board in our tests, delivering light, crispy chips and succulent chicken, which you can programme to be ready at the same time using the handy sync function. However, it really impressed when baking cupcakes – a task many air fryers struggle with. They came out beautifully golden and risen. Even Mary Berry would find it hard to compete.

It doesn’t have a child-lock and the components aren’t dishwasher-friendly (although they’re easy to wipe clean). But those minor quibbles aside, it’s easy to use and comes with detailed instructions (both physical and via a QR code that takes you to video tutorials). A smart buy for busy bakers.

While a predecessor to the VersaZone, this one is no less impressive. You can’t combine the two drawers, but you can sync them to prepare multiple dishes at once, with a total capacity of 7.6L, which is plenty of space for cooking for a family of four.

The results didn’t disappoint either, with a particularly succulent roast chicken. Our chips were fluffy too, but crisped up best when distributed across two drawers, rather than cramming lots into one. Turning them a few times helped as well.

The lack of cooking charts means some guesswork is required to begin with, but you can scan a QR code in the booklet to access lots of recipes online (albeit not very traditional ones).

Handy windows also mean you can easily check ion how your food is doing. Plus, the effective non-stick design made washing up a breeze, which is always a bonus in our book.

Score: 92/100

The roast setting on this air fryer produced beautifully moist chicken thighs as well as that all-important crispy exterior – helped by a baking plate that drained away an impressive amount of fat and grease. But, this machine really impressed when it came to chips. They emerged perfectly cooked; even the smallest portion didn’t burn – a common air fryer pitfall. Finally, it nailed our dessert course too, with well-risen, fluffy cupcakes.

If there's a downside, it would be with the size – the dual basket design means you can’t fit an entire roast chicken inside. However, the option to sync the drawers is handy if you’re cooking for a large group. And this easy-to-use, efficient air fryer has one final party trick: you can switch the internal lights on to check out your food through the viewing window whenever you want to take a peep.

Russell Hobbs Satisfry Air & Grill Multi Cooker 26520

Score: 91/100

Not just an air fryer, this multi-cooker also grills, sears, roasts, bakes and slow cooks, making it a smart choice if you’re after a space-saving do-it-all appliance.

It claims to air fry up to 70% quicker than earlier Russell Hobbs models; this wasn’t tested, but it did cook our chicken to succulent, golden perfection in a faster-than-most 30 minutes (simply press the chicken icon on the casing and it presets the optimal temperature and cooking time.)

Simple and modern in design, it couldn’t be easier to set up and use. The buttons are responsive, it’s compact for storage in smaller kitchens and it’s lightweight enough to move around. It scored a perfect ten in our chips and chicken tests, only dropping a few marks for its patchy cupcakes (not all rose well and some came out paler than others) and fiddly iron basket, which proved tricky to remove while wearing oven gloves.

At over £100 less than our winning Ninja , this is a more affordable offering from the premium kitchen appliance brand. It also proved its worth on test, with perfectly chicken kievs inside and out. Chips were scrumptious too, but we recommend cooking them in smaller batches for best results.

The compact design is ideal for cooking for one or two people. It also has a clear display, is stable in use and lightweight if you’re storing it in a cupboard. But unlike most fryers, the basket doesn’t have a proper handle, which means oven gloves are needed when removing it.

There are also plenty of recipes and food charts included, so you can cook up a storm as soon as you set it up.

Score: 89/100

The medium-sized chicken we cooked in this air fryer was practically faultless; its crispy skin browned evenly, and the meat itself was juicy. In fact, you’re in for a real feast with this easy-to-use appliance. Chips were light and fluffy and vegetable kebabs were crisp yet still moist. Even cupcakes baked well, despite losing some marks for uneven colouring.

There are seven pre-sets to help you on your way to air-fryer mastery along with a detailed instruction manual. Testers loved how simple it was to adjust the temperature and timer, but the lack of a viewing window meant they couldn’t check-in on food without opening the drawer – plus there’s no reminder to shake or turn your dishes, so you’ll need to pay attention when cooking.

But, it’s a good choice for medium-sized households that are after delicious air-fried food without much fuss.

Daewoo 11L 1700W Space Saving Split Drawer Air Fryer

If you don’t have much space on your counter but still want a large capacity air fryer, then this cleverly designed model may do the trick. It has two baskets that can sync to finish cooking at the same time, but instead of sitting side by side, the five-litre oven section and six-litre drawer are stacked vertically to save space.

Our chicken Kyivs cooked beautifully and two small frozen pizzas came out nicely crisped after 20 minutes in the bottom section. Chips had a slightly uneven colouring, but this didn’t affect their taste and testers loved the bagel function, which rivalled some of the best toasters.

Note, the accessories aren’t dishwasher safe and there’s no child lock, so it might not be right for young families. But for small kitchens with big cooking dreams, it’s a savvy buy.

Ninja Speedi 10-in-1 Rapid Cooker & Air Fryer

Score: 88/100

Ninja’s new 10-mode multi-cooker stands out for its innovative “Speedi Meals” function, which allows you to cook your grain of choice at the same time as meat and vegetables, thus quickly preparing a full meal for up to four people at once.

Impressively, every part of our trial meals cooked correctly and retained their flavour, with both chicken and salmon turning out moist and tender. It also cooked chips in a respectable 22 minutes (two minutes faster than the promised 24) and delivered fluffy fairy cakes.

The lid is hinged, rather than removable, which our tester found slightly awkward to use, and may make under-cupboard storage tricky. However, the control interface is intuitive, the troubleshooting advice is clear and it comes with a recipe booklet packed with tasty inspiration for each setting.

COSORI Smart Wifi Air Fryer

This smart fryer has ample room to prepare a family dinner and boasts a whopping 13 cooking modes, including steak, seafood and frozen food.

It took a while to roast a chicken but, 45 minutes later, it came out golden and moist, while our fairy cakes were just right. When cooking chips, it dropped just half a mark – they were exceptionally evenly cooked.

We like how it comes with an extensive recipe book and detailed instructions too, while its accompanying app lets you control the machine remotely for helpful flexibility.

Instant Pot Duo Crisp + Air Fryer

As well as air frying, this machine works as a pressure cooker, slow cooker, sauté pan, steamer, sous vide and food warmer with extra settings for roasting, broiling, baking and dehydrating!

On test, it delivered delicious chips and scored perfect marks for its fairy cakes, although we were unable to bulk bake as we could only fit five in at a time.

As a result of its multi-purpose design, it wasn’t the most intuitive model we tested for air frying, but its online instructions should help you get set up quickly.

The capacity of its air frying basket was also fairly small – we managed to cook two chicken Kyivs and three portions of chips. One side of our chicken stuck to it, too. That said, this is worth investing in if you’re only looking to cook for one or two and need a multi-tasking machine to save on storage space.

Lakeland Digital Compact Air Fryer

Score: 87/100

Tight on cupboard space? This slim air fryer should slot in nicely. We were able to cook two chicken Kyivs in it at once and the end results were crispy, while our chips were well-browned. Our fairy cakes cooked evenly, too.

The digital display didn’t always respond well to our touch and we’d have liked an indicator light to show the fryer was heated and ready to cook. As a basic air fryer, though, it did a reliable job at producing tasty food.

Salter EK4750BLK Dual Air Fryer

Does the world of air fryers seem daunting? Well, this dual-basket machine comes with clear instructions and food charts, which make getting started simple. The display is easy to follow and setting up each drawer is straightforward. It’s also one of the more compact dual air fryers we tested, making it suitable for smaller kitchens.

Heat distribution was mixed though; food positioned in the front half of each drawer cooked better than that at the back. Luckily, this didn’t impact the finished dishes too much – our chicken was juicy and our chips were the perfect texture inside, if a little unevenly browned.

Some cupcakes were undercooked, but this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker for an otherwise beginner-friendly machine.

Morphy Richards Health Fryer 480003

Boasting a three-litre basket, this air fryer has ample room if you’re cooking for the family. It barely dropped any points in our chips and cupcake tests, with both emerging evenly cooked thanks to outstanding air circulation. And while the chicken Kyivs lost some moisture from the middle, they were crisp.

The outside of the appliance stayed cool during cooking and, overall, it was easy to use thanks to clear instructions and recipes. Coming with a two-year guarantee, this is a great value buy.

Sharp 5.5L Air Fryer With Digital Control Panel

Score: 86/100

With its simple-to-use design, this is a great beginner-friendly buy. Its eight pre-set functions are easy to program and cooked chicken Kyivs and chips effectively. It’s not big enough for an entire chicken, though.

Despite there being no dessert pre-sets, it excelled when baking cupcakes – they were golden-brown, well-risen, and crisp on the outside with a beautifully fluffy centre.

The countdown timer is on the top of the appliance rather than the front, which makes it harder to check progress at a glance. And it plays a tune when switching on, starting and resuming, which could get tiresome. Otherwise, our experts found it a good addition to the kitchen.

Salter 4.5 Litre Digital Air Fryer EK4221

This nifty little air fryer is a great affordable choice. Its controls are clear and responsive, the machine is stable in use, and it’s effortless to clean thanks to a trusty non-stick coating. The cooking performance also impressed, with our chicken, chips and cupcakes hard to fault.

Despite its one-basket design, you can cook multiple meal components at once thanks to the “ Group-Fry” function. It took some trial and error to get this right on test, but eventually we figured out the perfect size to chop our vegetables so they stayed moist while the steak finished cooking.

This air fryer is a good alternative if you’re cooking for one or two, or don’t have room for a dual-drawer model.

Hannah is our homes editor, specialising in reviewing the latest kitchen appliances, cleaning products, mattresses and bedding, and crafting equipment. Hannah has written about hundreds of products, from air fryers to smoothie makers to pillows , and is committed to finding the most reliable and best value for money buys.

Hannah is also interested in sustainability in the home and has completed a course with the University of the Arts London in sustainable textiles, so she can help cut through the noise on what’s green and what’s not. Hannah has an MA in Magazine Journalism and has previously worked as a freelance lifestyle and women’s sports journalist , working for Stylist , Sky Sports and more.

Hannah has also previously worked in a florist and can normally be found caring for her house plants or sewing something new for her home or wardrobe.

Megan is the Good Housekeeping Institute’s homes writer. She loves diving into the latest product releases to find the very best buys on the market.  When she’s not writing about the newest gadgets and gizmos for your home and garden, you’ll find her cooking, running and exploring London’s foodie hotspots – or trying to make friends with every dog she passes.  Megan has an MA in Magazine Journalism and has previously written for Stylist, Glamour, TimeOut, SquareMeal, and YOU magazine. You can find Megan on Instagram @meganlouisegeall and on X @megan_geall

Blossom is our Senior Homes Tester. Passionate about finding the best home products and appliances for our readers, she has tested everything from blenders to pizza ovens. Blossom enjoys delving into the intricacies of products and refining testing protocols for hundreds of items. Innovative items like robot vacuum cleaners and wine coolers are among her favourite tests to date, and her most notable accomplishment is toasting 360 slices of bread in a determined bid to find the best toaster. In her free time, Blossom openly admits to being a music geek and indulges her creative side through crocheting, baking, singing and writing.   

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COVID-19: guidance for people whose immune system means they are at higher risk

• Department of Health & Social Care
• UK Health Security Agency

Updated 21 May 2024

Applies to England

© Crown copyright 2024

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: [email protected] .

Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.

This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-guidance-for-people-whose-immune-system-means-they-are-at-higher-risk/covid-19-guidance-for-people-whose-immune-system-means-they-are-at-higher-risk

This guidance only applies to people living in England. There is separate guidance available for people living in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Introduction

The success of the COVID-19 vaccination programme has meant that the requirement for shielding and identifying people as clinically extremely vulnerable ( CEV ) is no longer necessary.

Most people who were part of this CEV patient cohort are no longer at substantially greater risk than the general population and are advised to follow the same guidance as everyone else on staying safe and preventing the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory infections, as well as any further advice received from their healthcare professional.

However, there remains a smaller number of people whose weakened immune system means they may be at higher risk of serious illness from COVID-19, despite vaccination.

Enhanced protection measures, such as those offered by specific treatments or additional vaccinations alongside other protective behaviours, may benefit these individuals. This guidance is for those individuals who remain at higher risk.

This page contains information on:

• who this guidance is for
• keeping yourself safe

COVID-19 vaccines

Covid-19 treatments, covid-19 testing.

• what to do if you test positive for COVID-19
• what to do if you test negative for COVID-19 and still feel unwell

Who this guidance is for

Immunosuppression means you have a weakened immune system due to a particular health condition or because you are on medication or treatment that suppresses your immune system. People who are immunosuppressed, or who have specific other medical conditions, may have a reduced ability to fight infections and other diseases, including COVID-19.

Most people with immunosuppression will be under the care of a hospital specialist and/or known to their GP. As a result of this they will usually be eligible for either or both of:

additional vaccines including COVID-19 boosters

Further information on who is included in these groups of people is included in the sections on vaccination and treatments below. If you are in one of these groups, consider following the guidance below on keeping yourself safe.

Keeping yourself safe

The following advice on ‘keeping yourself safe’ is aimed at adults. Children and young people are recommended to continue to attend education, unless they are advised otherwise by their clinician. Attending education is hugely important for children and young people’s health and their future.

If you have been advised by the NHS that you are in one of these groups, you are advised to:

• ensure you have had all of the vaccines you are eligible to receive
• continue to follow any condition-specific advice you may have been given by your specialist

You are advised to try to avoid contact with people who have symptoms of COVID-19 or other respiratory infections. A detailed description of COVID-19 symptoms can be found in guidance for people with symptoms of a respiratory infection including COVID-19 .

If you have visitors to your home, consider ventilating your rooms by opening windows and doors to let fresh air in. More advice on ventilating your home can be found on GOV.UK.

Consider asking visitors to your home to take additional precautions, such as keeping their distance. COVID-19 tests are no longer free for the general public, but you may wish to ask visitors to take a lateral flow device ( LFD ) test before visiting. You might also consider asking them to wear a face covering and you may want to wear a face covering yourself.

If it feels right for you, work from home if you can. If you cannot work from home, speak to your employer about what arrangements they can make to reduce your risk. It may be that you are entitled to a Reasonable Adjustment under the Equality Act . See Public health principles for reducing the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory infections in the workplace

If you are too ill to work, you may be eligible for Statutory Sick Pay .

When out and about, you may want to try to keep your distance from others if that feels right for you, and consider reducing the time you spend in crowded spaces or anywhere that is enclosed or poorly ventilated. Wash your hands regularly and avoid touching your face.

Consider wearing a well-fitting face covering in crowded public spaces. Although face coverings are primarily worn to protect others, because they cover the nose and mouth, which are the main routes of transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 infection, they may also provide some limited protection to the wearer.

Further advice about face coverings can be found in guidance on living safely with respiratory infections including COVID-19 .

If you have a weakened immune system due to a health condition or medical treatment, and you are aged 6 months or over, you are eligible for a COVID-19 vaccination this spring if it has been at least 3 months since your last vaccination.

This is to help improve any protection you may have built from previous vaccination or infection.

By having a further dose of vaccine, you may reduce your chance of catching the COVID-19 infection. If you do catch COVID-19, the symptoms may be less severe and the illness shorter than if you had not had the extra vaccination.

Further information, including about those who may need an extra dose this spring, is available . You should receive a letter inviting you to book. If not, check with your GP or specialist whether you are eligible.

You should be offered an appointment between April and June, with those at highest risk being called in first.

How to book

If you are eligible for a vaccine, you can book a COVID-19 vaccine:

• on the national booking system
• by going to a walk-in COVID-19 vaccination site
• on the NHS app
• by talking to a local NHS service, such as a GP surgery
• by talking to your care home

It will help to take the vaccination invite letter, an NHS letter describing your condition or treatment, or a repeat prescription slip with you, or you can show your health record or prescription history in the NHS App.

You can book or manage a COVID-19 vaccination online through the NHS website.

If you can’t book online, phone 119 free of charge, 9am to 5:30pm Monday to Friday. You can ask someone else to do this for you. Please ensure you have your NHS number at hand. If you have difficulties communicating or hearing, or are a British Sign Language ( BSL ) user, you can use textphone 18001 119 or the NHS BSL interpreter service .

The NHS strongly encourages those with a weakened immune system to take up their offer for the spring 2024 COVID-19 vaccination as soon as possible to ensure they have the highest possible level of protection.

Further information on COVID-19 vaccinations is available on NHS.UK.

The NHS is offering treatments to those people with COVID-19 who are at highest risk of becoming seriously ill and who are aged 12 years or above. Not all treatments are suitable for people aged 12 to 17 years.

The list of eligible people who are offered these treatments is regularly reviewed and is available on the NHSE and GOV.UK websites. The list currently includes some people who have:

• Down’s syndrome, or another chromosomal disorder that affects their immune system
• certain types of cancer or have received treatment for certain types of cancer
• sickle cell disease
• certain conditions affecting their blood
• chronic kidney disease ( CKD ) stage 4 or 5
• severe liver disease
• had an organ transplant
• certain autoimmune or inflammatory conditions (such as rheumatoid arthritis or inflammatory bowel disease)
• HIV or AIDS and have a weakened immune system
• a condition affecting their immune system
• a condition affecting the brain or nervous system, such as multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, motor neurone disease, myasthenia gravis, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease or certain types of dementia
• certain lung conditions or treatments for lung conditions

This list is a summary and does not cover everything.

If you were identified as being eligible for assessment for COVID-19 treatments before 27 June 2023, you will have been contacted by the NHS to make you aware of this.   

If you have become eligible for assessment for COVID-19 treatments since June 2023 (or become eligible), you will have been told about this (or will be told about this) by your doctor or specialist at the point that you were diagnosed with a qualifying condition or began a qualifying treatment. 

If you are unsure whether you are eligible, speak to your doctor or hospital specialist who can advise you.

Treatments for COVID-19 are most effective if they are started early (ideally within 5 days of you first developing symptoms). It is therefore important that you take a COVID-19 test as soon as possible if you develop symptoms so that you can access treatments early if you test positive for COVID-19. 

A broader group of patients (currently those aged 18 years and over, and with underlying health conditions) may also be able to take part in the  PANORAMIC clinical study  if they test positive for COVID-19 and are symptomatic.

In England, patients eligible for COVID-19 treatments can access free LFD  tests.

If you are eligible for COVID-19 treatments, please make sure you have a supply of  LFD  tests at home so that you can test yourself quickly if you develop symptoms of COVID-19. You can now obtain free LFD tests from your local pharmacy. You can also use tests you’ve paid for, for example, a test you’ve bought from a supermarket or pharmacy. Further information is available on NHS: Treatments for COVID-19 .

Symptoms of COVID-19, flu and other respiratory infections include, among others:

• a high temperature
• unexplained tiredness or lack of energy
• shortness of breath
• a loss of, or change to, your normal sense of smell or taste

Test kits contain instructions and links to support those who need assistance in testing.

If you test positive

If you test positive, you should try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people. Further advice about staying at home can be found in guidance for people with symptoms of a respiratory infection including COVID-19 .

If you are eligible for treatment, it’s important to start as soon as you can. To be effective, treatments for COVID-19 need to be given quickly after your symptoms start.

If your COVID-19 test result is positive, follow the information for accessing treatments in your area on the NHS COVID-19 treatments page.

If you test negative and you still feel unwell

If your test is negative but you still have symptoms, you should take another test on each of the next 2 days (3 tests in total over 3 days).

If you continue to feel unwell, you should seek healthcare advice via your GP or NHS 111. If it is an emergency, you should call 999.

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Map Options

Education Rankings by Country 2024

There is a correlation between a country's educational system quality and its economic status, with developed nations offering higher quality education.

The U.S., despite ranking high in educational system surveys, falls behind in math and science scores compared to many other countries.

Educational system adequacy varies globally, with some countries struggling due to internal conflicts, economic challenges, or underfunded programs.

While education levels vary from country to country, there is a clear correlation between the quality of a country's educational system and its general economic status and overall well-being. In general, developing nations tend to offer their citizens a higher quality of education than the least developed nations do, and fully developed nations offer the best quality of education of all. Education is clearly a vital contributor to any country's overall health.

According to the Global Partnership for Education , education is considered to be a human right and plays a crucial role in human, social, and economic development . Education promotes gender equality, fosters peace, and increases a person's chances of having more and better life and career opportunities.

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." — Nelson Mandela

The annual Best Countries Report , conducted by US News and World Report, BAV Group, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania , reserves an entire section for education. The report surveys thousands of people across 78 countries, then ranks those countries based upon the survey's responses. The education portion of the survey compiles scores from three equally-weighted attributes: a well-developed public education system, would consider attending university there, and provides top-quality education. As of 2023, the top ten countries based on education rankings are:

Countries with the Best Educational Systems - 2021 Best Countries Report*

Ironically, despite the United States having the best-surveyed education system on the globe, U.S students consistently score lower in math and science than students from many other countries. According to a Business Insider report in 2018, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science. Discussions about why the United States' education rankings have fallen by international standards over the past three decades frequently point out that government spending on education has failed to keep up with inflation.

It's also worthwhile to note that while the Best Countries study is certainly respectable, other studies use different methodologies or emphasize different criteria, which often leads to different results. For example, the Global Citizens for Human Rights' annual study measures ten levels of education from early childhood enrollment rates to adult literacy. Its final 2020 rankings look a bit different:

Education Rates of Children Around the World

Most findings and ranking regarding education worldwide involve adult literacy rates and levels of education completed. However, some studies look at current students and their abilities in different subjects.

One of the most-reviewed studies regarding education around the world involved 470,000 fifteen-year-old students. Each student was administered tests in math, science, and reading similar to the SAT or ACT exams (standardized tests used for college admissions in the U.S.) These exam scores were later compiled to determine each country's average score for each of the three subjects. Based on this study, China received the highest scores , followed by Korea, Finland , Hong Kong , Singapore , Canada , New Zealand , Japan , Australia and the Netherlands .

On the down side, there are many nations whose educational systems are considered inadequate. This could be due to internal conflict, economic problems, or underfunded programs. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's Education for All Global Monitoring Report ranks the following countries as having the world's worst educational systems:

Countries with the Lowest Adult Literacy Rates

• Education rankings are sourced from both the annual UN News Best Countries report and the nonprofit organization World Top 20

Download Table Data

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Which country ranks first in education?

Which country ranks last in education, frequently asked questions.

• Best Countries for Education - 2023 - US News
• Literacy rate, adult total (% of people ages 15 and above) - World Bank
• World Best Education Systems - Global Citizens for Human Rights
• UNESCO - Global Education Monitoring Reports
• World’s 10 Worst Countries for Education - Global Citizen
• International Education Database - World Top 20