Joan Didion without her style
The writer’s posthumous therapy journal is raw and unvarnished – the most direct book she never wrote.
By Lola Seaton
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Joe Dunthorne’s lessons in chemistry
The novelist thought his great-grandfather’s memoir would be a story to be proud of. He found something else.
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Brian Friel’s vanishing world
In the playwright’s short stories, modernity collides with an older, more mysterious sense of place.
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Fear and loathing in Liverpool
Why a “left-wing city” can still host a race riot.
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The best books of 2025 so far
From urgent new fiction to the inside story of Keir Starmer’s Labour, the New Statesman picks the season’s essential reading.
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Samuel Beckett’s art of reduction
In The Unnamable, the writer’s prose was stripped to the bone – and the bone itself boiled white.
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The best children’s books for Easter
From hidden jewels to good eggs, children will be delighted by these funny, moving stories.
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Katie Kitamura’s study of social dynamics
The novelist coolly examines how we interact with each other in a deeply unsettling story of reversals and doubles.
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