Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund
Using hundreds of hours of interviews, the Times journalists have put together the story of how Labour managed to see off both the Corbynist left and the Tories to win the general election. At the heart of it is Starmer himself and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Read the full review here.
Bodley Head, 480pp, £25. Buy the book
We Do Not Part by Han Kang
The South Korean Nobel laureate here devises a tale in which a real-life massacre in 1948 haunts the dreams of an unsettled woman. There is a pilgrimage to a snowbound island, a budgie in distress, and a dose of magical realism as brutal past and fragile present combine. A novel of deft metaphor and connection. Read the full review here.
Hamish Hamilton, 384pp, £18.99. Buy the book
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes
Our deep collective unease, argues Hayes, is a consequence of the attention-grabbing content shovelled into our minds. The culprit is the smartphone. But if we are to reclaim our own attention, we need to do more than just resist tech: we need to pull towards each other. Read the full review here.
Scribe, 336pp, £20. Buy the book
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride
McBride returns to the story of young Eily and her love affair with Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior. These two characters met and fell in love in the Irish novelist’s 2016 work The Lesser Bohemians; here, they are two years into their relationship. McBride’s formally innovative, fragmentary style is utterly unobtrusive, and allows her to present romantic and sexual tension with refreshing immediacy. Read the full review here.
Faber & Faber, 336pp, £20. Buy the book
The Age of Diagnosis: Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far by Suzanne O’Sullivan
“We are not getting sicker – we are attributing more to sickness,” says the consultant neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan. Both physical and mental health problems are now subject to overdetection, and the treatment that follows is often helpful to neither patient nor health service: diagnosis is causing more harm than good. Read the full review here.
Hodder Press, 320pp, £22. Buy the book
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie
Ian Leslie tells the story of how the Beatles came to be, and how they changed postwar British culture at large, through a deep exploration of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “romantic” relationship, and the songs they wrote together. Leslie follows them from the Liverpool schooldays when they would bunk off to smoke on the bus to the peak of Beatlemania and their eventual break-up. Read the full review here.
Faber & Faber, 432pp, £25. Buy the book
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The feted Nigerian author’s first novel in a decade explores big themes: misogyny, masculinity, race, colonialism, the Covid pandemic and abuses of power, both personal and institutional. However, it does so subtly, through the lives of four very different African women. Adichie’s characters want to love and be loved – and they are struggling. Read the full review here.
4th Estate, 416pp, £20. Buy the book
On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd
The former Australian PM Kevin Rudd is fluent in Mandarin and deeply knowledgeable about China. Here, he delves into Xi Jinping’s world-view, which he frames as “Marxist-Leninist nationalism”. Focusing on domestic politics, political economy and foreign policy, Rudd provides an account of Chinese policy and behaviour shifting further to the left than ever before. Read the full review here.
OUP, 624pp, £26.99. Buy the book
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In this tightly woven coming-of-age tale, the Nobel Prize-winning Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah follows the lives of three young people – Karim, Fauzia and Badar – in 1990s Zanzibar, as the bonds between them are tested by betrayal. Set against a shifting backdrop of political turmoil and class struggle, this is a moving and wise story of infatuation, first love, work and parenthood. Read the full review here.
Bloomsbury, 256pp, £18.99. Buy the book
Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark
Using case studies stretching across centuries, the internationally renowned art historian TJ Clark navigates the politics of appearance in a capitalist society and how this impacts visual culture. Written over the course of 25 years and split into three parts – “Precursors”, “Moderns” and “Modernities” – the series of essays rethinks issues related to artmaking and the politics of today. Read the full review.
Thames & Hudson, 384pp, £40. Buy the book
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
This is a playfully titled collection from a novelist beloved for her recognisable voice. These 12 stories centre middle-class, middle-aged, Midwestern US women who are searching for more in life. There’s even a sequel to her masterwork, Prep, which reunites readers with Lee Fiora at her 30-year school reunion. Across the stories, Sittenfeld effortlessly captures ordinary moments of significance between people. Read the full review.
Doubleday, 320pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi
In this engaging biography of an epic, the writer Joseph Luzzi explains how Dante’s Divine Comedy laid the foundations of Italian literature, became the definitive portrait of the romantic sensibility, and was reclaimed by 20th-century modernists. He posits the work as, if not a conventional memoir, a kind of autofiction, as Dante attempts to make sense of his disrupted and damaged life. Read the full review.
Princeton, 232pp, £20. Buy the book
Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson
In this journey through Palestine, married couple Shehadeh and Johnson explore the careless treatment and outright destruction of the region’s Muslim memorials and historical sites. One of the more complex realities they grapple with is not just Israel’s hand in erasing this history, but Palestine’s own role. Read the full review here.
Profile, 240pp, £14.99. Buy the book
Universality by Natasha Brown
Natasha Brown’s follow-up to her award-winning debut novel, Assembly, concerns the fallout of a viral exposé written by an ambitious young journalist and the murder of the leader of a hippie-anarchist group, who has been clubbed to death with a solid gold bar. Part compelling mystery, part vicious satire on journalism, publishing, cancel culture and wealthy elites, Brown’s second novel is daring and witty. Read the full review here.
Faber & Faber, 176pp, £14.99. Buy the book
Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature by WG Sebald
This sequence of essays by the late author of Austerlitz appears for the first time in English, creating a prelude to his own literary writings. In a series of close readings of Austrian writers including Bernhard, Kafka and Stifter, Sebald illustrates how their work was shaped by pathologies and historical forces – many of which inspired his own essayistic semi-fiction. Read the full review here.
Hamish Hamilton, 544pp, £25. Buy the book
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025