Former Australian prime minister issues warning that young men’s thinking on the issue is going backward

Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has said global progress on gender equality is “really glacial and slow” as she warned that it is going backwards among young people.

Gillard cited recent polling by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which showed that 51% of respondents believe that men are doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% think that men are now discriminated against.

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© Photograph: Labor Party

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© Photograph: Labor Party

The bestselling author on how to avoid reader indifference, the advantage of writing historical stories and why she returns to Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates again and again

Rose Tremain, 80, published her first novel in 1976 and has gone on to become one of her generation’s most admired talents, garnering numerous literary accolades along with a damehood in 2020. Her 17th novel, Absolutely and Forever, is a slender yet profound coming-of-age story whose heroine, Marianne, is raised in the home counties in the 1950s. When she meets floppy haired, artistic Simon, fateful consequences are set to accompany a potent sexual awakening. Tremain lives in Norfolk with her husband, the biographer Richard Holmes.

How did Absolutely and Forever begin for you?
I have for years been haunted by the life and destiny of a close, very beautiful school friend, who fell in love aged 15 and thought she saw the map of her future before she was hardly older than Shakespeare’s Juliet. And then that future was snatched away. The idea that a whole life can be determined by a catastrophe that happens in early youth is both fascinating and tragic. The story of Absolutely and Forever changes the shape of the original and Marianne is more like me than my beautiful friend, but it has its roots in her story.

Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain is published in paperback by Vintage (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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© Photograph: Ali Smith/The Observer

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© Photograph: Ali Smith/The Observer

Hay and Edinburgh forgo pragmatism in turning their backs on the Baillie Gifford fund

How gratifying to chuck dirty money back in the face of a would-be benefactor. Such moments mark literature. Pip refusing funds from Magwitch, a convict. Will Ladislaw disdaining the charity of George Eliot’s corrupted Bulstrode. The statement is this: scruples do not belong only to the rich. There is a price at which I, too, cannot be bought.

And yet. In these great works of fiction, tensions are drawn out, questions raised. Ladislaw accepts support from another flawed man, Casaubon, of whom he disapproves. Hypocrisy? Or the observation that in a hard world pragmatism has its place – that beggars can be choosers only on occasion? And is Pip right to cast away the reformed and grateful Magwitch? Are all paths to atonement thus to be closed?

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© Photograph: Steven May/Alamy

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© Photograph: Steven May/Alamy

Former Tory minister admits at festival that he felt a fraud due to need to give the impression he was in three places at once

Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart found being a politician “very yucky” and felt like a fraud, he told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

Asked whether he would consider going back into politics, he said that he found being a politician “personally very, very unpleasant” and “didn’t like it”, adding: “I feel like a fraud all the time, in a whole series of ways.”

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© Photograph: Steven May/Alamy Live News/Alamy Live News.

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© Photograph: Steven May/Alamy Live News/Alamy Live News.

Unearthed notes owned by the renowned philosopher Jeremy Bentham reveal the roots of his influential ethics

One of the dangerous “fools” caricatured in a medieval printed satire called Ship of Fools is the Foolish Reader. He is shown in an illustration surrounded by his many learned volumes, but he doesn’t read any of them. This idiot, depicted with many others, including a Feasting Fool, a Preaching Fool and a Procrastinating Fool, was a warning to the wise by the German author Sebastian Brandt 530 years ago.

Now research at a London university has unearthed a rare English 1509 copy of this book once owned by the renowned English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. And the 1494 satirical allegory, which pokes fun at various kinds of public folly, sheds new light on Bentham’s influential ethics.

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© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

A sneak preview of a new exhibition about him sends shivers down my spine

Tomorrow, it will be 100 years since the writer Franz Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna from tuberculosis – and the good news is that as major literary anniversaries go, this one is easy to mark. You could, for instance, simply read him: a short story, perhaps, or a few pages of Ross Benjamin’s new, uncensored translation of his diaries. If you’re in Oxford, where his papers are in the Bodleian Library, you can see a new exhibition about him, and gawp at his sputum jar and a syringe of the type with which those treating him used to inject cocaine directly into his larynx; you might also wander in the city’s University Parks, where a giant inflatable “Jitterbug” – like Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, it is half man and half insect – has appeared, as if from outer space.

Or you could just go about your regular life, and wait for the K-word – Kafkaesque – to float, unbidden, into your mind. The newspapers or the BBC will probably deliver at breakfast time, but if for some reason they don’t, there must be a bill you need to query, some kind of rebate you’re owed. Personally, I find that battling with the council over its stupid exercises in confirmation bias – questionnaires about low-traffic zones that permit only one “correct” answer – is good for reaffirming my sense that faceless, slightly sinister bureaucracy is indeed all around. But there are also a growing number of friends I can text, the better to find out how their David-and-Goliath office struggles are going. Oh, the glorious word soup that spouts endlessly from the mouths of HR departments!

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© Photograph: Kafka2024

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© Photograph: Kafka2024

Author of novel Prophet Song about an imagined fascist Ireland tells Hay audience he is not a political writer

“I miss my solitude,” last year’s Booker prize winner Paul Lynch told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.

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© Photograph: Tristan Hutchinson/The Observer

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© Photograph: Tristan Hutchinson/The Observer

The Irish writer on Limerick’s hip-hop scene, the ghostly magic of the hawthorn, and escaping to the Italian Alps on YouTube

Born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1969, writer Kevin Barry, who now lives in County Sligo, won the 2007 Rooney prize for Irish literature for his short story collection There Are Little Kingdoms. In 2011, he released his debut novel, City of Bohane, which won the International Dublin literary award; his 2019 novel, Night Boat to Tangier, was longlisted for the Booker prize. His writing has appeared in publications including the New Yorker and Granta, and he also works as a playwright and screenwriter. His fourth novel, The Heart in Winter, is published by Canongate.

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© Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

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© Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

The writer and broadcaster, 57, on tracking down stories, holding grudges, feeling happiest when he’s at work – and looking for the connections that bring us together

I found childhood quite uncomfortable. The itchy fabric of the school uniform, the bright overhead lights of the classroom, the being in a room with 30 boisterous young Welsh people – all of these things that were intolerable.

There was solace in going home to watch The Tube or to the arts centre that showed Scorsese films – portals into a different world. They gave me glimmers of hope that life could be good.

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© Photograph: Mike McGregor/The Observer

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© Photograph: Mike McGregor/The Observer

A century on from the author’s death, the word ‘kafkaesque’ has survived wrangles over his estate, calls for its banishment and being used on the Simpsons and misused as a meme. How did it gain such a hold over culture?

After splitting up with Diane Keaton in the film Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s lugubrious Alvy hooks up with a hippy-dippy music journalist for a one-night stand that does neither of them any favours. “Sex with you is really a kafkaesque experience,” says Pam, over a post-coital cigarette. “I mean that as a compliment.” Given that Pam (a fabulously drifty Shelley Duvall) is a self-confessed Rosicrucian, with a chat-up style that leans heavily on the word “transplendent”, it’s clear that finding a philosophical vocabulary for life’s highs and lows is not her strongest suit.

Annie Hall was released in 1977 – 30 years after the first usage of the adjective “kafkaesque” was recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. One might have thought that such a resounding satirical takedown in an Oscar-winning film would make the word an embarrassment. But no. Fast-forward to 2010 and it was back in the satirical crosshairs, as the title of an episode in the third series of Breaking Bad, in which bags of blue meth from Walt and Jesse’s superlab are distributed in tubs of batter to fried chicken restaurants across the American south-west. The pair’s lawyer, Saul, tries to persuade a bemused Jesse to launder his ill-gotten gains by becoming the tax-paying proprietor of a nail salon. When the leader of Jesse’s support group says his working conditions sound kafkaesque, he has no idea how right he is.

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© Illustration: The Project Twins/The Guardian

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© Illustration: The Project Twins/The Guardian

When Charlie Higson published a new Bond novel last year, online critics accused him of turning the iconic spy into a ‘woke, libtard snowflake’ ... But he has always been a complicated character, argues the author

Which of these statements most closely represents your views about 007? A) James Bond has gone too woke; b) James Bond is a racist, sexist, imperialist dinosaur who has no place in the modern world; c) I’ve never given it much thought, really. I like the car chases, the nice locations and the stunts.

Most sensible people would pick option “c”. It’s just a bit of fun and best not to overthink it. But there are many people who are obsessed with James Bond and what he represents. Including me. And, as with fans of any cultural artefact – be it Star Wars, a football team, a music act – their biggest fans are their biggest critics. Everyone thinks they own Bond. They know what he is, who should play him in his next incarnation, how the films should be, how Bond should be. And they reserve their highest criticism for the two family firms that do actually own him – EON, which makes the films, and Ian Fleming Publications (IFP), which publishes the books. This sense of affronted ownership can perhaps best be summed up by Alan Partridge frustratedly snapping “Stop getting Bond wrong” in an oft-posted clip.

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© Composite: Shutterstock, Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto/Allstar, Allstar, United Artist/Sportsphoto/Allstar,

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© Composite: Shutterstock, Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto/Allstar, Allstar, United Artist/Sportsphoto/Allstar,

At eight months old she was left on a blanket in the Villa Borghese, Rome. More than 50 years later, prize-winning poet Maria Grazia Calandrone set out to discover the truth behind her abandonment

On 24 June 1965 a young woman sat her eight-month-old baby girl on a blanket in the gardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome, and walked quickly away. Within minutes, a passerby spotted the tiny child, alone, with no identifying documents, no note, not even a name. When the mother did not return to claim her that evening, the baby was handed over to the nuns at Rome’s adoption services. Three days later, the mother’s body was found floating in the Tiber.

Before she died, the woman had sent a letter to the press, containing a brief account of the terrible choice she had made. The letter, handwritten, gave the baby’s name and date of birth, and concluded: “Finding myself in a desperate situation, I have no other choice than to leave my daughter to the compassion of all, And I with my friend will pay with our lives for what we did, or, got right or, got wrong.” The letter was signed “Lucia Galante, now Greco”. Her “friend” was presumed to be the baby’s father, whose body surfaced in the river a week later.

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© Photograph: Valeria Scrilatti

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© Photograph: Valeria Scrilatti

A vivid debut of trans life in Spain after Franco observes a world of violence and petty cruelties with compassion

Alana S Portero’s debut novel became something of a sensation when it was published in Spain last year. It spent seven weeks on the bestseller list, won several awards and was acquired for translation into 13 languages.

The protagonist, Álex, is a child growing up in Madrid during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Her Madrid is not, however, the hedonistic city of La Movida Madrileña, the countercultural movement that reshaped Spain after Franco’s death, rather Álex lives out in San Blas, in poverty. Her Madrid is closer to the Harlem of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a city of desperation, bloodied community and dope. Indeed, the first time Álex feels a desire to kiss someone, it is her neighbour, Efrén, dead from a heroin overdose. “If it’s possible for a five-year-old to fall in love,” she writes, “then my love poured completely on to that tragic wreck.”

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© Photograph: Florencia Downes

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© Photograph: Florencia Downes

This cybersecurity playbook is inspired by David Cross’s insights on how to best handle a potential incident that could have been caused by what seemed to be a suspicious email sent to a marketing team. He recently shared his recommendations on CyberOXtales Podcast, highlighting the importance of having a clear playbook for incident response, determining […]

The post Effective Incident Response: A Cybersecurity Playbook for Executives appeared first on OX Security.

The post Effective Incident Response: A Cybersecurity Playbook for Executives appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The Scottish writer, whose career spanned more than 35 years, was one of only three people to have won both of the UK’s most prestigious poetry prizes for the same book

• The books of my life: John Burnside

John Burnside, author of Black Cat Bone and The Asylum Dance, has died aged 69 after a short illness. He died on 29 May, his publisher has confirmed.

Though mainly known for his poetry, the Scottish writer wrote in many forms, including fiction and memoir, across a career that spanned more than three decades. In 2011 he won the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize for his poetry collection Black Cat Bone, making him one of only three poets to have won both of the UK’s most prestigious poetry prizes for the same book (the others being Ted Hughes and Sean O’Brien). Last year, he won the David Cohen prize, which is given in recognition of an author’s entire body of work.

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© Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

The perfect post-sundown shot has long proved elusive. But a new book called Night Fever is celebrating the trailblazers who caught not just what the small hours look like – but how they feel

In 2008, the celebrated photographer Dayanita Singh discovered that using daylight colour film stock at night yielded strange results. When she shot at dusk, the photos came out blue. Feeling experimental one night, she decided to leave her camera on a long exposure. The following morning, she woke to discover that she had been robbed. The thieves had taken her cameras and those rolls of exposed colour film from under her bed – with pictures still waiting to be revealed. “Obviously, the camera saw something it should not have seen,” she says.

The photos Singh made next capture the frightening and uncanny sensations this incident triggered. She set about capturing images like a robber might. She wore a headtorch and captured a parrot by its light. She trained her lens on the decorative fluorescent tubes lighting neighbourhood trees and marvelled at the surveillance-footage green they lent her images. The daylight film made indiscernible night colours lurid: the ground turned red, the trees yellow, the sky a galactic indigo.

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© Photograph: © Ming Smith, courtesy of the Artist

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© Photograph: © Ming Smith, courtesy of the Artist

Promoting his book at Hay festival, comedian says his mother and grandparents’ flight from Nazi Germany affected later generations

David Baddiel has said he makes comedy to process the intergenerational trauma passed on through the experiences of his mother and grandparents of fleeing the Holocaust.

Baddiel’s mother was born in Nazi Germany and arrived in the UK as a baby in 1939 after her father was persecuted during the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews.

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© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

A mother reveals her mysterious past in a tale of choice and the roads not taken

If you thought Ann Patchett snagging Tom Hanks to read the audiobook of her 2019 novel The Dutch House was a coup, for her ninth novel she has lured Meryl Streep into the recording booth. Tom Lake sees a family brought together during the 2020 pandemic on a farm in Michigan. As Lara’s three adult daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, pitch in and help with the annual cherry harvest, they insistently quiz their mother about her mysterious youth.

Lara, they learn, once had ambitions to become an actor, and played Emily in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in a theatre on the edge of a lake. During an idyllic summer, she had an intense romance with her leading man, Peter Duke, with the pair spending all their time rehearsing or swimming in the lake: “We could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat,” Lara recalls. But she quit acting soon after, had a family and threw herself into small-town life; Peter, meanwhile, became an Oscar-winning film star who died prematurely.

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© Photograph: Getty Images

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© Photograph: Getty Images

Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I have been a devoted fan of Welsh author Carys Davies since reading her collection of stories The Redemption of Galen Pike a decade ago. Her new novel, Clear, is deft, atmospheric, myth-making and wears its historical setting with light but sure authority. It is set in the mid-19th century, and follows a minister dispatched to a remote Scottish island to “clear” the last remaining inhabitant, who has no intention of leaving. It’s her best novel yet.

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© Photograph: PR

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© Photograph: PR

This history of the bitter fight over the Federal Theatre Project has disturbing lessons for today’s politics

At the beginning of his history of the Federal Theatre, Shakespeare expert James S Shapiro gives the dictionary definition of playbook: both “a book containing scripts of dramatic plays” and “a set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in competitive activity”. It is the latter that features more than you might expect in his compelling account.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration established a national theatre as part of the New Deal. Shapiro, who won the Baillie Gifford prize for 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, dramatises that effort from its modest, tumultuous beginnings to its record audience-pulling successes, its pioneering of integrated casts and the ensuing culture war that led to its disbandment.

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© Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy

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© Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy

The drummer, DJ and Oscar-winning director is a key custodian of Black culture, with 200,000 records to prove it. So why does he think he’s getting too old for rap music?

With a sigh, Ahmir Thompson – better known as Questlove – turns his laptop around, so I can see the inside of his apartment, rather than the beautiful view of the New York skyline through the window behind him. It is a chaos of overflowing boxes and furniture covered with papers. “An ex-publicist of mine decided that they didn’t need their 8x10 photographs and old articles from the NME any more, so they gifted them to me,” he shrugs.

Thompson seems equivocal about this state of affairs. On the one hand, he can barely contain his delight: “Look at this!” he enthuses, showing me a newly acquired invite to the 1984 premiere of Prince’s Purple Rain movie. But, on the other: well, look at the place. “People are saying: ‘I got kids, but they won’t care about this stuff like you will. If this needs to go in a museum or something, I can trust you with history.’ The universe has put me in the position of keeper of the record. So, you know, be careful what you wish for.”

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© Photograph: @CHRISTIAN_GERMOSO/Christian Germoso

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© Photograph: @CHRISTIAN_GERMOSO/Christian Germoso

Festival bows to pressure from authors and activists over investment firm’s links to Israel and fossil fuel companies

The Edinburgh international book festival (EIBF) has announced the end of its 20-year partnership with Baillie Gifford. Last week the Hay literary festival also dropped its sponsorship from the investment management firm after a series of last-minute drop-outs.

The singer Charlotte Church, the comedian Nish Kumar and the politician Dawn Butler were among those due to appear at Hay who decided to boycott the festival because of Baillie Gifford’s links to Israel and fossil fuel companies. By the end of the festival’s second day, Hay’s organisers announced the sponsorship has been “suspended” for 2024.

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© Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

Author of Anansi’s Gold, a nonfiction account of a notorious Ghanian conman ‘told with biting wit’, wins £1,000 award

Yepoka Yeebo has won the 2024 Jhalak prize for her nonfiction book about a Ghanaian con artist.

Anansi’s Gold is an “exhilarating journey” through the life and “almost unbelievable” adventures of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, “told with great panache and a biting wit,” said prize director Sunny Singh.

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© Photograph: -

After Lee’ accidental on-set killing, speculation of a curse elevated this grungy revenge fantasy to cult status. Its violent, cartoonish energy still holds power

Just over 30 years ago, emerging action star Brandon Lee – son of Bruce Lee – was killed by a prop gun accident, fatally shot in the stomach on the set of this Gothamesque revenge fantasy thriller. It was a desperately sad event that generated more spurious talk of a family “curse” (Bruce died at age 32), rather than a conversation around movie location safety, which continues to be a problem to this day.

Now The Crow, which was released in 1994, a year after Brandon’s death, has been rereleased for its 30th anniversary. Brandon had largely finished filming and the movie was completed by finessing certain scenes in rewrites and using stunt doubles and digital superimposition of his face, which was camouflaged by the rainy, murky cityscapes and the eerie whiteface makeup. Now, audiences can savour once again the irony of a movie bringing its star back from the dead in a story about someone coming back from the dead. Screenwriters David J Schow and John Shirley adapted the hugely successful comic book series by James O’Barr, which drew on his real-life anguish at his fiancee being killed by a drunk driver, and also his memories of a newspaper story about a couple getting killed by a robber for their engagement ring.

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© Photograph: Buena Vista/Sportsphoto/Allstar

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© Photograph: Buena Vista/Sportsphoto/Allstar

An eagerly awaited sequel to the author’s debut is a wildly inventive fantasy noir of lush and surprising child-like wonder

‘Drawing is the way I understand things,” says Karen Reyes, as she sits and sketches on Chicago’s L-train, her fanged mouth tight with concentration. It’s 1968 and Karen, a 10-year-old girl who thinks she’s a werewolf, has a lot to digest.

The 2017 first volume of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters saw her turn detective after her beloved neighbour, Anka Silverberg, was found with a bullet in her chest under neatly tucked bedcovers, her doors bolted from the inside. This debut – at once a child’s diary, a murder mystery and a showcase for the fantastic beasts of Karen’s fertile imagination – is one of the best graphic novels of the 21st century so far.

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© Illustration: © Emil Ferris

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© Illustration: © Emil Ferris

The singer’s memoir recounts a life of ups and downs, with record-breaking success accompanied by critical snobbery and racial bias

Darius Rucker will be the first to admit his memory can be hazy – he says on page one of his memoir that his years as the lead singer of the American rock band Hootie & Blowfish were a blur of fame, drugs and his “close personal friend Jim Beam” – but he’s still armed with numbers. There’s the wild success of the band’s debut album Cracked Rear View, which became the most popular record of 1994 and remains the 11th bestselling album of all time in the US. There’s the backlash to the band’s mid-90s ubiquity and their precipitous downslide in fame, playing to 8,000 people in a 14,000-seater just two years after rocking stadiums. Then there are the odds Rucker faced as a middle-aged Black man trying a second career in country music, when he became the first Black artist to score a #1 hit in 25 years.

Rucker, now in the second decade of his country career and a bona fide Nashville star, deploys these figures and more casually in Life’s Too Short, his new memoir, and in amiable conversation peppered with a barreling laugh. Among them: the number of times he sang Nanci Griffith’s I Wish It Would Rain on his mother’s deathbed (at least 100); the amount his largely absent father asked for when he got back in touch at the height of the band’s popularity ($50k); the number of radio stations he personally visited in 2008 to get his first country single any airplay (110); the number of ecstasy pills bought off a dealer on a whim during a Hootie stadium tour (2,000, for $30,000 in cash – “and we did ‘em all”, he laughs over Zoom from his home in Nashville). “I thought about about taming it down, but then I always said if I wrote the book I was going to tell the truth,” he says of that last stat, “and the truth is when we were going, I don’t think anybody went harder than us.”

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© Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Alamy

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© Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Alamy

Reuniting the stars of Black Narcissus, this movie about a back-room boffin attached to a bomb disposal unit finds the film-makers pushing gloriously against genre conventions

Kathleen Byron and David Farrar were unforgettable presences in the 1947 Powell and Pressburger classic Black Narcissus, playing a hysterical nun and the taciturn colonial agent with whom she is peevishly infatuated. The film-makers reunited these remarkable performers two years later for this intimate, intense wartime drama thriller; brilliant on the emotional misery, low-level dread and petty office politics of wartime government. It takes place mostly in London’s noirish darkness and rain, except for the sensational final sequence in the bright sunlight of Chesil beach in Dorset.

Adapted from an autobiographical novel by military scientist Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room is a work that shows the film-makers pushing – brilliantly – at the conventions and constraints of a regular wartime period drama. Any number of British directors might have wanted to take on this story. But the Powell and Pressburger authorial flourishes are irresistible.

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© Photograph: Studiocanal, photo by Anthony Hopking

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© Photograph: Studiocanal, photo by Anthony Hopking

Ex-Spice Girl tells Hay festival about tips from William Boyd and Jacqueline Wilson for children’s book

Geri Halliwell-Horner has revealed she took writing advice from the twice Booker prize-nominated novelist William Boyd and the bestselling children’s author Jacqueline Wilson when working on her latest children’s book.

The former Spice Girl said Boyd, the author of Any Human Heart, told her to think more about structure – “it’s like a spine to a body”, he said.

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© Photograph: Kristy Sparow/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Kristy Sparow/Getty Images

Copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Refugees was due to be returned to Helsinki’s central library month after USSR invaded Finland

A book borrowed from a Helsinki library has been returned – 84 years overdue.

A Finnish translation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical novel Refugees was received by librarian Heini Strand on Monday at the main desk at the Helsinki Central Library Oodi.

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© Photograph: Helsingin keskustakirjasto Oodi

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© Photograph: Helsingin keskustakirjasto Oodi

A comedic hunt for raw footballing talent in Africa explores a new kind of colonialism

Once upon a time, football was a local affair. A club really was a club, belonging to its members, who were footballers and fans alike, all drawn from the same town, village or factory. But today nothing could be more global. A Premier League side may still bear the name of some backwater that briefly flowered in the Industrial Revolution, but it will derive its players and supporters, its owners and managers, its revenue and capital from every corner of the Earth.

This transformation is relatively recent, and literature has yet to catch up. Football narratives tend to be nostalgic and parochial: the neurotic north London of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, the class-conscious Yorkshire of David Peace’s The Damned United. English writers seem unable to escape football’s myriad outdated local mythologies, a game invented by Englishmen but whose world span now far exceeds their imaginations.

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© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

There’s great joy as well as pain in this luminous story of Indigenous life and the battle against exploitation

When Nemonte Nenquimo was little, she and her sisters and brothers would hear planes flying over their village in the Amazon and race one another to the nearby landing strip to see who was arriving. Only white people – known as cowori – travelled by plane, and they would bring gifts of candy, clothes, earrings and dolls with blond hair. Over the years, they brought other things too: God, polio, alcohol and oil executives waving contracts allowing them to plunder indigenous land for its oil reserves. One village elder reported signing papers with his thumbprint after being given bread and Coca-Cola and assured that the oil companies would build schools and medical clinics.

In her richly detailed memoir, written with and translated by her American partner Mitch Anderson, Nenquimo documents her path from early childhood in a Waorani village deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest to becoming an environmental activist, named in 2020 as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. The Waorani tribes, which live traditionally as nomadic hunter-gatherers, once claimed the largest territories of all Indigenous Amazonians in Ecuador – land that was among the most biodiverse on Earth. But that was before it was reduced by settlement, cattle grazing, oil extraction, gold mining and logging, and its rivers poisoned with oil. In 2019, Nenquimo helped win a historical lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government protecting more than[LJ add] half a million hectares of Waorani ancestral territory from being auctioned to oil companies.

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© Photograph: Amazon Frontlines

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© Photograph: Amazon Frontlines

In 1977, Janine Wiedel set out in her VW campervan to photograph potteries, jewellers, coal mines and steel works. It became one of the most important photographic works of its generation

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© Photograph: Janine Wiedel

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© Photograph: Janine Wiedel

An unflinching examination of its own history has revealed shocking stories in the sandstone foundations of a revered institution

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Nazi apologists, massacre perpetrators, grave robbers, racists and eugenicists were hugely influential across the entire history of the University of Melbourne, according to its own research.

The university has published a shocking account of the dark side of these erstwhile heroes of Australian academia in a book it hopes will tell a greater truth about the institution and its dealings with Aboriginal people.

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© Photograph: Tamati Smith/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tamati Smith/The Guardian

Tabloid had women on payroll to get stories about people’s sexual performance, singer tells Hay festival

James Blunt claims the News of the World paid women to sleep with celebrities in order to get stories about their sexual performance.

The singer, who settled his legal action against News International in 2012, said the police had sent him emails from the News of the World, which showed that two “beautiful” women were on the payroll of the now closed tabloid “to go out and shag celebrities”.

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© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Devotees of author from Britain and the US lobby Southampton council to reject proposals for historic Dolphin building

Devotees of Jane Austen on both sides of the Atlantic have joined a campaign to save the historic port city hotel where she celebrated her 18th birthday.

Plans are afoot to transform the Grade II-listed Dolphin hotel in Southampton, where Austen once danced in the grand ballroom, into student accommodation.

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© Photograph: Andrew Croft/Solent News & Photo Agency/Solent News

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© Photograph: Andrew Croft/Solent News & Photo Agency/Solent News

From the love/hate setup and the must-dump boyfriend to the kooky mate and frantic finale this well-crafted love story hits all the classic romcom beats, just don’t expect fireworks

Based on Sophie Cousens’ novel of the same name, and adapted for the screen by the author, this opens with a twinkly tourism-office-style visit-London-for-the-festive-season montage that lets us know from the off that the film will be playing by 1990s romcom rules. You know the sort of thing: a declaration of love delivered against a pressing deadline ideally involving a change of location. As This Time Next year progresses, it quickly becomes apparent that said rules have been thoroughly studied, to mostly satisfying effect, as from the get-go the story hits the expected beats. You’ve got heroine Minnie’s initial antagonism towards her love-match Quinn, a loser boyfriend who must first be seen through and ditched, and of course heartwarming subplots involving careers and family. And getting to see the comforting formula followed faithfully is exactly why you would want to watch the movie, so it’s a job well done.

The actors have been taking notes from the same playbook as the script. Lead Sophie Cookson gives us a very plausible blend of Renée Zellweger and Keira Knightley mannerisms circa the early 2000s. Lucien Laviscount smoulders effectively as the almost-too-perfect leading man. Will Hislop continues the consistently fun work he’s been doing in a small role as the dickhead boyfriend (no British actor is embodying millennial bell-end quite as skilfully right now). One real highlight, who will hopefully see more work off the back of their turn here, is a relative unknown: Charlie Oscar, who knocks it out of the park in a small role as a bakery assistant who somehow sits in the precise middle of a Venn diagram between Bubble from Absolutely Fabulous and the Emily Blunt character in The Devil Wears Prada.

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© Photograph: Signature Entertainment Ltd

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© Photograph: Signature Entertainment Ltd

A teen romance centred on Eid, an exploration of toxic masculinity and a thriller from the queen of YA crime are among this month’s highlights

Two rising stars of young adult fiction, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and Adiba Jaigirdar, team up for summer romcom Four Eids and a Funeral (Usborne, out June). Inseparable when they were growing up, Said and Tiwa have barely spoken since an incident many Eids ago. Can a funeral and a fire at the town’s Islamic Centre bring them back together? This delightful romance combines a fresh take on the enemies-to-lovers trope with a feelgood story about family and community.

Nathanael Lessore was shortlisted for the Carnegie medal for his debut novel, Steady for This, and his second book, King of Nothing (Hot Key), confirms him as a major new name in writing for younger teenagers. Fourteen-year-old Anton and his friends rule the school until he gets into serious trouble. By way of punishment, his mum sends him to a local community group where unexpected friendships help him to reframe the way he sees the world. It’s testament to Lessore’s lightness of touch and believable characters that despite delving into big topics such as toxic masculinity and grief, this is an immensely readable book that never feels too worthy.

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© Photograph: Aleksandria Rudenko

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© Photograph: Aleksandria Rudenko

Tension at a writers’ co-op is spliced with the hunt for a gifted footballer in the Netherland author’s first book in 10 years, an exceptional tale of desire and betrayal

Joseph O’Neill broke out with his third novel, Netherland, which made the Booker longlist in 2008 and was ecstatically reviewed in the New Yorker by James Wood, whose praise made it that summer’s hot book, propelling him into the literary A-list. But come autumn, O’Neill was the fall guy in Zadie Smith’s influential essay Two Paths for the Novel, which contrasted the smoothness of his post-9/11 scenario (“perfectly done … that’s the problem”) with the edgier experiment of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, branding Netherland an antiquated example of “a breed of lyrical realism [that] has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked”.

Although his next novel, The Dog (2014), about a New York attorney in Dubai, widely seen as a Netherland minus, was also Booker longlisted, O’Neill seemed to recede from view almost as suddenly as he’d emerged. So much the better, perhaps: his exceptional new novel, Godwin, coming 10 years after his last, would seem to represent time well spent. It somehow wrings edge-of-your-seat drama from the unlikely subject of the murky office politics dividing a technical writers’ co-op in pre-Trump Pittsburgh – and as if that doesn’t sound improbable enough, O’Neill splices that story with an equally unlikely saga involving a transcontinental hunt to snap up a gifted young footballer in west Africa.

The chase kicks off when Mark Wolfe, a thirtysomething failed scientist now writing grants for big pharma, is contacted from London by his estranged half-French half-brother, Geoff, breathlessly explaining that, in a bid to set up as a football agent in London, he’s paid $5,000 to an Ivorian middleman for three months’ “exclusive access” to footage of a young player known as Godwin. “I’m not saying he’s as good as Messi. I’d never say that. But he’s like him,” says Geoff, pleading for Mark to help him find the boy. “You’re the cleverest person I know … If you can’t find him, no one can.”

Mark, one of the novel’s two narrators, fully understands that the proposition is utterly bananas, but he’s at a low moment after a bust-up at the writing collective where he works. The book opens with the voice of his senior colleague, Lakesha – Godwin’s other narrator – and her mood of retrospect makes clear that Mark’s story won’t end well (“Everyone knew him as Wolfe”); but the pinball momentum of his point-of-view sections pushes that to the back of our minds as we’re kept agog by his ill-conceived trip across the Atlantic, where flaky Geoff – perpetually stringing Mark along – leaves him no option but to spend his first night in Europe kipping on a treadmill in Walsall.

O’Neill once told an interviewer that he reckons “plot happens most of all at the level of the sentence … as a reader, I want to start a sentence and then be surprised by what happens to it.” He happily flouts the writerly edict to show rather than tell – Godwin is all telling, its drama generated by an overlay of perspectives à la Joseph Conrad as its narrators recount nested monologues from various interlocutors, above all Jean-Luc, a wily French football scout whose claim to fame rests on working with the young Didier Drogba.

The quest for Godwin – a male midlife-crisis scenario doubling as wild goose chase – raises thorny questions of people trafficking and postcolonial legacies, as well as fuelling mass mania among the various rapacious parties seeking a cut. If O’Neill is in his element here, lifting the lid on the murky fixers and footmen circling big money, it’s to his credit that Lakesha’s portion of the book is equally engrossing, as we’re caught up in every twist and turn of an ill-conceived coup to oust her as co-lead of her writers’ collective (his decision to write in the voice of a black woman raised in poverty is, you suspect, a direct response to Smith’s diagnosis of what she called his “class/race anxiety”).

O’Neill’s storytelling here has an enthralling fireside quality, ushering us with deceptive simplicity into a labyrinth of motive and desire, breathtaking betrayals and artfully twined threads. A book to sink into, in other words, and one not to be missed.

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© Photograph: master1305/Getty Images/iStockphoto

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© Photograph: master1305/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Three years ago, Charlie Tallott was in a dark place – and found escapism through his camera. Now the photographer’s blissful, flash-laden images have won a prestigious award

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© Photograph: Charlie Tallott - New Dimension

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© Photograph: Charlie Tallott - New Dimension

Who do you want running your security operations: robots or cyborgs? For our less nerdy readers, robots are entirely machines, whereas cyborgs are humans that have been augmented with technology. In cybersecurity, the “robot” path would mean trying to replace human analysts with automation wherever possible. With new technology making this more and more realistic, […]

The post D3 Is Security Automation that Makes Your Team Better appeared first on D3 Security.

The post D3 Is Security Automation that Makes Your Team Better appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Another book roundup (previously; previouslier).

Between this World and the Next by Praveen Herat (Restless Books, 25 June 2024): Praveen Herat's gripping literary thriller is a breathtaking exploration of power, identity, unconditional love, and the question of how far we'll go to uncover the truth. Winner of the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. (Amazon; Bookshop) My Body Is Paper: Stories and Poems by Gil Cuadros (City Lights Books, 4 June 2024): Since City of God (1994) by Gil Cuadros was published 30 years ago, it has become an unlikely classic (an "essential book of Los Angeles" according to the LA Times), touching readers and writers who find in his work a singular evocation of Chicanx life in Los Angeles during and leading up to the AIDS epidemic, which took his life in 1996. Little did we know, Cuadros continued writing exuberant prose and poems in the period between his one published book and his untimely death at the age of 34. This recently discovered treasure is a stunning portrait of sex, family, religion, culture of origin, and the betrayals of the body. (Amazon; Bookshop) But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu (Unnamed Press, 5 Mar 2024): Shortly after flight MAS370 goes missing, scholarship student Girl boards her own mysterious flight from Australia to London to work on a dissertation on Sylvia Plath. Though she is ambivalent toward academia and harbors ideas about writing a post-colonial novel, if only she could work out just what that means, Girl relishes the freedom that has come with distance from the expectations and judgements of her very tight-knit Malaysian-Australian family. At last Girl has an opportunity to live on her own terms. (Amazon; Bookshop) Cartoons by Kit Schluter (City Lights Books, 21 May 2024): Set in the uncanny valley between Bugs Bunny and Franz Kafka, Cartoons is an explosive series of outrageous, absurdist tales. (Amazon; Bookshop) Crocodile Tears Didn't Cause the Flood by Bradley Sides (Montag Press, 6 Feb 2024): Bradley Sides merges the South with the weird in his latest collection of magical realism short stories: a boy creates a guide to his beloved pond monster, a parent weighs the consequences of the coming apocalypse, a young woman rejects ownership of her vampire family's farm. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Default World by Naomi Kanakia (Feminist Press, 28 May 2024): A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco. (Amazon; Bookshop) Dispatches from the District Committee by Vladimir Sorokin, trans. Max Lawton (Dalkey Archive Press, 14 May 2024): Grotesque, deconstructive, and absolutely genius, Vladimir Sorokin's short story collection Dispatches from the District Committee is a revelatory, offbeat portrait of Soviet life beyond the propaganda and state-sponsored realism. (Amazon; Bookshop) Giant On the Shore by Alfonso Ochoa, trans. Shook (Transit Children's Editions,14 May 2024): A tender fable about overcoming loneliness and welcoming new possibilities. (Amazon; Bookshop) How You Were Born by Kate Cayley (Book*hug Press, 12 Mar 2024): This tenth-anniversary edition of the Trillium Book Award-winning collection includes three new stories. (Amazon; Bookshop) Indian Winter by Kazim Ali (Coach House Books, 14 May 2024): A queer writer travelling through India can't escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present. (Amazon; Bookshop) Lines of Flight by Madhu H. Kaza (Ugly Duckling Presse, 1 May 2024): The book-length essay follows echoes and associative logics across cultures and eras, from Ancient Greece to thirteenth-century Japan to sixteenth-century Mexico to our own time, in an attempt to unfix translation and dwell in the ongoingness of language. (only from the publisher) The Long Swim by Terese Svoboda (University of Massachusetts Press, 1 Mar 2024): A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador's dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. "I've always had a knife," says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda's clear-eyed, wry angle on the world. (Amazon; Bookshop) A Map to the Spring by Lim Deok-Gi, trans. Kim Riwon and Karis J. Han (Codhill Press, 1 May 2024): With lyrical prose and profound insights, A Map to the Spring beckons readers to embrace the interconnectedness of all living things and find solace in the ever-renewing cycles of nature. (only from the publisher) Morning & Evening by Jon Fosse, trans. Damion Searls (Dalkey Archive Press, re-issued 21 May 2024): Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023. A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. (Amazon; Bookshop) Transit Books has also published his Nobel lecture, A Silent Language (Amazon). One Tuesday, Early by Annalisa Crawford (Vine Leaves Press, 14 May 2024): It's 6:05am one Tuesday morning, and Lexi Peters is alone. Her partner, her friends, her neighbours have all vanished without a trace. The entire town is deserted. Gathering every ounce of courage, she sets out to explore the streets, seeking any sign of life. On the same morning, her partner Finn awakens to an empty house. Recalling the blazing argument they had the night before, he assumes Lexi has snuck off somewhere to cool down. But she doesn't return. Time passes. Or not. (Amazon; Bookshop) That Pinson Girl by Gerry Wilson (Regal House Publishing, 6 Feb 2024): In a bleak Mississippi farmhouse in 1918, Leona Pinson gives birth to an illegitimate son whose father she refuses to name, but who will, she is convinced, return from the war to rescue her from a hardscrabble life. (Amazon; Bookshop) Pocketknife Kitty by Shannon Riley (Ghoulish, 24 June 2024): Jamie is a thirty-year-old banker wedged between grief and newfound freedom. Through a domino cascade beyond her control, she winds up stuck in her suffocating hometown. The monotony is broken swiftly when, following a night of spite-fueled impulse, Jamie soon begins to undergo a rapid and gruesome transformation. (only from the publisher) A Professional Lola and Other Stories by E. P. Tuazon (Red Hen Press, 7 May 2024): A collection of short stories that embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, trans. Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, 14 May 2024): A polyphonic tale of immigration and community by "the most promising Senegalese writer of his generation" (Le Monde). Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's previous novel The Most Secret Memory of Men was longlisted for the National Book Award. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Sisters K by Maureen Sun (Unnamed Press, 11 June 2024): After years of estrangement, Minah, Sarah, and Esther have been forced together again. Called to their father's deathbed, the sisters must confront a man little changed by the fact of his mortality. Vicious and pathetic in equal measure, Eugene Kim wants one thing: to see which of his children will abject themselves for his favor— and more importantly, his fortune. (Amazon; Bookshop) Some Things You Love With Your Insides, Your Guts by Joshua Rodriguez (Thirty West, 30 May 2024): Convinced the Earth is flat and that he's been duped by an untrustworthy world for too long, Carter's father is dragging him to an encampment that is both a cult and an uprising. (Bookshop) Tannery Bay by Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle (University of Alabama Press / Fiction Collective 2, 15 Feb 2024): In the enchanted town of Tannery Bay, it's July 37, and then July 2 again, but the year is a mystery. Trapped in an eternal loop, the residents embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery, unity, and defiance against the forces that seek to divide them. (Amazon; Bookshop) Tender Hoof: Stories by Nicole Rivas (Thirty West, 26 Jan 2024): In these pages, Rivas compactly merges the brutal with the surreal, blurring the line between safety and danger, sinner and saint. Twin girls accept a strange man's invitation; a young author's purported reincarnation leads to fame and misfortune; a lone bicyclist cycles her way through a lifetime of peril; not even a fairytale can save children from the flaws of their parents. (Amazon; Bookshop) Tomorrowing by Terry Bisson (Duke University Press, 12 April 2024): For twenty years, Terry Bisson published a regular "This Month in History" column in the science fiction magazine Locus. Tomorrowing collects these two decades of memorable events---four per month---each set in a totally different imaginary yet possible, inevitable yet avoidable future. From the first AI president to the first dog on Mars to the funeral of Earth's last glacier, these stories are speculative SF at its most (and least) serious. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Under Hum by Simone Muench & Jackie K. White (Black Lawrence Press, 10 May 2024): Collaborative poetry called "a gorgeous panoply of golden shovels, centos, and tangy tercets" by Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton. (Amazon) The Wildcat Behind Glass by Alki Zei, trans. Karen Emmerich (Restless Books, 28 May 2024): For Melia and her sister Myrto, summer means a break from Grandfather's history lessons and weeks of running free at the seaside with their ragtag group of friends. Best of all, cousin Nikos will visit and tell his fabulous stories about the taxidermied wildcat, which opens its blue glass eye when it wants to do good deeds and its black one when it makes trouble. Set in Greece during the 1930s, when the nation was torn apart by fascism, this is an unforgettable tale of family, humanity, and what it means to be free. From its 1963 release to the dozens of international editions and honors that followed including a Mildred L. Batchelder Award, the novel has enchanted generations of young readers. Now, a fresh English translation—the first in over 50 years—breathes new life into the timeless story. (Amazon; Bookshop) I'm not aware of MeFi having an affiliate membership with Bookshop, so I've set the affiliate link to the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).

We fear others’ judgment, but the evidence tells us that the things which cause us shame can make us more likable

We all carry some secrets that we would rather not share with the people around us. In much the same way that we may only invite visitors into the “good rooms” of our house while the rest is an absolute tip, we often hide the chaos of our personal lives behind a polished facade. This may be a serious mistake, since it’s precisely those vulnerabilities that can offer rich opportunities to bond with the people around us.

This is sometimes known as the “beautiful mess effect”, and one striking example of it playing out in the public sphere is in the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. At the time, even her harshest critics would have admitted that she had an incredible capacity to connect with people. And the widespread admiration for her seems to have arisen because of her vulnerabilities, rather than in spite of them. In her controversial BBC Panorama interview in 1995, for example, she discussed her husband’s infidelities, but also her struggles with mental health and her love affairs. Many of Diana’s detractors believed that she had provided the material for her own character assassination, but Diana’s popularity soared in the days after the interview, with the Daily Mirror reporting that an astonishing 92% of the public supported her appearance on the programme.

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© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

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© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

Friends, family and colleagues will celebrate the author with tributes and readings at St Martin-in-the-Fields church with limited tickets available for members of the public

A celebration of the author Martin Amis, who died last May aged 73, is due to be held in London next month.

Friends, family and colleagues of Amis will gather at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square on 10 June for the event, which will include tributes and readings from the writer’s body of work.

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© Photograph: Barry Lewis/Corbis/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Barry Lewis/Corbis/Getty Images

A fresh take on Operation Bagration, the colossal eastern front offensive in the second world war, is the author and broadcaster’s best book yet – and shows how next to the Soviets, the Germans’ worst enemy was Hitler

As a historian, Jonathan Dimbleby has written several good books about the second world war. But this is the most interesting. It is not about “turning points”, those diamonds of interpretation that authors love to dig up, sharpen and mount on an alluring book jackets. Instead, Endgame 1944 is about what happened after a turning point, about the gigantic consequences as the inevitable slouched out of the future into the present.

At the core of Dimbleby’s book is Operation Bagration, on the war’s eastern front. It was named after the famous Russian general who died of wounds in 1812, resisting the French invaders at the Battle of Borodino. In 1944, Bagration was the name given to “the mightiest onslaught of the second world war”, the offensive by five “fronts”, four Soviet armies and one Polish, numbering well over a million men who set off across a line stretching almost from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It began in June, timed to take advantage of the Normandy landings in the first week of that month, and by August the Red army had halted on the outskirts of Warsaw. The advance, in some places by as much as 600km, had driven the Nazi armies out of much of the Baltic lands, Belarus, all of eastern Poland, western Ukraine and the border regions of Romania and Hungary. It was no walkover. The Soviet armies suffered horrifying casualties. But in “the five months since the start of Operations Overlord [Normandy] and Bagration, a total of 1,460,000 [German] men had been killed, wounded or captured, 900,000 of these on the eastern front”. That and the devastating losses of German armour and equipment were unsustainable.

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© Photograph: Hulton Getty

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© Photograph: Hulton Getty

He starred in Peep Show, Green Wing and Wonka – and his first novel won an award. Now the star is making operas with 64 homeless people. Not bad going for someone who was written off by his teachers

Paterson Joseph is, by his own admission, an unlikely opera librettist. He had turned 50 by the time he got round to going to one, and only went because he was in it, as the “crazy” voice of God in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. “It’s not my world,” says the actor. But therein lies part of his mission: as a black Londoner written off by the school system, his life was transformed by the goldmine he discovered while truanting down at his local library.

One of his discoveries, as “a melancholy teen”, was Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. “I remember getting it out of the library,” he says, “just because it was a small book. And I started reading this poem out loud, at night in my bedroom. And I laughed – but I was also frightened and frustrated, weeping at the tragedy of it. When I closed the book, it was dawn.”

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© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

In this intimate study of a period of upheaval, a Chinese-born writer uncovers the stories of four young citizens whose lives were transformed by Deng Xiaoping’s reforms – and the obstacles they strove to overcome

When Yuan Yang was four years old, she tells us, her parents brought her from China to the UK as they pursued new educational opportunities. Although Private Revolutions, her vivid and detailed memoir, is not primarily the story of her own family, they, too, exemplify the theme of the book: a close look at how China’s citizens responded to the potentially transformative opportunities that four decades of rapid growth afforded.

Under Mao, Yang’s father’s family laboured as peasants in western China; as a child, her father paid his school fees with sweet potatoes, and when the sweet potato season was over he ate watermelon. From this unpromising beginning, he made it to university and later to a doctorate in computer science in the UK. Yang writes of his departure from China: “It was a simple decision for him: all the students who could leave were doing so. Chinese academia lagged behind the west, especially in the sciences, and the Beijing government’s massacre of students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had left many questioning the future of China’s universities.”

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© Photograph: Diversity Studio/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Diversity Studio/Getty Images

This revealing memoir about the author’s 20 years in the City of Light identifies the complex codes of behaviour that newcomers are obliged to master

In 1990 the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo published a short essay called Paris, Capital of the 21st Century. By the end of the 20th century, he had decided that Paris was exhausted. The city of avant gardes, ideas, revolutions and class struggle, which had defined so much of European and world history, was now no more than a museum. As almost a lifelong Parisian and a lover of the place, Goytisolo desperately wanted Paris in the 21st century to retake its place as a great metropolis. But this could only happen, he argued, if Paris reinvented itself by “de-Europeanising” itself. By this, he meant it had to look towards the world beyond Europe, welcoming its sometimes dissident non-French, non-European voices to make itself a truly global city. Only in this way could Paris be brought back to life.

More than 30 years on from that essay, Simon Kuper has written a book about what it has actually been like to live in Paris during the past two decades. I have lived in the city for exactly the same period, in the working-class district of Pernety, and seen all the changes that Kuper has. The view from Pernety and the view from his hipster right bank world have not always been the same. He often underestimates, for example, the severity of racial and class tensions in Paris. To his credit, however, he is always aware of his limitations as a foreigner and as an apprentice Parisian.

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© Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

The Norwegian writer on meeting the Taliban, her fears for girls’ education, and the legal battle that ensued after the publication of her bestselling book

The author Åsne Seierstad’s cool, shaded garden, within walking distance from the centre of Oslo, seems a very long way from Afghanistan and the Taliban. But sitting there, drinking tea, she brings a vivid sense of that other dustier, more chaotic world alive.

That relationship began for Seierstad two weeks after 9/11, when, as a freelance foreign correspondent, she embedded herself with the Northern Alliance of forces that, with western support, would sweep the Islamic fundamentalist regime from power. Twenty years later, she has been among the few journalists to go back after the desperate airlift that ended US and British support for democratic government and to spend time bearing witness to the Taliban’s chilling return to power.

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© Photograph: Elin Høyland/The Observer

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© Photograph: Elin Høyland/The Observer

In this evocative, amusing memoir, the author and podcaster recounts her 1990s fling with a guitarist – and considers whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict could have been foreseen

In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, author and podcaster Viv Groskop found herself dreaming of a train trip she made as an undergraduate in 1994. The three-day journey took her from St Petersburg, where she’d spent frozen months grappling with Russian grammar as part of her study year abroad, to the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, where a guitarist she’d fallen for had promised to take her on tour with his band, “Ukraine’s answer to the Red Hot Chili Peppers”. When the train finally crossed the border, it was fields of sunflowers that greeted her, “a glorious blur of yellow against the blue of the sky, like a firestorm”.

The trip becomes the fulcrum of this redolent, wryly honest memoir, in which she comes of age and chases love while striving for immersion in a region that was recalibrating its own identity, newly liberated by the collapse of the USSR to pursue its passion for Levi’s and all things western. As Groskop recalls: “People were anxious and sad and humiliated all at once, but also overexcited about Uncle Ben’s and Bounty.”

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© Photograph: courtesy Viv Groskop

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© Photograph: courtesy Viv Groskop