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

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker prize . Phillip Tennent, one of a com munity of beachcombers, rescues something seemingly organic and alive ...

This year’s longlist was odd, but with the shortlist the judges have made amends. Here’s who should win, and why he deserves it at long last

Join us for an evening with award-winning historian and writer Prof Susan Stryker, whose work has shaped conversation on gender and feminism for decades.

Susan Stryker's Changing Gender is at pains not to dumb down for what’s closer to a mass audience than most of what the author writes.

This is the most playful and spellbinding of the author’s seven books

A ‘capacity for despair’ forged by political oppression has long been consider a Magyar national trait. But after Orbán, writers in the country remind us that melancholy must not always be bleak

Podcast Episode · In My Good Books · 17 August · 55min

On his latest novel - The End of Everything - and the three texts that helped to shape it.

This month’s picks feature an adventure with Attila the Hun, a Victorian mystery and a detective in 1930s Germany. Could Sebastian Wolff be the new Bernie Gunther?

The writer's five-decade career urges us not to let disaster become familiar

The Swiss writer's latest novel sends up Nordic and Japanese minimalism via the mad and joyful world of fairy tale.

Adrian Duncan is an Irish artist and writer based in Berlin. His novel 'Love Notes from a German Building Site' won the John McGahern Book Prize. His latest novel 'A Thought Without Collision', publis...

This week's don't-miss cultural picks – from a moving coming of age story set in Luton to Nick Hakim’s ghostly new album – as enjoyed by our team of editors and writers

Writer and artist Adrian Duncan shares his thoughts on The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies by Jo Lloyd

A portal opens from our modern world of data centres and interior design into a medieval fantasy realm, in this playfully surreal tale from the author of Eurotrash

From a stunning story of dysfunctional Irish family to a new novel from the author of Sorrow And Bliss, these are our recommended reads for August 2026.

Science fiction meets modern-day style mag in the Eurotrash novelist’s mesmerising study of friendship and the perilous nature of existence

From Krasznahorkai’s extraordinary Nobel-prize acceptance speech to McManus’s astute chronicles of tumultuous times

Strange and beautiful, Christian Kracht’s new novel Air combines a satire on youthful pretensions with a thrilling fantasy

Our critics pick the year’s essential holiday reads, from richly varied novels to compelling works of nonfiction

In “Air,” by the Swiss writer Christian Kracht, a decorator’s unusual commission leads abruptly into another universe.

Plus Nathaniel Rich’s “Cloudthief” and Jem Calder’s “I Want You to Be Happy.”

Join us for our translated fiction book club on the last Wednesday of every month. For July, we're reading Pedro Paramo.