‘Dear Sebastian, I hate you’: a tale of three gutsy Victorian girls
Sally Nicholls's latest historical novel Yours from the Tower is a rewarding read for youngsters that never feels like a dull lesson
Sally Nicholls's latest historical novel Yours from the Tower is a rewarding read for youngsters that never feels like a dull lesson
Peter K Andersson’s biography of court fool Will Somer is a fascinating window onto Tudor life at its best, worst and most complicated
In his memoir Politics on the Edge, the decidedly heterodox ex-MP takes up arms against Westminster and leaders from Johnson to Truss
Ed Owens has some radical proposals for the monarchy, with bureaucratic innovations, new ‘King’s Days’ – and the King’s abdication
Clive Gifford is out to save children’s non-fiction from terminal decline, and he’s back with the dizzyingly informative The Book of Time
The fourth instalment of the Thursday Murder Club series is a mixture of action and comedy – with an unexpected comic kick
The ex-Prime Minister’s book mutters darkly about Windrush, John Bercow and her nemesis, the police – but her own failings somehow evanesce
Yascha Mounk’s new book mounts a defence of liberalism against its foes on Left and Right – but is the ideology its own worst enemy?
The Birdsong author's 16th novel, The Seventh Son, is a strained, juddering mess that never settles on what it wants to be
Benjamín Labatut’s brilliantly cerebral new novel spans eight decades, (at least) three geniuses, and the dawn of the technological age
Jonathan Sumption’s magisterial history of the Hundred Years War concludes with the detailed, judicious and far-sighted Volume Five
Adam Biles’s second novel, Beasts of England, makes dizzying hay with Orwell’s original, though tonally it goes its own satirical way
From the Black Death to Hong Kong, Robert Peckham’s Fear looks at how dread shaped history – but its bold scope is let down in the execution
What Was Shakespeare Really Like?, by Sir Stanley Wells, is a spry reflection on the Bard, gossipy and pacy, but not always convincing
Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted dystopia imagines the creep to totalitarianism through one family’s tortuous experiences
Cloudlanders, the debut novel from Christopher Mackie, is an enjoyably eccentric story full of imagination and thoughtfulness
David Runciman’s The Handover waves off ideas of killer robots, and argues that states and corporations were the smart machines of their era
Fiona Davison’s charming An Almost Impossible Thing profiles the pioneering woman horticulturalists who ploughed their own furrows
As Jake Wallis Simons’s timely Israelophobia reveals, the Left’s obsession with Israel is simply the oldest hatred under a new name
The White Teeth author turns to historical fiction, in a terrific novel about a court case that gripped Victorian England