The 15 best books for summer
The New Statesman’s selection of essential recent releases.
ByFiction reviews
Discover the best contemporary literature with the New Statesman’s expert reviews. From debut novels to short stories and literary veterans, get inspired here.
Elif Batuman and the art of a real life
In Either/Or, Batuman’s sequel to The Idiot, the protagonist is bewildered by the mundane and fixated on the profound.
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The purpose of sex
Lillian Fishman’s bold and searching debut novel, Acts of Service, questions the meaning of desire and introduces a major new…
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Ottessa Moshfegh and the tedium of depravity
The American author’s new novel of medieval brutality aims for the Marquis de Sade but ends up closer to Shrek.
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The secret world of Mick Herron
How the author of Slow Horses and Bad Actors became the foremost living spy novelist in the English language.
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Against the Bolaño industry
In continuing to ransack Roberto Bolaño’s sketchy drafts, his estate has reached a new, degrading low.
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Daisy Hildyard’s new novel reflects the ambivalence and violence of nature
The exhilarating narrative explores the complex boundaries between the natural and man-made world in rural life.
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Julian Barnes’s baffling new novel attempts to imagine a world without Christianity
The ghost of a more interesting narrative hovers over Elizabeth Finch, which is a novel not of ideas but of…
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Ten years of Swimming Home
A decade on, the author returns to her Booker Prize-nominated novel, and finds conflict and mortal danger among the waves.
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The best new books of 2022 so far
The New Statesman’s selection of good reads for this spring.
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Ali Smith, our thoroughly modern modernist
In her new novel Companion Piece, Smith turns the legacy of Joyce and Woolf into vital fiction for the 21st…
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The New Statesman’s best books of 2021
The year’s essential reading in 20 titles.
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Our favourite children’s books
From The Jungle Book to Z for Zachariah, New Statesman writers remember the children’s books that shaped us
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John le Carré’s aimless final novel
Silverview is a disappointing coda to his Cold War masterpieces.
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In her new novel, Sally Rooney looks her critics in the eye
Beautiful World, Where Are You despairs at the shallowness of fiction – and then embraces it.
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Nadine Dorries’ book The Four Streets is a bad novel, riddled with Shamrockese
After her remarkable flights from fact in her statements on abortion, it’s disappointing to find that Dorries is just not…
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