What I thought would be a quick pitstop at a local bookshop in Chiswick turned into a half-hour chat with the owner where I realised I hadn’t read a life-changing book in a while. The conversation inspired a strong urge to change that; I grabbed a copy of The
Zadie Smith’s postcolonial family saga White Teeth is a vibrant ode to London’s multiculturalism. Its blend of humour, history, drama, and even biology(!) made it a favourite of mine almost immediately. It follows Archie, an Englishman, and Samad, a Bangladeshi man, who meet during World War II. Samad
John Steinbeck and the phalanx
A delicious collection of Murakami’s unique brand of realistic weirdness in 24 short stories. Some ended abruptly, some ended perfectly, some could only be understood in a certain frame of mind. It’s hard not to be drawn back again and again by any writing by Murakami – to dislike
Braiding Sweetgrass is a beautiful collection of stories that, broadly, follow the life of the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer (a botanist and professor of environmental biology who is of Native American descent), and her evolving understanding of the relationship between scientific and indigenous ways of knowing, along with the implications
I really enjoyed The Dream of the Jaguar. It follows the life of an orphan found in the street by a mute beggar woman in Maracaibo, Venezuela, who builds his life up from poverty until he becomes the most successful surgeon in the country. This family saga is divided into
A stage-by-stage analysis of a romantic relationship from beginning to end, Essays in Love doesn’t completely lose its focus amid the passion of love, but it isn’t so objective that it reads like an academic paper. It’s full of discomfiting facts for romantics everywhere: chief among them
Immune by Philipp Dettmer I admit, I lied. I haven’t actually fully finished Immune despite coming back to it multiple times over the years. At first glance, it felt like a public-friendly introduction to the immune system which was good and all – but seemed all exposition. Fast-forward two years
Eurotrash is a demeaning portmanteau, combining “European” and “white trash”, used to describe pretentious European elites. Provocative from the start, Christian Kracht’s autofictional International Booker Prize Winner foreshadows the unsettling aristocratic class themes explored within the novel. A Swiss-German middle-aged man trying to break free from his family’s
There’s been a lot of controversy about the casting of Jacob Elordi, a white Australian, as Heathcliffe in Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, particularly that a white man could portray a character, who although never explicitly stated to be what we in 2026 would call a racial
Valentine's themed recommendations
My admission that Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) is my favourite book has often raised eyebrows. This 1947 novel is a classic mandatory back-to school read for French pupils, but is rarely considered a part of the adult canon. There is, indeed, something very