Novels I didn’t finish, and why that’s OK

There’s a quiet guilt attached to not finishing a book.  No longer on your TBR. Instead consigned to DNF. A sense that stopping is a kind of failure, or worse, a confession about the sort of reader you are. We talk easily about books we loved, books we devoured, books we raced through. We talk less about the ones we left behind, the bookmarks still sitting halfway through, the spines uncreased beyond a certain point.

For a long time, I treated unfinished books as a personal shortcoming. If I didn’t connect, I assumed the problem was attention, patience, or effort. That I hadn’t tried hard enough. But reading is not a moral exercise. It’s a relationship, and like most relationships, it’s shaped by timing, mood, expectation, and capacity.

Reading in the liminal: The books that hold us between seasons

There is a particular kind of reading that feels like standing in a doorway, neither fully in nor fully out.

Not every book asks for deep attention, but some arrive quietly and stay with you longer than expected. They don’t rush to a resolution or pull you along with pace. Instead, they hold space, for a mood, a shift, a moment that hasn't yet found its shape.

The waiting game: Why Donna Tartt’s silence is part of the myth

Some authors tour, tweet, podcast, publish—and then there is Donna Tartt. Three novels in more than three decades, no confirmed interviews since 2016, and not a whisper of what she might be writing now. And yet, her presence is everywhere. On BookTok, in dark academia mood boards, in conversations about obsessive friendships and beautiful prose and the kind of writing that insists you slow down and read every word.

It is a peculiar kind of fame: literary, elusive, enduring. And it begs the question—how has Tartt managed to become one of the most recognisable cult authors of our time by doing, ostensibly, so little?

The death of genre? Why writers are dismantling old labels

It used to be so simple. You wrote a crime novel, or a romance, or a dystopia. Bookshop shelves were helpful about such things: spine out, genre in. Literary fiction sat in its elegant corner, cool, aloof, unbothered by the commercial hustle elsewhere. Genre fiction was the grafter, busy, popular, and a little bit suspect.

But something is shifting. Writers are slipping past those borders, and readers are following them. In fact, they’re relishing the trespass. Literary novels are embracing dragons and time travel. Crime writers are reaching for unreliable narrators and experimental prose. Romance authors are crafting love stories that refuse tidy arcs. In 2025, the lines feel not so much blurred as beside the point.

Rejection letters as literature: The best (and worst) no's in publishing history

There’s something perversely comforting about reading other people’s rejection letters. Especially the ones addressed to now-immovable titans of literature.

Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell were all rejected with varying degrees of disdain, confusion, or complete indifference. It reminds us that the taste-making machinery of publishing is imperfect, and that a firm "no" isn’t always the final answer.

Why does every bestseller sound the same? A mini manifesto against beige prose

Pick up any recent bestseller and you’ll notice it. The prose is clean. Efficient. Emotionally calibrated within an inch of its life. And, yet, somehow, utterly indistinct.

This is beige prose, smooth, flavourless, and engineered for mass readability. It’s not bad writing, exactly. In fact, that’s the problem. It’s technically correct, but soulfully inert. A style that’s been edited within an inch of meaning. Every sentence feels like it’s been test-marketed, stripped of friction, and dunked in lukewarm relatability.

Books that saved my writing: Five under-the-radar titles every writer should read

Not every book that changes your writing shouts about it. Some sneak in sideways, books that don’t always appear on must-read lists but lodge themselves somewhere deep in your process. These aren’t craft manuals. They’re stranger, quieter, more potent than that.

When writers talk about the books that shaped them, it’s usually the big names: Bird by Bird, On Writing, maybe a bit of Joan Didion or George Orwell. But some of the most essential books in a writer’s life aren’t the ones offering advice.

The Booker goes blokey: what David Szalay's Flesh tells us about masculinity in fiction

David Szalay's Flesh is many things: stark, relentless, deeply bodily. But above all, it may be the most blokey Booker winner we've ever seen. With its monosyllabic protagonist István, a Hungarian immigrant who becomes a strip-club bouncer, chauffeur, and then a mysteriously wealthy man, Szalay has brought back something long missing from the literary stage: the unvarnished, working-class male.

Not since the heyday of Martin Amis, David Storey or even Alan Sillitoe has literary fiction made space for this kind of protagonist. 

The literary comeback of 2025: Why everyone's quoting Sontag again

It started, as these things often do, on Instagram. A scan of Susan Sontag's notebook in Helvetica type, posted by an aesthetic account better known for café shots and Proustian lighting. "Love words, agonise over sentences," it read. It had 112,000 likes.

In a year where cultural discourse seems more fragile than ever, Sontag's voice cuts through. Aphoristic, self-possessed, and unafraid to court complexity, she's re-entered the conversation not just as a thinker, but as a kind of literary style icon. 

Why we’re in love with literary angst

From tear-in-the-rain heartbreak to existential quiet, bleaker classics are finding a new, eager audience.

Remember when reading heavy meant dragging yourself through dense tomes? Nowadays, bleakness has become chic. The recent surge in interest around titles such as White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali is showing us something more profound about why readers gravitate toward literary angst.

The rise of the hyper-niche book club

From "sad girl autumn" to "cosy fantasy without war," readers are forming ultra-specific clubs that speak to identity, mood and emotional resonance.

Remember when book clubs were just about gathering around the latest must-read novel with a glass of wine in hand? That version still exists (and thrives), but something stranger and more specific has quietly been gaining ground: the hyper-niche book club. 

When pop stars read serious books: what book clubs mean now

Once upon a time, the book club was a quiet affair. A circle of friends, a bottle of wine, and a novel discussed with enthusiasm or polite disagreement. Then came Oprah, and everything changed. Her televised picks turned literary taste into a shared national ritual, making authors overnight sensations and cementing the idea that reading could be collective, not solitary. 

But today’s book club looks very different. When Dua Lipa recommends This House of Grief to her 90 million followers, or Florence Welch posts her annotated copy of The Bell Jar, something deeper is at play. Reading has become performance, identity, and, unexpectedly, power.