Joan Didion’s packing list and the illusion of preparedness

It’s the holiday season. You’re packing for your trip. There is no better time to revisit this: two skirts. Two jerseys. A bottle of bourbon. This is the famous packing list from The White Album. It is as precise as it is strange. It reads like a ritual, a personal inventory, a whisper of both glamour and dread.

It’s not really about the clothes. It’s about control. About readiness. About who she became when the suitcase clicked shut.

How long before AI writes a Bestseller? A Literary Thought Experiment

How long before AI writes a New York Times bestseller?

It’s a question that lingers like a subplot, unresolved, faintly unsettling, impossible to ignore. Earlier this year, a publishing data analyst sparked headlines by predicting that an AI-written book could top bestseller charts by 2030. 

Emily Henry and the craft of commercial fiction

It’s not just that Emily Henry writes bestsellers. It’s that she writes the kind of commercial fiction people want to reread, smart, emotionally layered romantic comedies that balance character, structure and warmth in just the right proportions. 

As a reader and a fan, I’ve marvelled at how her novels manage to feel both comfortably familiar and quietly profound.

Four debuts that disturb and dazzle: New voices to read now

There is nothing better when it comes to books than discovering a favourite new writer, and this summer has seen the arrival of several striking debut novels that push boundaries, both thematically and stylistically. These are books that disturb, provoke and linger in the mind. They are just the kind of books that will stick with you.

What links them isn’t genre or setting but a willingness to confront discomfort: whether in the body, the family or society itself. These books ask readers to sit with pain and ambiguity, not to solve or resolve it, but to acknowledge it.

Hidden Pages: Graham Greene and the joy of literary discoveries

I love a literary discovery like the newly found short story by Graham Greene, Reading at Night. It adds an intriguing footnote to a major literary life. Published in Strand Magazine, the piece is a ghost story of sorts—spare, eerie, and lightly comic. It’s a small thing, a curiosity, but it opens up new angles on Greene’s creative instincts.

Dua Lipa and Helen Garner: When pop culture meets literary depth

Dua Lipa’s book club selection of This House of Grief brought Helen Garner’s work into the mainstream spotlight and sparked an unexpected literary ripple. 

Garner’s forensic exploration of a real-life Australian murder case is anything but tabloid. Instead, she writes with quiet precision and moral seriousness.

Publishers and platforms: How Substack, AI & email newsletters are redefining fiction in 2025

In 2025, a quiet transformation is reshaping literary publishing. Authors are increasingly bypassing traditional deals to connect directly with readers via Substack, newsletters, and AI-assisted tools. This shift is not simply about technology. 

It's about creative autonomy, deeper community engagement, and the rediscovery of storytelling on a writer's own terms. In this new ecosystem, fiction finds fresh formats, writers build loyal readerships, and the lines between hobbyist and professional blur in fascinating ways.

The Booker Prize 2025: Subtle power and global resonance

This year's Booker Prize longlist pulses with quiet intensity. From the return of Kiran Desai after a 19-year silence to Maria Reva's striking debut, the list trades fireworks for finesse. That's right up my street.

These are novels of displacement, longing and radical introspection, stories that ask readers to listen closely.

Writing with machines, owning your voice, and where the ethical lines are drawn

We’ve crossed a threshold. What used to be the stuff of speculative fiction is now a line item in the writing process: AI is here, and it’s shaping how we write, revise and even brainstorm.

But with the rise of tools like ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Claude, a wave of questions has followed. If a machine helped shape a chapter, is it still your voice? If it tightened your prose or fed you metaphors, do you owe your reader an explanation? And most fundamentally—how much help is too much?

Burn Bright, Burn Brief —The quiet power of short novels and why less is suddenly more

In a world of infinite scrolling and 800-page epics, something strange is happening, books are shrinking. 

Not in value or complexity, but in size. Novels under 200 pages, long confined to indie presses or experimental shelves, are quietly becoming bestsellers. They’re winning awards. They’re getting second printings. And perhaps most telling of all, readers are finishing them.

The Literary Brat Pack and the birth of 1980s Manhattan Cool

For anyone craving an 80s mood board turned dark, literary statement, you’ve arrived at the right place. Step into 1980s Manhattan, when the city throbbed with neon lights, fast cars, and faster lifestyles, and the emergence of the so-called “Literary Brat Pack”.

Led by Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tama Janowitz, this trio of young writers provided a fresh, glossy glimpse of urban excess. But beneath the designer clothing and drug-fuelled nights, there was something more: a generational manifesto hidden behind chic minimalism.

Grief, grammar, and the Didion sentence: Rereading The Year of Magical Thinking

For me, few books confront grief with the unflinching clarity of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It is one of my favourite of Didion books and I reread it recently. 

Didion wrote it in the aftermath of her husband’s sudden death; it isn’t a memoir of healing so much as a dissection of loss, precise, restrained, devastating. 

Why the Classics still cast a spell: reading backwards in the age of the algorithm

Browse through the bookish corners of Instagram or TikTok, and you’ll encounter a familiar pattern: glossy covers, rapid emotional claims, and an endless stream of “must-reads” that promise devastation, catharsis, or shocking twists. 

It sometimes feels that the language of the algorithm values sensation over subtlety. Amid this noisy chorus, the quiet, deliberate appeal of the classics becomes harder to hear, yet more essential than ever. It is the reason that we return to them. And while some say it's about nostalgia. It isn't that at all.

Bookworm summer: Reading as stylish rebellion

Move over, Brat Summer. The era of ironic chaos and glam messiness is giving way for something quieter, more cerebral, and, dare we say it, more enchanting. Welcome to Bookworm Summer, where reading isn’t just cool again; it’s the season’s most coveted accessory.

From Dior’s limited-edition Dracula book tote to Dua Lipa’s Instagram book club and Kaia Gerber’s annotated paperbacks, literary flair is everywhere. Celebrities aren’t just posting reading lists for show; these curated collections have become a way to express identity, mood, and even political consciousness.

Why Mansfield Park deserves your attention in Austen’s anniversary year

 In the book world, you cannot have missed it. It’s 2025, and it’s Jane Austen’s year — the 250th anniversary of her birth. So, it's natural that readers will return to the classics: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility. They sparkle with wit, romantic tension, and iconic heroines — the ones we recommend, adapt, reread, and lovingly quote. But in this anniversary year, I want to make a quieter, more subversive suggestion:

Read Mansfield Park.

Packing lists and California cool: How Joan Didion made the personal iconic

Before minimalism was a hashtag or lifestyle trend, Joan Didion was living it with elegance and intent. Her now-famous packing list, tucked into The White Album, has become a cultural artefact in its own right—a snapshot of a writer whose personal style was as deliberate as her prose.

Is "Performative Reading" really so awkward?

It’s the quietest rebellion of 2025: the reader with a paperback in a coffee shop, a hardcover in hand on the train, a thick novel laid gently on a park bench. Yet according to a recent piece in The Guardian, even this small, once-innocent gesture, reading in public, is now tinged with suspicion. At least reading certain kinds of books is. So, the question is, are we reading, or are we performing?

Why romantasy is the book genre Gen Z can't stop talking about

Once upon a time, fantasy and romance lived in separate kingdoms. One was filled with dragons and quests; the other, with yearning glances and whispered confessions. Now? They’ve merged into a new, single, soaring genre known as "romantasy," and it's captivating Gen Z readers like few others.

Its influence is being felt throughout the publishing industry. I recently discussed this with a friend. He's a crime writer and is thinking about how he can weave elements into a new series. 

It's not hard to see why. In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, romantasy offers emotional intensity and escape in equal measure. With sweeping magical worlds and high-stakes love stories, it's a genre that doesn't ask readers to choose between action and intimacy. Instead, it says: have both.

Short stories, big hearts: ten collections worth reading

Sometimes, when you’re reading, you want to dip in and out. To read a story from start to finish, savouring the words and the rhythm of the story. There’s something deeply satisfying about finishing a tale in one sitting, especially when it lingers like perfume on skin. Short stories, at their best, are emotional distillations. They open small doors to large truths, inviting empathy, surprise, and sometimes awe. Here are ten collections that do just that.

From Memoir meltdown to dystopian excess: Jame Frey returns with a roar

Like a lot of people, I read A Million Little Pieces when it came out. I read it quickly, swept up by its manic rhythm and gut-punching candour. It felt raw, painful, and honest. 

Then came the controversy: the revelations that much of the book, which had been marketed as a memoir, had been fabricated, culminating in a televised public shaming by Oprah Winfrey in 2006. It wasn’t a memoir at all. More of a novel memoir mashup. A novior, if you like.

It was a moment that seemed to draw a line under Frey's literary future, banishing him to the margins of credibility. He was cancelled.