Julian Barnes: The six essential reads

A Sense of an Ending had been on my to-be-read pile for a long time, and I can’t believe I put it off for so long.

 It is such a wonderful book, and told in just 150 pages. It has the feel of a much longer novel because it packs so much in. Such a worthy Booker Prize winner.

How to tell if an agent is right for your book (not just your dreams)

So, you've got an offer from a literary agent. It is an amazing moment. After the champagne has settled (or the cautious optimism kicks in), the real work begins: deciding if this is the right person to guide your writing career.

It’s tempting to say yes immediately, and many do, but not every agent is the right fit.  I've been there a couple of times, and for whatever reason, it did not pan out. Here’s how to assess whether they’re not only excited about your book but also aligned with your long-term creative goals.

The call: what happens when a literary agent wants to sign you?

You’ve done the research, sent the query, and waited patiently, or obsessively, and now it’s happened. An agent wants to talk. This is what’s known as the call. 

For many writers, it’s thrilling and surreal. It can also be nerve-racking. You should enjoy the moment, and congratulate yourself on the hard work. You have achieved something very few writers do. I certainly did, as it is so hard to get a literary agent, and I think it is getting harder. 

How to write a query letter that doesn’t sound desperate

How to write a query letter that doesn’t sound desperate

Query letters walk a tightrope. Too humble and you undersell the work. Too bold and you risk sounding like you’ve written the next Ulysses. 

The trick is to find a voice that reflects your book’s tone while presenting yourself as a professional, not a hopeful. 

The literary middle: Loving books that don't go viral

In the age of algorithmic discovery, it often feels like the same ten books are everywhere. You open Instagram, you see Fourth Wing. You open TikTok, it's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Twitter/x? Something about Babel or The Secret History. 

There’s nothing wrong with loving a popular book. The best ones resonate for a reason. But in all the noise, it can be hard to hear the quieter voices. The books that didn’t land on a major award shortlist or trend on BookTok, but still left something behind in you.

How to find a literary agent: five honest steps for fiction writers

Finding a literary agent can feel like trying to catch the attention of a stranger in a crowded room, while whispering. There’s mystique, gatekeeping, and a mountain of mixed advice. But the process isn’t as impenetrable as it seems. Here’s a grounded guide to finding a literary agen t in five real steps.

Reading in the gaps: Why we return to books that broke us

There are books we finish and put down, and for a while, we are unable to speak. These are books that pull the air from our lungs. That leave us raw, like skin rubbed thin. And yet, somehow, we return to them.

Not immediately, of course. Often, we need time. Months. Years. Distance to recover from the ache they left behind. But they are on our minds, and the pull is there. Like gravity drawing us back to earth.

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.

Why are we still waiting for J.D. Salinger?

I was a teenager when I first read The Catcher in the Rye, and I remember thinking, quite seriously, that I wanted to be a writer, not in some abstract, romantic way, but with a kind of visceral clarity that made me look at books differently from then on. 

Holden Caulfield's voice felt like it had kicked the door open. It was messy, alive, and full of feeling. It didn’t sound like a book was supposed to sound, and that was precisely the point.