Penguin Random House announces book is expected in late 2022 with proceeds going to charity
The Duke of Sussex has agreed a publishing deal to write his memoirs and said he would do so “not as the prince I was born, but as the man I have become”.
The global deal for his “literary memoir” was announced by Penguin Random House, with publication expected in late 2022 and proceeds to be donated to charity.
Continue reading...The award-winning Turkish-British writer, whose new book explores love and politics in Cyprus and London, talks about generational trauma, food in exile and how heavy metal helps her write
If trees could talk, what might they tell us? “Well,” says the Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak, smiling at me over a cup of mint tea, her long hair a little damp from the rain. “They live a lot longer than us. So they see a lot more than we do. Perhaps they can help us to have a calmer, wiser angle on things.” In unison, we turn our heads towards the window. We’re both slightly anxious, I think, Shafak because she arrived for our meeting a tiny bit late, and me because this cafe in Holland Park is so noisy and crowded (we can’t sit outside because yet another violent summer squall has just blown in). A sycamore or horse chestnut-induced sense of perspective could be just what the pair of us need.
Shafak, who is sometimes described as Turkey’s most famous female writer, has a reputation for outspokenness. A fierce advocate for equality and freedom of speech, her views have brought her into conflict with the increasingly repressive government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In person, however, you get no immediate sense of this. Gentle and warm, her voice is never emphatic; she smiles with her (green) eyes as well as her mouth. And while her new novel, The Island of Missing Trees – her first since the Booker-shortlisted 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World – is certainly political, its themes to do with violence and loss, it’s also a passionate love story, one of whose most important characters just happens to be – yes – a gentle and sagacious tree.
Continue reading...Sophia Spring’s photographs celebrate how London’s many parks became a lifeline for locals during the pandemic, writes novelist David Nicholls
We didn’t call it the park; it was the “rec”, as in “recreation ground”. A flat, featureless oblong of patchy grass, sodden in winter, parched in summer, scattered with ring-pulls and dog mess – this was the late 70s – its great featureless expanse broken only by buckled goalposts and a few skinny, unclimbable trees. I hated the rec, partly because of the threat of team sports, partly because of the possibility of violence – the two seemed to go together – but during those long, endless days of summer, when the glare of sunlight on the TV screen became too much, we were harried out of the house to “get some fresh air”. And so we loitered on that great barren prairie, an immense waiting room, wondering why anyone would go to the park out of choice.
Last summer, there were queues at the gates of Clissold Park and anyone wanting to exercise in Highbury Fields was advised to go early to avoid the rush hour. All over the city, the parks began to resemble the sites of the festivals that had all been cancelled and if Londoners had ever taken their green spaces for granted, there was no danger of that now. In the space of six months, they’d been repurposed as meeting rooms, nightclubs, concert halls, theatres and cinemas, cafes and restaurants, impromptu markets, family living rooms, gyms. London is supposedly a city of 3,000 parks and while I’m a little sceptical of that number, it’s true that the city had never seemed greener than that summer. On early morning bike rides I discovered Bushy and Ruskin and Trent, Peckham Rye and Beckenham Place and Ladywell Fields. I discovered the canals and waterways that link them too, the bloodstream of London, captured so brilliantly by Sophia in these photographs. Walk north on the Lea, west or east on the Grand Union, south on the Wandle or the Waterlink Way and you can see the ghosts of London’s old industries, cranes and disused warehouses and old pumping stations. Keep walking for the rest of the day, under the pylons and past the depots, and you can feel the city fading behind you, the skies opening up.
Continue reading...Books show how close the US came to disaster, and document an unprecedented moment in US history that is not yet over
This week, the Guardian reported that what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents describe Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual”. Vladimir Putin, the documents say, therefore decided to assist Trump’s rise to power in 2016 as a way to weaken America.
Related: Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld
Continue reading...Gifted as a cub by a Maharajah to a young British boy, Singh lived at a house in Surrey before outgrowing his home and being driven in a black cab to the zoo. Now his story has been made into a book
“He was,” London Zoo said, “one of the zoo’s politest pets.”
Singh the Lion arrived in a black cab and padded in through the front door, on a lead.
Continue reading...Far fewer politically sensitive titles are on display in the first such event since Beijing imposed sweeping new regulations
Booksellers at Hong Kong’s annual book fair are offering a reduced selection of books deemed politically sensitive, as they try to avoid violating a sweeping national security law imposed on the city last year.
The fair was postponed twice last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. It usually draws hundreds of thousands of people looking for everything from the latest bestsellers to works by political figures.
Continue reading...Gen Mark Milley drew comparison to Nazi Germany as Trump tried to overturn election defeat, new book I Alone Can Fix This says
Shortly before the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, told aides the US was facing a “Reichstag moment” because Donald Trump was preaching “the gospel of the Führer”, according to an eagerly awaited book about Trump’s last year in office.
Related: Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book says
Continue reading...Ryûsuke Hamaguchi reaches a new grandeur with this engrossing adaptation about a theatre director grappling with Chekhov and his wife’s infidelity
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s mysterious and beautiful new film is inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name – and that title, like Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, is designed to tease us with the shiny wistfulness of a Beatles lyric. Hamaguchi’s previous pictures Asako I and II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy were about the enigma of identity, the theatrical role play involved in all social interaction and erotic rapture of intimacy. Drive My Car is about all this and more; where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur. It is a film about the link between confession, creativity and sexuality and the unending mystery of other people’s lives and secrets.
Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a successful actor and theatre director who specialises in experimental multilingual productions with surtitles – he is currently working in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and is preparing to play the lead in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He has a complex relationship with his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a successful writer and TV dramatist who has a habit of murmuring aloud ideas for erotic short stories, trance-like, while she is astride Yûsuke having sex, including a potent vignette about a teenage girl who breaks into the house of the boy with whom she is obsessed.
Continue reading...Some of the UK’s best-loved illustrators, including Axel Scheffler, Debi Gliori and Jackie Morris, have created artworks telling the stories of children in rural Nepal who struggle to get an education. The pictures are being raffled by the charity United World Schools, which has opened schools in the country.
All photographs by Navesh Chitrakar for UWS
*All girls’ names have been changed
Continue reading...As key states started to slip away from Trump, Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged former president to lie, according to new book
A drunken Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged Donald Trump to “just say we won” on election night last November, according to a new book, even as key states started to slip away from the president and defeat by Joe Biden drew near.
Related: Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarming
Continue reading...His latest project, piecing together the story of a bereaved Hong Kong man who wed his dead fiancé, has won an award. The photogapher reveals how it began with the discovery of a trunk of keepsakes
At the centre of Kurt Tong’s elaborate visual narrative Dear Franklin, there is a doomed love story that is also a ghost story. It traces the intertwined lives of Franklin Lung, a man who rose from poor beginnings to become part of Hong Kong’s social elite in the 1940s, and a young woman known only as Dongyu, the daughter of a high-ranking Chinese general.
They met, fell in love, but shortly after their engagement, Dongyu was one of several thousand refugees fleeing the Chinese communist army on board the SS Kiangya when it struck an old Japanese sea mine. “Their love story should have ended with this terrible tragedy,” says Tong, “but it continued after her death because Franklin agreed to a ‘ghost marriage’, an elaborate traditional ceremony in which he became eternally wedded to Dongyu in the spirit world.”
Continue reading...Having long encouraged universities to find funding elsewhere, politicians now home in on their ties to China to argue that they’ve lost their way
Outside the political sphere, much of Australia’s China panic centres on university campuses. This is hardly surprising, given the deep connections of the Australian higher-education sector to China.
In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, higher education brought in some A$12bn in export revenue, most of it from China. With more than 150,000 Chinese international students enrolled, some institutions relied on that single revenue stream to make up a quarter of their total budget before the current drop-off. Mandarin is the second language of campus life in most universities these days; Confucius Institutes have been established at 13 universities; partnerships and MOUs with Chinese universities proliferate in many fields. Australian academics now collaborate more with colleagues in China than in any other foreign country: one report found that an incredible 16.2% of scientific papers by Australian researchers – almost one in six – were co-authored with researchers in China, with papers in the fields of materials science, chemical engineering and energy topping the list.
Continue reading...Former Children of God member says simple question put to her by Walter Schwarz was life-changing
It was a simple question to a child, one routinely asked by adults: what do you want to be when you grow up? But for 11-year-old Bexy Cameron, who had never known anything but the strict religious cult she was born into, it was life-changing.
Her brief encounter with the Guardian journalist Walter Schwarz in the 1990s led to her escaping the Children of God cult at the age of 15, leaving behind her parents and siblings. Now she has written a memoir, Cult Following, about growing up in a movement founded by a controlling sexual predator. The last line of her acknowledgments reads: “Eternal gratitude to Walter Schwarz (RIP). Who knows what would have happened without that ‘one simple question’?”
Continue reading...Emmanuel Carrère’s drama – based on Florence Aubenas’s bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham – fails to probe fully the injustices faced by low-paid workers
Novelist and film-maker Emmanuel Carrère has contrived this earnestly intentioned but naive and supercilious drama about poverty and the gig economy, starring a tearful Juliette Binoche. It is adapted from the French non-fiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham from 2010 by investigative journalist Florence Aubenas, published in the UK under the title The Night Cleaner.
In it, Aubenas describes her experiences “going undercover” and working in the brutal world of cleaning in Caen in northern France, where desperate applicants have to burnish their CVs with fatuous assurances about how passionate they are about cleaning, in return for dehumanising work with pitiful pay, grisly conditions and no job security. The grimmest part of the work is scrubbing lavatories and cleaning cabins on the ferry between Ouistreham and Portsmouth. The book is in the undercover tradition of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain.
Perhaps what might have been valuable would have been a documentary fronted by Aubenas herself, about what has and hasn’t been achieved for gig workers in France since her book came out – or, arguably, a Loachian fiction based on the real lives of these workers. What Carrère has done is create a drama in which it is the fictionalised Aubenas who is the centre of an imagined gallery of toughly courageous workers – her new best friends. The real dramatic crisis comes with Aubenas’s awful dilemma when she has to confess to them she has been fibbing all this time, and using their lives as raw material for her book, which she will write as soon as she returns to her wealthy and fashionable life in Paris. Some of her soon-to-be-jettisoned pals will forgive her when they see how important her book is. Some may not.
Direct your energy into your creativity and do what you want to do
The question I am a nearly 40-year-old woman and I’ve recently realised that I have no idea what would make me happy. I’m married with children and a good career. We’re financially comfortable. I have nothing to complain about. Yet beneath the surface, I feel a sort of numb despair at life. I find no joy in anything. I dislike my job and feel disconnected from my family. I sleep poorly, which doesn’t help; sometimes at night I get so angry with myself for not being able to achieve this basic human function that I wish I would just die.
The one thing I’ve always wanted in life is to be a writer. I’ve had three books brought out by a large publisher, but they were unsuccessful. So, although people say I should be proud, I see myself as a failure. I keep telling myself not to give up, but increasingly it’s hard to find a reason to keep trying. I just cling to my old dream out of habit, and because it’s a vanishing spark of hope in an otherwise grey landscape.
Continue reading...Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, comfort food … the columnist recalls how she only had five months to write the feminist bestseller about everything
It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. All the visuals were brutal: Amy Winehouse, bleeding, being chased by paps; Britney Spears’s loss of virginity and her breakdown, being chatshow jokes; the “Charlotte Church Countdown Clock” to her 16th birthday, when she would become legally fuckable.
I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? “I’m not feminist, but …” was a common catchphrase, back then, when women tried to talk about inequality, but didn’t want to get dirty feminism all over their shoes.
Continue reading...A collection of wickedly funny, rousing polemics takes aim at ecotourism, the beauty industry … and crime fiction
In 1938, three years before her suicide at 59, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, a long-form essay on patriarchy and its seemingly inevitable trajectory, war – a forceful indictment of the fascism that was then sweeping Europe and beyond. Her most conspicuously pacifist work, Three Guineas was contentious for its time. It argued that subjugation of women in the domestic sphere (notably, Woolf refers to “the daughters of educated men”, women of her own privileged class) is reflected in an equal lack of representation in the public domain of education and influence: “The public and private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other,” she wrote. As part of a solution, Woolf proposed supporting three causes with a guinea each: specifically, a society to avert war, a campaign for the rebuilding of a women’s college and an organisation to encourage women’s professional employment. Always elegant, Three Guineas nevertheless throbs with justifiable anger and fear. Its rallying cry and the recognition that the personal is also political would go on to, for example, inspire female peace activists of the 1960s, who took various of its sentences as antiwar slogans. “Set fire to the old hypocrisies,” urges Woolf. Unsurprisingly, its central themes have not dated.
Ellmann is hellbent on upbraiding the deleterious forces of the prevailing misogyny
Continue reading...After fleeing persecution in Myanmar, Ealom was detained in a ‘torture camp’. Using tricks learned from Prison Break, he snuck his way out
In 2013, when Jaivet Ealom sat squeezed in a boat with other asylum seekers, he prayed, not for the first time, for an easy death. They were far from shore off the coast of Indonesia, the vessel was sinking, and Ealom could not swim.
Fishermen from a nearby island came to the rescue, hauling each passenger from the half-submerged vessel. Ealom was saved. But during the chaos, a small baby fell into the ocean. “It never resurfaced,” remembers Ealom. “[The mother] just screamed from the bottom of her lungs. It was traumatising.”
Continue reading...Mark Meadows reportedly said ‘We can’t organize that’ after Trump told supporters he’d march, according to Landslide
Donald Trump told supporters he would march on the Capitol with them on 6 January – then abandoned them after a tense exchange with his chief of staff, according to the first excerpt from Landslide, Michael Wolff’s third Trump White House exposé.
Related: Top US general got into shouting match with Trump over race protests – report
Continue reading...That 10% fee buys a novelist like me more than the chance of a big book deal – from a hand with the DIY to a shoulder to cry on after yet another knockback
A few weeks after the sudden death of my agent, Deborah Rogers, in 2014 the colleague deputed to take me on phoned. “I’ve found something in Deborah’s desk.”
“Yes?”
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