A richly wise book about how to live a creative life in a world full of distractions and false goals

Subtitled 1,000 Trees to Find in Britain and Ireland’s Towns and Cities, Wood’s work is a kind of illumination, and an exercise in mindfulness

This comedy of manners meets murder mystery is a promising and enjoyable debut, despite its sometimes overstretched similes

Podcast duo explore society’s inability to reckon with the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade

Keating uses deadpan expressionism to tell startling tales about what happens to our feelings when they collide with the social world

From Plato to Dylan, Augustine Sedgewick outlines how fatherhood has constantly been redefined by political, economic and religious changes

Tao Leigh Goffe makes the case for 1492 being the ‘ground zero’ of both colonial conquest and today’s climate emergency

The Boys luxuriates in a particular kind of north London nostalgia, decisively slotting into the traditions and tropes of a distinctly British literature

Clark’s third novel is concerned with the unseen powers that buffet and shape human lives

Inspiring account of IWU, edited by Evelyn Conlon and Rebecca Pelan, has left this reviewer turbocharged for further change

Paul Rainey’s follow-up to Why Don’t You Love Me?, 1653 book The Compleat Angler revisited, queer love, teen angst and more

Sarah Moss, Joseph O’Connor, Wendy Erskine, John Banville, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and other authors and reviewers choose their top reads for the holidays

Works by Kristen Arnett; Adam Zeman; and Six Irish Women Writers, edited by Tanya Farrelly

This is typical of the author’s tone of mild speculation that he dares to wonder if the fires set by British troops in 1920 were good for the city

Characters seem like paintings or drawings, fixed and emblematic

Hope-engineering essays are crafted like soft waves of power crashing upon barriers of imbecility

The main characters delivers her droll confessional in a voice as brightly true and un-phony as that of Holden Caulfield

Author’s shallow understanding of class and failure to address this pivotal driver in left–wing politics is a notable flaw

In part, this novel is about how rich people mobilise to protect their class interests

A comical and unsettling exploration of the human delusion of being in charge of our own lives