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Today:
The Bridge by Colm Tóibín review – betrayal and survival in the High Pyrenees
NEWS | 04 September 2026
Twenty years ago, Colm Tóibín published a steadily desolating novella set in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees. The Bridge stays in the mind less as a historically specific story of 20th-century development than as an ageless study of loss, betrayal and survival. A Long Winter and The Bridge have grown from that beginning. To read A Long Winter afterwards, meeting the past that crouches in the shadows of the later story, would be as absorbing as to read chronologically. The Bridge by Colm Tóibín is published by Picador (£12.99).

Top Stories:
Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings by Jared Diamond review – how to change the course of history
NEWS | 04 September 2026
Early in this book, Jared Diamond proudly introduces “what I term ‘the Hamlet test’”, which helps decide whether prominent individuals really make a difference, or whether others might have done just as well. Scholars widely agree that Hamlet and Shakespeare’s other masterpieces were possible only thanks to the outsized influence of Marlowe. But Diamond is not interested in what literary scholars think, and is confident that his “Hamlet test” is a fine intellectual novelty. But from this book’s Olympian perspective, subject-matter experts in military affairs are as invisible as those in literary history. skip past newsletter promotion Free newsletter | Weekly Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories.

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Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 04 September 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

World:
The best books to read in August: new paperbacks from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salman Rushdie and Werner Herzog
NEWS | 04 September 2026
Sara Collins£8.99 (RRP £9.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshopFictionThe School of NightKarl Ove KnausgårdKarl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Here, Kristian Hadeland is the author of a 500-page suicide note, and the misanthropic narrator of a compellingly nasty novel. From the remote Norwegian island where he’s preparing to end his life, Kristian sets down the story of how he got there, starting with his time as a photography student in mid-1980s London. Sophie Dickinson£9.89 (RRP £10.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshopFictionDiscontentBeatriz SerranoAmbivalence towards working life is the subject of this tremendously entertaining debut novel. Kevin Power£8.49 (RRP £9.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshopMemoirMemoirFranklyNicola SturgeonFirst, Frankly takes us back to a council flat in the former mining village of Dreghorn, Ayrshire.

Current Events:
The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet review – the fabulous life of Barbara Cartland
NEWS | 04 September 2026
Barbara Cartland was famous for dictating her novels. Anyone expecting this biography of Barbara Cartland to be an amusing takedown of a monstre sacré along the lines of Craig Brown’s witty 2017 decimation of Princess Margaret will be disappointed. This, of course, is not the Barbara Cartland that most of us remember from the 80s and beyond. She also pulled off a promotion with Dewhurst the butcher, which offered customers one of six previously unpublished Cartland novels for every £12 they spent. Somehow, and this remains the deep mystery of it all, Barbara Cartland emerges as that rather admirable thing: an entirely self-made woman.

News Flash:
Kolkhoz by Emmanuel Carrère review – intricate portrait of an elite French family
NEWS | 04 September 2026
When Emmanuel Carrère’s mother, Hélène, died in 2023, at the age of 94, President Macron spoke at her memorial. It’s also an act of reparation towards Hélène, whom Emmanuel worshipped as a child but upset as an adult by publishing a book that she’d forbidden him to write. Hélène was 15 at the time and unsuccessfully tried to hide the truth about George’s death from her younger brother, Nicolas. double quotation mark Carrère’s mother wouldn’t have slept well if she’d known this book was comingShe was determined and highly ambitious. When diagnosed with cancer and admitted to a palliative care home, she merely told him she’d be away at a conference.

Latest:
Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter review – hope amid the hopelessness
NEWS | 04 September 2026
In her ebullient 1998 debut The New Feminism, Walter hailed Margaret Thatcher as a trailblazer. Instead, Walter advocates for ecofeminism, and for solidarity and sisterhood, “narratives that focus less on how I win on my own, and more on how we thrive together”. Walter founded the charity Women for Refugee Women in 2006, directing it for the next 15 years. Meanwhile feminism was being commodified by companies like Missoni, which copied the pink pussy hats knitted, for nothing, by feminist protesters, and sold them for £140 apiece. Part of their work involves helping women who want to marry against their parents’ wishes, and, says Mourad, “often we end up dancing at their weddings”.

Breaking:
Betrayal by Luke Harding review – could Donald Trump be a Russian asset?
NEWS | 04 September 2026
He worried about the impact of the sort of long-range strikes against Russian territory that Kyiv is now launching on a daily basis. This caution frustrated Ukrainians to the point that they looked forward to Donald Trump shaking things up after he won re-election. In Trump’s head it was President Zelenskyy, fighting a war he was bound to lose, who was the problem. Harding demonstrates Trump’s betrayal less through accounts of negotiations and summits than in his reporting from Ukrainian cities under constant attack from the air. Harding discusses the question of whether Trump might himself be a Russian asset.

Trending:
Passage by Colin Thubron review – mortality and memory in a gem of a novel
NEWS | 04 September 2026
In the shallow and infantilising age through which we are living, Colin Thubron dares to assume that his readers are adults. Thubron began his career as a travel writer and a large part of the action of Passage is set in a vividly but economically evoked Egypt. Thubron is obviously an old Egypt hand, or at least has the skill to convince us that he is. The one who loved the most was Alan; Kathleen, having returned home to Melbourne, wrote to him more and more infrequently, then not at all. The record of Kathleen’s passage from life into the not-life is at once tragic and affirmative.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 04 September 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

This Just In:
The Disappearers by Marlon James review – a scorching exposé of homophobia in Jamaica
NEWS | 04 September 2026
“A sense of sweep,” replied Marlon James, when asked what moves him most in literature. The goal, in the words of director Havelock Titus, is to shatter “the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality”. But here, far from the glib relish of which James has been accused throughout his writing career, one senses an unequivocal ethical purposefulness. James makes room for the contradictions of queer life, its intimacies, estrangements and hungers, in utterly indelible ways. The Disappearers by Marlon James is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20).

Today:
Triage by Claudia Rankine review – how should we respond to the world’s atrocities?
NEWS | 04 September 2026
They’re passionate; they’re idealistic; they’re committed to the activism of the time (“shantytowns were built on campus to protest apartheid South Africa”) and steeped in the texts and authors and philosophical conceits of the humanities. But between the narrator and the theorist, the meaning of the game is never definitively pinned down. Triage acknowledges the validity of both characters’ responses – the witnessing and bearing of grief versus the acts of intervention and remaking. Triage is a challenging book for challenging times: it forces us to look at the world around us without blinking. There may be, as the narrator suggests in one of her final conversations with the theorist, “no solutions, only recognitions”.

Top Stories:
Life of M by Rachel Cusk review – is this story of a film star based on Natalie Portman?
NEWS | 04 September 2026
M is also, in the words of the nameless and genderless narrator of Life of M, “a good sport”. Episodes from M’s life are intercut with observations from the narrator’s own experiences. In a world where everyone is acting, Cusk seems to be saying, the appearance of things is all the certainty we have. The narrator of Life of M is more a mirrored surface, their reflection of M’s celebrity as much a part of the illusion as the celebrity itself. Jokes, a reliably dark pleasure in Cusk’s work, are in regrettably short supply.

World:
Children’s books roundup – the best new picture books and novels
NEWS | 04 September 2026
Small Monster, Big Monster by Allan Sanders, Phaidon, £7.95Refrigerator is EMPTY. by Sarah Ziman, illustrated by Nia Havilliard, Otter-Barry, £8.99What annoyed Big Sister this week? As the traps and puzzles get deadlier, can Drew find Evie and save his own future before time runs out? skip past newsletter promotion Free newsletter | Weekly Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Based on a popular Webtoon, this funny, touching, addictive queer YA graphic novel should delight Heartstopper fans.

Current Events:
Children and teens roundup – the best new picture books and novels
NEWS | 04 September 2026
This soft-smudged, colourful picture book celebrates the playfulness and creativity of parenthood. Fortunately, Phoebe and her dubious prophecies are there to help, alongside Cora the tone-deaf baby siren and apprentice shapeshifter Perry. Wishbound by Clemency Brown, Chicken House, £7.99In the Wishmaker Institute, rebellious Leonie is being trained to control her magic. One day she’ll be Matched with a rich child, and dedicate the rest of her life to making their wishes come true. But the house is tainted by memories of her alcoholic father, whose conditioning has shaped her in ways she can’t escape.