From ice queens to wild robots: the best new children’s books this Easter
The Beast from the East may have delayed spring, but at least we have great new kids’ stories from north, south, east and west.
Dear Mrs Bird: the new generation of novels putting women back into the story of World War Two
If you have seen recent films Dunkirk or Darkest Hour, you’d be forgiven for thinking that World War Two was a struggle in which half the human race was missing. Its soldiers and strategists, politicians and prisoners, workers and wounded are all men,...
The New Jewish Queens
When Michael Franks won the annual Wingate Prize yesterday for his memoir the Mighty Franks, a dazzling portrait of an eccentric Los Angeles family, it set the seal on what looks to be an annus mirabilis for a new kind of heroine....
‘Daemon Voices’ by Philip Pullman
“Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story.” If I had to trace the death of the novel – or at least a prolonged attempt to kill it – to a single phrase, this is it. EM Forster wrote...
New Statesman 2017 Children’s Books picks
Few readers will fail to spot this has been a golden year for children’s books. With Philip Pullman’s magisterial return to the world of His Dark Materials in La Belle Sauvage, and Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s rapturously received nature-fest The Lost...
Helen Dunmore
A celebration of the life and work of acclaimed novelist Helen Dunmore. A wonderful friend and literary inspiration.
I fought off a burglar in my own home – but he inspired my new novel
Stories have the power, which Dickens above all used, to make the haves see the have-nots as people. My burglar was not a beast, but a person.
New Statesman 2016 Xmas Children’s Books Picks
If keeping your spirits up in the past month has been difficult, then the best children’s books may be a present to yourself. I am emerging from the duvet much as Moses came down from the mountain, to say there...
The Hunger Games and the teenage craze for dystopian fiction
Wizards and vampires are out. The market in teen fiction is dominated now by societies in breakdown. And it’s girls who are lapping them up.
What Language Do I Dream In? by Elena Lappin
Lappin's account of her life as a mulitple émigré is shot through with sadness and euphoria.