The former poet laureate guides us through his life in poetry, from encounters with Larkin and Auden to the act of composition itself. The science journalist delves into deep time to uncover the historical roots of gendered oppression. A mute young woman in Seoul makes a connection with her language teacher, who is himself losing his sight, in the new novel from the author of The Vegetarian. In this book, a young girl is murdered at a London housing estate, and another young girl in the complex, Lucy, is suspected of having committed the crime. Lucy is taken into questioning, and her family members - her young mother Carmel, her alcoholic uncle Richie, and her detached grandfather John - wait over a stretch of 24 hours in a hotel while she's being detained. During this time, Tom, a reporter, is on a mission to break this story, and speaks with the family members one-on-one to learn more about the events that unfolded, but also about the dynamics of their family. What we get, then, are long sections in the past, giving us pieces to understand how this poor, Irish family ended up in this situation in London. O rdinary Human Failings is an ensemble piece focused on the adult siblings Carmel and Richie Green and their parents, Rose and John. At the end of the 1970s, the shame of Carmel’s teenage pregnancy prompts the family to move from Waterford in Ireland to a London housing estate.

Set in an alternative America, an ambitious, genre-busting investigation of creativity told through the life of an iconoclastic artist, as written by her grieving widow.

The subject matter is tough and none of it is exactly a bundle of laughs. Megan Nolan doesn’t go in for fairy story endings for either her characters or the novel itself. The main theme of the book was well conveyed, and it is that devoting love, and time, to a child does not come easily to everybody. The British-Iranian woman wrongly imprisoned in Iran between 2016 and 2022 writes about her incarceration and the fight to get her out. Two years ago, Acts of Desperation, the story of a young woman trapped in a toxic relationship, made people sit up and take notice of the equally young Irish novelist Megan Nolan. That electric, bestselling debut won her, inter alia, a Betty Trask Award and a longlisting for the Dylan Thomas Prize. The concern, of course, after such a first novel, is whether the author will be able to deliver something as good the second time around. But Nolan has excelled herself: Ordinary Human Failings is a raw, pulsing thing, unflinching in its gaze but tender in its handling of its broken, bruised protagonists.

A sweeping examination of how climate has shaped history, and how humans in turn have shaped climate, from the author of The Silk Roads. Ravenous: Why Our Appetite Is Killing Us and the Planet, and What We Can Do About It by Henry Dimbleb y , Profile A woman chases her double across Europe, in an investigation into fraying identity from the author of The Man Who Saw Everything.The elements of the book—young mother, alcoholism, leaving Ireland, unscrupulous tabloid newspaper—are all pretty predictable and can feel a bit stereotypical, but the book also does try and dig a bit further into the family and how small failings have an impact. The journalist, Tom, doesn't really have much of a plotline, and some hints about him being able to be a chameleon in different settings and how he tries to get in with the family could've been explored a bit further in the narrative. Still, the book begins with Tom’s perspective: his ambition and anxiety, his charm and cynicism. One minor gripe would be that while the future lives of the Green family members are hinted at towards the end, the equally interesting Tom simply slips away. Perhaps he just moves on, unaffected; perhaps, as Carmel thinks to herself, he “didn’t understand and would never feel the consequences of” the cruelty of his job, insulated by power and money. But early on, Nolan hints at a character too intelligent for that, and Tom is plagued by self-loathing. When he can’t stop the phrase “ I’m the loneliest man in the world!” from “screaming” round his brain, he foreshadows the isolation that also defines each of the Greens. It’s clear that his work – hateful as it may be – is his own act of desperate distraction. I wondered what became of him, too. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Broadcast last year on his podcast, Ellis’s first novel in 13 years melds autobiography and fiction to focus on a group of privileged LA students at risk from a serial killer.