THE JOURNAL
The designer Brunello Cucinelli surrounded by books. Image courtesy of Brunello Cucinelli
Fun fact: in the US, reading as a pastime has fallen by 40 per cent in the past two decades. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they’ve entirely given up reading for pleasure. The writer James Marriott – whose forthcoming book The New Dark Ages promises to be one of the most urgent of the year – has described this moment as nothing less than the dawn of the post-literate society: the counter-revolution against the reading revolution that birthed the modern world, quietly gathering momentum in each and every one of our pockets.
There’s a bright side, though. Reading improves memory, sharpens critical thinking and rebuilds our capacity for sustained focus. It reverses what a daily diet of short-form video and AI reliance has eroded. In The New York Times, author and professor Cal Newport writes: “Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls ‘deep-reading processes’ that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand.” Perhaps 20 or 30 pages of a book a day should become the new 10,000 steps, he suggests, a basic foundation for cognitive fitness.
And there’s an even brighter side: reading is actually fun. We’ve just forgotten that. With the long days of summer stretching out in front of us, now is also the right time to pick up a book. As for the notion of the beach read, forget what you thought constitutes a vacation page-turner. That gripping (or spicy) paperback you’re ashamed to be seen with on the Tube is perfectly fine. But, somewhat paradoxically, the complex, nuanced literature that is difficult – that challenges your perception of the world or of what a book can even be – might just be what your holiday is calling for. After all, to be absorbed, wholly, in something that requires your full attention? That is its own form of rest – and a much better one than scrolling, at any rate.
Below, seven world-building books that represent the best of what’s out there right now – spanning literary fiction, debut novels, translated works and non-fiction. Once you’re in, you’re in.
01. Transcription by Ben Lerner
Image courtesy of Granta
Ben Lerner’s first novel in seven years is, characteristically, a slim masterpiece. An unnamed writer arrives in Providence, Rhode Island, to conduct what will be the final interview with Thomas, his 90-year-old mentor. There’s one snag: he drops his phone in the sink and has no way to record the interview. He is, of course, too embarrassed to confess, and so the interview begins. “A breathtaking interrogation of family, connection and memory,” says The Guardian, and of technology’s role in our lives, we’d add. In just 144 pages, Lerner says more than most writers manage in 400. Read it in an afternoon, think about it for considerably longer.
02. Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated by Lin King)
Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2026 International Booker Prize, Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ presents a nesting doll of a novel. A Chinese-language text written as if it were a rediscovered 1939 travelogue by a fictional Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, who travels through colonial Taiwan on a culinary tour and falls, helplessly, for her emotionally distant Taiwanese interpreter. A powerful meditation on the legacy of empire, disguised as a slow-burn love story.
03. Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam
Photograph by ©Alex J Corona. Additional background images by Shutterstock
Three lads in a white BMW bombing down Manchester’s Curry Mile on a single surreal, increasingly chaotic night. Winner of the Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, Blackburn-born debut novelist Sufiyaan Salam has written something that owes a debt to both James Joyce and Jay-Z, while sounding like absolutely no one else. A blistering coming-of-age story about masculinity, love, violence and what it means to be young, Northern and brown in contemporary England.
04. London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
Image courtesy of Doubleday
True story: in 2019, a 19-year-old named Zac Brettler died after jumping from a luxury apartment building on the bank of the Thames. When his parents began investigating, they discovered Zac had been living a double life – posing as the heir to a Russian oligarch’s fortune and getting tangled in London’s shadowy criminal underworld. Radden Keefe uses the tragedy as a prism through which to examine the city itself – its dirty money, its gilded rot, its spectacular capacity for self-delusion. As with Say Nothing and Empire Of Pain, you won’t sleep until you’re finished.
05. Love Machines by James Muldoon
People falling in love with AI chatbots, adopting children with them, resurrecting deceased partners, confiding in them as therapists – this is an episode of Black Mirror, right? Not quite. In a spectacular example of life imitating art, sociologist James Muldoon approaches the subject of romantic human-machine relations with genuine warmth and serious academic rigour. Featuring interviews with users, developers and the chatbots themselves, what emerges is equal parts urgent, unsettling and unexpectedly moving.
06. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Image by Jonathan Cape
Ian McEwan, one of British literature’s greatest living authors, has done something unexpected in his 18th novel. He’s written what he describes as science fiction “without the science”. Set in 2119, in a UK battered by climate catastrophe and partially submerged by rising seas, it follows Tom Metcalfe, a literature professor on a quest to find a poem that was read aloud at a dinner party a century earlier – and never seen since. It’s part literary thriller, part love story, part elegy for the world we are living in right now.
07. May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry
Image courtesy of Granta
Rebecca Perry is best known as a poet (she was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize). Her debut novel May We Feed The King bears that sensibility on every page and in the construction of every sentence. The premise: a contemporary curator, unnamed and grief-stricken, takes a commission to dress the rooms of a medieval palace and becomes so absorbed in the story of the reluctant king who once lived there, that the line between her life and his begins to dissolve. Strange, expansive and unlike anything else published this year – as befits a poet with an original mind wading into the waters of the novel for the first time. Handle with appropriate care.