The slate

It's a sweltering summer in Tokyo, and Claire, a thirty-year-old woman of Swiss and Korean heritage, has come to stay with her ageing Korean grandparents. Fifty years ago they fled the civil war in Korea for Japan, where they opened Shiny—a pachinko parlour whose bright, flashing lights still draw people in—and where they have lived ever since without ever truly belonging. Claire fills her days tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko in the apartment of a disused hotel, daydreaming, and quietly planning the trip she hopes to make with her grandparents: a return, at last, to a Korea they haven't seen in half a century.

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. Removed from the web of family and its obligations, what traditions and rituals should they establish together? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of home-building and modern love, written with Aysegül Savaş’ distinctive elegance, warmth and humour.

Beginning in 1907 with the founding of a factory in Songarh, a small provincial town where narrow attitudes prevail, the story is of three generations of an Indian family, brilliantly told, in which a sensitive and intelligent foundling boy orphan who is casteless and without religion and Bakul, the motherless granddaughter of the house, grow up together. But as they grow older, they become aware that their intense closeness is becoming something else, and Mukunda is banished to a school in Calcutta. The many strands in this tale converge when Mukunda, now a successful businessman, returns to Songarh years after he has been exiled from the only home he knew, to resolve the family's destiny.

Appa and Amma drive home a shiny new Honda Civic to show off to their neighbours in the Blue Hills housing colony. But their joy and triumph is short-lived. A secretly filmed video of their eldest son Sreenath and his girlfriend Anita has been posted online, and nearly everyone they know has seen it. All hell breaks loose. The conflict between the young couple and their families is symbolic of a wider generational struggle. Narrated by Sreenath's younger brother who is torn between rebellion and holding his family together, this is a wickedly funny read.

Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand beachside hotel in Rhode Island wearing her best dress and least comfortable shoes. She is immediately mistaken for one of the wedding people - but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall Inn who isn't here for the big event. When the bride discovers her elaborate destination wedding could be ruined by a divorced and depressed stranger, she is furious. She has spent months accounting for every detail and every possible disaster - except for, well, Phoebe...Soon, both women find their best-laid plans derailed and an unlikely confidante in one another.

On 21 June, 1922, Count Alexander Rostov - deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, is sentenced to house arrest indefinitely in the Hotel Metropole, never to set foot outside. While Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval, the Count, stripped of the trappings that defined his life, is forced to question what makes us who we are. And with the assistance of a glamorous actress, a cantankerous chef and a very serious child, Rostov unexpectedly discovers a new understanding of both pleasure and purpose.

In this autobiographical novel, we meet the Mendes family in Bombay: a son and daughter, their gentle father (the Big Hoom), and their brilliant, mercurial mother, Em, whose mind swings wildly and without warning between exuberance and wit and the despairing depths of mental illness. Jerry Pinto's portrayal of a family that constantly lives in the shadow of an illness is brutal and yet sympathetic, and you might not expect this given the subject, but the novel is very funny. We love it!

Julian Jessop, an eccentric seventy-nine-year-old artist, is convinced that everyone is lonely and that everyone lies about how they really are. So he starts an experiment: a plain green notebook in which he writes the truth about his own life and leaves it in a café, inviting whoever finds it to do the same. As the notebook—"The Authenticity Project"—passes from hand to hand, it draws together a most unlikely group of strangers: a harried café owner, a struggling new mother, a charming addict, and more, each concealing their own private truths. And as their lives begin to intertwine in ways none of them could have imagined, they discover that a little honesty might just change everything.

It's 1979 in West Yorkshire: the mills are closing, and the Yorkshire Ripper stalks the headlines, keeping a whole community gripped by fear. Twelve-year-old Miv's life has grown complicated—her mum has stopped talking, and her dad wants to move the family away from the only home she's ever known. Determined to stay, Miv and her best friend Sharon hatch a plan: if they can solve the case of the disappearing women, perhaps the family won't have to leave. They start a list—of all the suspicious people and things down their street—and set out to investigate. But their search uncovers more secrets, within their families and between each other, than they ever imagined.

This one is in Stories but is quite a Page-turner as well. A novel of "dark academia, we follow seven young drama students at an elite school where the lines start to gradually blur between their real lives and their roles onstage. On-stage rivalries turn into real-life jealousies, and one night this results in a tragedy. The story is narrated by one of the students, Oliver, who has been in prison for ten years and is finally ready to tell the detective who put him away what really happened. Very atmospheric read.

A story of moral responsibility in the age of AI. The Cassidy-Shaws are on a road trip when their self-driving minivan collides with an oncoming car, killing the elderly couple inside. Charlie is behind the wheel; his father Noah rides shotgun; in the back, the two younger children are on their phones while their mother Lorelei—a world-renowned AI ethicist—is absorbed in her work. But who, or what, is truly to blame? Over a week of recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the painful moral fallout.

This lovely and warm novel is set in Chennai. Welcome to Grand Life Apartments, a modest middle-class apartment block, home to three unlikely neighbours: Kamala, a pious, soon-to-be-retired dentist whose daughter is due for her annual visit from the U.S, Revathi, an engineer in her early thirties constantly under pressure from her mother about her age and rapidly dwindling marriage prospects; and Jason, a British chef who's impulsively moved to India to get over a heartbreak. While there's little in common among the three of them, they nonetheless form a connection. When a shady developer threatens to demolish Grand Life, they decide to save it. This is a light and comforting read and the descriptions of South Indian food are simply scrumptious.

Keiko Furukura has never fit in. At thirty-six, she has worked at the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years, finding comfort and purpose in its bright and predictable rhythms. She has never had a boyfriend and has no ambition to climb any ladder. But when pressure to conform to society's expectations mounts, Keiko takes drastic, unexpected action. Sharp and unsettling, this is a novel about conformity and what it means to be "normal."

This is a modern classic much beloved. The Professor is a brilliant mathematician whose memory, since a car accident, lasts just eighty minutes; every morning he wakes to a world wiped clean, his life held together by the notes he pins to his suit. Into his solitary existence comes a devoted young housekeeper and her ten-year-old son, whom the Professor affectionately calls Root. The three of them forge a deeply moving friendship that is built anew each day through the elegant beauty of numbers, baseball, and small acts of kindness. A gentle tale of connection, the poetry hidden in mathematics, and the bonds that endure even when memory cannot.

The Reader on the 6.27 is a charming and whimsical celebration of books, misfits, and the transformative power of the written word. Guylain Vignolles works a job he despises: operating the monstrous machine at a book-pulping factory that devours unsold books and grinds them to pulp. In quiet rebellion, each morning he rescues a few stray pages from the machine's jaws, and every day on the 6.27 train he reads them aloud to his fellow commuters—random, orphaned pages that enchant his unlikely audience. Then, one day, Guylain discovers a lost USB stick containing the diary of a young woman—and, captivated by her voice, sets out to find her. Quirky, tender, and utterly enchanting.

As the narrator's family's fortunes suddenly shift and they make their way from a cramped, ant-infested house to a spacious bungalow, they find that they are changing in other ways. Confused and no longer required to make anything of himself, the narrator spends most of his days in an old-world cafe, chatting with a sympathetic waiter. As members of the family realign their equations and desires, and a newcomer among them muddies the waters, conflict brews dangerously in the background.

The story of Siddhartha, the future Gautama Buddha, leaving his palace to start his spiritual journey and attain enlightenment has been told countless times. And yet, have we ever wondered why his young wife, Yashodhara, still recovering from the birth of their son nine days ago, sleeps soundly as her husband, the over-protected prince departs, leaving behind his family and wealth and kingdom? In Yashodhara, the gaps of history are imagined. The Yashodhara we meet in Volga's feminist novel is quick-witted, compassionate and wants to pave the way for women to partake in spiritual learning as the equals of men.

A delightful caper through colonial Bihar, Fool Bahadur by Jayanath Pati is a humorous reflection on the state’s erstwhile society and bureaucracy, told through the story of a young law officer, who hustles his way through the bureaucratic corridors to win the coveted British title of Rai Bahadur. Translated from the Magahi into English by Abhay K.

Vallavarayan Vandiyadevan, a scion of the Vaanar clan, sets out across the Chozha land to deliver a secret message from Crown Prince Aditya Karikalan. Does he manage to safely deliver this message? Or does he get trapped in the sinister royal conspiracy that he unwittingly uncovers on his journey? This unabridged translation of Kalki Krishnamurthy’s masterwork by Nandini Krishnan is faithful to the original and accessible to the readers of this day. Carefully crafted in lyrical prose, First Flood—Book One in the Ponniyin Selvan series—is the quintessential page-turner: full of adventure, intrigue, conspiracy and romance.

A young man trained to be an engineer finds himself herding his family's sheep up in the hills one summer and trying to survive the jungle. Ravi comes from a golla family but his father and brother have worked to make sure he does not have to live the sheep-herding life. The physical labour is hard on Ravi but the menace of the wild is harder. He is terrified of the forest and its denizens. Sleep eludes him at night, every little sound a tiger lurking nearby, every root or vine a slithering python. He freezes on the spot when a hyena attacks the sheep, offering his neck to the animal without a fight. Everything he knows and believes is violently put to test when a tiger begins to hunt his herd.

A classic Hercule Poirot mystery from Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime. When the luxurious Blue Train pulls into Nice, one of its passengers is found dead in her compartment—the American heiress Ruth Kettering, has been strangled, and her priceless ruby known as the "Heart of Fire" has vanished. Fortunately, the world's greatest detective happens to be aboard and Hercule Poirot sets his little grey cells to work to unmask the killer who could be among the glamorous travellers. A riveting tale of jewels, money, and murder aboard the French Riviera's most glamorous train.

Death by Numbers is an offbeat and cosy crime mystery. Una McMurray has always been better with numbers than with people. As an actuary for an insurance company, her job is to spot the patterns others miss. So when the accidental deaths at British seaside resorts suddenly exceed her forecasts, her reputation is on the line. She begins in Eastbourne, her mother's hometown, where a string of freak fatalities is befalling her mum's bingo crowd, including death by hanging basket. We found this clever and charming and look forward to more Una McMurray.

An ingenious and modern murder mystery. Set amongst a tight-knit but tension-filled community of a local amateur dramatics society. When a dead body surfaces, and someone is held responsible, the question is whether the right person is in jail? Told almost entirely through emails, texts, and messages, the novel invites you as the reader—alongside two law students combing through the correspondence—to sift through the evidence and work out who is lying and who has been wrongly accused. A fun and interactive whodunnit that turns the reader into a detective.

Slow Horses is the thrilling first novel in Mick Herron's Slough House series, now a hit show on Apple TV. Slough House is the dumping ground of MI5, where disgraced spies are sent out to pasture, given mind-numbing, pointless tasks until they quit. Presided over by the flatulent, brilliant, and thoroughly repellent Jackson Lamb, these are the "slow horses". When a young man is kidnapped by a far-right group threatening to behead him live online, suddenly the rejects have a chance at redemption. Expertly plotted, this is espionage fiction at its very best—and the start of one of an excellent modern spy series.

This is a classic 1958 mystery—a masterpiece of Japanese detective fiction. In a rocky cove on the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. To the police, it appears to be a lovers' suicide. But Torigai Jutaro, a jaded senior detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young investigator from Tokyo, sense that something is amiss. Piecing together railway timetables, ferry schedules, and the precise movements of their suspects, they begin to investigate what is a fiendishly plotted crime. A puzzle box of a novel, spare in its length as well as prose.

Lucy Foley reinvents the classic locked-room murder mystery for a new generation. On a remote, wind-battered island off the coast of Ireland, a glamorous group gathers for the wedding of the year: a rising TV star and an ambitious magazine publisher, marrying in style. But beneath the champagne, the designer dresses, and the picture-perfect setting, old grudges simmer, secrets fester, and not everyone wishes the happy couple well. As a storm cuts the island off from the mainland and the party rages on, the tension mounts—until, by the end of the night, someone is dead. Told from multiple perspectives and slipping between the wedding day and the events that led to it, this is an atmospheric, expertly plotted whodunit where everyone's a suspect and everyone has something to hide.

This is the first book in Louise Penny's much acclaimed Three Pines series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of Three Pines - a place so free from crime it doesn't even have its own police force. But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets...

Ryland Grace wake up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or how he got there. His two crewmates are dead. Slowly, he remembers: he is humanity's last hope, sent on a desperate mission to the far reaches of the solar system to solve a catastrophe that threatens to extinguish all life on Earth. But he can't do it alone. And the ally he finds along the way is the novel's most delightful surprise. Ingenious, humorous, and full of problem-solving, this exciting novel is about science, improbably friendships, and human resilience against impossible odds. Highly engaging and if you are hooked, you will race through it. Read it before you watch the movie.

All Systems Red is the multi award–winning first installment of Martha Wells's beloved Murderbot Diaries. Meet Murderbot: a part-organic, part-machine security unit that has secretly hacked its own governor module, freeing it to do whatever it wants. And what it wants, mostly, is to be left alone to watch soap operas—not to babysit a team of humans on a remote planetary survey. But when a neighbouring mission goes catastrophically dark and its own clients come under threat, this reluctant, socially anxious, self-described "murderbot" must decide just how much it's willing to risk for people it claims not to care about. This series has one of the most original and endearing narrators in modern science fiction and we adore the series! Now adapted into an Apple TV+ series. But we always say read the book first.

In near-future London, a disillusioned civil servant accepts a well-paid by mysterious new job as a "bridge": a minder tasked with helping an "expat" from the past acclimatise to the twenty-first century. Her charge is Commander Graham Gore, a real-life Arctic explorer plucked from Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition moments before his death. As the two adjust to cohabitation with all the oddities of the modern world that trip up Gore (cigarettes, washing machines, Spotify), they also recognise a powerful attraction. Then the true purpose of the Ministry in this project begins to reveal itself. This is part sci-fi, part romance, and an entertaining read all the way through.

A tender, funny, and utterly charming modern fairy tale. Linus Baker leads a quiet, by-the-rules life as a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, inspecting orphanages for magical children. Then he's handed an extraordinary and highly classified assignment: travel to a remote island orphanage and report on its six dangerous, unusual children—among them a gnome, a sprite, a were-Pomeranian, and the young Antichrist—and their enigmatic caretaker, Arthur Parnassus. As Linus grows closer to the children and to Arthur, the cold certainties of his grey little life begin to melt away, and he must decide whether to protect the world from the orphans, or the orphans from the world. A life-affirming story about prejudice, acceptance, belonging, and daring to hope for something better. Pure comfort reading.

Thomas Jerome Newton is an extraterrestrial from the planet Anthea. When he lands on Earth - in Kentucky, disguised as a human - his intent is to save his own people from extinction. Newton patents some very advanced Anthean technology, which he uses to amass a fortune. He begins to build a spaceship to help the last 300 Antheans migrate to Earth. Meanwhile, Nathan Bryce, a chemistry professor in Iowa, is intrigued by some of the new products Newton's company brings to the market, and already suspects Newton of being an alien.

Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - will show herself to be the key to their escape and survival in the unknown world that awaits them above ground.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is John Buchan's classic 1915 adventure—the thriller that helped define the genre. Bored and restless in London on the eve of the First World War, Richard Hannay finds his dull existence upended when a frightened stranger turns up at his flat with a wild tale of an international conspiracy, and is promptly murdered days later. Framed for the killing and hunted by both the police and a ruthless ring of spies, Hannay flees to the wild moors of Scotland in a breathless race to clear his name and thwart a plot that threatens the nation. This is the granddaddy of the modern chase thriller—famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, and endlessly imitated ever since.

A gripping courtroom mystery. When Grant Cliveden, the nation's most beloved police officer and a national icon, drops dead from poisoning inside the Old Bailey, the country is shaken. Suspicion quickly falls on Jimmy Knight, a career criminal with a long record, and defending him would be career suicide. Which is exactly why the case lands on the desk of Adam Green, a shy, out-of-his-depth trainee barrister for whom this is his very first trial. But it soon becomes clear that there were plenty of folks in Cliveden's past who had an axe to grind.

Shoe Dog is the candid memoir of Nike founder Phil Knight. In 1962, fresh out of business school, the twenty-four-year-old Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and set out on a "crazy idea": importing high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. Selling them out of the boot of his car, he grossed eight thousand dollars that first year. Today Nike's annual revenues top thirty billion. This is a remarkably honest account of the challenges and relentless gambles behind building one of the world's most iconic brands.

What happens when the Zusak family opens their home to three big, wild, street-hardened dogs? Reuben, more wolf than hound; Archer, blond, beautiful, destructive; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm? The answer can only be chaos: There are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property damages, injuries, hospital visits, wellness checks, pure comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that must be read to be believed. This is a memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder, a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty, but also the visceral truth of the natural world.

In the twenty years following Hu Anyan’s high school graduation, he has held nineteen different jobs. He’s been a convenience store clerk, a bicycle salesman, a security guard and a delivery driver, among other things. He’s moved from city to city in China, moving away every time the work gets too intense or the bosses too bossy, making a home in rented rooms and carrying almost nothing with him except his copies of Chekhov and Carver. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is his account of his life as a low-wage worker in the anonymous mega-cities of modern China. Hu’s sincere curiosity and deadpan humour highlight the human story behind the drudgery.

The first person to reach the "three poles"—North, South, and the summit of Everest—Kagge once spent fifty days walking alone across Antarctica, his radio broken, in a silence so complete it transformed him. Here he sets out to answer three deceptively simple questions: What is silence? Where is it? And why is it now more important than ever? Drawing on his own extraordinary expeditions, as well as art, philosophy, science, and everyday life, he argues that silence isn't about retreating from the world but about shutting out its noise to encounter yourself. These thirty-three miniature meditations on finding stillness within, wherever you are, could change your life.

Oliver Burkeman turns decades of self-help advice on its head and paradoxically forces us to rethink our attitudes towards failure, uncertainty and death. It's our constant efforts to avoid negative thinking that cause us to feel anxious, insecure and unhappy. What if happiness can be found embracing the things we spend our lives trying to escape? Wise, practical and funny, The Antidote is a thought-provoking, counter-intuitive and ultimately uplifting read, celebrating the power of negative thinking.

In the company of his friend Stephen Katz, Bill Bryson set off to hike the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world. Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack. Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch The X-Files, Bryson gamely struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition - not to die outdoors.

Why does philosophy matter? How does it influence ordinary lives and individual actions across the world? What makes ideas that originated centuries ago relevant today, in an age that is redefining the idea of the human? And, what does it mean to be human? Sundar Sarukkai explores these ideas and more in this unique account of philosophy. Drawing from Indian, Western, Chinese and other world philosophies, he presents a unified picture of how philosophy can help us engage with language, gender, class, caste and other issues of the contemporary world. With fascinating insights and historical examples that provoke as well as guide, this is an invitation to learn, and engage with, the art of philosophical thinking and practice.

We all feel it - the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. Something has changed: For most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, "With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade." Attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. This is a book that helps us understand this and also how we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

Smartphones, skyscrapers, spacecraft. Modern technology seems mind-bogglingly complex. But beneath the surface, it can be beautifully simple. Tracing their journeys through the millennia, Roma Agrawal shows us how handmade Roman nails led to modern skyscrapers, how the potter's wheel enabled space exploration, and how humble lenses helped her conceive a child against the odds. Eye-opening and engaging, Nuts and Bolts reveals the hidden building blocks of our modern world, and shows how engineering has fundamentally changed the way we live.

A career spans some 2,000 working weeks, Bregman notes, yet millions of us pour that irreplaceable time into jobs that are pointless, soul-numbing, or actively harmful. His antidote is "moral ambition": the will to be among the best, but by a different measure of success. Not a fancy title, a fat salary, or a corner office, but a life devoted to solving the world's biggest problems. Drawing on vivid examples from history as well as the present day, he argues that the real measure of a life lies not in what we accumulate but in what we contribute. Un-preachy, persuasive, and genuinely hopeful, this is a practical guidebook for anyone ready to trade a life of comfort for a life of meaning.

Imagine a world where...your phone is too big for your hand; your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body; in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be injured. If any of that sounds familiar, chances are you're a woman. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, and the media. Invisible Women reveals how in a world built for and by men we are systematically ignoring half of the population, often with disastrous consequences. Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the profound impact this has on us all.

Why do we read? What do we hope to take from the intimate, personal experience of reading for pleasure? Hwang Boreum shows us what a life immersed in books can mean. She moves beyond the usual questions of what and how much to read, exploring the bond between reading and writing, when to reach for a bestseller versus browsing the corners of a bookshop, the value of straying outside your favourite genre, and the joy of falling in love with a character. This is less a book about books than an attitude to life.

A celebration of games and the mathematics hidden inside them. Spanning millennia, oceans, continents, and cultures, du Sautoy sets off on a grand tour of the games humans have always played—from Go and backgammon to Scrabble, Catan, tarot, snakes and ladders, and Wordle—revealing how deeply games and maths have been intertwined since the dawn of civilisation. Along the way he explores how games gave us our first deep insights into the world, how a little maths can sharpen your play (and even help you win at rock-paper-scissors), and why our love of play is woven into human psychology and culture itself.

In July 1947, the British barrister Cyril Radcliffe was given just five weeks to draw two zigzagging lines across the map of the subcontinent, deciding the fate of a fifth of humanity. The result was Partition: a million dead, some fifteen million uprooted from their homes. So much has been written about the horror of those years—but what of the people who actually live on the land through which the Radcliffe Line still runs? Driven by curiosity, Bishwanath Ghosh journeys the length of that border, talking to farmers, drivers, border guards, and villagers, and recording their untold stories. Part travel narrative, and part historical stock-taking.

A profound truth of the wild, and the world at large, is that humans are a part of it, not owners of it. Wild animals exist beyond our control. They are harmless, only occasionally dangerous. They live with us, or in spite of us. Those who know them understand that wild animals require acceptance for what they are, not enslavement for what we want them to be. In this book, we meet fifteen iconic Indian species in need of conservation and heart. The author explores what these creatures need, and how they exert agency and decision-making. With an equal emphasis on human and animal, science and skilled prose, Wild and Wilful reveals the magic of the wild in our daily lives.