‘every life is full of incident, joy and sorrow’

Novels, for me, have come from somewhere I wasn’t looking. In my twenties I was carrying an idea about a woman wandering around Ireland on a quest she didn’t understand and I sat in the Reading Room o

A year in the life of the eighteenth-century naturalist

Queer as folk tales

Since the death of her partner, Rayya, in 2018, Elizabeth Gilbert has been on an extraordinary journey with grief and addiction. In her new memoir, she spares no-one, least of all herself, as she tells Christobel Hastings

Ian McEwan is strolling through the garden of his Cotswolds manor house. Bees waft drowsily between wildflowers. Plump apples, pears and walnuts bauble the trees. Vibrant cerulean-blue damselflies hov

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was my recent holiday read, and I loved it. It tells the story of lonely widow Tova, whose teenage son vanished 30 years ago. She works at a small aquari