With subjects ranging from Elvis to bubble and squeak, the poet’s unmistakable delivery elevates his satirical verse to the realms of high art

The latest poetry collection from John Cooper Clarke, AKA the Bard of Salford, What comes with themes including chlamydia, necrophilia, Elvis, the “misery soup” of rolling news, the late racing commentator Peter O’Sullevan, Boxing Day bubble and squeak and the delights of Manchester’s Curry Mile – “Drunk chicks blow chunks out the back of a stretch / Staccato heels a-clatter”.

These poems are vintage Clarke: full of wordplay and whimsical humour and threaded with sharp social commentary. Blue Collar Wallah is a portrait of a “heteronormative handyman” who is a “two meat and one veg guy, potatoes never kale”, and who finds himself out of step with contemporary values; Smooth Operetta depicts the youth tribe once known as casuals, discernible by their Farah slacks and slip-on shoes – “Neat neat neat neat neat / Please do not make me repeat”.

What is available via Picador, 47 min

Continue reading...

Narrator Simone Collins leans into the dark humour of life at the domestic coalface, where moments of fierce love jostle with soul-sapping drudgery

A thrillingly blunt account of new motherhood, Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize, and finds its narrator addressing her baby, whom she calls Sailor, as she reports from life at the domestic coalface. Blending the profound and the soul-sappingly mundane, she talks of her fierce love for her son while navigating the purgatory of laundry, mealtimes, baby groups, trips to the playground, broken nights and exhaustion. In between relaying the routine of her days, she reflects on her altered identity – “I was just a woman! How has this not registered before?” ­– and observes the inequity of life as the mother of an infant where the working world is “an adult place from which I’ve been banished” and during which she has become an “indoor creature indentured to domesticity”.

The narrator is the Irish actor Simone Collins, who leans into Kilroy’s dark humour and the protagonist’s compulsive frankness, which leads her to swear vociferously at her little boy – who by now is nearly two – after he wanders off in Ikea. But the villain of the piece is her lazy, tactless husband who, on getting home from work, heaps judgment on his wife for her chaotic, frazzled state and who believes changing the occasional nappy qualifies him as an “involved father”. When he suggests his wife has postnatal depression, she duly erupts: “This is life-is-shit depression … I miss my old life like I’d miss a lover. I pine for it. I daydream about leaving you so that I can be with it again. You’d like to diagnose postnatal depression because then it’s not your fault.”

Continue reading...

The books will be released sequentially, starting with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, with a full cast of yet-to-be-named actors and a ‘groundbreaking new soundscape’

New audiobooks of all seven titles in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series will be released exclusively on Audible in late 2025. More than 100 performers have been cast to voice the books’ various characters and “bring these iconic stories to life as never heard before”.

A joint statement from Amazon-owned Audible and Pottermore Publishing, the audio and ebook publisher of the Harry Potter series, said the new audiobooks will not aim to replace the much-loved single-voice English-language recordings by Jim Dale and Stephen Fry, but “sit alongside and complement” them.

Continue reading...

The Scottish comedian narrates her traumatic experience of being ‘wired differently’ and why autism is so frequently missed in women

When the Scottish comedian Fern Brady phoned her father to say she had been diagnosed with autism, he was on his daily commute back from London. He said, “Oh right”, and began complaining about the traffic. Brady replied: “Well, they say autism can be inherited from one parent, so I guess that’s answered the question of which one.”

Strong Female Character, written and narrated by Brady, and winner of the inaugural Nero award for nonfiction, documents the turmoil of growing up with undiagnosed autism, during which she excelled academically but struggled with sensory overload and had violent outbursts that baffled her family, teachers and peers. After she began self-harming, her parents sent her to an adolescent psychiatric unit where she was a day patient. She was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, though she knew that wasn’t the whole story. It took until she was 34 to get an autism diagnosis.

Continue reading...

An ill-matched narrator can ruin an otherwise rollicking book. But a good one can bring stories to life – and evoke our earliest childhood memories

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

My earliest memory of being read to as a child involves my father gleefully reading AA Milne while stretched out on my little bed, his shoes disappearing over the edge. His enthusiasm was infectious. I still know the poem Happiness by heart: “John had great big waterproof boots on …” Milne’s collection When We Were Very Young marked the beginning of my reading journey and has a place on my bookshelf to this day.

I passed on my love of literature to my daughter, who, like me, took over her own reading duties from a young age. My sons were more reluctant but loved being read to well into their teens. Harry Potter on cassette – and Stephen Fry’s narration – saved us from murdering each other on many a long road trip, although homicide was a distinct possibility the year I accidentally bought the Jim Dale version.

Continue reading...

Miriam Margolyes, Kate Winslet and Nicola Sturgeon among those giving voice to objects including a femur, a thumbscrew and a glass dildo

“I think it’s terribly funny that men have these weird dangles between their legs - I wouldn’t like that at all.” The actor Miriam Margolyes is talking about male genitalia and dildos – subjects she assumes must have been causing amusement for millennia. “I think from the very beginning, women have been just hooting with laughter.”

And yet – how would we know? So often, women’s voices have been squeezed to the margins of history, their thoughts on all kinds of subjects disregarded by those who got to narrate the past. As Margolyes puts it: “Women have had to fight for space from the beginning.”

Continue reading...

Maya Saroya narrates the Booker-shortlisted story of how a family channels its grief on the squash court and produces a potential champion

After 11-year-old Gopi’s mother dies unexpectedly, she and her older sisters Mona and Khush channel their grief at the local sports centre where their father, known as Pa, teaches them to play squash. “I want you to become interested in something you can do your whole life,” he tells his children.

Set on the outskirts of London in the late 1980s, this Booker -nominated debut novel from Chetna Maroo begins a few days after the funeral, when Pa and his daughters are visiting extended family to mark the end of the mourning period. Their aunt Ranjan frets that the girls are going “wild” and suggests she take one of them off Pa’s hands – “Three is too many,” she tells him. Gopi waits for him to decline the offer but he doesn’t answer. This is typical of Pa, who carries his grief silently, leaving his children confused and looking for clues as to what the future holds.

Continue reading...

The Australian writer explores the Nineteen Eighty-Four author’s treatment of women in an empathetic biography of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy

After spending a summer reading George Orwell in between looking after her teenage children, the Australian author and former human rights lawyer Anna Funder observed how few references the Nineteen Eighty-Four author made to the women in his life. She was especially dismayed by the absence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy , Orwell’s first wife, who joined her husband on research trips and who died while undergoing surgery aged 39. And so in the genre-bending Wifedom – which has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize ­– Funder moves “from the work to the life, from the man to the wife”.

The book is both a heartfelt memoir of Funder’s struggles with the concept of “wifedom” and a biography of the first Mrs Orwell, who typed and gave feedback on her husband’s manuscripts in between chores at their freezing Hertfordshire cottage. Funder draws heavily on the letters O’Shaughnessy wrote to her friend Norah Symes, boldly – and controversially – fleshing them out to give a more detailed picture of the couple’s life together.

Continue reading...

A year after adding à la carte sales of audiobooks, Spotify is offering paying subscribers 15 hours of books a month.