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There are books that no matter when you read them, you will feel like they were written for that moment in time. Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti is one of them.

I really wanted to like Code Violation by Ruth Stilling, I really did. But unfortunately, this book has now taken the place that Mile High was previously holding in my personal hall of books I simply could not get behind.

Blood Drunk is a September new release and Ben Shepherd’s debut novel. He spent twenty years writing about the world's real monsters. As a diplomat, editor and policy analyst, he worked for the Foreign Office and Chatham House, specialising in conflict and politics in Central Africa. All the while, he was quietly writing a book about vampires, magic and organised crime.

Calling it the end might seem dramatic, but there aren’t many other ways to describe the current state of the internet. The Dead Internet Theory claims there are more bots on the internet than humans, and with the way AI is rotting all our algorithms, this has never been truer.

A few weeks ago, Southbank Centre’s Letters to the Future festival welcomed bestselling novelist R.F. Kuang to host The Future of Education panel, intended to unpack the transformative ideas redefining education in the 21st century: rising costs, shifting labour markets, the use of artificial intelligence…

If you're in a reading slump and want something to pull you out of it, this is a strong pick. It's a closed-door romance with an enemies-to-lovers arc that actually earns the label (more on that later), set inside a fantasy’s political competition for an empire's throne. If soft, cute, low-heat romantic fantasy is your genre, this delivers.

Robin Dembroff’s new book is part feminist critique, part philosophical intervention, and part invitation to rethink the way we understand ourselves.

In honour of finishing my 430th book ever read, I am bringing you a recommendation today: Blood Drunk by Ben Shepherd, which comes out this month.

August 29th, 2026: McEwan Hall, Edinburgh. Kiran Desai had not published a book in 20 years. Of the 5000 pages which sputtered out of the printer in a first draft, the nearly 700 pages of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny which careened out in stealth were worth the wait. Desai was looking, hunting, for some ‘sign of life’.

I think I may have just read one of the books that will become a classic of our century, up there with Sally Rooney, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Elena Ferrante.