Mark Kermode is an English film critic, musician, radio presenter, television presenter, author and podcaster. He is the co-presenter, with Ellen E. Jones, of the BBC Radio 4 programme Screenshot and co-presenter of the film-review podcast Kermode & Mayo's Take, alongside long-time collaborator Simon Mayo. Kermode is a regular contributor to The Observer, for which he was chief film critic between September 2013 and September 2023.
Monica Ali is a British writer of Bangladeshi and English descent. In 2003, she was selected as one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" by Granta based on her unpublished manuscript; her debut novel, Brick Lane, was published later that year. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name. She has also published four other novels. Her fifth novel, Love Marriage, was published by Virago Press in February 2022 and became an instant Sunday Times bestseller.
Norman Rush is an American writer most of whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He won the U.S. National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America is a 2003 historical non-fiction book by Erik Larson presented in a novelistic style. Set in Chicago during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, it tells the story of World’s Fair architect Daniel Burnham and of H. H. Holmes, a criminal figure widely considered the first serial killer in the United States. Leonardo DiCaprio purchased the film rights in 2010. The concept has since been in development hell.
Love (2003) is the eighth novel by Toni Morrison. Written in Morrison's non-linear style, the novel tells of the lives of several women and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey.
Mating (1991) is a novel by American author Norman Rush. It is a first-person narrative by an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert.
Super Sad True Love Story is the third novel by American writer Gary Shteyngart, and was published in 2010. The novel takes place in a near-future dystopian New York where life is dominated by media and retail.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a fantasy novel by British Indian author Salman Rushdie published by Jonathan Cape in 2015.
Fates and Furies (2015) is the third novel by the American author Lauren Groff.
Autumn is a 2016 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published by Hamish Hamilton. It is the first of four seasonal ‘state of the nation’ works. Written rapidly after the United Kingdom's 2016 European Union membership referendum, it was widely regarded as the first 'post-Brexit novel' dealing with the issues raised by the voters' decision. In July 2017, Autumn was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and in September 2017 it was announced as one of six books to make the shortlist. Many newspapers viewed it as the most likely candidate for winning; it was beaten by George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo.
Feel Free: Essays is a 2018 book of essays by Zadie Smith. It was published on 8 February 2018 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. It has been described as "thoroughly resplendent" by Maria Popova, who writes: "Smith applies her formidable mind in language to subjects as varied as music, the connection between dancing and writing, climate change, Brexit, the nature of joy, and the confusions of personhood in the age of social media."
Quichotte is a 2019 novel by Salman Rushdie. It is his fourteenth novel, published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and Penguin Books India in India. It was published in the United States on 3 September 2019 by Random House. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes's classic novel Don Quixote, Quichotte is a metafiction that tells the story of an addled Indian-American man who travels across America in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he has become obsessed.
Mortal Kombat is a 2021 American martial arts fantasy film co-produced and directed by Simon McQuoid from a screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham, based on the video game series created by Ed Boon and John Tobias. The film serves as a reboot of the Mortal Kombat film series and is the third film in the franchise. It stars Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Tadanobu Asano, Mehcad Brooks, Ludi Lin, Chin Han, Max Huang, Joe Taslim, and Hiroyuki Sanada. The film follows Cole Young, a washed-up mixed martial arts fighter who is unaware of his hidden lineage or why the assassin Sub-Zero is hunting him down. Concerned for the safety of his family, he seeks out a clique of fighters that were chosen to defend Earthrealm against Outworld.
Mr. Fox is a 2011 novel by British author Helen Oyeyemi, published by Picador in the UK and by Riverhead Books in the US.
Grand Union: Stories is a 2019 short story collection by Zadie Smith. It was published on 3 October 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books.
The Man in the Red Coat is a book by Julian Barnes. It was published on 11 November 2019. The book concerns Samuel Jean de Pozzi, a French surgeon and pioneer in the field of gynaecology whose portrait in a red coat John Singer Sargent painted, and other people of Belle Époque Paris, including Robert de Montesquiou, Prince Edmond de Polignac, Jean Lorrain, Sarah Bernhardt, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde.
Harlem Shuffle is a 2021 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It is the follow-up to Whitehead's 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, which earned him his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is a work of crime fiction and a family saga that takes place in Harlem between 1959 and 1964. It was published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021.
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019) by Adam Higginbotham is a history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that occurred in Soviet Ukraine in 1986. It won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in 2020. Higginbotham spent more than a decade interviewing eyewitnesses and reviewing documents from the disaster, including some that were recently declassified. Higginbotham considers it the first English-language account that is close to the truth.
Spring is a 2019 novel by Scottish author Ali Smith, first published by Hamish Hamilton. It was long-listed for the Orwell Prize (2020).
Underland: A Deep Time Journey is a book by Robert Macfarlane and the sequel to The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Initially published in English on 2 May 2019 by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and on 4 June 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company in the US, the book has been translated into over a dozen languages. An audiobook, read by Matthew Waterson, was also released in June 2019 by HighBridge Audio.
