Books

A beautiful memoir about the ugly side of Europe tops our round-up of 2024’s best non-fiction

Photographer Andrew McConnell set out to record cosmonauts in Kazakhstan – but found the local people infinitely more fascinating

First published in 1924, his masterpiece Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) is a highbrow ode to chilling

Our editor-at-large’s rundown of the pick of the week’s streaming, cinema, theatre and books

An Israeli startup’s plan to use AI to publish 8,000 books a year sounds like the death of quality

A 1532 first edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince, which are vanishingly hard to come by, has just come on the market

The German artist returns with a playful book that shakes things up by bringing the surreal into the everyday

How a habitual jailbird became one of Germany’s most famous authors by writing about a Wild West he’d never visited

The former German chancellor has played it smart again by shrouding her memoirs in secrecy ahead of their release

From Sally Bowles to George Smiley by way of Kreuzberg and Alexanderplatz, the best books about Berlin

Too centralised, too short term, too obsessed with Twitter, our political system is a dysfunctional mess. If we don’t fix it, we’ll all suffer

There’s pain and glory in The Last Dream – a patchy collection from the Spanish film-maker – but its highlight is all about his mother

The wisecracking writer was traumatised and transformed by her 1937 visit to Spain to support the Republican cause in the civil war

If a new novel is to be believed, the former German chancellor retired to the countryside and started solving murders

A literary festival that reminds us of the healing power of words

From James Joyce and Jerome K Jerome to Eliot and Alice Oswald, a personal pick of the greatest writing about rivers

The story of Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko captures the reason why the country must fight, why it must win and why the west needs to support it all the way

As November 5 approaches, here’s what you should be reading

Across the US, the authorities are banning books. If Trump gets into the White House, the censorship could get even worse

Why do oligarchs – and their defamation lawyers – still have the power to silence all criticism?

His attempts to pin the Brexit blame on David Cameron say everything about this egotistical inadequate

Joker: Folie à Deux takes music and makes it a medium for deception, pain and lethal misunderstanding

After co-writing The Thick of It and Veep, Ian Martin channels his most absurd politician yet – Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson’s lie-filled book shows he believes he has done nothing wrong – and also thinks his political career is far from over

Francis Ford Coppola’s hell-for-leather sci-fi epic was 40 years in the making and is an extraordinary film that defies convention

Daring choices are vindicated in the writer’s brilliant new novel about a chess player, his brother and their family

The French photographer took half a million pictures in his life. It took only one to restore his reputation and bring him wealth and controversy

The surprising origins of The Prisoner of Zenda, the ultimate swashbuckling tale of derring-do

Our editor-at-large's rundown of the pick of the week’s streaming, cinema, theatre and books

A combination of deep thinking, a fascination with the everyday and a playful wit produced some of the most groundbreaking fiction of the 20th century

Our editor-at-large's rundown of the pick of the week’s streaming, cinema, theatre and books

The six pieces reproduced here offer glimpses of Palestinian humanity as the horror grew, from its first minutes into subsequent months