In the lobby of the respectable Meredith Hotel in the seaside village of Hazelbourne, two English ladies from different backgrounds face a dilemma that results from being female.

A conventionally structured tale of murder, the story plays out against actual and imagined social history. Fortunate to be educated and married to the enlightened and liberal Doctor Ramu Murthy, Kaveri not only involves herself in solving a murder, but persuades Ramu to aid her efforts in helping the police. As she does so, she comes across all manner of social ills. The burden of a home’s respectability, Kaveri quickly realizes, is placed on the womenfolk.

This well-researched and riveting book exposes how vastly different the world was just a hundred years ago. Before World War I, Parker tells us, “imperialism had been the familiar form of government for much of the globe.” After it, “the future seemed to belong to alternative forms of government — the nation state, democracy, communism, fascism. In Britain itself, 1918 had seen the ushering in of (almost) mass democracy for the first time, with a universal male franchise and votes for most women over thirty.”

Set in Mahdist Sudan in the late 1800s, this novel carries us into the heart of the Muhammad Ahmad’s rebellion against foreign control of the region. A deeply divisive figure among Muslims, the Madhi claimed to be the expected one, then rebelled against the British, Egyptians and Ottomans who were controlling Sudan at the time. After his death, his tomb in Omdurman was desecrated by the British to discourage another Muslim uprising, but later rebuilt.

The greater good is a phrase that comes up a lot in this novel, but it isn’t as good as it sounds. Instead, the phrase is brought into service to excuse evil deeds on both sides of the conflict.

The latest installment of the Malabar House series, like its predecessors, bristles with evocative descriptions of India in the early years after independence.

Last year I read 123 books, 22 more than in 2022. Bizarrely, my total for 2021 was also exactly 123 books read.

First as a man, then as a woman, Jan Morris has travelled the world and written about it, showing it to readers through her unique vision. Her journalistic exploits include covering the first conquest of Mt. Everest, the 1956 Sinai War, as well as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the South African Treason Trial involving Mandela, the construction and destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the 1997 British handover of Hong Kong to China when the lease had expired.

Rovelli writes with enthusiastic reverence about our amazing universe. Marvelling at our scientific advances, he emphasizes the recurring need to change our minds about what we thought we knew. This is challenging, “and the difficulty lies not so much with the new concept as it does with becoming liberated from old ones.”

I knew David Cornwell—the man the reading and moviegoing world knows as John Le Carre—worked as a spy and a diplomat, but I knew nothing about his family. This series of vignettes, published when he was 85, provide some wonderful glimpses into his life.

“If a tech company is not trying to sell you a product, you are the product they are selling.” The setting of this tale is up to the minute, and like other great contemporary mysteries, it comments on society as currently constituted.

Among the chief delights of reading Osman’s work are his fresh turns of phrase and flights of fancy. Chris, the local policeman is bitter after being ruthlessly sidelined by the high-handed SIO Jill Regan of the National Crime squad. Fantasizing about solving the murder ahead of both Regan and the Thursday Murder club, he imagines retired MI6 officer Elizabeth and her three intrepid pensioner friends “starting a gunfight in a hollowed-out volcano.”

Yesterday afternoon, I sat down on the back porch to take a quick peek inside Uncontrolled Flight before plunging back into some editing work I needed to finish. At 11 pm, I was in the same chair, reading the last page of the novel. 

…Indeed, existentialism heralded all kinds of social revolutions. Along with producing Beauvoir’s foundational feminist text, it “offered gay people encouragement to live in the way that felt right, rather than trying to fit in with others’ ideas of how they should be.” It also appealed to “those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or…fighting colonialism…a change of perspective.” While he worked out his philosophy of non-violent resistance, Martin Luther King read Sartre, Heidigger, and Paul Tillich.

If today’s horoscope is any indication, AI can’t quite replace human writers yet. Witness the scattershot list of purportedly flattering adjectives describing today’s birthday baby in the Sun’s Astrology column. Concise? maybe… Aggressive… well, okay; sadly, these days that seems to be something that many aspire to… Being labelled passionate is unlikely to raise any ire. But sumptuous?

In March, Eleanor Catton visited Vancouver to converse with Bill Richardson about Birnam Wood. Lesley Hurtig, artistic director of the local Writer’s Fest, characterized the novel as “a stunning takedown of late capitalism,” and Bill Richardson found many parts of it laugh-out-loud funny.

Some say ruthless cutting is a sign you’re a real writer. According to novelist Bianca Marais, other milestones are finding beta readers to critique your drafts, and critiquing the work of others. Reading other people’s unpublished manuscripts can reveal their uncut darlings, which inspires me to find and cut my own.

Scott J. Shapiro is a Yale professor of law and philosophy. For a change of pace, he directs the Yale Cybersecurity Lab. Built around the historic “five extraordinary hacks” mentioned in the sub-title, the book is full of charm and humour. It is also strewn with fascinating bits of historical and sociological detail.

Books are doorways into other lives. Through her non-fiction, I’ve been visiting the life of this Irish journalist, who came to professional writing after other lives as a university lecturer and a television producer for BBC and RTE.