A long chapter in the history of bookselling belatedly closed last month – a chapter that opened in 1792. That was when a London couple, Anna and Henry Walton Smith, set up as news vendors in Mayfair.

322pp. Picador. Paperback, £10.99. Both Newby’s book and From Scenes Like These are set in the 1950s, and we can see that both novels, from different angles, are trying to come to terms with an old, ...

To return or not to return? That is the question that has defined the long-running debate around the sculptures made almost 2,500 years ago to adorn the buildings of the Acropolis of Athens. They tend ...

Guadalupe Nettel’s new collection of short stories, The Accidentals, beautifully translated by Rosalind Harvey, begins with an epigraph from Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as ...

There are approximately 10,000 medieval churches in Britain, and Andrew Ziminski, a stonemason and restorer, has visited more than half of them. Churches of shorter pedigree are not wholly absent in ...

In autumn 1988, I travelled by ferry from Helsinki to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia – a four-hour crossing over the Gulf of Finland. The reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had ...

Nikko is a small mountain town two hours north of Tokyo, where towering cedars erupt from scraggly ravines and a green-blue river gallops beneath a 300-year-old lacquered bridge. High above the town, ...

256pp. And Other Stories. Paperback, £14.99. Morgan Talty Charles, the narrator of Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, does not know when exactly his daughter, Elizabeth, was born. For days, he sat ...

In Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte prises open and peers into the ugliest parts of the modern psyche. Following the author’s debut novel, Private Citizens (2016), this collection of short stories is ...

Philip Hoare’s exhilarating new book often feels like a print by William Blake. In the centre stands Blake himself, with arms outspread, his pale blue eyes meeting our gaze, his body radiating light ...