Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Doctor Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold
The story of how in 1910, Dr Crippen murdered his wife, fled with his lover on an ocean liner, was caught using a transatlantic telegram, and was tried and hanged, is pure penny dreadful sensation. Hallie Rubenhold’s deft study looks at the personnel involved in the drama and the backstories, by turns nondescript, seedy and startling, that led them to tragedy. Read our review here.
Doubleday, 512pp, £25. Buy the book
A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi
There are seven Kinga Sikoras, or seven versions of her – including a matchmaker, a perfumier and a window cleaner – and each keeps a diary informing the other Kingas of what she got up to. The latest novel from Helen Oyeyemi is a dizzyingly funny narrative, where slapstick surrounds a central mystery. But the story’s crowning jewel is her ability to create seven unique voices belonging to one individual. Read our review here.
Faber & Faber, 256pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, translated by Tom Holland
Just a single copy of Suetonius’s short but vivid biographies of the Caesars had been preserved in a Frankish monastery, yet it became the model for how to write about powerful rulers for succeeding generations. Tom Holland’s exemplary translation of this collection shows how strikingly modern they are in their mix of personal details, politics and power. Read an excerpt from the book here.
Penguin Classics, 448pp, £25. Buy the book
Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo
In her feminist reimagining of Moby-Dick, the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted author Xiaolu Guo follows a similar plotline to Herman Melville’s great novel, but with a slightly changed cast, including Ishmaelle, a 17-year-old girl who takes the identity of a 15-year-old boy. Guo deftly incorporates philosophical questions about our relationship with nature and gender dysphoria into the plot, with affecting results. Read our review here.
Chatto & Windus, 448pp, £18.99. Buy the book
Photo by Malick Sidibé 2025 courtesy Loose Joints.
Loose Joints Publishing, £49. Buy the book here
Peak Human by Johan Norberg
The decline of all great civilisations is cyclical, notes Johan Norberg in Peak Human, yet inevitably another great dynasty seems always to emerge from the wake of previous eras. Norberg views history through seven “golden ages”, ranging from Ancient Greece to the Anglosphere by way of the Renaissance and Song China. However familiar the territory may be, he manages to place something surprising at every turn. Read our review here.
Atlantic, 512pp, £22. Buy the book
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt
The British-Irish writer Seán Hewitt has won awards and acclaim for his first two collections of poetry. Now, he publishes a mature and complete debut novel. It is a sore and delicate love story about two teenage boys in a fictional northern village. Hewitt’s poetic facility makes easy music of his atmosphere. The central relationship is revealed with a light, sensitive touch, and reaches impressive emotional depths. Read our review here.
Jonathan Cape, 240pp, £16.99. Buy the book
The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by Ann Schmiesing
Jacob and Wilhelm, the Brothers Grimm, were responsible for the most disturbing collection of fairy stories ever published. Their tales were not just entertainment, for children and for adults, but a means by which to preserve both the German language and its folk past. Compiled in the age of Romantic nationalism, the stories are united by their strangeness and brutality, according to Ann Schmiesing. Read our review here.
Yale University Press, 360pp, £25. Buy the book
Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever by Lamorna Ash
How younger generations are confronting and embracing religion is the focus of Lamorna Ash’s study of contemporary faith. Sparked by two of her friends who converted, she combines her personal religious journey with interviews with people who have redefined their understanding of Christianity or are turning to it for the first time, as well as visits to Quaker meetings and Jesuit retreats. Read our review here.
Bloomsbury Circus, 352pp, £22. Buy the book
Beartooth by Callan Wink
The characters of Callum Wink’s highly readable second novel are Thad and Hazen, two young Montana brothers who begin to discover new things about themselves, and each other, after an injury. The book is at once thoroughly wild and thoroughly intimate. The modest poetry of Callan’s prose does justice both to the beauty of the wilderness and to the complexity of the brothers’ relationship. Read our review here.
Granta, 256pp, £14.99. Buy the book
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China’s Stolen Children by Barbara Demick
Drawing on the story of two identical twins separated between China and the US as infants, Barbara Demick shows the dark side of China’s international adoption programme. In it, many babies were taken from the arms of their parents by government officials and trafficked. Chinese bureaucracy remains opaque, with affected families still unable to find their children. Read our review here.
Granta, 336pp, £20. Buy the book
Guest Editions. £45. Buy the book here
Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War by Minoo Dinshaw
This fine work of narrative history follows the careers of two friends who found themselves on opposite sides during the English Civil War – the parliamentarian Bulstrode Whitelocke and the royalist Edward Hyde (the future Earl of Clarendon). They met as students and both worked within their respective parties to temper extremism, later writing accounts of their turbulent times. Read our review here.
Allen Lane, 544pp, £30. Buy the book
A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis – selected and introduced by John Hatt
Norman Lewis is best known for his wartime memoir Naples ’44. However, much of his other writing, suffused with deadpan humour, where beauty and absurdity sit side by side, deserves wider recognition. This selection of 36 pieces takes in everything from an encounter with bandits in Guatemala to conversations with Cossack prisoners of war facing death. Read our review here.
Eland, 504pp, £25. Buy the book
Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class by Joel Budd
When did the working class become racialised? In classical Marxist scholarship, it didn’t need to be – the working class was generally assumed to be white. But with mass immigration, a new category, the “white working class”, has been invented. Joel Budd’s mixture of reportage, travelogue and enquiry is one of the most searching studies into this contested subcategory yet. Read our review here.
PanMacmillan, 336pp, £20. Buy the book
The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British 20th Century by Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley’s new book is a history of the central-European émigrés who fled fascism in the 1930s, from Ernst Gombrich to Ernő Goldfinger. If you’ve ever picked up an orange Penguin paperback, taken a walk down the South Bank or moaned about the Trellick Tower, you’ve registered how they transformed Britain. Read our review here.
Allen Lane, 608pp, £35. Buy the book
The Boys by Leo Robson
Staff at the New Statesman love to see a former colleague graduate from book critic to book author. It is even more pleasing to see the book in question receive wall-to-wall praise. With a large canvas (London at the time of the 2012 Olympics), and a small cast (centred on two brothers attempting reconciliation after life has separated them), Robson has pulled off a tricky career swerve. Read our review here.
Riverrun, 304pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Affordable housing, infrastructure and climate crisis action: these are things we all want, so why do we never get them? Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s book is a galvanising attack on the over-regulation of the US economy, which could be applied to Britain too. This is an argument that has too often been made by the right; the authors point the way towards a progressive developmentalism.
Profile, 304pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Malaparte: A Biography by Maurizio Serra, translated by Stephen Twilley
“Malaparte” is such a perfect name for a laureate of violence and fascism that it’s a shame it was invented – by Kurt Suckert. It means “bad side” in Italian and this biography reveals a writer whose travelogues, written while following the Eastern Front of the Second World War, are evidence of the “bad side” of humanity he saw with grim clarity. Read our review here.
New York Review of Books, 736pp, $39.95
Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi
The collector and Picassophile Douglas Cooper was not a nice man (acid tongued, bitchy, prickly) but he was an interesting one. He befriended – and fell out with – many of the greatest artists of the mid-20th century, was a wartime Monuments Man, and art historian and proselytiser with a sometimes dangerous gay lifestyle. Read the review here.
Yale University Press, 592pp, £45. Buy the book
[See also: Kemi Badenoch isn’t working]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 23 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Kemi Isn’t Working