Tight-lipped humour thrums through the latest in the Booker winner’s Strafford and Quirke crime series, which centres on a university professor and his missing wife
The Norwegian author on the magic of Ursula K LeGuin, returning to Virginia Woolf, and the insight of Jorge Luis Borges
Friday 18 October 2024
My earliest reading memory
One of the most intriguing books, when I was around six years old, was Gangles by Ronald McCuaig. The main character, a wild girl from Australia, could stand on top of fountains and travelled around with a whale by balancing on the water spray the whale exhaled. Reading that book was one of the great experiences of my childhood. That is completely impossible to understand when I leaf through it now: how could something so small grow into something so huge? Pure magic
The American writer is 120 pages into a memoir about her relationship with the New York Trilogy author, entitled Ghost Stories
John le Carré’s son does him proud in an excellent spy thriller about a Soviet agent that faithfully bridges two of his father’s classic tales
Considering the drift of those books, it’s maybe unsurprising if we’ve lost sight of le Carré’s achievements as a novelist, especially in his early years. His first big hit, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), which mapped a thwarted romance on to geopolitical intrigue in divided Berlin, accelerated the spy genre’s 20th-century breakaway from jingoistic tub-thumping and gung-ho adventure. By the time of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), an ensemble psychodrama in which the British plot against one another as much as against the Soviets, le Carré’s narrative energy is generated more by gnarly workplace tensions rather than conventional derring-do, which is nonetheless tinglingly present in the book’s shattering finale.
The unknown Bram Stoker story Gibbet Hill, published soon before the author began working on Dracula, has eerie echoes of his vampire classic
In a Dublin library once frequented by James Joyce and WB Yeats, beneath a turquoise and white domed ceiling and surrounded by oak shelving, Brian Cleary stumbled across something by Dracula author Bram Stoker he believed no living person had ever read.
Authorities had said they were re-establishing electricity service after a power plant failed on Friday
Cuba was plunged into blackout for a second time on Saturday after its electrical grid collapsed again hours after authorities announced they had begun re-establishing service.
CubaDebate, a state-run media outlet, said the grid operator, UNE, had reported the “total disconnection of the national electro-energetic system” and was working on re-establishing it.
The electrical grid first collapsed at about midday on Friday after one of the island’s largest power plants failed, leaving more than 10 million people without power.
Even before the collapse, an electricity shortfall on Friday had forced Cuba’s communist-run government to send nonessential state workers home and cancel school classes as it sought to conserve fuel for generation. But lights began to flicker on in scattered pockets across the island early in the evening on Friday, offering some hope that power would be restored. UNE has not yet provided any details on what caused the grid to collapse again on Saturday, or how long it would take to re-establish service.
There have been weeks of worsening blackouts, often lasting 10-20 hours, across much of the island, which Cuba’s government has blamed on deteriorating infrastructure, fuel shortages and rising demand. Strong winds that began with Hurricane Milton last week had also made it harder to deliver scarce fuel from boats offshore, officials have said.
Fuel deliveries to the island have dropped off significantly this year, as Venezuela, Russia and Mexico, once leading suppliers, have reduced their exports to Cuba. Venezuela slashed its deliveries of subsidised fuel by half this year, forcing the island to search for far more expensive oil on the spot market.
Cuba’s government also blames the US trade embargo, as well as sanctions imposed under the former US president Donald Trump, for its difficulties in acquiring fuel and spare parts to operate and maintain its oil-fired plants. On Friday, the US denied any role in the grid collapse in Cuba.
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| Hanif Kureshi: ‘I began to feel I was both a helpless baby and a terrible tyrant.’ Photograph: Spencer Murphy/The Guardian. Grooming: Victoria Poland |
Hanif Kureishi on his accident: ‘I believed I was dying, that I had three breaths left. It seemed like a miserable and ignoble way to go’
An exclusive extract from the writer’s new memoir
By Hanif Kureshi
Saturday 12 October 2024
On Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, then back to the apartment, I had a fall.
He was known for taboo-busting, transgressive stories about identity, sexuality and belonging. Then the author and screenwriter broke his neck. But he’s still every bit as provocative …
“Iwasn’t even pissed,” Hanif Kureishisays, as if somehow that would have made it better. The writer is talking about the accident that left him a tetraplegic. Or, as he likes to call himself with classic Kureishian brutality, a vegetable. Though he’s not. His body may be broken, but his brain isn’t.
