The People’s Republic of iPhone
How Apple unwittingly assisted China’s global technological dominance.
ByBook reviews
Read all the latest book reviews from the New Statesman and discover the best novels, non-fiction, essays and biographies. If you’re looking for something more specific, explore our sections dedicated to politics books and history books.
Have we reached peak humanity?
Johan Norberg’s history of civilisation is an impressive conceptual achievement – but it has little to say about our own…
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The epic of James Joyce
How Richard Ellmann’s capacious 1959 biography shaped modern life writing.
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Neo-Nazi safari
How close can any journalist get to the English far right?
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From Helen Oyeyemi to bell hooks: new books reviewed in short
Also featuring Irascible by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi and To Have or to Hold by Sophie Pavelle.
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The vagus nerve industry
Can a small and unassuming bundle of fibres really be the key to better health and a longer life?
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America’s broken commonwealth
The nation’s founding myth was based on faith and solidarity – but it also contained the roots of today’s democratic…
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Gertrude Stein’s quest for fame
The modernist phenomenon believed bad attention was better than none at all.
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The Biden cover-up
The extent of the president’s decline was concealed by his desperate team. The reality was even worse than it seemed.
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From Isabel Allende to Tim Wigmore: new books reviewed in short
Also featuring Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer and The Lost Orchid by Sarah Bilston.
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Rafael Nadal: the king of Paris
No player has dominated one Grand Slam as Nadal did the red clay of Roland Garros.
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Andrea Dworkin’s dispatches from the sex wars
In her 1981 treatise, Dworkin called porn “the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls”. Forty years later, has sex-positive…
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Britain’s small boats obsession
Overcrowded dinghies used for desperate, dangerous crossings have become totemic in our toxic immigration conversation.
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Solvej Balle’s day without end
In this Danish novel, a woman stuck in a repeating time loop is forced to consider the very fundamentals of…
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How the world stopped Hitler
The Second World War was not just won on the battlefield, but in seemingly marginal regions from Ireland to Iraq.
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The sounds that shape us
Alice Vincent’s Hark asks why gender, age and parenthood change the way we listen.
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The road that built England
The country’s elusive identity resides not in a National Trust garden, but on the thundering dual carriageway of the A1.
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Who are the white working class?
A deeply reported survey of a much-mythologised slice of Britain reveals a heterogeneous, complex demographic.
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From Omar El Akkad to Laura Spinney: new books reviewed in short
Also featuring Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt and Mythica by Emily Hauser.
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Joan Didion without her style
The writer’s posthumous therapy journal is raw and unvarnished – the most direct book she never wrote.
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