The Reading Room
Everyone has the one decision they'd undo. But if you could change one decision, you'd have to give back everything that came after it - and that's the part nobody thinks about.
Bletchley built the future in total secrecy, then said nothing for thirty years. The opposite of how we build now. There's a lesson in that contrast.
A fully loaded iPad in 1990 would be the most advanced object on Earth, and strangely useless. A thought experiment about what we'd save, and why.
Some people don't just listen to music - they live inside it. Ten books, from Daisy Jones to Patti Smith, for the friend who feels songs more than they hear them.
She's read the bestsellers, the Booker shortlist and every book-club pick. Here are ten books for mums who read everything - including a couple she won't have found yet.
Ask what people would do with a time machine and they reach for history books. The honest answer is always smaller, and it's always about one afternoon they'd redo.
We assume every useful invention reaches us eventually. But what if some are too powerful to exist - and someone, somewhere, quietly decides we can't have them?
Why does music give you goosebumps? Science has a word for it. What it can't explain is why one specific voice gets under your skin and stays there for decades.
Can you have a real relationship with an AI? People already are. The interesting question isn't whether it's real to them - it's what it tells us about being human.
Should authors use AI to write fiction? I use it for almost everything else in this job. The words are the one place I won't let it in - and here's the honest reason why.
I sit amid a plethora of Macs. People ask me this every week. Here is the honest answer about the best laptop for writers in 2026 - and why the cheapest one is enough.
Ten of the best books about divorce for men. Sharp, funny, properly bruising novels about what comes after the marriage ends - including the dad-lit classic.
Ten books like Black Mirror. Near-future tech, ethical dread, the small price you pay for using the thing in your pocket. Plus the augmented-humans answer.
The best British sci-fi novels. Wyndham, Banks, Ballard, Hutchinson, and the augmented-humans entry. Twelve novels that imagine the future from a council flat.
Ten books about parallel universes. Multiverse thrillers, sliding-doors literary fiction, and the AI relationship novel that asks the same question quietly.
Books about musicians fiction - nine novels that earn the rock star myth. From Daisy Jones to The Commitments to Cold Heart October.
How Irish fiction writes grief - a literary tradition from Joyce to Keegan to Burns, and where contemporary Irish novels are taking it next.
Best augmented human thriller books - ten novels where humans get upgraded. From Altered Carbon to Flowers for Algernon to 22:22:22 Frequency Shift.
Five British dad-lit novels that didn't make the canonical list - some forgotten by readers who once loved them, some indie titles that deserve more attention.
There's a whole genre of well-meaning misunderstanding about shy people. This is what 'just say hi' actually involves on our side of the wall.
The instinctive reading of 'AI partner' as pathology is wrong. The real reasons people build them are more interesting than the stereotype.
Essential Irish fiction novels - from Rooney and Keegan and Burns to the genre-blenders making Irish literary fiction stranger and richer.
Novels about grief that don't crush you. Books where loss is the engine but life is the destination - grief rendered with warmth, wit, and transcendence.
Books with paranormal elements that aren't horror. Ghosts, magic, the uncanny - all without jump scares, gore, or dread. Literary, romantic, cosy, transcendent.
Time travel back to the 80s, done properly. Eight novels that get the cassette-tape detail right and don't treat the decade as cosplay.
Time travel back to the 90s, done properly. Eight novels that get the dial-up dread and Y2K weirdness right - and don't treat the decade as cosplay.
A list for readers who don't need everything spelled out. Ten novels that earn their power by knowing exactly what to keep secret.
If you read about retro gaming the way other people read about wine, this list is for you. Ten books that honor the obsession, not just the nostalgia.
The retro gaming revival isn't a fad. It's a generation in midlife reconstructing the childhood it never quite got to have. Here's why - and what to read.
Matt Haig's bestseller asked the right question and stopped short of the hard answer. Here are ten novels that pick up where it left off.
Literary sci-fi for people allergic to spaceships. Eleven novels where the speculative element does its work in the background while character carries the front.
For readers whose own brain runs hot. Ten novels about minds that won't stop turning, from Notes from Underground to Convenience Store Woman.
The ache isn't for dial-up. It's for what attention felt like when you couldn't check. Ten novels that remember it properly, without getting sentimental.
AI love stories don't have to be grimdark. Ten novels about humans and machines trying to understand each other - warm, weird, and surprisingly tender.
The best rock star novels aren't about the rise. They're about what comes after - the quiet years, the comeback no one asked for, the song that still works.
Ten books that hook you on page one. No literary homework, no dusty classics — just propulsive, funny fiction for men getting back into reading.
Not quirky, not adorkable - actually funny. These 10 novels have protagonists who will make you laugh out loud on public transport and not care who sees.
Not postcard Ireland. Not twee villages and charming eccentrics. Novels where the country itself is doing something to the characters — shaping them, trapping them, haunting them.
If Daisy Jones left you chasing that high, these 10 books about music, band drama, and the people who burn brightest will get you there.
The best time travel novels aren't really about time. They're about regret, second chances, and the quiet horror of knowing too much. These ten understand that.
Not books that use anxiety as a plot device or a quirky character trait. Books where it runs through everything — the way it actually does in real life.
Not books about introverts learning to come out of their shell. Books where being inward, observant, and quietly overwhelmed by the world is simply the condition the story lives in.
A great techno-thriller series gives you a world to return to. Here are the series worth committing to — including one British one that most people haven't found yet.
Modern dating has given fiction a new kind of anxiety to work with. These ten novels take that anxiety seriously, and occasionally do very funny things with it.
Time travel romance works when the premise creates genuine obstacles for love, not just a backdrop for it. These five novels understand the difference.
If you can hear a Spectrum loading tape in your head, these books are for you. The history, the culture, and the obsession — in ten volumes.
Dad lit done right - ten novels about men in the messy middle of fatherhood and midlife, picked for the ones that actually earn the reread.
The best techno-thrillers aren't about hackers or explosions. They're about what happens when technology gives humans more power than they know how to handle.