A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.
The opening pages introduce us to a world straight out of gothic fable. In an isolated manor house by a forbiddingly dark forest, a strange-looking baby is born. This unearthly child, Lajos, is fated to carry forward the family name of the Lazars, a noble dynasty with an alarming tendency to go mad, die violently, or both.
Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It's irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He's exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a dying river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: Is this thing I'm in really alive? By whose standards?
Bulgaria is home to the largest Turkish community in the Balkans. Around 500,000 ethnic Turks live in the southeastern European country of 8 million, making up about 8% of Bulgaria's total population, according to a 2021 census. Most are descendants of Turkish settlers who came to Bulgaria with the Ottoman conquest in the 14th and 15th centuries. Many settled in the southern and north-eastern provinces of Bulgaria. Members of this ethnic minority, who largely subscribe to Sunni Islam, still speak Turkish, unlike the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims known as Pomaks.
Lying in my bed, I listened to what sounded like a woman screaming outside in the dark. I picked up my pen. A month of living in this Icelandic village and I was still unaccustomed to the impenetrable January gloom and the ferocity of the wind; its propensity to sound sentient. I had started to feel like the island was trying to tell me something, had a story it wanted me to write.
She continues to work remotely for a German company in the energy sector. Her company, which is based in eastern Germany, pays her an ordinary German salary, even though Borisova works from Bulgaria. She now enjoys a higher net income, thanks to the country's lower taxes and social security deductions. She does not pay rent in Pomorie because she lives with her parents, which allows her to put more money aside each month. After all expenses, she has just over 700 left.
Tom Layward, the narrator and main character of Ben Markovits' new novel, The Rest of Our Lives, introduces himself in a curious way: On the very first page of the book, he talks, matter-of-factly, about the affair his wife, Amy, had 12 years ago, when their two kids were young. Amy, who's Jewish, got involved at a local synagogue in Westchester; Tom, who was raised Catholic and is clearly not a joiner, remained on the sidelines.
