A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr (NYRB Classics, $14). In this slim 1980 novel, a young man just back from the First World War is hired to restore a wall painting in a Yorkshire church.

Our New Scientist Book Club has been reading Sebastian Faulks’s The Seventh Son, a futuristic sci-fi thriller in which a young woman answers an ad to carry a child that is, unbeknownst to her ...

My early books were really asking the question: who are we and how did we end up where we are? So naturally you have to find your answer in the past. The detail is drawn from research, from visits ...

Condensing the First World War – a war which saw the slaughter of 9 million soldiers and 13 million civilians– into any art form is no easy task ...