Site search

The author of One Boat, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, talks about how writing became a daily necessity and about the books he reads again and again

‘The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea’

Want to set up a book club but unsure where to start? From finding your format to preparing in advance, discover how to kickstart your own club and create judgement-free spaces for talking candidly about books

‘She has imagined this moment of return many times over the past decade, recreating every detail of the house as she approaches it’

‘He’s barely twenty years of age, but he goes shuffling down the hallway in his stocking feet with all the spryness of a care-home resident’

‘He tries to work out if his friend is telling the truth or if he’s lying. Though he would prefer him to be lying, he thinks that he’s probably telling the truth’

‘Meanwhile the dark slid itself onto her chest like a snake, organizing its weight into neatly stacked coils that might go on forever and bury her, crush her, if she didn’t leap out of bed just in time and, with deft skill, reopen the door’

‘‘White men,’ Lenny told him, those eyes sparkling, ‘that’s who. White men have it hardest these days’’

‘I don’t know what made her do that – it was only afternoon – but maybe she was possessed by the same feeling of shame as I was, and the sense that a part of our lives was coming to an end’

Douglas Stuart’s blistering and heartbreaking debut is an exploration of the unsinkable love that only children can have for their damaged parents