What to read this week, from Hillary Clinton to the Beatles

BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths 

In 2024, Salman Rushdie published Knife, a memoir of the attack he suffered two years earlier. Now we have a book by his wife, the American poet and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, telling the story from her point of view, recalling the horror of being at home in New York and watching her husband’s fate unfold on a TV news ticker. But Griffiths’ memoir contains a double tragedy, and much of the memoir deals with another trauma: the loss of her best friend, fellow poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who died unexpectedly on the day Griffiths and Rushdie got married. Though grief is, as Stephanie Merritt writes in her review, a “watermark” running through this book, The Flower Bearers also reflects the author’s sense of humour and sharp ear for dialogue. When Griffiths’ father first meets Rushdie and learns he is a writer, he politely asks his future son-in-law: “Would they know your name at Barnes & Noble?”
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WHAT TO READ NEXT

Inside the Situation Room: The Theory and Practice of Crisis Decision-Making edited by Hillary Rodham Clinton & Keren Yarhi-Milo 

In the musical Hamilton, Aaron Burr yearns to be “in the room where it happens”. But what does happen in that room – in the heart of power, where decisions about the fates of nations are made? This is the subject of a new book edited by Hillary Clinton and international relations scholar Keren Yarhi-Milo. It sheds valuable light on the human psychology that informs how governments deal with national security crises. But, writes the historian and foreign affairs expert John Bew, once action has been taken, the biggest question – and the one that is going to become more urgent for the US in Venezuela and Iran – is a simple one. What comes next?
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This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

The first novel by the acclaimed Pakistani-American short story writer – an epic of power and privilege in 20th-century Pakistan – has garnered rave reviews in the US and is being tipped for the big literary prizes on both sides of the Atlantic. Our reviewer, Lucy Popescu, is no less impressed. Mueenuddin’s book, which follows the landowners and staff of a family farm, is excoriating on corruption and class and masterful in its storytelling.
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The best children’s books for 2026 (so far)

If you need something to kickstart the National Year of Reading, look no further than Kitty Empire’s roundup of chapter books for readers aged (roughly) 8-12. Here be werewolves – and alpacas – as well as plenty of adventure.
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ENDNOTES

Which is the better Beatles song, Penny Lane or Strawberry Fields Forever? Do you favour the gorgeous lyrical vignettes of Paul McCartney’s street under its “blue suburban skies”? Or the rich psychedelia of John Lennon’s vision of a place where “nothing is real”? The author Ian Leslie says that the two songs, which were released as a double A-side in the UK on 17 February 1967, encapsulate the differences between Lennon and McCartney:

“They're both majestic achievements, but the strangeness of Strawberry Fields is very obvious, right? It's all on the surface. Penny Lane is this shiny pop song but when you look hard at what's going on in the lyrics and musically as well, it’s so much more complex and emotionally conflicted than you ever realised.”

Leslie has a point. Of the song’s fireman, McCartney sings: “He likes to keep his fire engine clean / It's a clean machine” – a line I’ve always thought was both perfect and haunting. And as I listen to it again, I can’t deny that the piccolo trumpet solo that follows is, to quote McCartney again, “very strange”. I am unable to pick a favourite. But there are certainly worse ways to spend a damp Thursday in January than revisiting these two masterpieces from almost 60 years ago. They are, as Leslie says, “some of the best things that humans are capable of”.

Ian Leslie’s book John and Paul: A Love Story is out in paperback on 29 January, and you can read his interview with Tim Adams here.

Illustration by Charlotte Durance