Stand-out historical novels to read now: The Pretender By Jo Harkin, The Golden Hour By Kate Lord Brown, The Midnight Carousel By Fiza Saeed McLynn
It's 1480, and England is undergoing a particularly thorny patch as the warring factions of Lancaster and York look to the throne, fight bloody battles, imprison princes in the tower and indulge in mayhem and machinations in the quest for power.
Meanwhile in a quiet little hamlet, naive, endearing ten-year-old farmer's son John Collan is about to have his life upended.
He's taken from his home by canny political operators and transformed into Lambert Simnel, a pseudonym for his 'real' identity – Edward Plantagenet, who'll become king of England once Henry VII is disposed of.
Ambitious, mischievous and well written, Jo Harkin's stand-out second novel's boldly drawn characters and their ruthless aspirations make for an entertaining read.
The Golden Hour By Kate Lord Brown (Simon and Schuster £18.99, 448pp)
Heady and romantic, Kate Lord Brown's escapist tale heads to 1939 Cairo in the company of gilded, headstrong Juno Munro and handsome, intuitive Max Aeberhardt as they search for the tomb of the legendary queen Nefertiti on an archaeological dig.
Heat, dust and forbidden passion play their part in this swoony story, but there's also a stalwart friendship alongside the sexual tension – one based on long-held secrets, as Lucie Fitzgerald discovers when she visits her dying mother Polly in 1970s Beirut.
Best friends with Juno since childhood, Polly slowly unspools the tragic story of Juno, her whirlwind marriage to troubled Alec and her overwhelming obsession with Max who, like an old-style Hollywood hero, declares of their love: 'We redraw the maps. We realign the stars' with the Valley of the Kings as a backdrop.
The Midnight Carousel By Fiza Saeed McLynn (Michael Joseph £16.99, 368pp)
There's a dark, magical glimmer to this enthralling debut from Fiza Saeed McLynn, which opens in 1900 in a foundry workshop in Paris as grieving carousel maker Gilbert Cloutier hurries to finish his beautiful, uncanny masterpiece in time for the city's Great Exhibition.
Ensconced in the wilds of Essex, living in rural poverty, outsider Maisie Marlowe is fascinated by a flyer for the mysterious carousel, little realising that it'll play a central role in her intrepid story.
In a series of quietly discombobulating events, she ends up in prohibition-era Chicago, helping to run an amusement park, where Cloutier's strange merry-go-round seems linked to the unsolved disappearances of people in both France and America.
It adds an eerie edge to an already beguiling tale of a brave woman claiming her hard-won happiness against the odds.
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Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Sick sci-fi sex fantasy written by Epstein's first benefactor people say inspired his twisted island... before author's SON ended up arresting him
An obscure 1970s sci-fi novel — packed with graphic depictions of teenage sex slaves, breeding clinics, and aristocratic rapists — is suddenly one of the most talked-about books on the internet. Conspiracy theorists have drawn eerie parallels between its disturbing plot and Jeffrey Epstein 's real-world sex trafficking ring. The book in question, Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale, published in 1973 by Donald Barr — a former headmaster of a New York City prep school and father of Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr — has found itself at the heart of a tangled web of online controversy. Fueling the speculation is the fact that Donald Barr, a former CIA officer, once served as headmaster at the prestigious Dalton School on the Upper East Side, where Jeffrey Epstein taught in the mid-1970s, despite lacking a college degree. Though Donald Barr had stepped down by the time Epstein was hired, conspiracy theorists have seized on the timing, the lurid novel, and his son Bill Barr's role in Epstein's 2019 death in custody — as proof of a sinister connection. 'The Internet is abuzz with many bizarre theories,' reviewer Justin Tate posted on Goodreads about the 250-page book, which is now being sold online for as much as $4,000 a copy. 'Some read Space Relations like it's the Da Vinci Code, with hidden clues that might even reveal who killed Epstein. Others marvel over loose connections between Barr's plot and Epstein's crimes.' What has most stunned readers is how eerily similar the fictional universe is to the real-life sex trafficking empire run by Epstein, who abused scores of underage girls in New York, Palm Beach and his now-infamous private island. The plot of Space Relations follows John Craig, an Earth diplomat captured and enslaved on a distant planet called Kossar, where the ruling aristocracy maintains a brutal regime of sexual domination and forced breeding. Craig ultimately becomes a servant to Lady Morgan Sidney, a sadistic elite described as having 'high breasts and long thighs', and is compelled to rape a teenage slave girl as part of an intergalactic breeding clinic. Critics have called the book 'cheesy', 'bad writing' and 'incredibly creepy' — but that hasn't stopped a cult following from forming among collectors, conspiracy theorists, and critics of America's ruling class, who say the novel reads more like a disturbing prophecy than fiction. Just one year after Space Relations hit shelves, Donald Barr was headmaster at Dalton. In 1974, Epstein, then a college dropout in his early 20s with no teaching qualifications, landed a job there teaching math and physics. His brief stint at the school is widely seen as the springboard for his later social climbing — and grooming. It's never been definitively confirmed that Donald Barr personally hired Epstein. But it's that foggy link — between the bizarre content of the novel, Epstein's inexplicable employment, and Bill Barr's involvement decades later — that has sent the internet into a frenzy. Following Epstein's death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York in August 2019, then-Attorney General Bill Barr promised a full investigation, calling the circumstances a 'perfect storm of screw-ups' — including non-functioning security cameras and asleep guards. He ultimately accepted the ruling of suicide, despite widespread doubts and calls for deeper scrutiny. Recently, conservative YouTube host Tucker Carlson featured a segment exploring the connections, interviewing controversial history podcaster Darryl Cooper, who called the coincidences 'very strange and unacceptable'. Cooper questioned Bill Barr's motives for dismissing Epstein's death as a 'suicide before they'd finished the investigation.' Donald Barr's son, Bill, came under fire for his handling of the Epstein suicide investigation when he was President Donald Trump's Attorney General in 2019 'It could all be a coincidence, but the odds are against that,' said Cooper. The claims have been debunked by fact-checkers, including Snopes, which labeled the theories 'mostly false.' There is no proof Donald Barr, who died in 2004, played a role in Epstein's hiring, nor are there strong similarities between the fictional interplanetary sex ring in Space Relations and Epstein's real-life criminal enterprise. Still, for a novel that once gathered dust on the back shelves of second-hand bookstores, Space Relations has found a strange second life — not as science fiction, but as the focus of one of the strangest conspiracies of the post-Epstein era. 1999 - Virginia Roberts Giuffre is allegedly recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell to became Epstein's 'sex slave,' at 17. She also claimed that he forced her to have sex with his friend Prince Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth. 2002 - Trump tells New York Magazine that his friend Epstein 'likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.' 2005 - A 14-year-old girl tells police that Epstein molested her at his Palm Beach mansion. May 2006 - Epstein and two of his associates are charged with multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with a minor. State attorney of the time Barry Krischer, referred the case to a grand jury who heard from just two of the 12 girls law enforcement had gathered as potential witnesses. They returned just one single count of soliciting prostitution. July 2006 - The case is referred to the FBI by the Florida Palm Beach police who were unhappy with how the case was handled. 2007 - Epstein's lawyers meet with Miami's top federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta, who would later become the Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration. They secretly negotiate the 'deal of a lifetime'. June 2008 - After pleading guilty to two prostitution charges, the millionaire was sentenced to 18 months in a low-security prison in exchange for prosecutors ending their investigation into his sex acts with minors and give him immunity from future prosecution related to those charges. In reality, Epstein was able to work from his office six days a week while supposedly incarcerated at the jail. July 2008 - Accusers learned of the deal for the first time. July 2009 - Epstein is released from jail five months early. July 2018 - The Miami Herald publishes investigative journalist Julie K. Brown's exposé on Epstein's long history of alleged sexual abuse and news of the 'deal of a lifetime' after Acosta was made Labor Secretary. February 2019 - The justice department opens an internal review into Epstein's plea deal. July 7, 2019 - Epstein is arrested after his private jet lands at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport from Paris. At the same time, federal agents break into his Manhattan townhouse where they uncovered hundreds of photographs of naked minors. July 8, 2019 - Epstein is charged with sex trafficking charges which detail how he created a network of underage girls in Florida and New York, paying girls as young as 14 to provide 'massages and sex acts.' The charges carry a sentence of up to 45 years in prison. July 11, 2019 - More than a dozen women, not previously known to law enforcement, came forward to accuse him of sex abuse. July 24 - Epstein was found unconscious in his cell after an apparent suicide attempt. He was moved to suicide watch at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. August 9, 2019 - More than 2,000 documents are unsealed which reveal the lurid allegations against Epstein in detail.
The Guardian
10 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Everybody's starved of affection': Past Lives director Celine Song on the brutal dating scene and her realistic new romcom
'Our financial literacy is so fucked,' says Celine Song. We're having breakfast in Manhattan on a sunny Saturday in early July, a few weeks after her new film, Materialists, has opened in New York City. She's wearing a charmingly ironic outfit: a T-shirt that says 'HOWDY' and a baseball cap that says 'Big' (she's petite, 5ft 4in, for the record) – but she speaks with almost disarming earnestness. She's frustrated, she tells me, that people have described one of the characters in her film, a private equity manager with a $12m apartment, as a 'billionaire'. 'If you're a billionaire, your big apartment is not $12m!' she exclaims. 'The average income of an American adult is $35,000. What that means is half of America makes less than $35,000. Three times that is $100,000. Ten of that is $1m. And a billion dollars is not a hundred of that. No, it's a thousand of that.' She's offended because a billionaire would never be a likable character in her movie. 'I think because of how visible billionaires are, we think that's what wealth is. And I'm like: no, that's just crime.' It's a bit unusual to be talking about financial literacy in the context of a romcom, the genre that Materialists defiantly embraces with its story of a high-end matchmaker (Dakota Johnson) torn between an old flame with no money (Chris Evans) and a suave, moneyed suitor, the 'not-billionaire' in question (Pedro Pascal). Romantic comedies, particularly those set in New York City, tend to be escapist fantasies: you're not supposed to wonder how the heroine can afford to live in a swanky one-bedroom in Manhattan or wear Louboutins; you're certainly not supposed to ponder the moral implications of the hero's wealth. But in Materialists, every detail is spelled out. Early in the film, Lucy (Johnson) announces to Harry (Pascal) that she makes '$80,000 a year before taxes' – something the private equity partner should keep in mind before pursuing her. The characters' apartments, Song says, were carefully researched and designed based on their economic situations. There's Harry's $12m penthouse in the expensive Manhattan neighbourhood Tribeca. Lucy lives in an aspirational studio in the posh neighbourhood of Brooklyn Heights that she rented right before the Covid-19 pandemic (Song looked on US real estate website Zillow to estimate the rent); Evans's character John lives with three roommates in south-west Brooklyn's Sunset Park. (It was supposed to be in Williamsburg, before the film's construction crew said that he'd never be able to afford that.) It's not that Song is a mercenary realist. The only subject that makes her eyes light up as much as money is love, which she describes as 'being hit by lightning'. Song's first feature film, Past Lives, which nabbed two Oscar nominations in 2024, spins a beautiful time-crossing and bicultural saga around a happily married Korean immigrant in the US – a stand-in for Song – who re-encounters a childhood sweetheart and confronts the life that could have been. The characters talk about inyeon, a Buddhist belief in relationships as something fated and cosmic, cutting across life cycles. There's no such wistful dreaming in Materialists. Harry's romantic overture to Lucy is to tell her that he's interested in her 'intangible assets'; he wants to date the broker, the person who decides who is and isn't valuable. 'I feel like as we grow into this efficiency-focused, productivity-focused way of thinking about the world, everything we do is so that we can be better, faster, stronger,' Song says of our culture of relentless optimisation. 'Where is the place where you're just like an animal who's trying to live?' Song, 36, was born in Seoul to artist parents. She says her father, a film-maker, named her after the impish stage magician played by Juliet Berto in Jacques Rivette's French new wave classic Céline and Julie Go Boating. When Song was 12, the family emigrated to Ontario, Canada, where she lived throughout her college years, before moving to New York to pursue a master of fine arts degree in playwriting at Columbia University. By the time she started making movies, she had achieved considerable success in theatre for deeply personal, yet daringly experimental plays, including 2019's Endlings, which weaves together the stories of three female Korean divers and a Korean-Canadian writer in New York, and a live production of The Seagull on the Sims 4, staged during lockdown in 2020. Song never really suffered the indignities of modern dating. As portrayed in Past Lives, she met her husband, the screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes – who recently wrote Luca Guadagnino's tennis film Challengers – at a writing residency in Montauk in Long Island when she was 24. But in her early years in New York, she got a pretty acrid taste of dating culture when she worked as a matchmaker for six months, after hearing about the gig from a friend in the industry. It seemed like an 'HR job' with a more 'involved client-facing element' – and Song had studied psychology in her undergraduate years. But she knew she couldn't make lightning strike for her clients, and they knew it, too. 'I was basically given instructions on who to say no to,' she says of the job. 'They were saying: 'I'm not even available to get hit by lightning by certain people who don't meet my criteria.'' The worst of them, sampled in the film, were brazen with their bigotry. 'People would rank what races they wanted. They would literally say: 'No Asians'. They wouldn't admit that even to their therapist.' She had wanted to make a film about the experience for years, but the script had never quite worked. Then she realised why. 'I thought the focus was on the clients. But the problem is that the clients are not that interesting, because they all want the same thing. If I asked 10 clients what kind of guy they wanted, they would all say: over 6ft tall, makes more money than me, great body, strong hairline.' Things clicked when one day, years ago, she ran into an old friend from graduate school at a fancy gala dinner for theatre donors. She was there as one of the rising playwrights that wealthy patrons could rub shoulders with; he, once a very promising acting student, was there as a server. When she went over to greet and hug her friend, she sensed that they were both embarrassed. It was as if they were breaking an invisible barrier – like Rose going below deck to fraternise with Jack in Titanic. 'How Victorian is that?' she says. 'But it's 2017!' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion She realised that the movie she was trying to make was about class, which is what all the great romances are really about, anyway. Early in Materialists, when Lucy meets Harry at a fancy wedding she's helped facilitate, John interrupts them – he's there as a waiter. It's our first indication that Lucy is an impostor in the world of wealth that she's insinuated herself into so elegantly and seamlessly. The cold calculus with which she surveys people as dating prospects hits something of an iceberg whenever she's with John: love, as always, gets in the way of logic. Lucy eventually undergoes a reckoning in Materialists, but Song doesn't judge her protagonist too harshly. She has deep empathy for women like her, who trust in logic to rescue them. She brings up the 'tradwife' trend taking over social media, where women embrace traditional gender roles and domesticity, as a symptom of a crisis beneath the surface. 'I think it has so much to do with how deeply broken our economic systems are, especially in the US. As we have learned, the American dream is not achievable. You cannot jump your class. But what's one of the few ways that you can still jump your class? Well, marriage.' If there is an element of escapist fantasy to the film, it's that the protagonists, all deeply insecure in their own ways about their desirability, are played by three of the most beautiful people in the world. To have Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans vying for your hand is an embarrassment of riches, and Song admits that even casting Dakota Johnson as Lucy – a woman who believes there's nothing special about her – was a bit of a 'fantasy trick'. 'But the thing is, it wasn't a stretch for my actors to play these roles; they got it better than me. Who feels more like merchandise than the guy who plays the Mandalorian or Captain America?' For all its hard-nosed cynicism, Materialists is even more sentimental of a romance than Past Lives; its declarations about romance are all the sweeter for the superficial, number-crunching conventions they resist. Even so, making a star-studded romantic comedy after the critical success of Past Lives is a bold move. The genre is more or less dead today, or relegated to Christmas specials on streaming services. Even A24, which distributed the movie in the US, seemed to be self-conscious about releasing a romcom: the company published a 'syllabus' for Materialists, a list of Song's reference films, replete with highbrow names such as Thomas Vinterberg and Mike Leigh, as well as Merchant Ivory productions and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. But Song herself is unselfconscious about her love for romances. 'I still remember showing Past Lives at this festival in Ireland,' she says. 'This one really burly Irish guy was asking me a question during the Q&A. And he started crying, telling me the story of his own childhood sweetheart. And I remember thinking: it's funny that when it comes to the matters of love, we relegate it to the girlies. But the truth is that everybody's just actually starved of love and affection. I knew, when I was making Materialists, that there is a very real market for it.' She embraces the idea that Materialists might spark more conversations about love and romance. 'It is so romantic that I get to invite the audience to the movie theatre for two hours to do nothing but talk about love and dating and relationships and marriage.' But then again, there's always the matter of money. 'We get to be so real! I get to say things like $12m [apartment]! You know, the most reliable, audible response in every screening I've been in is the moment when Harry says '$12m'.' Materialists is in UK cinemas from 13 August.
Times
2 days ago
- Times
The Michelin star chef who is raising the game at Sunderland
'I'll be back in 20 seconds, I need to get changed,' says Tommy Banks before he charges through double doors in the Jimmy Montgomery Stand at the Stadium of Light, and slides across an empty dance floor — his white Adidas trainers having already been discarded. He is wearing a T-shirt and black jeans before the transformation takes place into his cooking attire and this Sunderland-supporting TV chef, now plotting award-winning food at the stadium, will reveal much more of a fondness for Super Kev than Superman. There are curious ways for that lifelong bond of heartache, pain and the occasional moment of out-of-this-world exhilaration to start between supporter and club, and York-born Banks, Britain's youngest-ever winner of a coveted Michelin star, has a pretty unique reason for Sunderland being his footballing love. 'My next door neighbour was Bob Murray's butcher,' he says. 'Bob was the Sunderland chairman and he would give tickets to my neighbour. My neighbour took us up to my first game in 2000. It was a League Cup tie on a Tuesday night, Sunderland versus Man United. 'I was in the top-right corner, a noisy part of the stadium. It was great, for me as a ten-year-old. My framing point was that Man United had won the Treble, Dwight Yorke got sent off, Julio Arca scored in the first half and then Kevin Phillips scored the winner. 'I just remember the ground was rocking and everyone was singing 'Sunderland til I die'. I loved it. I'd never seen anything like it. It was electric and, yeah, I was hooked.' Home was York, where Banks, who is now 36, would begin working at The Black Swan at Oldstead, from where he would earn that Michelin star. 'At school, me and my mate were the only two Sunderland fans,' he adds. 'Everyone else was mainly Leeds or there was the odd Man United fan and some liked York City. 'What was it like being a Sunderland fan? Up and down! I remember getting really upset when Chris Makin was sold to Ipswich Town. My favourite-ever kit was 2002 and it was almost like Inter Milan colours, dark blue and light blue stripes. I think the new Hummel away kit is the nicest kit we've had since. 'When I started working after I left school I didn't come up [to matches] as much because as a chef I was always working weekends. To my whole brigade's annoyance, I would always stream every match. But then it was rubbish going down to League One, just rubbish.' It was not rubbish in 2013, when Banks, now a regular on BBC's Great British Menu and Family Cooking Showdown, picked up that first Michelin star. He was at the two games that feel like they have sent electric currents through Wearside, the last-gasp play-off wins against Coventry City and Sheffield United. It raises the question of which was better, getting his two Michelin star or either winning goal at the Stadium of Light or Wembley? 'You know what, it's difficult because it's not the same emotion, is it?' he says. 'When a goal goes in, it's pure ecstasy. The Coventry game at the Stadium of Light was like nothing I'd ever seen. You saw the atmosphere, it was just nuts. 'The game was on a knife-edge. I'd lost my voice the next day and I had meetings and I went, 'I'm really sorry, I'm a Sunderland fan', and they were all going, 'Good on ya!'. 'You don't get that moment with a Michelin star. It's more a slow burner. It's quite hard to compare. At the time [of his first one], they just published the book and you would have to try and find it on a PDF online, which was quite anticlimactic. 'Now they do a big ceremony and you get invited to go on stage, but I never got that because the second time I won a Michelin star for my second restaurant was during Covid so it was on Zoom. I've never actually experienced that, going on stage to this great applause.' So you're trying to say the Sunderland goals are better? 'Yeah, but don't write that the Sunderland goals were better than a Michelin star! 'The thing is for me with those two goals [Dan Ballard in minute 32 of extra time against Coventry and Tommy Watson in minute five of added time at Wembley] we were at the stage where we were really involved with the club for what we are going to do. We had already decided we were going to do 'Banks on the Wear.' ' As the club returns to the Premier League for the first time in nine seasons, in the kitchen on every match day at Sunderland's home ground will be a chef with two Michelin stars. That feels pretty unique. 'When the guys I knew at [hospitality company] Delaware said, 'We might be doing a deal at Sunderland, you're a fan, do you want to be involved?', I was like 'absa bloody lutely' but you never know if these things will come off. 'I was with David Bruce [Sunderland's chief business officer] for the West Brom game and he told me his vision of what they are trying to do and I was like, 'Wow!' I really like this guy and I feel the club is in good hands and going in a good direction. 'You wouldn't know this unless you're a chef, but there is a league table for the boardroom food. There is a league table for the best restaurant. I want to win both of them.' He will walk through that restaurant at the Stadium of Light with about 50 Sunderland fans after our chat. He will talk through his love of the club. There will be a refurb of the Black Cats Bar, called 'Tommy's Pie Shop' as well as the star of the show, his restaurant, Banks on the Wear, that will include a directors' box seat at the game for those enjoying his food. 'It's a huge honour,' he says. 'The pressure I feel is that this has not been done before, it's a very new thing. We will be in from first thing in the morning and there will be a team of ten of us. 'I want it to be the best restaurant in the Premier League. It's trail-blazing. It will be fever pitch by the time that first game of the season against West Ham comes around. It'll be off the charts.' Places are available seasonally and match-to-match in Banks on the Wear, visit to book a table for 2025-26. Premier LeagueAugust 16, 3pm
