Hollywood star looks unrecognisable as she films new mystery series Vanish with Sam Claflin in Paris
Kaley Cuoco, 39, who rose to fame on The Big Bang Theory, wore an oversized trench coat with sandals for the scenes.
Her co-star, Sam, 38, was much more recognisable in the on-set shots and was smartly dressed in a white shirt, blue trousers, and brown shoes.
The Amazon Prime mystery series is centered around a romantic getaway that goes wrong.
Kaley could be seen walking a chihuahua on a pink lead in the pictures, although it is not known if the dog will feature in the four-part series.
Its synopsis reads: 'When a couple's trip to Paris takes a dark turn with the sudden disappearance of her boyfriend Tom [Claflin] aboard a train to the south of France, Alice [Cuoco] is plunged into a web of intrigue and danger, uncovering shocking secrets about the man she thought she knew. '
Amazon revealed that the series was being filmed between Paris and Marseille last month and have said viewers can expect to enjoy it in 2026.
The Head of Content Acquisitions at Prime Video UK, Tushar Jindal, said: 'With Kaley and Sam leading an incredible cast, this gripping thriller will keep viewers guessing at every turn.
'We're delighted to bring to Prime Video in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada and we can't wait for audiences to be swept up in the mystery.'
Snaps of Kaley's striking look in the upcoming series follow an interesting start to 2025 for the actress.
Her younger sister Briana, 36, also an actress, tied the knot with singer Brian Logan Dales, 39, on New Year's Eve and their wedding was officiated by none other than Kaley herself.
The lavish ceremony took place at the Cathedral of St. Vibiana near downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday - with loved ones in attendance to support the newlyweds.
Kaley was accompanied by fiancé Tom Pelphrey.
Cuoco's nearly two-year-old daughter Matilda - whom she shares with Pelphrey - was also part of the wedding party as the flower girl.
In a sweet video uploaded to her Instagram stories, Kaley and Tom could be seen holding hands with the little one as they guided her down the aisle which was bordered by a number of lit candles.
In the caption of the post, Kaley penned to her 7.9 million followers, 'The best NYE to date.'
'I got to marry my sis and her love. blend two amazing families together surrounded by our friends, a gorgeous environment, a kiss at midnight with the love of my life, and a perfect flower girl. what a night to remember!'
When it came to the reception, guests had the chance to watch a fireworks display on the ceiling of the venue on New Year's Eve once the clock hit midnight.
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Liam Gallagher's former gardener blasts Oasis star 'sacking him without notice' and says rocker should 'have the balls to do it face-to-face'
For more than a year, Tom Ceze lovingly tended to the bougainvilleas and citrus trees in the grounds of Liam Gallagher 's spectacular hideaway home on the French Riviera. The professional gardener seemed to get on well with the Oasis singer who hired him personally and would often encourage him to break off from his horticultural endeavours and join him for a coffee or a cold beer. But he says their relationship ended on a sour note when he received a call out of the blue - telling him he was being given the chop. And now Tom has spoken for the first time about how disappointed he's been with the way he has been treated by the singer who is set to earn a reported £50m from the Oasis reunion tour which begins on Friday. The 45-year-old told MailOnline: 'I built my life around that job.' He said he believed he had 'a gentleman's agreement' with the star over his long-term employment carrying out gardening work in the grounds of the Wonderwall singer's six-bedroom 18th-century villa. Reports of a fallout between the pair first surfaced last August when Tom posted in on an expat forum to express his frustration, writing: 'This is not nice! We are in France! 'There are rules here... please act responsibly and at least have the balls to sack me face to face.' Now, in an exclusive interview, Tom has given his first detailed account of what happened. He told how after years of gardening work, he thought he had landed his dream job working on the six-acre estate which Liam bought from TV star Noel Edmonds for £3million in 2023. 'He hired me in person after his manager found me. I built my life around that job and let half of my gardening clients go to accommodate Liam's vast property and his needs.' Latvian-born Tom had been based on the French Riviera for a number of years, tending to the gardens of wealthy landowners as well as helping to look after properties. He said he was interviewed by Liam, 52, and his fiancee Debbie Gwyther, 40, before they hired him to work for them at just over £25-an-hour (30 euros) in early 2023. The couple took him on shortly after buying the property which is set in the hills in Provence, around a 30-minute drive from the millionaires' playground of Cannes. The sprawling rustic mansion, described as 'a luxurious Provencal bastide', features traditional stone walls and blue shutters. With three floors, the stunning pad is decked out with luxury furniture and decor, and enjoys spectacular views of the surrounding vineyards. It comes complete with a heated swimming pool and pool house along with a 'summer kitchen'. Its extensive landscaped gardens are described as being 'planted with Mediterranean and exotic trees' and includes an olive grove. It was built as the home for a wealthy family of acclaimed perfumiers in an area known as 'the world's perfume capital'. Manchester-born Liam is said to have fallen in love with the tranquility of the bolthole, which is 'half the world away' from his life in London where he owns a £4 million mock-Tudor mansion. He recently posted a rare selfie of himself on Instagram sunbathing at the property - with another of his rescue dogs, Buttons, having a snooze on a chair. A third image shows part of his garden, with the pool and sun loungers, and is simply captioned: 'spiritual.' Tom continued: 'We shook hands on that deal, and where I am from, we believe that a handshake is enough if you are both honest people. 'Liam seemed like a nice guy. He told me the garden was a success, and he was always offering me and the other staff coffee and beers.' But this happy period was not to last. Tom went on: 'In April last year, as I was about to board a flight, his manager Gemma called to tell me I was being let go without notice. 'She didn't provide any explanation; she just said they 'don't want you anymore'. 'I've been trying to contact Liam to say that losing this job has really messed up my life. 'I was relying on the work, and now other millionaires in the South of France won't hire me as they think I will make problems.' Tom told how he hired another gardener to help him manage the workload and insisted he had been carrying out the duties he was asked to perform in a professional way. He said: 'Liam was a pleasure to work for at first and Debbie too, and the chateau is like a castle, it's the most incredible property. 'He has special requests for the garden - he wanted it to look rustic, which means overgrown with valuable plants. But, he claims he was left out of pocket after he turned down other lucrative work before he was axed without warning - leaving his tools behind. Tom said he was told not to return to the mansion, but no explanation was given for his dismissal, and all contact was broken off. He said he had to contact lawyers to get 'just two weeks' notice' and permission to return to collect his working equipment. He said he was left hurt when he was sacked by one of Liam's employees in a cold phone call - rather than the singer speaking to him face-to-face. He told MailOnline: 'It was my dream job because I really liked Liam and I believed he was the type of man that would honour his word. Tom told how he had contacted lawyers in Nice over his sacking. He said: 'I had to fight to get just two weeks' notice so I could go back and collect my tools.' He has now quit the south of France and is working in Uganda after setting up Tom's Green Coffee Company. He describes his firm as an eco-friendly supplier of specialty coffee from beans grown in the Rwenzori Mountains that are hand picked by local farmers and families. He said: 'I'm in Uganda right now, but I will be back in France speaking to the lawyers again soon. I need to reach a resolution, even if I have to go and ring on his doorbell. 'My message to Liam is, You hired me in person so you should at least have the balls to fire me face-to-face.' Liam bought the property from Edmonds, 76, who first listed it for sale in 2017 after he and third wife Liz Davies moved into a luxury apartment in Monaco before relocating to New Zealand. After looking round the property, the pop star is said to have been amused by 'multiple engravings' by its previous celebrity owner - who shares his first name with Liam's brother. When the couple first moved in, a source said: 'Liam's been telling mates, 'I've bought Mr Blobby's house'. 'Him and Debbie plan to put their own stamp on it. They think all the carvings of Noel's name are quite funny and ironic.' Liam and Noel, 58, had famously been through a spectacular falling out which led to Oasis splitting up 16 years ago. Their long-awaited comeback tour is set to kick off on Friday with the first of two gigs at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff. The brothers are said to have secretly reunited at the villa days after they announced they were reforming last year. Liam reportedly previously had problems months after he moved in following claims the property had been invaded by British doggers. Holidaymakers boasted about their alleged escapades on a members-only swinging site with one writing: 'Me, the missus and our pals love that we're rockin' out at Liam's place. He's welcome to join in.' A second bragged: 'I've had plenty of meets there because a lot of the time it's empty' while another said: 'Had a few nawties at Noel Edmonds' gaff in the grounds'. However, one warned their fellow swingers to be careful, saying the French Police in the area 'don't have a sense of humour'. Liam later denied the claims saying: 'There are no doggers, no sex people. 'I went round the grounds looking.' In February last year he told Mojo magazine that he spent most of the previous summer at the house. He said: 'There's an Irish bar around the corner, a lobster shack down the road. 'I can sit in with Debbie, get absolutely rat-arsed, and nobody turns around and says 'Are you that b***end from Oasis?' And the weather is nice.'
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
This month's best paperbacks: Deborah Levy, David Nicholls and more
Fiction Creation Lake Rachel Kushner Psychology Coming of Age Lucy Foulkes Geopolitics Nuclear War Annie Jacobsen Fiction You Are Here David Nicholls Letters Want Gillian Anderson Fiction Rosarita Anita Desai History An African History of Africa Zeinab Badawi Biography Didion & Babitz Lili Anolik Essays The Position of Spoons Deborah Levy Poetry Bad Diaspora Poems Momtaza Mehri Fiction Yorùbá Boy Running Biyi Bándélé Environment Into the Clear Blue Sky Rob Jackson Fiction A thrilling novel of ideas Creation Lake Rachel Kushner Bruno Lacombe, in his youth an ally of the 1960s revolutionary intellectual Guy Debord, is now self-exiled to a cave complex in the limestone regions of southern France. The caves are like a kind of political rhetoric in themselves, a message convoluted and endless. Their vanished inhabitants obsess him. Since the Neanderthal extinction, 'the wedge between human beings and nature' has become 'far deeper than the wedge between factory owners and factory workers that created the conditions of twentieth century life'. The left, he believes, needs to properly understand this. Meanwhile, shadowy French authorities have decided that Lacombe and the 'Moulinards' – the post-Debordian eco-commune he mentors by email – need to be steered out of their less than utopian rural domesticity and towards some act of serious terrorism, so they can be dealt with. So they hire Sadie Smith, a freelance American spy-cop, to infiltrate and provoke an outrage. The situation Sadie finds on the ground is confused and intersectional, centred on a real-life green issue: the diversion of local water supplies into vast 'mega-basins' to support corporate agribusiness projects at the expense of the local farmers and the environment. Actors within and without the Moulinard commune, less in bad or good faith than in something shifting constantly between the two, all have their motives for protest or intervention. Sadie is a triumph of character – not quite fully self-deceived, not even entirely corrupted by the barely controlled confusions, emotional complications and near-disasters of the deep-cover agent's life. She's a satire, but she's also being straight with us. She's not quite a sensationist, although the world pours in on her senses, and through hers into ours. How, Rachel Kushner asks in this Booker-shortlisted novel, does the individual's embrace of experience interface with the ideological? In what circumstances can ideology even permit an interface? Sadie Smith is perhaps both question and answer. M John Harrison £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Psychology The truth about teenagers Coming of Age Lucy Foulkes What does your reminiscence bump look like? If this sounds like a blow to the head with a touch of amnesia, it isn't – but it might be just as painful. No, as Lucy Foulkes explains in her eye-opening guide to the psychology of adolescence, it's the period of life during which people report the greatest number of important autobiographical memories. For most of us it starts around 10 and peaks at 20, taking in a plethora of firsts: first kiss, first love, first time drinking alcohol or taking drugs, first time away from home. Not to mention exams, bullying, breakups and bereavement. Thinking about it, maybe a concussion would be preferable. But then, as this book shows, it's these enduringly vivid years that define the adults we become. Foulkes, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Oxford, conducted 23 in-depth interviews for Coming of Age and they are by turns funny, hair-raising and desperately sad. Occasionally, like Naomi's account of her first love, Peter, they have a sort of novelistic potency. In any case, the majority of readers will find someone they can identify with among her diverse cast of teenagers. Most are now in their 30s or older and are looking back wistfully, with regret, or with something like equanimity. Their accounts allow Foulkes to bring out her central point: that we narrate our lives into being, and that adolescence is so important partly because it is where this narration begins in earnest. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are, and we can get stuck in these stories, or change them to our advantage. Coming of Age ends movingly. Foulkes showed each of her subjects what she'd written to make sure they were happy with how they'd been portrayed. These were stories of joy, pain and loss that had reverberated through their lives. For many, seeing them presented as part of the broader story of adolescence prompted a re-evaluation. One said their 'shoulders had finally dropped' after 20 years, another that they now felt ready to talk to others about what they had been through. Adolescence may be the first draft of personhood, but it doesn't have to be the last, as this wise and revelatory book shows. David Shariatmadari £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction A well-mapped romance You Are Here David Nicholls Michael, 42, a bearded geography teacher from York, is walking 200 miles across Britain in order not to think about his recent divorce. His concerned friend Cleo gathers a small party to accompany him for the first few days, including her old friend Marnie, 38, a copy editor, also divorced, living in Herne Hill. Backstories are gently woven: unremarkable childhoods, how their marriages fell apart, the arc of their careers. Then everyone else goes home, and we are left with Marnie, Michael, their growing sexual chemistry and Britain's spectacular landscapes. Nicholls's novels often confound narrative expectations – most notably with the shock ending of One Day – but there are few surprises here. Short, pacy chapters are energised by a trail mix of jolly headings: in one section, playlist songs that Marnie and Michael share – 'Don't Speak by No Doubt (1996)', 'No Limit by 2 Unlimited (1992)'. Droll signposting aside, we are following the Jane Austen map of romantic plotting: two wounded but complementary souls, initial indifference, misdirected affections, growing attraction, misunderstandings, obstacles, hope and resolution. There is satisfaction to be taken from this midlife redemption tale, not least because it fills a gap: Nicholls's novels now cover love and marriage across every age bracket from teens to mid-50s. It may not be challenging – unlike Austen's Persuasion, quoted in the epigraph, it offers neither visceral desperation nor pent-up agonies – but for many it will be a comforting antidote to the grimness of our grim world, a crowd-pleaser and, surely, a TV hit-to-be. Lucy Atkins £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Letters Let me be your fantasy Want Gillian Anderson Part of the pleasure of reading Want – a collection of 174 anonymous sexual fantasies submitted by women from around the world – is that the scenarios are often strikingly odd. One contributor dreams of being fed chocolate by the Hogwarts potion master. Another longs to have sex with her office door knob. Women are still seen as less sexual than men, but this book attests to a vivid imaginative hinterland, where the desires are far more inventive than the 'Milf' and 'cheerleader' tropes that dominate man-made porn. In one particularly detailed submission, a woman daydreams about breastfeeding an attractive cashier at the supermarket. The fantasies in this book are sometimes shocking, but hard limits were imposed during the selection process to remove anything that, if acted out in real life, would be illegal. Want is edited by Gillian Anderson, who has restyled herself as a sort of sexual agony aunt after playing a charismatic therapist in Netflix's Sex Education. In her introduction, Anderson explains how she struggled with the less straightforwardly empowering submissions. Some did make the final cut, but they are punctuated by anxious self-justification. One woman interrupts her fantasy about being held captive by a group of robbers to insist that she is 'a feminist', and that the imaginary robbers have her 'consent'. Some of the stories in this book feel too self-censored to be truly erotic. Even so, Want makes for addictive reading. More compelling than the fantasies themselves are the frequent glimpses into the women's real worlds. One contributor confesses that she fantasises about her partner's death – she longs to be free, because she has never explored her true feelings for women. Another writes that she brings herself to orgasm by thinking about her husband cheating on her. He has been unfaithful in reality, so every time she does this, she cries. The real-life loneliness conveyed here is much rawer than the wish-fulfilment. At its best, Want gives you privileged access into the most painful, truthful corners of these women's lives. Kitty Drake £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction A transcendent late gift Rosarita Anita Desai Anita Desai's riddling and haunted new novel is set in motion when Bonita, a young Indian woman, meets a tricksy figure in a park in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. A student of Spanish, Bonita is leafing through local newspapers when she is approached. 'The Stranger' – elderly, overfriendly and peculiarly dressed 'in the flamboyant Mexican style that few Mexican women assume at any other than festive occasions' – claims to know Bonita's dead mother, whom she calls 'Rosarita'. She says they met and became friends when the latter came to pursue art under the tutelage of Mexican maestros. Bonita has no recollections of her mother painting or travelling to Mexico. She remembers, however, 'a sketch in wishy-washy pale pastels that had hung on the wall above your bed at home, of a woman seated on a park bench – and yes, it could have been one here in San Miguel – with a child playing in the sand at her feet'. The woman 'is not looking at the child and the child is not looking at her, as if they had no relation to each other, each absorbed in a separate world, and silent'. Written in the second person, the novel interrogates the gulf that can exist between a parent and her child, and the sketch – forgotten and recalled – is a sly mise en abyme that also speaks to the fickleness of memory, and the ever-porous boundaries between the past and the present. Desai has been writing for more than six decades now. Thrice shortlisted for the Booker prize, she is known for the effortless lyricism of her sentences, the deceptive simplicity of her stories, and her canny eye for detail. This is a novel of profound philosophical inquiry, pondering the enigmas of the mind and the self, the frontiers of fantasy and reality, and ultimately, whether one person can ever fully imagine and understand the life of another. Yagnishsing Dawoor £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop History An insider's take An African History of Africa Zeinab Badawi There is no shortage of big tomes about Africa written by old Africa hands – those white journalists, memoirists, travel writers or novelists who know Africa better than Africans. This genre, lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical essay How to Write About Africa, weaves together stories that exalt the continent's landscape but decry its politics, that revere its wildlife but patronise its people, that use words such as 'timeless', 'primordial' and 'tribal' when explaining Africa's historical trajectories. Zeinab Badawi's An African History of Africa is a corrective to these narratives. Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book. The very act of telling African history from an African perspective and making this history accessible to a wide audience is an assertion of dignity and an invitation to learn more. As Badawi puts it: 'I hope I have demonstrated that Africa has a history, that it is a fundamental part of our global story, and one that is worthy of greater attention and respect than it has so far received.' She most certainly has. Simukai Chigudu £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Biography Friendship and rivalry in LA Didion & Babitz Lili Anolik Journalist Lili Anolik's latest book is a 'provocation', a dual biography of the two friends who carved their initials on to the counterculture of 1960s and 1970s California. Joan Didion used her reporting skills to fashion herself into a serious-minded literary titan, while Eve Babitz's novels and essay collections, compiled from the same social scenes but shaped more loosely and with greater spirit, fell into relative obscurity. That is, until Anolik tracked Babitz down in 2012, by then seriously ill and living in squalor. Anolik became obsessed, helping to restore Babitz's reputation as a writer and chronicler of Los Angeles life, eventually writing the 2019 biography Hollywood's Eve. 'My preoccupation was unbalanced, fetishistic,' she admits here. This time, Anolik uses Didion as the headliner, though seemingly through gritted teeth. When Babitz died, aged 78, in 2021 – just days before Didion, who was 87 – her sister Mirandi discovered boxes of papers in the back of a wardrobe. Anolik was reeled in by an excoriating but unsent letter from Babitz to Didion, which she chooses to interpret as a platonic 'lovers' quarrel'. Babitz assails her friend and occasional collaborator (Didion briefly edited Babitz's first collection, before Babitz 'fired' her) for what she perceives as Didion's dislike of women, her contempt for art, and her deference to her husband. Anolik takes this wounded screed and runs with it, replaying Babitz's story through its entanglements with Didion's. This is vivid, entertaining stuff and often gallops along as if it's been up all night at one of Didion and Dunne's notorious Franklin Avenue gatherings, but it is, perhaps, more provocative than entirely convincing. Rebecca Nicholson £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Essays Portrait of the artists The Position of Spoons Deborah Levy "It is a writing adventure to go in deep, then deeper, and then to play with surface so that we become experts at surface and depth,' writes Deborah Levy, and it's as good a statement of intent as any in this collection, which delves into topics both trivial and profound: brothel creepers, car crashes, lemon curd, trauma. The theme, insofar as there is one, is the artists who have inspired her. Many of these are women, and Levy writes skilfully on the complex interplay of self-presentation and effacement that's often demanded of female creativity. Lee Miller 'both hides from and gives herself to the camera'; Francesca Woodman makes 'herself present by making herself absent'. Artists and writers invent things, but they invent themselves too. Levy is good on the prices we find ourselves paying: for art, for love, for fitting in. Of Ann Quin, the avant garde, working-class writer who drowned herself in the sea off Brighton, she says: 'I want to know more about what it took to want to swim home and I know Quin could have told me.' In another short piece called Values and Standards, she writes about an acquaintance she sometimes meets at the school gates. This woman's husband takes pleasure in humiliating her; to survive, 'she had removed her own eyes and saw the world and herself through his eyes'. Levy wonders if she ever 'puts her own eyes back in', and considers her own narrowing of vision at times when 'other things had become bigger. Perhaps overwhelming.' Here is Levy on the French writer and film-maker Marguerite Duras: 'She thinks as deeply as it is possible to think without dying of pain … She puts everything in to language. The more she puts in, the fewer words she uses.' At her best, Levy pulls off a similar feat, plunging into the depths, taking us with her. Freya Berry £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Poetry A dazzling voice Bad Diaspora Poems Momtaza Mehri The long-awaited debut collection from the former Young People's Poet Laureate for London invites readers to consider the concept of diaspora. Mehri brings unflinching discursive skills to verse that melds criticism, autobiography and essay while still achieving a crisp sonic momentum characteristic of lyric poetry. The meanings of diaspora in this collection are as varied as the forms Mehri deploys: prose poems, found poems, poems using emojis and erasures. 'Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.' 'I don't want to guard something I don't own.' Mehri finds a new tone somewhere between Gwendolyn Brooks's effortless musicality and Carolyn Forché's noun-laced haunting intensity. Hers is a dazzling voice that refuses to speak from a podium, preferring to examine guilt, culture and personhood from within the 'nightly decision' of community. Oluwaseun Olayiwola £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Life after the apocalypse Juice Tim Winton Tim Winton and speculative fiction may seem an odd combination. His novels excel at the here and now, depicting lives at the margins, young love and young parenthood, violence at the hands of fathers. But the harsh beauty of the western Australian landscape has long been a presence in his work, and Winton has also long highlighted his country's fragility in the face of climate chaos, and been fiercely critical of the exploitation of Australia's mineral wealth. So the cli-fi premise of Juice, his latest novel, could be a perfect Winton fit. Set in an unspecified future, some centuries from now, the book opens on a man and a girl driving across a landscape blackened by ashes. The hellscape is worthy of the Mad Max franchise, with slave colonies springing up from the parched earth like termite mounds. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy's The Road here, too, in the black dust thrown up by the vehicle's tyres, and in the child passenger, observing everything with a mute wariness. And Winton's ending is a masterstroke, the heart-in-your-mouth final chapter one of the best things I've read in a long time. Rachel Seiffert £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction A historic hero Yorùbá Boy Running Biyi Bándélé Like the protagonist of Yorùbá Boy Running, Biyi Bándélé had been running from a young age. At 14, he won a writing competition at school; another award in his 20s, for his radio play script Rain, took him to London in 1990. He hit the ground running there, publishing his first novel, The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond, in 1991. This was the beginning of a prolific and multifaceted career that, sadly, came to an end when Bándélé died suddenly in 2022 at the age of 54. At the time he was putting the finishing touches to his film adaptation of Wole Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman – a play very much centred on death and redemption and now available on Netflix as Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman. He was also working on this posthumous novel, Yorùbá Boy Running, partly inspired by the history of Bándélé's great-grandfather, who, like his protagonist, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was formerly enslaved. One doesn't come to a posthumous novel for its perfect finish; not all the sections of the book are as polished or as inventive as the opening part. The editors have done a great job of ordering and signposting the different sections with dates and thematic headings, making it easier to follow the sometimes intricate chronology of the narrative. We are lucky and grateful that the author was able to leave us with this bookend to his glorious if truncated career that began long ago in Kafanchan, Nigeria, when he started running towards a distinguished future in faraway London. Helon Habila £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Metro
7 hours ago
- Metro
'I'm the new Superman – here's how I spent my last hour of anonymity'
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video What's that in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a new Superman movie that's about to land in cinemas across the UK. Superman is the first film in James Gunn's new shared superhero universe and hopes to usher in a new era for Clark Kent and his super friends. Which brings us to the new Superman himself, David Corenswet. The 31-year-old had just one hour between finding out he'd scored the biggest job of his life and the world finding out. So, how did he spend it? 'Oh, I just played solitaire by myself and panicked quietly,' David laughed while speaking to Metro about that fateful s60 minutes on the red carpet at London's Superman Fan Event. 'No, I had the opportunity to tell about six or seven people who I was close to, and just kind of relished in this one hour where I had a big secret that nobody else knew about,' he continued. 'It's a rare moment in life, so I tried to be present with it, and not be too overwhelmed.' To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'I got to tell my wife and a couple of family members, and then just sat in a chair and waited for the news to break.' Thankfully, once David's not-so-secret identity had been exposed, he could rely on other actors who've slipped into Superman's red Speedos for advice. 'I was lucky enough to exchange letters with Tyler Hoechlin and Henry Cavill, two fellas who have played Superman before me,' David explained. 'They said, 'You know, there's not much advice that we can give. You know, you sort of have to do your own thing.' 'But it was really wonderful to get words of encouragement from them, and then to be able to write to them and talk about how appreciative I was of the way that they had stewarded the character in their time. That was a special experience.' Superman will eschew the traditional origin story and instead introduce us to a Clark Kent (David Corenswet) who's been battling bad guys for years and is already in a relationship with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). More Trending Unfortunately, this means Superman has had time to make more than a few enemies, including Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who has a plan to bring the Man of Tomorrow down to Earth. Will he succeed? Well, you'll have to fly over to your local cinema to find out. Superman soars into cinemas on July 11. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: 'Underrated' horror movie hailed by fans finally arrives on Amazon Prime MORE: 'One of the best horror films' is finally coming to Amazon Prime next week MORE: James Gunn confirms controversial scene from Superman trailer isn't in the final cut
