Make some space on your bookshelf because we’ve got this season's best page-turners
Still Talking
by Lore Segal (Sort of Books, £9.99)
Pulitzer-nominated American author Lore Segal spent most of her life writing. From her 1960s debut, Other People's Houses, to Stories About Us, which was printed in the New Yorker the week she died in 2024. Now comes a posthumous collation of short stories published in her final year that follow her last book, Ladies' Lunch. The 90-year-old pals are back to their regular meet-ups, discussing everything from memory loss to creeping agoraphobia, providing a poignant exploration of later life with an insight that few live to experience, let alone portray so masterfully.
Himmler’s Curtains: A Memoir of Loss and Concealment
by Simon Weisz (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22)
Simon Weisz once worked as an opera singer and ran a marketing agency before becoming a psychotherapeutic counsellor – a profession that ties in most obviously with his debut book, Himmler's Curtains. The book tells the story of his uncovering his Jewish identity at the age of 18 and learning that his mother survived Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and a death march. Piecing together her past, he gradually gains an insight into the ways trauma has affected her and, in turn, has been passed on to him.
The Disappearing Act
by Maria Stepanova, trans by Sasha Dugdale (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Art imitates life in Maria The Stepanova's new novel, Charges Att which follows a writer known simply as M, living in exile from her unnamed native country as it wages war on a neighbouring state. Given that Stepanova, a Russian poet, essayist and author, left her home in Moscow for Berlin in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine, the similarities are no coincidence. As M struggles with severe writer's block, it becomes clear that she's consumed not only by the unease of untetheredness, but also the weight of the guilt of a nation.
By Danielle Goldstein
This article appears in the Spring 2026 issue of JR.