“You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you.” So writes Adam Nicolson in , his paean to that indispensable pair of ancient epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Christopher Nolan’s of the latter makes Nicolson’s book essential reading now for anyone interested in the story’s greater significance.

Nicolson’s work follows three trains of thought. In the first, he waxes philosophical about what Homer – always referred to in the singular, but acknowledged to have been multiple people, spanning generations – has to say about the meaning of life and the clash between civilisation and depravity. He delves into the fascination literary giants have had with Homer, including John Keats, whose poem Endymion gives the book its title, and Alexander Pope, whose translations leave much to be desired.

The other two strands are more rooted in the tangible world. Nicolson digs into the text of the Iliad and the Odyssey and parses out variations in the Greek, tracing the language’s structure back to the Linear B of the Mycenaean era and beyond, and uses this linguistic examination to attempt to pin down exactly when the poems were first composed – much earlier than we’d previously thought, he argues. The standardised, written Homer that we know came down from a much older oral tradition, says Nicolson, as far back as even 2000-1800 BC.

Finally, he finds traces of Homer’s writing in archaeological treasures from around the ancient Mediterranean, from a papyrus found at the Hawara site in Egypt to a pottery shard discovered in a tomb on the island of Ischia, one of the oldest surviving examples of written Greek. The papyrus dates to about AD 150; the pottery, to the 8th century BC. Much attention is also paid to the shaft graves of Mycenae, and what they can tell us about the world before the Bronze Age collapse.

Nicolson isn’t interested in the historicity of the poems themselves – they are myths, after all – as much as he is in the world that produced them. He draws a compelling portrait of a complex ancient realm, and of people for whom these stories provided a link to their nomadic, warrior-centred past.

Rereading The Mighty Dead, with its focus on relics and remnants, reminded me of my honeymoon to Crete. My husband and I visited the archaeological museum in Heraklion and saw a boar-tusk helmet on display; in book 10 of the Iliad, you will find Odysseus described wearing one, too. It is a reminder, as Nicolson’s book impressively contends, that the world of Homer is still very much all around us, if we know where to look.

Who were the enigmatic Sea Peoples blamed for the Bronze Age collapse?

Around 3000 years ago, several empires and kingdoms in the Mediterranean collapsed, with a group of sea-faring warriors implicated as the culprit. But new evidence shows that many of our ideas about this turbulent time need completely rethinking

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by Valerie Tiberius

The 17 best popular science books of 2026 so far

The first six months of the year have brought us popular science reads on everything from consciousness to cosmology. Liz Else rounds up her favourites

by Richard Coker

by Tamie Jovanelly

by Rod Flower

by Roopika Risam

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by Ian Bogost

by Dan Werb

 by Sue Black

91av recommends an unsettling deep dive into forensic science

Esteemed forensic anthropologist Sue Black gives a candid insight into the UK criminal justice system and how it really works in her book An Expert Witness, finds Linda Geddes

by Eleanor Drage

The best new popular science books of June 2026

The most exciting popular science reads this month explore everything from symbiosis to hormones, while Alice Roberts takes on an editor-in-chief role in her latest book

by Melanie Challenger

I am on holiday later this month, so I’m pleased to find there’s a really wide range of intriguing new science fiction to take with me. I’m particularly keen to get cracking on a tale by Sheila Armstrong about strange ancient things found in a bog, but I’m also excited to read a new book by one of my favourite authors, Paul Tremblay (even if it does sound very disturbing). And I’m looking forward to the high-concept thrillers and classic space-set sci-fi on offer, too – not forgetting the first new Red Dwarf novel released in 30 years.

by Ruth Newton

This sounds a little Severance-like and ideal summer reading for those of us who enjoy a good high-concept thriller. It’s set in a near future where you can outsource your emotional pain thanks to a biotech company, Eudaimonia. Sounds good, right? You can get rid of your unwanted negative emotions. But the price is paid by a “Carrier” – a woman who is paid to take on your pain. When Viv goes to work for Eudaimonia, she discovers even darker secrets.

The best sci-fi novel in 2026 so far – plus 6 other great reads

Sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson rounds up her favourite reads of the year to date – and highlights one particular book as her top pick

by Paul Tremblay

I’m super excited about this one. I’ve loved Paul Tremblay ever since I read the absolutely terrifying Shirley Jackson-inflected A Head Full of Ghosts. This time Tremblay has written a piece of AI horror, set in a near future where former professional gamer Julia is offered a temporary job escorting a man in a vegetative state from California to the East Coast. Why is the man in this state? Because he has an AI mind implanted in his head – and he is trapped in a strange and morphing hellscape he can’t escape. Loved the great riff on Philip K. Dick in the title.

by Deb Olin Unferth

Set at “the end of the world as we know it”, as its publisher writes, this follows two women who fall in love – one of them raised in a research pod deep in the ocean, and the other who works in a luxury resort as a bartender (but who may also be a robot). Together, they try to “salvage some trace of planet Earth” as it slowly disappears.

by Riley August

Ellis feels something is missing from his seemingly perfect life, so he sets out for the hedonistic world of Planet Happy. Nara is the attendant tasked with ensuring that Ellis will indeed find happiness on his trip, but activists disrupt the visit, and they set out on an adventure together.

by Sheila Armstrong

I have this on my bedside table ready to read when I get a minute – it’s the book I’m most looking forward to in July. It follows a dog’s uncovering of a strange antler in a restored bog, which leads to the discovery that the peat is an ancient dying ground of the Great Irish Elk. These aren’t the first things to be found in the bog. Archaeologists have already discovered prehistoric settlements and the mutilated body of a woman, 2,000 years old. And the deep time of the bog seems to have a sinister influence over the lives of those who have been touched by it.

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by Nadia Afifi

Azad is a fugitive, hunted by the Vitruvian Authorities after he exposed his home planet’s dark secrets. If he really wants to spark rebellion, Azad needs the help of a space pirate with her own agenda – and they must revisit the past.

by Rob Grant and Andrew Marshall

The first new Red Dwarf novel in 30 years is a prequel, written by co-creator Rob Grant and Andrew Marshall, creator of the sitcom 2point4Children. It sees the mining ship Red Dwarf orbiting Saturn’s moon Titan, with the crew – including Lister and Rimmer – all planning their latest shore leave. (Lister, interestingly, is planning to find a cat to smuggle back on board…). But everyone’s plans go awry when a cryptic message from the future arrives.

by Gregory Bastianelli

A blend of science fiction and horror, this follows a doctor, Monica Cucinotta, working in an Italian hospital on the frontlines of a deadly virus which causes thorns to erupt on the bodies of its victims. When she is infected , she has to leave the hospital and travel across a devastated world to get back to her loved ones.

The best new science fiction books of May 2026

New science fiction from big names including Ann Leckie, Alan Moore and Martha Wells are just some of the exciting crop of titles out this month

by Claire McGowan

This sounds terrifying – and pleasingly Handmaid’s Tale-ish. It’s set in a version of Great Britain ruled by the Hope Party, where a series of new laws have made a swathe of changes, including a rewilding of the countryside, and a prioritisation of children’s rights. But fertility is constantly monitored, and abortion and contraception are banned. Kate is is too scared to say anything against these new norms, but is forced to take action when her daughter becomes pregnant.

by Rebecca Thorne

I like the look of this piece of cosy science fiction, in which Torian acquires an ancient and abandoned starship covered in moss. But when Torian sets out on board, keen to get away from her overbearing ex-captain (and ex) Amelia, she discovers that the moss is in fact Moss, the ship’s organic computer, and it has a mind of its own.

by David Arlo

This sounds rather silly but also fun. It follows game developer Hal, who has been working for years on “the most anticipated video game of all time”, in which players enter a fully immersive virtual reality where they can live their fantasies. Hal needs to do a final test off the record to see if he can genuinely achieve total immersion, so tries it out on his family – only to discover they can’t escape from the game. So, he goes in to save them and bring them back to reality.

by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles

Kracht has previously been shortlisted for the International Booker prize; now, his publisher is comparing his latest to Ursula K. Le Guin and Jorge Luis Borges. It tells the story of a designer, Paul, who is walking through the corridors of a server farm in Norway – until he vanishes in a blackout. Meanwhile, in another time and place, a man wakes up in a forest, and a young girl helps him to an icy settlement. This sounds really intriguing.

The best new science-fiction books of June 2026

There is plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it’s solar-powered cities from Adrian Tchaikovsky or a strange future from M. John Harrison

by Meg Smitherman

A gothic sci-fi novella in which interplanetary transporter Midonia is given the job of flying Sister Irena to a planet where the people worship a deity known as Anguish. But when their ship is grounded by a solar flare, Midonia is stuck on the planet, where a strange voice starts invading her mind at night.

by Calvin James

We’re promised both romance and sci-fi in this tale about junior supply officer Levar, who is called upon to serve as a diplomat in peace talks because he once dated an Imperial baroness. Then he discovers that a former lover, Astrid, is actually the Demon Emperor, and their feelings for each other are still very much present.

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When I decided to write a space opera, I wanted to start with a supernova. There is no force in the universe like it, either in scale or destructive power – but though it is irrefutably dramatic, it’s also something you can see coming. As a writer, I find this fascinating. What does it mean to look into the heavens and know the exact date when a star will die and with it, your world? What choices do you make, and what price would you pay to save yourself – or your civilisation?

This is the story of Slow Gods.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are one of these astronomers, watching the stars that will soon destroy your world. For millennia, you’ve known the supernova is coming, and for millennia your people have ignored it. It’s a difficult sell: “Let’s fundamentally transform our entire society to save the lives of billions of people… in about 500 years’ time.” Everyone agrees in a “rhubarb-rhubarb” sort of way that fine, yes, this is a good idea. For someone else. Later.

Well shucks. Suddenly millennia became centuries, became decades. Time is running out. Perhaps you are looking at your newborn grandchild when you realise: you know how, and when, this babe will die. Perhaps they suffocate as the oceans boil, burn alive as the atmosphere ignites or simply die from radiation sickness, skin and organs slowly liquefying. All the incremental changes you made down the years – a distant colony here, a bit of a space elevator there? Not enough. It’s time for your entire civilisation to re-tool around the grim but inescapable premise of saving what you can in the time that remains.

Deep-space sci-fi novel is delightful, profound and not to be missed

A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North’s first venture into classic science fiction. Read it! says Emily H. Wilson

Some hasty maths ensues. You’ve got a century to rescue a population of 5 billion before your planet burns. You build space elevators and vast motherships to carry people across the stars, and at the height of the project can evacuate almost 50 million people a year. (You are going to ignore the perpetual danger of the things lurking in the monstrous dark, infesting the crew with madness, playing tricks with biology or simply gobbling a ship whole. Such creatures defy computation, after all.)

In 100 years you can maybe, in a pinch, get everyone off-planet – but of course it’s never that simple.  Children are still being born, the population renewing itself faster than you can evacuate. Perhaps you try to limit population growth? But no – a childless century is as sure a death for your civilisation as fire itself. Life must continue, even if you know that for every child saved, another will die when the planet burns.

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Perhaps you are selective about who’s evacuated, and in what order. Do you prioritise the educated, the most fertile, the famous? And by implication, are you going to leave the disabled, the vulnerable, the marginalised behind? This is a genocide by omission, civilisational eugenics – is that who you are?

Fine – a lottery system. At least people can agree it’s fairer, even if no one wants to accept their own powerlessness. You hope and hope that your number will be called, but as the years tick by, that hope begins to slip away. Your people expect you to die quietly, all because of a simple bit of bad luck. Do you?

Even if you escape, where do you go? Some worlds straight up reject your people, leaving millions stranded in the endless dark. Others are more willing to accept you, but only a few hundred thousand at a time, shoved into the most desolate corners of an unwelcoming planet that your biology simply isn’t adapted to. Your people are being scattered into tiny enclaves across the stars, cut off from each other, forgetting their own customs, languages, ideas. You have saved lives, certainly – but you haven’t saved your civilisation. Historians leap into action, bickering over what songs and stories are most quintessentially you. You watch as your society is put into a museum, history sold to the highest bidder, and know that whatever is displayed is only a fraction of who you are.

Or maybe you don’t. This is after all just one story in the galaxy of Slow Gods.

Maybe instead you downplayed the crisis and said “someone else will sort it out”, as if anyone can out-bluff a supernova, and now you’ve got less than a decade before your seas boil, and there are billions of people with nothing to do except die. The richest and most powerful have saved themselves, but they still need income, and for that they need people. Desperate, terrified people who will do anything to survive.

You eye up your gunships. You eye up other worlds – vulnerable worlds, outside the blast radius. And you maybe make a choice to save your own children, even if that means someone else’s child will die, because what parent will do less? Choosing between guaranteed annihilation or violence without end, perhaps you choose a war that will burn the galaxy, having decided that this is no choice at all.

Claire North’s  (Orbit) is the July read for the 91av Book Club. Sign up here, and come and discuss the book on our Discord channel .

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�ճ����91av Book Club has been reading a popular-science classic in June: Richard Dawkins’s , which celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year.

I hadn’t previously read this one – it had always intimidated me (an English graduate). But my colleague Rowan Hooper, a behavioural ecologist as well as our podcast editor, reread it to see how it holds up today and concluded it pretty much did. He had a few issues with the biology and said it “feels its age” – Dawkins himself admits to “sexist pronouns” in a 1989 preface – but Rowan found that “the core message remains relevant not just because genes being selfish is a brilliant meme (a term Dawkins coins at the end of the book), but because it is such a powerful way to understand how evolution operates: the metaphor makes us think as if genes behave selfishly”.

Read an extract from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the 91av Book Club’s read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published

It was time to gird my loins and embark on a book I’ve always been a bit embarrassed for omitting. I have to admit to being a little exhausted at first: there was preface after preface in my edition, in which Dawkins was arguing with all sorts of people about how the book had been received. This was somewhat confusing, given I hadn’t – yet –  read it. I should have skipped straight to the first chapter.

Once I got into it, though, I found myself (mostly) carried along swimmingly by Dawkins’s writing. He certainly has a knack for a good metaphor – I particularly liked the idea of our bodies as “survival machines” for genes. Without having studied any biology after the age of 16, I got my head around his central point: that natural selection works because genes, or copies of them (replicators, as he calls them), are out to survive, building the optimal bodies (or survival machines) in order to do so.

I did find his tone a little irascible and hectoring at times. It was like he was having conversations with various colleagues/rivals about his points, rather than the general reader. For example, talking about how “one gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies”, he writes that “it is an argument that some of my most respected colleagues obstinately refuse to agree with, so you must forgive me if I seem to labour it!”. We’re also firmly told about the correct pronunciation of “algae” (a hard “g”, people). There’s a lot of that sort of thing, but I finished feeling pleased to have got my head (mostly) around his argument.

Book club members were less impressed – this is, I think, the book that has received the most negative comments of any we’ve read, with a handful of members deciding not to join us in reading it at all, as they disagreed with some of Dawkins’s personal views. (I share the perspective of member pwhipp, who wrote on our channel: “I don’t think we should reject serious scientific writing simply because the author is combative, controversial, or personally irritating. If we did that consistently, the shelves would become very thin indeed.”) Pwhipp, by the way, called The Selfish Gene “an important and very well-written book, whatever one thinks of Dawkins’ public persona or his outspoken atheism”.

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Pwhipp was in the minority, however. Alan P was one re-reader who felt “underwhelmed” by The Selfish Gene. “The text is (as he admits himself but doesn’t change) sexist throughout. It’s not just the assumption of male pronouns for general statements, but there are some comments in the end notes and the text of the book itself that even for the eighties are questionable,” he wrote. “The tone is argumentative – sometimes I’m not clear that it isn’t argument for its own sake – but it’s definitely jarring. The endless footnotes contradicting the text are really difficult to follow. If the science has changed then the text of the book needs to change as well. So it may be that it was a masterly summary of the known science in its day – but now it’s a bad tempered, difficult to follow, mess.”

Alan did enjoy the new chapter “Nice guys finish first”, added to later editions: “I was always of the opinion that genes don’t make ethics so it’s nice to have the idea that even if genetic determinism was a thing, that cooperation is a successful strategy in the wild.”

The Selfish Gene at 50: Why Dawkins’s evolution classic still holds up

When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book’s gene-centred view of evolution still has much to teach us in today’s genetic age

Dee55, meanwhile, first read The Selfish Gene back in the early 80s and found it “an absolute revelation” at the time. Going back to it was “interesting”, but, as a humanities graduate, Dee55 found “specific challenges in following some of the arguments”. “I enjoyed the Chapter 5 stuff on the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) as a fun ride, but I think I need to reread it before continuing. I am very aware that I am just not in a position to assess RD’s ideas in the context of other evolutionary biology thinking,” Dee55 wrote.

Rowan took a deeper dive into the book in a longer piece for 91av, speaking to biologists about its message and what still stands today. Taking into account developments in the field that have happened over the past 50 years, Rowan wrote that “all the evolutionary biologists I spoke to for this piece struggled to find major problems with The Selfish Gene”. There was one exception: the idea of the meme, which, despite its memetic proliferation today, “doesn’t hold up”, he was told.

Overall, then, a thorny choice: this particular piece of popular science was notedly unpopular for the 91av Book Club.

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