Books in the Media: Thomas Asbridge's history of the Black Death declared an ‘impressive achievement’
The review pages included everything from a history of a devastating pandemic to two debut novels and an examination of shrinking linguistic diversity.
Historian Thomas Asbridge’s “learned but horribly compelling” The Black Death: A Global History (Allen Lane) was reviewed by Katherine Harvey at the Times. “Asbridge skilfully combines a global narrative of the plague with examples of horrendous personal tragedy to build a powerful portrait of a world that stared death in the face,” wrote Harvey. He “also writes sensitively of the considerable psychological burden that unimaginable loss and the constant threat of new outbreaks placed on survivors”. The history was called “gripping and authoritative” by Tony Barber, writing for the Financial Times. Asbridge takes an “ambitious” approach by presenting “as full as possible a picture of the grim events outside western Europe, especially in north Africa and the Middle East”. An “impressive achievement”, concluded Barber.
Ana Kinsella’s “absorbing” debut novel, Frida Slattery As Herself (Scribner), which tells the story of the relationship between a young actress and a theatre director-playwright over nearly two decades, is “commit[ted] to emotional complexity”, found Johanna Thomas-Corr at the Sunday Times. “Kinsella is interested not only in the drama of the relationship but in its subtler recalibrations – the way it evolves, fractures, reforms – as well as the way artistic collaborations can illuminate and obscure truth.” The Bookseller’s Alice O’Keeffe selected Kinsella as one of The Bookseller’s Debuts of 2026: Volume Two. O’Keeffe called the novel “cleverly structured” and one that “examines the precarity of the artistic life and the time spent on hiatus”.
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The Telegraph’s Tim Smith-Laing reviewed Sophia Smith Galer’s How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words (William Collins), calling it “urgent” and “timely”. Smith Galer cites a United Nations “estimate that a language disappears every two weeks” and “it is not just that languages are disappearing; it is that ‘something is disappearing them’”. Smith-Laing wrote: “Smith Galer’s research takes in the full gamut, from the current Russian efforts to eradicate Ukrainian... to more insidious stories of neglect and decline, such as the fate of Dagbani in Ghana, threatened by climate change, population shifts and government fecklessness.” Smith Galer brings “both journalistic immediacy and academic expertise to her subject”, Smith-Laing added. Reporting for the Sunday Times, James McConnachie described How to Kill a Language as “punchy and persuasive” and a “skilfully journalistic book”.
Portia Elan’s SF novel Homebound (Chatto & Windus) tells of four women: aspiring programmer Beck, in 1983 Cincinnati; Dr Tamar Portman, an integrative biologist living in 2078; captain of a salvage ship in 2586, Yesiko; and Lieutenant California Solo, pilot of a mission to save a “fleet of stalled starships”. The women are “divided by time, but bound to each other; their connections as cryptic as they are inevitable”, wrote Beejay Silcox for the Guardian. Silcox described Elan’s debut as a “novel of inheritance: the shared programme of folklore and ritual, prayer and pop culture”. The review concluded: “The quiet promise of [Elan’s] novel is that your people are out there, even if they aren’t technically human. Homebound is sentimental, soft-hearted and guileless – the adjectives critics tend to use sneeringly, as though kindness were easy.”
