Penulis: Agus S

It’s not the new generation of handheld gaming some might have been hoping for, but this is a highly refined version of the original console

There was a time when the designers of the Switch 2 were considering calling their new machine the SuperNintendo Switch. They decided against it, however, because it would be able to play original Switch games – and 1990’s Super NES had no backwards compatibility with 1983’s NES. After playing with it for the weekend, I’d say a more accurate name would be the Switch Pro: effectively a modernised and highly refined version of the original console, rather than a whole new generation.

The larger screen and more powerful processor are the most obvious upgrades, but every facet of the console is higher spec. The larger Joy-Cons feel more robust and are easier to use – the way they magnetically clip on to the console is very pleasing. The user interface is a graceful if slightly boring iteration of the Switch’s, enhanced with subtle haptic feedback and delightfully subtle bleeps and blips.

The drop back to a standard LCD screen from the gorgeous Switch OLED model will annoy some, but the quality is decent and the increased display real estate makes a huge difference – it’s not quite up there with the very best handheld PCs, but then it’s significantly cheaper than a top-of-the-range Steam Deck or similar. I tested it with the most cinematic launch games I had – IO Interactive’s extremely good value Hitman World of Assassination: Signature Edition and Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut – and both provided a surprisingly epic experience in handheld mode, aided by the console’s extremely good virtual surround sound (you also get full 5.1-ch Linear PCM surround if you use compatible headphones or TV). Just don’t expect 4K, 60fps visuals as standard.

In handheld mode, titles will run at between 720 and 1080p resolution, with 4K reserved for docked mode – though even here, only a few titles currently support full 4K resolutions. Cyberpunk 2077, for example, caps out at 1080p with the framerate at 30fps in Performance mode. In short, don’t expect cutting edge PS5 Pro or PC visuals – we’re looking at something between PS4 and PS5.

The set-up is simple enough: switch it on, connect to the internet (via wifi or the ethernet port on the dock) and download an update. If you have a Switch it asks you to place it nearby, then copies across your user details and any games you own. The whole process took me about an hour and was completely painless, though beware – if you skip the transfer process, you won’t get another chance later to port your stuff across from your original Switch. GameShare, which allows you to share compatible games with Switch or Switch 2 owners who don’t have their own copy, is extremely easy too. I tried the local two-player option with Sega’s lovely multiplayer puzzle battler Puyo Puyo Tetris. You simply choose the GameShare option from the game’s main menu, while your friend selects GameShare from the Switch home screen; then the two seamlessly connect and you can start playing together.

I’m interested to see how the feature holds up with more complex games, or with more players. For example, Survival Kids allows you to GameShare with two other consoles, which will put greater processing demands on the Switch 2 that’s doing the streaming, and could therefore affect performance. For now, I was impressed, and it will work really well with forthcoming party game Super Mario Party Jamboree.

GameChat, meanwhile, Nintendo’s rather overdue version of in-game video chat, requires you to connect and confirm your identity via your smartphone, and then you’re in. You can buy a Switch 2 Camera (£50) for this, but any old USB webcam will do. I think this may well prove a nice extra for close friends or families keen on playing together while apart; we’ll have to wait and see if any forthcoming games make interesting use of it.

There are some extra costs to think about. If you want to play with more than two people you may need another set of Joy-Cons, which will set you back £75, or a Pro Controller at the same price. (I tried out the officially licensed PowerA Advantage pad, which doesn’t have rumble and only works in docked mode, but is a really sturdy option for Mario Kart sessions and very good value at £30.) A subscription to Nintendo Switch Online (needed for online play and, when the introductory offer runs out, GameChat) is £17.99 a year for one account, or £31.49 per year for your family. It’s £34.99/£59.99 a year for the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack, which offers access to a large range of retro Nintendo games from all eras and any extra content for modern games. It’s a decent price when compared with other gaming subscriptions, but still another expense to manage. Finally, you may need a microSD Express card if you start running out of space for new games on the built-in 256GB. A 256GB card will cost around £50. It all adds up.

As for battery life, Nintendo is promising between two and 6.5 hours. I did a mixed test in which I played Mario Kart World, downloaded and played Hitman, and used GameShare and GameChat, and got about 3.5 hours, which is not bad.

Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming

Should you buy one? If you somehow missed out on the original Switch, absolutely yes – it’s the zenith of Nintendo’s quest to make a hybrid handheld/home console, with a wide range of launch games (though currently only one genuine exclusive must-have inMario Kart World) and the promise of many glorious exclusives to come. If you already have a Switch, it’s worth the upgrade if you can afford it – the larger display, the better controllers, the social applications, all make it worth the outlay. It’s reignited lounge multiplayer in our house, my sons readily deserting their rooms to play Mario Kart together, and while this interest will probably ebb and flow, it’s been nice to have that back.

The one incontrovertible truth is that Nintendo’s games cannot be played elsewhere. No smartphone, no PC, no Xbox or PlayStation will give you access to the full-fat Mario, Animal Crossing, Pokémon or Zelda titles, and it is exciting to imagine how those experiences will be translated to a new, beautifully crafted machine with a modest armoury of fresh features. Perhaps the design team at Nintendo were right not to call it Super Switch, but for the next few years, a Switch Pro equivalent is more than good enough.

TheNintendo Switch 2is available now; £395.99 in the UK, $699.95 in Australia and $449.95 in the US

There’s a lot to take in at the yearly live video event: from Paralives to Felt That: Boxing, Dosa Divas to Resident Evil Requiem, here are our favourites

The ninth mainstream instalment in the survival horror series returns us to the wreckage of Racoon City and promises a blend of cinematic action and psychological horror. FBI agent Grace Ashcroft appears to be the main character, but is anything in this series ever what it seems?

The latest project from Sega’s Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio (Yakuza, Like a Dragon) is a historical action adventure set in Japan during the early 20th century, featuring moody detectives, street gangs and jazz – a potent combo for this idiosyncratic team.

Surely the dream combination: James Bond meets the team behind the Hitman series in an adventure that seeks to reboot the Bond backstory and legend. Featuring globe-trotting espionage, stealth and gadgets, it’s the most exciting video game outing for Fleming’s character since GoldenEye.

A folkloric rural life sim, where you play as horticultural sorceress, tending to your garden and looking out for the darkness at the edge of the village. Developer Failbetter (Sunless Sea, Fallen London) are pioneers of narrative game design and the team is growing something special here.

Australian developer House House had an unexpected smash hit withUntitled Goose Game– now it’s back with a similarly unusual co-op adventure where players become bird-like creatures, exploring a mysterious puzzle-filled island. Like some sort of hallucinogenic 1970s children’s animation come spectacularly to life.

No one saw this coming: a big, dark post-apocalyptic action adventure from Game Freak, the creator of Pokémon. Set in a ruined Japan menaced by robots and monsters, you play as Emma the Sealer, using plants as weapons and aided by a faithful canine companion – and not a Jigglypuff in sight.

Developer Outerloop (Thirsty Suitors) returns to its self-created subgenre – the cooking RPG – with this typically colourful sci-fi tale. Two sisters fight an evil corporation by preparing real food rather than artificial slop for their local community. Expect spices and feelings.

Not so much a game as a bizarre TV simulator, Blippo+ encourages players to channel surf an alien broadcasting network, consuming soap operas, sitcoms and news reports in a haze of surreal, glitchy FMV.Hypnospace Outlawmeets Radio Times? Sure, go on then.

Whoever had “something that combines The Muppets with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!” on their Summer Game Fest wish list must be feeling pretty happy right now. New developer Sans Strings Studio has utilised the power of Unreal Engine 5 to produce the highly naturalistic puppet boxing odyssey the world desperately needs.

After the hugely successful inZOI, here’s another indie take on The Sims, which pares down the experience to a single-player life adventure with no DLC, but lots of home customisation options, characters to meet and pets to, um, pet.

A time-warping steampunk adventure from the makers of Wasteland and Saints Row. There’s a hint of Bioshock in its setting: a dystopian future city where inhabitants augment themselves with clockwork cyber limbs. What could possibly go wrong?

Finally, Atlus has confirmed a remake of its legendary 2008 role-playing adventure set amid occult rituals and gruesome murders in rural Japan. Little is known beyond the title, but that’s enough to get us interested.

You’ve inherited a creaky old hotel and now you have 30 days to renovate it while solving puzzles and exploring the labyrinthine hallways. Part renovation sim, part spooky adventure, this was a real standout at the Xbox showcase.

The latest bizarre concoction from Psychonauts developer Double Fine has you controlling an anthropomorphic lighthouse as it explores a coastal realm together with its sea bird companion. What are they putting in the water at this studio?

The world doesn’t need another deck-building strategy game – unless it’s also a courtroom drama in which you’re a team of environmentalists suing a corrupt billionaire for poisoning a river. Timely stuff from Amsterdam-based studio Speculative Agency.

PC (version tested), PlayStation 5, Xbox; Build a Rocket Boy/IOI PartnersA lot of work and ambition have gone into this strange, sometimes likable cover-shooter throwback

There’s a Sphere-alike in Redrock, MindsEye’s open-world version of Las Vegas. It’s pretty much a straightcopy of the original: a huge soap bubble, half sunk into the desert floor, with its surface turned into a gigantic TV. Occasionally you’ll pull up near the Sphere while driving an electric vehicle made by Silva, the megacorp that controls this world. You’ll sometimes come to a stop just as an advert for an identical Silva EV plays out on the huge curved screen overhead. The doubling effect can be slightly vertigo-inducing.

At these moments, I truly get what MindsEye is trying to do. You’re stuck in the ultimate company town, where oligarchs and other crooks run everything, and there’s no hope of escaping the ecosystem they’ve built. MindsEye gets this all across through a chance encounter, and in a way that’s both light of touch and clever. The rest of the game tends towards the heavy-handed and silly, but it’s nice to glimpse a few instances where everything clicks.

With its Spheres and omnipresent EVs, MindsEye looks and sounds like the future. It’s concerned with AI and tech bros and the insidious creep of a corporate dystopia. You play as an amnesiac former-soldier who must work out the precise damage that technology has done to his humanity, while shooting people and robots and drones. And alongside the campaign itself, MindsEye also has a suite of tools for making your own game or levels and publishing them for fellow players. All of this has come from a studio founded by Leslie Benzies, whose production credits include the likes of GTA 5.

What’s weird, then, is that MindsEye generally plays like the past. Put a finger to the air and the wind is blowing from somewhere around 2012. At heart, this is a roughly hewn cover shooter with an open world that you only really experience when you’re driving between missions. Its topical concerns mainly exist to justify double-crosses and car chases and shootouts, and to explain why you head into battle with a personal drone that can open doors for you and stun nearby enemies.

It can be an uncanny experience, drifting back through the years to a time when many third-person games still featured unskippable cut-scenes and cover that could be awkward to unstick yourself from. I should add that there are plenty of reports at the moment of crashes and technical glitches and characters turning up without their faces in place. Playing on a relatively old PC, aside from one crash and a few amusing bugs, I’ve been mostly fine. I’ve just been playing a game that feels equally elderly.

This is sometimes less of a criticism than it sounds. There is a definite pleasure to be had in simple run-and-gun missions where you shoot very similar looking people over and over again and pick a path between waypoints. The shooting often feels good, and while it’s a bit of a swizz to have to drive to and from each mission, the cars have a nice fishtaily looseness to them that can, at times, invoke the Valium-tinged glory of the Driver games. (The airborne craft are less fun because they have less character.)

And for a game that has thought a lot about the point at which AI takes over, the in-game AI around me wasn’t in danger of taking over anything. When I handed over control of my car to the game while tailing an enemy, having been told I should try not to be spotted, the game made sure our bumpers kissed at every intersection. The streets of this particular open world are filled with amusingly unskilled AI drivers. I’d frequently arrive at traffic lights to be greeted by a recent pile-up, so delighted by the off-screen collisions that had scattered road cones and Dumpsters across my path that I almost always stopped to investigate.

I even enjoyed the plot’s hokeyness, which features lines such as: “Your DNA has been altered since we last met!” Has it, though? Even so, I became increasingly aware that clever people had spent a good chunk of their working lives making this game. I don’t think they intended to cast me as what is in essence a Deliveroo bullet courier for an off-brand Elon Musk. Or to drop me into an open world that feels thin not because it lacks mission icons and fishing mini-games, but because it’s devoid of convincing human detail.

I suspect the problem may actually be a thematically resonant one: a reckless kind of ambition. When I dropped into the level editor I found a tool that’s astonishingly rich and complex, but which also requires a lot of time and effort if you want to make anything really special in it. This is for the mega-fans, surely, the point-one percent. It must have taken serious time to build, and to do all that alongside a campaign (one that tries, at least, to vary things now and then with stealth, trailing and sniper sections) is the kind of endeavour that requires a real megacorp behind it.

MindsEye is an oddity. For all its failings, I rarely disliked playing it, and yet it’s also difficult to sincerely recommend. Its ideas, its moment-to-moment action and narrative are so thinly conceived that it barely exists. And yet: I’m kind of happy that it does.

The subheading and captions on this article were amended on 13 June 2025 to correctly refer to the developer as Build a Rocket Boy and the publisher as IOI Partners, not “Build A Robot Boy” and “IO Interactive” as an earlier version said.

Awakened by Laura Elliott; Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab; Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang; Esperance by Adam Oyebanji; The Quiet by Barnaby Martin

Awakenedby Laura Elliott (Angry Robot, £9.99)A debut novel set in an apocalyptic 2055, following the development of a neural chip dispensing with the need for sleep. At first it seemed a blessing: it ramped up people’s metabolisms, made them stronger and more productive workers, but when they ignored the advice to turn it off and sleep for at least a few hours a week, they turned into ravenous monsters. Thea is one of a group of scientists who developed the chip and are now barricaded in the Tower of London, struggling to reverse the damage they have caused, when two survivors turn up seeking shelter: a silent, traumatised woman and her protector, a nameless man who shows signs of having once been Sleepless himself. Thea comes to question her own values and past actions in a dark and gripping gothic tale with echoes of Frankenstein and The Yellow Wallpaper.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soilby VE Schwab (Tor, £22)The latest by the author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue spans centuries, and is focused on three women: Maria, born in 16th-century Spain; Charlotte, in Victorian England; and 21st-century Alice, who grew up in Scotland and is struggling to adapt to life as a university student in the US. All are sexually drawn to women and are isolated from their families. Other, darker connections are revealed as their separate stories become more closely interwoven. A fresh and addictively readable take on a much-loved horror/fantasy trope.

Immaculate Conceptionby Ling Ling Huang (Canelo, £14.99)In a near-future America, Enka longs to paint. At college she feels a fraud compared with her new friend Mathilde, a tortured artist whose work draws on personal trauma. Enka’s friendship and care rescue Mathilde from suicidal despair more than once, and later, when Enka is married to a tech billionaire, she sponsors new works. But she is secretly tormented by jealousy of her friend’s talent. When her husband’s company develops a neural implant intended to increase empathy, Enka decides to use it, ostensibly to help Mathilde by absorbing some of her trauma – and perhaps her talent? A satirical yet believable look at the extremes of the high-end art world, this is also a disturbing portrait of the dark underside of close female friendship.

Esperanceby Adam Oyebanji (Arcadia, £10.99)In a high-rise apartment in Chicago, a man and his young son are found dead, apparently drowned in seawater. Police detective Ethan Krol struggles to solve this impossible crime, but there may be a connection to the unsolved murder of several of his family members in Nigeria, found dead in a swimming pool six months earlier. Meanwhile, in Bristol, Hollie Rogers befriends Abi, a visitor to the city who claims she’s from Nigeria. But Abi’s amazingly quick reflexes and strength, combined with her hi-tech gadgets and ignorance about 21st-century life, make Hollie suspicious. A fast-paced, superbly plotted blend of mystery and science fiction with roots extending back to the slave trade and a terrible crime committed in the Caribbean in 1791.

The Quietby Barnaby Martin (Pan Macmillan, £16.99)This debut novel by an award-winning composer opens with a dramatic prologue. Citing “the Atavism Act of 2043”, a man seizes Hannah’s little boy, Isaac, for genetic testing: “If he passes, he will be taken into the care of the State. If not, he will be returned to you.” It is not immediately clear whether this has already happened or is yet to come, when the novel begins. The narrator, Hannah, is wary of CCTV cameras and keeps Isaac close to her always. The world has changed dramatically since the arrival of something called the Soundfield. The sun’s UV rays are so dangerous that people now sleep by day and only go outside after dark. The reader, too, is kept in the dark until nearly halfway through the book: despite Hannah’s status as a Soundfield researcher, she reveals little about it, or how it connects to genetic testing, and the narrative is sometimes deliberately misleading. But her concern for Isaac comes through powerfully and, along with all the mystery, keeps the reader hooked in expectation of revelations to come. Only the how and why of the Soundfield is not among them – and such an intriguing concept deserves a sequel.

The winner of this year’s fiction prize on growing up as an outsider, why we’re all guilty of complicity, and using her acceptance speech to reveal that she is intersex

It has been a dramatic couple of years for 37-year-old Dutch author Yael van der Wouden: her first novel, The Safekeep, a love story that deals with the legacy of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, was the focus of a frenzied bidding war and shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. Last night it won the Women’s prize for fiction.

“I wrote this book from a place of hopelessness,” she says when we meet. “I was looking for a ray of sunshine.” This morning in London the sun is blazing. She could never have expected that her novel would see off shortlisted authors including Miranda July (of whose work she is a big fan) and Elizabeth Strout.

Warm and open, the author is shorter than I expected. Coming as she does from a country of tall people, as she jokes: “I have tall energy.” She has great energy, despite several glasses of champagne last night and only a few hours’ sleep. On her shoulder is a tattoo of a hare – an important symbol in the novel – which she had done after completing the book.

In her tearful acceptance speech, Van der Wouden told the audience that when she hit puberty: “all at once, my girlhood became an uncertain fact.” The fact that she is hormonally intersex “was a huge part of my 20s, and then I got the healthcare that I needed … I am receiving truly the greatest honour of my life as a woman, presenting to you as a woman and accepting this Women’s prize and that is because of every single trans person who’s fought for healthcare, who changed the system, the law, societal standards, themselves. I stand on their shoulders.”

It was the first time she has spoken about it publicly. Not to have done so she tells me, “wouldn’t have been me. I had my five minutes on stage and I figured what better moment to share something that I care about? It’s heartbreaking to see so much hatred toward trans identities, queer identities.”

Set in the Netherlands in 1961, The Safekeep is a tense psychological thriller and tender love story between two very different women, Isabel and Eva. It is a story of dispossession and self-discovery, national and intimate secrets and shame. “This is a novel about a woman who is obsessed with a house, and then a stranger comes and upends her life,” the author says. Isabel is gentile, Eva is Jewish. To say much more would be to give away clues in a narrative that unfolds in a series of jagged revelations, like the shards of broken china Isabel cherishes, that come together to make a devastating and beautiful whole.

The idea for the novel came to her “as a parting gift” in a car on the way to one of the funerals of her Dutch grandparents, who died within days of each other in 2021. “It came from a place of trying to escape grief,” she says. “I was trying to find distraction in my own head, as I’ve done since I was a kid.”

Born in Israel in 1987 to a Jewish mother of Romanian and Bulgarian heritage and a Dutch father, Van der Wouden, who describes herself as a “Dutch-Israeli mixed-bag-diaspora child”, spent her first 10 years in Ramat Gan, a city just east of Tel Aviv. She is careful not to talk about her childhood through what she calls “a pink cloud” of nostalgia because of her vehement opposition to the Israel-Gaza war – she would like to see “a ceasefire with immediate aid”.

Both her parents were animators (her father created an Israeli version of Sesame Street) and while she and her two younger sisters were encouraged to engage with all art forms, she was not at all bookish.

It wasn’t until the family moved to the Netherlands when she was 10 that Van der Wouden discovered books – with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden being a particular favourite. But she also discovered antisemitism, while living with her grandparents in a house in the forest. Though that home is still her “happy place”, going from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv to “being the only Jew in the village” wasn’t easy. To her new Dutch classmates she resembled Anne Frank.

Now, she has no time for the rhetoric of tolerance. “I think that’s a terrible word, because tolerance is putting up with somebody. I want to be desired. I want to be loved. Rather than writing a story about tolerance, I wanted to write a story about love in the aftermath of war.”

With Isabel, she created a character who goes from prejudice and repulsion to desire. There is a lot (an entire chapter) of sex in the novel. She laughs. “My goal was to imbue the whole book with a sense of tension, and that tension is erotic.”

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She deliberately chose the perspective of Isabel rather than Eva, so as not just to tell the victim’s story. “There’s also many parts of perpetrator within me, within my history,” she says. Van der Wouden had never read a novel that explored what she calls “the psyche of quiet complicity”. Through Isabel she wanted to show that “complicity comes from small and uninteresting acts of dismissal”, and it is something of which we are all guilty. “It’s part of the human experience. The question is, how do we deal with knowing that we looked away from something terrible, how do we then move forward?”

The emotional power of the novel rests on the way in which Isabel reveals herself to be someone completely different, even to herself. “What’slikeme,” Isabel says to her brother. “There’s no such thing.Likeme.”

This speaks to Van der Wouden’s personal experience. “We don’t leave this life in the same bodies were born into, we are always under flux,” she says. “This is not to say that gender and sexuality is a choice followed by change, but rather that change is an inherent part of life.” On the question of the supreme court ruling on gender rights, she adds: “To subject that to law feels baffling to me, especially as it is accompanied by legal, verbal and physical violence.”

Much of The Safekeep was written during lockdown in Utrecht, where she had an attic apartment overlooking the canal. “A beautiful golden cage,” she says. She now lives half an hour away in Rotterdam, where she is thrilled to have a garden. She has already completed the first draft of a second novel set in a fishing village in the Netherlands in 1929.

Her greatest hope for the novel as it goes on to find a bigger audience, “if this isn’t too saccharine,” she says apologetically, “is, in fact, hope.”

Along with other icons of African writing, Ngũgĩ taught generations how to decolonise literature, language and the mind

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, giant of African literature, dies aged 87

Growing up in post-independence Nigeria in the 1970s, at home you always had access to the Bible if you were Christian, or the Qur’an if you were Muslim, along with books in the Heinemann African Writers Series. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was a staple, and the plays of Wole Soyinka: The Lion and the Jewel, most likely, or The Trials of Brother Jero. Often accompanying them were books by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – I remember we had both Weep Not Child and The River Between. And even if you didn’t have them at home, you’d soon encounter them in school – they were standard set texts, from secondary school to college.

These three writers belonged to the so-called first generation of African writing, the generation that started publishing in the 1950s and 1960s. The three names stood, like the legs of the three-legged pot, under African literature, while in the pot was cooking whatever fare the minds of these writers conceived of. They shared a similarity of subject matter: pro-independence, pan-Africanist, postcolonial theory, but stylistically they were very different from one another. Kenyan Ngũgĩ, unlike the two Nigerians, was shaped by very stern political obstacles, pushing him to take very radical positions on politics and language.

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In 1955, back home from school on vacation, he found his family home destroyed by the British colonial soldiers. His home town of Limuru had been razed to the ground. This was during the emergency, what the British called the Mau Mau uprising. This incident formed one of the motifs in his early fiction. His early novels, Weep Not Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977), were written in English, under the name James Ngugi, before he stopped writing in English and changed his name to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

In his time as faculty member in the English department in Nairobi University, in the 1960s-70s, he fought for a curriculum change – in nomenclature and in substance, from English Literature to Literatures in English. It was a very important move that would shape other nascent departments of English Literature around Africa, by insisting upon a parity in all levels between English literature and other literatures in their original languages and in translation – those of African languages in particular.

Ngũgĩ’s generation saw the role of the writer as that of a teacher to the newly independent Africans, who were struggling to make sense of the modern world forcibly thrust upon them by colonialism. For Ngũgĩ, the teacher was always a Marxist activist, something of a community organiser. His plays, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and I Will Marry When I Want (1977), were approached as community theatre, at the level of the people, for the people, and their highly political and critical content caused rioting on the streets when they were staged, for which Ngũgĩ was arrested by the Daniel Arap Moi regime.

Arrests and detentions and exile were rites of passage for African writers of the first generation. Ngũgĩ’s move into exile introduced his work to a new audience; he went on to produce some of his most important critical essays and polemical works. Decolonising The Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), in particular, occupies a central position in his body of work because of the early groundwork it laid in the field of postcolonial literary theory.

His migration also included a migration away from the English language to his mother tongue, Gikuyu. Even when his position on the importance of writing in one’s mother tongue grew less compelling than it was before the rise of world and global literatures, he held on to it, not for any practical value, but for the symbolic purpose of decolonising the mind. Growing up, we saw writers of Ngũgĩ’s generation like prophets, figures from the Old Testament. That is why, when they die, we realise that the age of prophets is coming to an end, and we who are left behind must murk about the best we can, while we can.

The Story of a Heart, which won this year’s award for nonfiction, tells how one child saved the life of another. The author talks about the amazing families involved, campaigning for a better NHS, and how being a doctor frames the way she writes

To read Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, which has won this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction, is to experience an onslaught of often competing emotions. There is awed disbelief at the sheer skill and dedication of the medical teams who transplanted the heart of nine-year-old Keira, who had been killed in a head-on traffic collision, into the body of Max, a little boy facing almost certain death from rapidly deteriorating dilated cardiomyopathy. There is vast admiration for the inexhaustible compassion of the teams who cared for both children and their families, and wonder at the cascade of medical advances, each breakthrough representing determination, inspiration, rigorous work, and careful navigation of newly emerging ethical territory. And most flooring of all is the immense courage of two families, one devastated by the sudden loss of a precious child, the other faced with a diagnosis that threatened to tear their lives apart.

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To write such a story requires special preparation. “I was full of trepidation when I first approached Keira’s family,” Clarke tells me the morning after she was awarded the prize. “I knew that I was asking them to entrust me with the most precious thing, their beloved daughter Keira’s story, her memory.” The former journalist trained as a doctor in her late 20s, and has spent most of her medical career working in palliative care. Subsequently, she has also become an acclaimed writer and committed campaigner, publishing three memoirs: Your Life in My Hands, Dear Life andBreathtaking. She turned to her medical training for guidance when writing The Story of a Heart. “I said to myself, my framework will be my medical framework, so I would conduct myself in such a way that they would, I hoped, trust me in the same way that someone might trust me as a doctor. And if at any point they changed their mind, then they could walk away from the project.”

Each family read the manuscript in its entirety, with Clarke determined that she would not publish if they had any qualms. On the morning that we speak, she has been in touch with them, and she reads me a message from Loanna, Keira’s mother. It says simply: “Keira really has made such a difference to so many people. She is just incredible.” Loanna, she goes on to tell me, now visits schools to tell children about Keira; Max’s mother, Emma, is an “indefatigable” ambassador for the NHS’s organ donation programme. Nobody who reads the book could forget the almost superhuman fortitude of Keira’s father, Joe, or her sisters, all of whom not only consented but pressed forward with donating her organs, even as Loanna and Keira’s brother were gravely injured. There, too, is the bravery of Max’s father, Paul, supporting his desperately ill son through the pain and trauma of treatment; and Max’s brother, Harry, now finishing his second year at medical school. It is because of these people that in 2020, Max and Keira’s Law entered the statute books, ruling that adults would be presumed to have given consent to organ donation, rather than having to opt in, an enormously important step in addressing the scarcity of donor organs.

For Clarke, it was also important to shine a light on the care with which the medical teams treat those who, in death, are giving someone else the chance of life; from the “moment of honour” that precedes all surgery to retrieve donor organs, in which all fall silent to consider the patient, to the last offices of washing and dressing performed by nurses. “It’s the patient that’s the important person,” she explains. “And I think that says something very profound about us as a species, doesn’t it?”

Clarke, who is the mother of two teenagers, spends half her time working with patients, and half on “other things”; not only writing books, but shining a light on the challenges her profession – and by extension all of us – are facing. At the moment, she is furious about the government’s recent decision to stop issuing visas to foreign care workers, because what they do is regarded as unskilled labour. With a shortage of 100,000 care workers, the result is patients unable to be discharged from hospital: “A direct consequence of that is I will see more patients on trolleys dying outside an A&E that they can’t even get into because we don’t have enough care workers. I will look them in the eye. Keir Starmer won’t. Wes Streeting won’t. But I will, and I will try to give them the best care I can in a corridor where there isn’t even a curtain to draw around them for dignity.”

She has, she says, always been torn between the arts and science, but that medicine is “the perfect marriage of hard science and beautiful, messy humanity. And I try to write books that represent medicine accurately in that sense. You are not a good doctor if you’re just a scientist and you’re not a good doctor if you’re just about emotion and feeling: you have to marry the two.”

One of the world’s most prestigious and intensive musical competitions took over downtown Fort Worth these past few weeks. Will its winner prove to be another Yunchan Lim-style sensation?

Adistinctive line drawing of a grand piano adorns a clock face inSundance Square. At night, it beams like a Tracey Emin installation, presiding over Fort Worth’s downtown district. At the intersection leading to Bass Performance Hall the crosswalk has been replaced with an oversized keyboard, and, inside the cavernous venue, sartorial style favours black and white stripes. A pop-up gift shop in the lobby boasts an array of musical-themed memorabilia; there’s the line drawing on a bubble-gum pink T-shirt, an enormous travel mug, a steak-branding fork. The theme-park feel is confirmed by a white Steinway emblazoned with Mickey Mouse – a limited hand-painted Disney edition (price on request). Welcome to piano city, smiles the sign.

Every four years, piano lovers from across the world gather in this Texas enclave for the Van Cliburn international piano competition – the instrument’s Olympics.

It’s not just about the financial reward (the gold medallist receives $100,000 (£74,000); silver $50,000; bronze $25,000, plus there’s other discretionary awards): participation potentially catapults an early-career pianist into the industry’s orbit. In 2022, at the postponed 2021 instalment, a then unknownYunchan Limtook gold. Earlier this year I witnessed crowds of fans waiting to present the now 21-year-old with stuffed animals after a spectacular concert in Lucerne, where he played alongside Martha Argerich. Lim’s Van Cliburn performance ofRachmaninov’s third piano concertois now the most-watched version of that concerto online, with more than 17m views.

If Bass Performance Hall’s painted skylight and elaborate candelabras recall a European opera house, the dazzling white balconies are all-American. Conductor Marin Alsop pulls the reins on the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, the Cliburn’s house band. It’s finals week: six pianists (from the28 chosento compete in the competition) perform over four nights. Every performance is livestreamed – this year’s simulcast had 20m views across 145 countries – and, for the first time, is available via Apple Music Classical, along with curated playlists. A new Cliburn Keys View offers the option to watch a hands-only perspective, where disembodied lower arms deploy impeccable technique. While instructive, to do so misses the interplay between soloist and ensemble.

Most major international piano competitions require their finalists to perform one concerto. There’s usually a standard list of repertoire – inevitably Tchaikovsky 1 – and the concert is make or break. The Cliburn finalists (an all-male group; only four women competed in Fort Worth, two of whom made it as far as the semi-finals) play two concertos, one from a designated selection, the other can be anything. Alsop deserves her own gold medal for her openness to the challenge, which this year included the quirky choice of Bartok 2. After one concerto I stepped into a lift alongside Alsop who looked thoughtful and exhausted. Most orchestral seasons feature Rachmaninov 3, Beethoven 4 and Prokofiev 2 over the course of a few months. Alsop had done them all in one evening.

The Cliburn judges heard 55 hours of music over the course of the event, as 28 pianists became 12, and then six. British pianist Paul Lewis, head of the jury, described the process as “overwhelmingly intense”. From 2015-18 Lewis was chair of the Leeds international piano competition, the UK counterpart that feels positively quaint in comparison.Keir Starmer publicly wished participants luckahead of last year’s Leeds competition; Trump is unlikely to congratulate this year’sCliburn laureateswho include competitors from Russia, Hong Kong, the US, Israel and combinations thereof. He’s missing a trick: the Cliburn has always had political clout. Founder and Texan native Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn charmed audiences at the 1958 inaugural International Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, winning gold at the height of the cold war and returning to that most hallowed of US celebrations, a ticker-tape parade. While some of his recordings are historic gems (his 1958 recording with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra and Kiril Kondrashin was broadcast with choreographed fireworks at the city’s afterparty), Cliburn’s main legacy is the quadrennial contest that takes his name. Set up in 1962, its importance for cultural unification was immediately confirmed.

There are no public guidelines on judging, what one judge wants from their Brahms 2, say, might vary wildly from another.Aristo Sham’s Mendelssohn 1frothed;Philipp Lynov’s Liszt 2bubbled. “Why aren’t you standing up?” one lady scolded the press line, as each participant received rapturous applause and we struggled to scribble. “Y’all have a favourite?” one Texan asked me in the loos, where I photographed the doors decorated with a stave. I did, but mine was different to hers. Carter Johnson, the 28-year-old Canadian-American threw a curveball with theRavel left-hand concerto, a work composed for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the first world war. It’s a brooding piece demanding technical wizardry (British left-hand pianist Nicholas McCarthy plays it at this year’sProms opening weekend); Johnson danced and pedalled with elegance.Vitaly Starikovemployed some quirky tempi in the Schumann;Evren Ozel’s Tchaikovsky 1was almost as muscular and thrilling as Cliburn’s own historic performance. At this level, differentiation is down to matters of taste.

Unusually – judging at this level can require UN levels of diplomatic negotiation to reach a consensus, depending on individual rules – the announcement came on time, with all finalists and jury members present. (There are sometimes resignations: in 1980 Argerich left the International Chopin piano competition in protest at the elimination ofIvo Pogorelićin the third round; and there are sometimes huffs: one young pianist refused to participate in the celebratory performance at the conclusion of last year’s Hamamatsu international piano competition in Japan.) And, all prizes were awarded (theTchaikovsky competitionregularly withholds gold if a clear hierarchy of winners cannot be agreed, with joint silver given instead). Sham took the top spot, becoming the first pianist from Hong Kong to win in the Cliburn’s history. The unassuming polymath – Sham is a former child star (featured on Channel 4’s 2009 documentary The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies) who studied economics at Harvard and music at Juilliard – was a surprise choice to the press, but not to Cliburn viewers – he won theAudience awardby more than 9,000 votes.

Starikov won silver and Ozel placed third, also winning the Mozart Concerto award. I was disappointed not to seeLynov’s talents recognised – he was too; it was some time before he appeared at the reception, but crucially, he attended. Talk was all about the verdicts; everyone had a different top three. After the huge success of Lim, the pressure to find the Next Big Pianist was palpable. But Lim is exceptional; competitions spit up dozens of superb musicians and only one in a generation will have his distinctive touch.

The latest clutch of piano olympians gathered at a small table, looking as if they wished it was a piano stool. Journalists asked the necessary inane questions and received the necessary inane answers (Q: how does it feel? A: good). At one point Starikov, fatigued or bored, passed on the microphone to Ozel. All three wore shiny medals and consulted unseen bank accounts, blinking into bright futures.

Listen to live performances from this year’s Cliburn competition on Apple Music Classical:https://apple.co/2025Cliburn; watch all the finals round concerto performances atwww.youtube.com/thecliburn

(Polydor)The three LA sisters dwell on the bitter end of a relationship in tracks that range from replayable valley-girl rap to plodding country-pop

Haim’s 2013 breakthrough single The Wire was a swaggering, high-spirited breakup anthem. The slick, twanging pop-rock was correctly identified at the time by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow as echoing the oeuvre of Shania Twain (though this wasn’t the sick burn he thought it was), over which the LA trio copped to commitment phobia, communication issues and having their heads turned, before skipping into the California sunset with their hearts intact. Well, to commandeer the title of Haim’s debut album: those days are very much gone.

I Quit, the sisters’ fourth album, still has plenty of breakup songs, but these are no cheerful odes to dumping dudes in your 20s. Instead, the record fixates on the bitter end of a deeply flawed long-term relationship; at least some of these songs are informed by the love lost between lead vocalist Danielle Haim and Ariel Rechtshaid, the garlanded producer who worked on all three of the band’s previous albums (I Quit is instead helmed by Danielle, Rostam Batmanglij and Buddy Ross). The mood is not desolate – the narrator instigated the split – but it is searching and pained. The ex is portrayed as careless and manipulative, and punches are not pulled (“I swear you wouldn’t care if I was covered in blood lying dead on the street”). There are many references to setting oneself free, reflected in the – perhaps too on-the-nose – sample of George Michael’s Freedom! ‘90, which is woven through the opening track, Gone.

The idea of Haim sampling George Michael is more fun in theory than in practice: Gone is initially characterised by a low, flat vocal melody and sludgy instrumentation that manages to strip all euphoria from its co-opted “freedom!” refrain. But then a guitar solo that recalls the White Stripes in their pomp arrives, before this newfound garage-bluesiness is merged with Freedom! ‘90’s bedrock rhythm. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a song, but a belatedly brilliant one.

On Haim’s last album, 2020’s Women in Music Pt III, the sisters expanded on the perky and sometimes airless rock of their first two records to great acclaim. Gone hints at even more experimentation this time round, so it is disappointing to encounter the wan, plodding country-pop of All Over Me. But hold tight for track three, the absurdly delightful Relationships, which incorporates 80s bombast, the hyper-melodic, pitch-climbing toplines of 90s R&B and a valley-girl-ish take on old-school rap. It is the best pop song they’ve ever made.

I Quit peaks, spectacularly, here. The rest of the album’s 15 tracks range from fiercely good and instantly replayable to somewhat bland and instantly forgettable.

Haim have long been likened to Fleetwood Mac – a comparison Stevie Nicks recently endorsed, telling GQ that collaborating with the trio was “like coming home”. Yet in lieu of that band’s intangible magic and mystery, Haim are undoubtedly best when they add something new to the 70s soft-rock mix, which comes in fits and starts. Slipping intosprechgesang,as on the droll nostalgia-fest Take Me Back, always feels like a wise move, a chance to lean into the sisters’ GSOH, so obvious in interviews but less so in their actual songs. See also Million Years, which employs a manic breakbeat and gloopy synths to wicked, bubbly effect; and the near-nu metal of Now It’s Time’s punchy, synthetic beat, buzzing guitars and whooshing production.

I Quit is sonically scattershot, but gratifyingly consistent in one regard. Over its considerable runtime, Haim rake repeatedly over the same heartbreak to construct a candid, complex portrait of a woman working hard to psychologically liberate herself from a relationship, laying out obvious toxicity (“an innocent mistake turns into 17 days”, of conflict, presumably) and harm (“you really fucked with my confidence”), while entertaining the notion that maybe all relationships are like this: “Is it just the shit our parents did? And had to live with it.” As a process, it’s messy, a bit like this album. But ultimately worthwhile, also a bit like this album.

Mark William Lewis – Tomorrow Is PerfectThe zeitgeist-lassoing film and TV studio A24 is sidestepping into music and Londoner Lewis is their first signing. The exquisite Tomorrow Is Perfect is like early Coldplay by way of the Durutti Column.

From memories of photoshoots and telephone calls with the late Beach Boy, to appraisals of his complex but pure music, Guardian readers pay tribute to a great

Whether wistful or euphoric, Brian Wilson made pop’s most overwhelmingly beautiful music

Ray Davies, Graham Nash and others on Brian Wilson’s songwriting genius

Endless summer: how Brian Wilson soundtracked California

I remember the Christmas after my mother’s death in 1989 when I was 15, I purchased the best-of collection from Asda, interested to see what I would hear. It had the hits, of course, but also a few of the deeper cuts from Pet Sounds and onwards. To say this changed my life is an understatement – Brian’s music, harmonies and subject matters struck an incredible chord in me. It did exactly what he existed for, bringing comfort to a heart and soul that needs it. I’ve been a fan ever since – I saw him at the Royal Festival Hall on his first Pet Sounds tour, watched him perform Smile in utter disbelief and wonder in Liverpool, while finally introducing his amazing show to my beautiful wife at the Summer Pops in Liverpool. Quite simply the greatest musician to ever live, in my opinion.Stephen Woodward, 50, Liverpool

I first heard California Girls when I was 10 years old. I yearned to be that tanned girl with the bleached blond hair. However, I lived in Burnley, a northern mill town with grey skies and a surfeit of rain! Nonetheless, the Beach Boys’ music transported me to those white sandy beaches, fringed with palm trees and lapped by the Pacific waves. As I got older, the music ofBrian Wilsonevolved, too. Those exquisite harmonies and lyrics continued to move and enthral me. He was a musical genius and his music still manages to evoke in me every human emotion possible.Catherine, Leeds

It was 1988 at the Savoy Hotel, London, when I had my brief but indelible encounter with the Beach Boy myth and legend. I was in my formative years as a portrait photographer, and Brian Wilson was being revealed to the press by his doctor and manager,Eugene Landy.

Stepping out of the lift on to the top floor, I was greeted by the ethereal melodies of a piano drifting through the corridor – Brian was composing in his penthouse suite. His two assistants greeted me with smiles. I set up my lighting and asked Brian to sit – he looked deeply into the lens and froze. After just three frames, the assistants intervened, politely informing me the session was over.

Before I left, the assistants insisted on photographing me alongside him. Two polaroids were required – one for litigation purposes and another as a personal keepsake. For the first one, I played my best poker face. For the second, the memento, I decided to playfully raise an eyebrow. I snatched the Polaroid before the ink was dry, bid them all adieu and beat a hasty exit. As the image developed, two figures surfaced from the darkness – Brian and me, shoulder-to-shoulder, both with raised eyebrows! To me, in that moment of lucidity, Brian was gentle and respectful. That’s how I remember my encounter with the legend.Gavin Evans, photographer, Berlin

I grew up in Corby in the 90s and felt about as far away as possible from the Beach Boys’ music. I think that’s precisely why I fell in love with it. It felt transportive. I had the chance to see Brian Wilson perform Pet Sounds in Barcelona in 2016, which felt close to a perfect moment, the kind of thing I’d dreamed of as a child. When my first child was born 18 months ago, Pet Sounds was the first music I ever played for her.Jack Roe, writer and photographer, Liverpool

I cannot help agreeing that Brian was the Mozart of the US and in spite of all plaudits he remains vastly underrated. If I play At My Piano for Swiss friends who are probably far less aware of the Beach Boys, they all love the beautiful melodies even without the affectionate and tender lyrics. The man was gentleness and love personified. Most people seem unaware of his later work, some of which definitely rivals his finest Pet Sounds moments for its amazing harmonies, arrangements, tender poetic lyrics and haunting melody. He was courageous over a testing lifetime and leaves a wonderful musical legacy.Kingsley Flint, 76, retired, Cossonay, Switzerland

Musical composition isn’t an exact science: most of us could shove a few chords together to make verses and a chorus, put it in a 4/4 time signature and voila! There’s the basis of a pop song. But carrying that series of chord progressions to a higher form, and communicating feeling that touches almost all human souls who hear it, is what Brian Wilson did. Through his music, Brian invited us to grow up with him, and we did.Eamon McCrisken, 58, languagecoach, Spain

I never met him but he did phone me up in 2005 after I donated to a charity appeal for the tsunami where he promised to ring everyone who donated a certain amount. One day, my wife and I were eating and let the phone go to the answering machine when it rang. I’ve never moved as quick as when I heard his unmistakable voice saying: “Hi James, this is Brian Wilson calling from California.” Luckily I caught him before he hung up and got to tell him how much his music meant to me. I’ll treasure that call forever.James Ellaby, 44, senior content writer, Manchester

As a teen, I thought the Beach Boys were a bit naff. Later in life, having grown up a fair bit, I bought Pet Sounds and a greatest hits compilation on a whim, and was floored on first listen by how Brian captured and blended the essential dichotomy of life: beauty and ugliness, happiness and sadness, optimism and pessimism, ennui and joy. His music made me smile and cry, sometimes simultaneously, in a way that no music had before. Now, I feel a hole in my heart knowing that Brian is gone and that the world has lost a musical oracle, and I wonder: can anyone ever make us feel these things again?Lachlan Walter, 46, writer, Melbourne, Australia

Since I was about 10, I have loved the music of the Beach Boys. By the time I was starting to date, finding and losing love, Brian’s songs were there soundtracking my life like he knew me and I felt I knew him. I think all his fans felt a profoundly deep affection for him, an empathy for his suffering and a desire to make him feel as happy and loved as he made us feel. One memory about him particularly stands out for me. A few months after I first saw Pet Sounds live, my daughter was born. She was crying in my arms and I sang God Only Knows to her and she stopped crying straight away – it’s our song now.Oliver Learmonth, 55, creative artist, Brighton

In January 2002, I was at home in Holland when I found out Brian would be playing the whole of Pet Sounds in London the following week. How had I missed this news? As I quickly found out, the gigs were all sold out. No matter, I had to go. I invented a spurious excuse to visit my company’s office in London, and the following Monday I was at the Royal Festival Hall box office at 10am, to be told: “We occasionally get returns from ticket agencies. You could try coming back at 5pm.” I was there at 3pm, ferreting among early arrivals in the hope of a spare. No luck. But at 5pm, the box office had a couple of returns. Pricey, but what the hell: side stalls ticket W24 was mine, and canyoueffin’believeit, this turned out to be the front row on the right side of the stage, only a few feet from guitarist Jeffrey Foskett’s head. At 50, I was as excited as a kid at Christmas.Andy, 74, retired administration manager, Preston