The Midnight Guardians

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Spectacular. A story of real and rare power – one of the best books I’ve read in years.” Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of THE GIRL OF INK AND STARS The performances are uniformly excellent: unable to rely on his regular cast of players, Flanagan has assembled a new crop of young talent to play the dying teens. Iman Benson is Ilonka, who was on her way to an Ivy League college when she got her diagnosis. Though resolved to spend her final days at Brightcliffe a glimmer of hope remains, and she cannot resist the help of Samantha Sloyan’s sinister local naturalist, who seems to have emerged from Goop headquarters by way of Salem. Never has someone been so menacing while brandishing a blueberry.

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He and his family moved to Brighton – a place “where no one really fits in, so almost everyone fits in”, Haig says – in 2015. He and Semple home-school their children, 13-year-old Lucas and 12-year-old Pearl. They had been at school in York, but weren’t particularly enjoying it, and their experiences reminded Haig of his own problems at secondary school in Newark in Nottinghamshire, where as a sensitive teenager he felt isolated and directionless in a tough, sporty environment. It would be hard for any reader to find Bella as fascinating as Edward does, with her character, never very distinctive, now smothered by his adoring gaze (“the English language needed a word that meant something halfway between a goddess and a naiad”). But taken together, the two narratives at least depict mutual attraction. Midnight Sun could be read as Meyer’s attempt at a do-over, following criticism of Twilight for romanticising a coercive relationship. Edward’s habit of breaking into Bella’s bedroom to watch her sleep, for example, was held up by some highly literal commentators as modelling unhealthy boundaries to impressionable young women, who were still learning how to navigate their own relationships with vampires. (As Meyer pointed out in a recent interview: “Really the problem is that he’s murdered a ton of people.”)Spoilers preclude discussion of exactly which horror tropes are eventually used to bring those anxieties to life, but Flanagan is once again concerned with death – and how to defeat it. He wants to explore ancient, heavy questions about religion – whether there is an afterlife or a God; why any such deity would allow suffering; which belief system captures the story’s essence; why humans crave these answers. Too often, though, he does this by sitting two characters down on chairs and having them conduct a long, long debate about it. Even when the townsfolk’s hysteria spills over and the gore starts flowing, the talky interludes persist. And Col and Ruth were lovely leads - I think their gradual opening up to each other made for an honestly lovely way to connect with them. With one friend trapped in time andthe other chasing down a ghost, Keira Ryan must find it in herself to move past the damage caused by her misplaced trustandfulfill her destiny to bring forth the fall of the House of Gammen. Can she defeatthe royal line beforethe gremlin-like creatures of Atlantis cross into our world? No amount of screen presence can detract from the narrative being an overstuffed mess in need of a purge. Every episode, we spend time in the worlds created by the characters when they tell stories at night, but none (save perhaps Anya’s doppelganger nightmare The Two Danas) is as interesting as the events taking place at Brightcliffe. The series at first manages a balance between the two layers of fiction, but maddeningly tips the scale to luxuriate in the heavy-handed allegories of the stories they tell. After watching Sumpter deliver a devastating speech to his estranged mother that expertly walks the line between melodrama and melancholy, to subsequently see him flattened in a lame sci-fi concept is infuriating. It’s one of the weirder aspects of 21st century pop that every major new album feels like a puzzle to be solved. Nothing is ever just announced, promoted, then released. Instead, breadcrumbs of mysterious hints and visual clues are very gradually dropped via the artist’s social media channels. Fans pore over them and formulate excitable theories as to what’s about to happen. Articles are written collating said fans’ theories and weighing up their potential veracity. Sometimes, it goes on longer than the actual album’s stay in the charts. It has certainly happened with Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights. Everything has been pored over for potential information about its contents, up to and including the kind of eye shadow she wears on the album cover. Conspiracy theories have abounded. Space precludes exploring them here, as does concern for your welfare: reading about them makes one’s head hurt a bit.

Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer review - The Guardian Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer review - The Guardian

Senior year has begun. Keira Ryan should be worrying about the two boys that are vying for her heart. She should be worrying about Prom. But instead of a dress, she’s choosing which dagger to carry. An ancient evil is working to infiltrate our world, and she’s the only one who can stop it . . . the prophesied “Child of Sun & Moon”. His fears were unfounded. Canongate rescued him. He realised the key was to write for himself and not worry about critical expectations or the division between literary and commercial fiction. The Humans gave him confidence and confirmed his new publisher’s faith in him; Reasons to Stay Alive, which was derived from a blog he wrote in 2014, established him firmly in the public mind as a teller of stories and an open, uninhibited, ego-free chaperone through the maelstrom of life.Bring a large pan of water to a boil, add salt (about 2 tsp for every litre) and stir. Add the spaghetti, stir and set your timer for two minutes before the end of the recommended cooking time. The best show I watched this year was the miniseries Maid. It is brutal at times, but balanced with heartfelt emotion. Margaret Qualley was fantastic in the lead role as a house cleaner who dreams of being a writer, but nearly outshone by her mother (played by her real-life mother Andie MacDowell). Jonathan, 39, attorney, New York, US Mare of Easttown (Sky Atlantic) It all seems a long way from the dark moment in Ibiza in 1999. Is he in that fabled “good place”? “I will for ever have to be mindful of my mental health,” he says. “I can’t take my eye off the ball. But I’m definitely in a very grateful place. I never say I’m a happy person, because that’s almost like saying you’re a sad person. It fixes you as that thing and imposes certain expectations. I try to be open to everything. What we aim to do is to make people who want to travel in Europe hesitate to take the plane, to make a 90-minute flight a thing of the past.”