Sophy Roberts’s latest book, A Training School for Elephants, was reviewed at the weekend in the Financial Times and The Sunday Times. In the FT, William Atkins said it was an “absorbing” tale of colonial ambition and hubris, written with “compulsive meticulousness”. In The Sunday Times, James McConnachie said it was “a beautiful, intelligent and heartfelt book… It will haunt me.”

In The Observer, Stuart Jeffries reviewed The North Pole by the explorer Erling Kagge: “a big book of ripping yarns and existential angst”. In the same paper, Stephen Smith greeted a new collection of Gay Talese’s journalism, A Town Without Time, as “a wonderful non-fiction rendering of New York”.