Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days
Helen Pidd was the Guardian’s North of England editor, based in Manchester for 12 years. As she changes roles to become a presenter on the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast, she looked at the rapid transformation of her home city and complaints from its proud locals that it’s being “Londonised”. Is it the case, she asked, that Manchester is becoming less Mancunian? Or are Mancunians just changing, along with their ever expanding, shape-shifting city?
“I have written dystopian fiction before, and my latest novel, Vera, or Faith, is a continuation of the natural outcome of my birth in Leningrad and my removal, at age seven, to Reagan’s America. I think I have predicted the future with fairly good aim in novels such as Super Sad True Love Story, where social media helps to give rise to a fascist America, although my timeline when that book was published in 2010 was 30 years into the future, not a decade and change.”
When Gary Shteyngart left the Soviet Union for a new life in the US, the novelist never imagined he would live under another authoritarian regime. Then Trump returned to power … Is it, he asked, time to move again?
