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The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup

Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo; How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K Dick; The Woman Who Fell to Earth by RB Russell; Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia

Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo, translated by Herbert Lomas (Pushkin, £9.99) Outside his apartment block, behind the bins, a young man known as Angel finds a sick, abandoned troll cub. Seized by the desire to raise it as his pet, he smuggles it indoors and sets out to learn all he can about trolls. In the world of this prize-winning Finnish novel, trolls are not creatures of legend but a rare species, the result of convergent evolution. Keeping such a dangerous animal is illegal, and Angel doesn’t know what to feed it or how to cure it. He turns to the clientele of his local gay bar for help: lying, breaking hearts, seducing a veterinarian in order to steal his drugs. For such a short novel, Troll covers a lot of ground; it’s told through various viewpoints, and bolstered by invented sources ranging from folk tales to scientific papers. As well as a queer love story, it’s a reflection on the distance between man and animal, and modern city life versus nature. Published in English 20 years ago as Not Before Sundown, this new edition is sure to thrill another generation of readers.

How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K Dick ( Isolarii , £14. 95 ) In 1978, still struggling to make sense of a religious experience from 1974 and to start an overdue novel, Dick produced this essay, which includes reflections on writing science fiction, Christianity and his two great obsessions: what is reality, and what does it mean to be human. Written as a speech that he probably never gave and first published in a posthumous collection in 1985, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the most influential American writers of the late 20th century. His warning that “we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated mechanisms” feels increasingly urgent today. Published as a miniature pocketbook, it’s provocative, funny, scary and thought-provoking – essential reading.

The Woman Who Fell to Earth by RB Russell (Tartarus , £40 ) Tanya is woken in the night by the sound of something hitting the roof: this turns out to be the dead body of her old friend Catherine. How it got there is a mystery left unsolved by police and media, but when Tanya learns she has inherited Catherine’s house, crammed full of books, files and stacks of old newspapers, she is drawn deeper into the pursuit of the truth, and into the world of the occult. A rare book dealer has stolen some of Catherine’s more valuable possessions, including a mysterious artefact called the Sixtystone, which featured in a novel by Arthur Machen, and Tanya sets out on an increasingly strange journey to try to recover it. The biographer of Robert Aickman and founding member of the Friends of Arthur Machen society has produced a modern, wonderfully strange story that admirers of both those earlier authors should love.

Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia (Dead Ink, £10.99) The horror in this debut collection of stories is subtle but effective. Apart from cave-dwelling cryptids in one story and ghosts in others, supernatural elements are slight; our fear for the female characters arises from their ordinary lives, in family relationships or encounters with strangers. The stories are beautifully written, with believable characters in vividly described American settings – from a snow-bound college dorm to a wellness retreat in the Mojave desert – and all are shot through with unease and a streak of strangeness that makes them outstanding.

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The Haunting of Prince Harry

Balmoral Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, was Queen Elizabeth’s preferred resort among her several castles and palaces, and in the opening pages of “ Spare ” (Random House), the much anticipated, luridly leaked, and compellingly artful autobiography of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, its environs are intimately described. We get the red-coated footman attending the heavy front door; the mackintoshes hanging on hooks; the cream-and-gold wallpaper; and the statue of Queen Victoria, to which Harry and his older brother, William, always bowed when passing. Beyond lay the castle’s fifty bedrooms—including the one known in the brothers’ childhood as the nursery, unequally divided into two. William occupied the larger half, with a double bed and a splendid view; Harry’s portion was more modest, with a bed frame too high for a child to scale, a mattress that sagged in the middle, and crisp bedding that was “pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.”

It was in this bedroom, early in the morning of August 31, 1997, that Harry, aged twelve, was awakened by his father, Charles, then the Prince of Wales, with the terrible news that had already broken across the world: the princes’ mother, Princess Diana, from whom Charles had been divorced a year earlier and estranged long before that, had died in a car crash in Paris. “He was standing at the edge of the bed, looking down,” Harry writes of the moment in which he learned of the loss that would reshape his personality and determine the course of his life. He goes on to describe his father’s appearance with an unusual simile: “His white dressing gown made him seem like a ghost in a play.”

What ghost would that be, and what play? The big one, of course, bearing the name of that other brooding princely Aitch: Hamlet. Within the first few pages of “Spare,” Shakespeare’s play is alluded to more than once. There’s a jocular reference: “To beard or not to beard” is how Harry foreshadows a contentious family debate over whether he should be clean-shaven on his wedding day. And there’s an instance far graver: an account, in the prologue, of a fraught encounter between Harry, William, and Charles in April, 2021, a few hours after the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband and the Royal Family’s patriarch, at Windsor. The meeting had been called by Harry in the vain hope that he might get his obdurate parent and sibling, first and second in line to the throne, to see why he and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, had felt it necessary to flee Britain for North America, relinquishing their royal roles, if not their ducal titles. The three men met in Frogmore Gardens, on the Windsor estate, which includes the last resting place of many illustrious ancestors, and as they walked its gravel paths they talked with increasing tension about their apparently irreconcilable differences. They “were now smack in the middle of the Royal Burial Ground,” Harry writes, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

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King Charles, as he became upon the death of Queen Elizabeth , in September, will not find much to like in “Spare,” which may offer the most thoroughgoing scything of treacherous royals and their scheming courtiers since the Prince of Denmark’s bloody swath through the halls of Elsinore. Queen Camilla, formerly “the Other Woman” in Charles and Diana’s unhappy marriage, is, Harry judges, “dangerous,” having “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar.” William’s wife, Kate, now the Princess of Wales, is haughty and cool, brushing off Meghan’s homeopathic remedies. William himself is domineering and insecure, with a wealth of other deficits: “his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time.” Charles is, for the most part, more tenderly drawn. In “Spare,” the King is a figure of tragic pathos, whose frequently repeated term of endearment for Harry, “darling boy,” most often precedes an admission that there is nothing to be done—or, at least, nothing he can do—about the burden of their shared lot as members of the nation’s most important, most privileged, most scrutinized, most publicly dysfunctional family. “Please, boys—don’t make my final years a misery,” he pleads, in Harry’s account of the burial-ground showdown.

As painful as Charles must find the book’s revealing content, he might grudgingly approve of Harry’s Shakespearean flourishes in delivering it. Thirty-odd years ago, in giving the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the future monarch spoke of the eternal relevance of the playwright’s insights into human nature, citing, among other references, Hamlet’s monologue with the phrase “What a piece of work is a man!” Shakespeare, Charles told his audience, offers us “blunt reminders of the flaws in our own personalities, and of the mess which we so often make of our lives.” In “Spare,” Harry describes his father’s devotion to Shakespeare, paraphrasing Charles’s message about the Bard’s works in terms that seem to refer equally to that other pillar of British identity, the monarchy: “They’re our shared heritage, we should be cherishing them, safeguarding them, and instead we’re letting them die.”

Harry counts himself among “the Shakespeareless hordes,” bored and confused as a teen-ager when his father drags him to see performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company; disinclined to read much of anything, least of all the freighted works of Britain’s national author. (“Not really big on books,” he confesses to Meghan Markle when, on their second date, she tells him she’s having an “Eat, Pray, Love” summer, and he has no idea what she’s on about.) Harry at least gives a compelling excuse for his inability to discover what his father so valued, though it’s probably not one that he gave to his schoolmasters at Eton. “I tried to change,” he recalls. “I opened Hamlet . Hmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper . . . ? I slammed it shut. No, thank you.”

That passage indicates another spectral figure haunting the text of “Spare”—that of Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer. Harry, or his publishing house—which paid a reported twenty-million-dollar advance for the book—could not have chosen better. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter turned memoirist and novelist, as well as the ghostwriter of, most notably, Andre Agassi’s thrillingly candid memoir, “ Open .” In that book, published in 2009, a tennis ace once reviled for his denim shorts and flowing mullet revealed himself to be a troubled, tennis-hating neurotic with father issues and an unreliable hairpiece. When the title and the cover art of “Spare” were made public, late last year, the kinship between the two books—single-word title; closeup, set-jaw portrait—indicated that they were to be understood as fraternal works in the Moehringer œuvre. Moehringer has what is usually called a novelist’s eye for detail, effectively deployed in “Spare.” That patched, starched bed linen at Balmoral, emblazoned with E.R., the formal initials of the Queen , is, of course, a metaphor for the constricting, and quite possibly threadbare, fabric of the institution of monarchy itself.

Moehringer has also bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon. The language of Shakespeare rings in his sentences. Those wanton journalists who publish falsehoods or half-truths? They treat the royals as insects: “What fun, to pluck their wings,” Harry writes, in an echo of “King Lear,” a play about the fragility of kingly authority. During his military training as a forward air controller, a role in which he guided the flights and firepower of pilots from an earthbound station, Harry describes the release of bombs as “spirits melting into air”—a phrase drawn from “The Tempest,” a play about a duke in exile across the water. Elevating flourishes like these give readers—perhaps British ones in particular—a shiver of recognition, as if the chords of “Jerusalem” were being struck on a church organ. But they also remind those readers of the necessary literary artifice at work in the enterprise of “Spare,” as Moehringer shapes Harry’s memories and obsessions, traumas and bugbears, into a coherent narrative: the peerless ghostwriter giving voice to the Shakespeareless prince.

Moehringer has fashioned the Duke of Sussex’s life story into a tight three-act drama, consisting of his occasionally wayward youth; his decade of military service, which included two tours of duty in Afghanistan; and his relationship with Meghan. Throughout, there are numerous bombshells, which—thanks to the o’er hasty publication of the book’s Spanish edition—did not so much melt into air as materialize into clickbait. These included the allegation that, in 1998, Camilla leaked word to a tabloid of her first meeting with Prince William—according to Harry, the opening sally in a campaign to secure marriage to Charles and a throne by his side. (Harry does not mention that, at the time, Camilla’s personal assistant took responsibility for the leak—she’d told her husband, a media executive, who’d told a friend, who’d told someone at the Sun , who’d printed it. Bloody journalists.) They also include less consequential but more titillating arcana, such as Harry’s account of losing his virginity, in a field behind a pub, to an unnamed older woman, who treated him “not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.” The Daily Mail , Harry’s longtime media nemesis, had a field day with that revelation, door-stepping a now forty-four-year-old businesswoman to come up with the deathless headline “Horse-loving ex-model six years older than Harry, who once breathlessly revealed the Prince left her mouth numb with passionate kissing in a muddy field, refuses to discuss whether she is the keen horsewoman who took his virginity in a field.”

The leaks have done the book’s sales no harm, and neither have Harry’s pre-publication interviews on “Good Morning America” and “60 Minutes”; in the U.K., Harry did an hour-and-a-half-long special with Tom Bradby, the journalist to whom Meghan tearfully bemoaned, in the fall of 2019, that “not many people have asked if I’m O.K.” But “Spare” is worth reading not just for its headline-generating details but also for its narrative force, its voice, and its sometimes surprising wit. Harry describes his trepidation in telling his brother that he intended to propose to Meghan: William “predicted a host of difficulties I could expect if I hooked up with an ‘American actress,’ a phrase he always managed to make sound like ‘convicted felon’ ”—an observation so splendid that a reader can only hope it was actually Harry’s.

There is much in the book that people conversant with the contours of the Prince’s life, insofar as they have hitherto been reported, will find familiar. At the same time, Harry bursts any number of inaccurate reports, including a rumored flirtation with another convicted fel— sorry, American actress, Cameron Diaz: “I was never within fifty meters of Ms. Diaz, further proof that if you like reading pure bollocks then royal biographies are just your thing.” Not a few of the incidents Harry chooses to describe in detail are centered on images or stories already in the public domain, such as being beset by paparazzi when leaving night clubs—he explains that he started being ferried away in the trunk of his driver’s car so as to avoid lashing out at his pursuers—and being required to perform uncomfortable media interviews while serving in Afghanistan in exchange for the newspapers’ keeping shtum about his deployment, for security reasons. (An Australian publication blew the embargo, and Harry was swiftly extracted from the battlefield.)

Given that what Harry dredges up from his past are so often things that have been publicly documented, one wonders whether Moehringer was obliged to indulge Harry’s extended dilation upon media-inflicted wounds , through Zoom sessions that even sympathetic readers will find exhausting to contemplate. There is a certain amount of score-settling and record-straightening, which, though obviously important to the author, can be wearying to a reader, who may feel that if she has to read another word about those accursed bridesmaids’ dresses—of who said what to whom, and who caused whom to cry—she just might burst into tears herself. More significantly, though, there are broadsides against unforgivable intrusions committed by the press, including phone hacking. (Harry is still engaged in lawsuits against a number of British newspapers that allegedly intercepted his voice mails more than a dozen years ago.)

And then there are pages and pages devoted to Harry’s personal trials, which even the most dogged reporter on Fleet Street would not dare dream of uncovering. Chief among these is Harry’s struggle to overcome penile frostnip after a charitable Arctic excursion with a group of veterans, which ends up in a clandestine visit to a Harley Street doctor; he writes, “North Pole, I told him. I went to the North Pole and now my South Pole is on the fritz.” “On the fritz” is an Americanism that we can hope Harry picked up while guiding American pilots—he calls them Yanks—back to base in Afghanistan, rather than the exchange being the ingenious invention of his ghostwriter. Moehringer, on the whole, does a good job of conveying the laddish argot of a millennial British prince, who addresses his friends as “mate” and—repeatedly—calls his penis his “todger.”

Above all, “Spare” is worth reading for its potential historical import, which is likely to resonate, if not to the crack of doom, then well into the reign of King Charles III, and even into that of his successor. As was the case in 1992 with the publication of “ Diana: Her True Story ,” by Andrew Morton—to whom, it was revealed after her death, the Princess of Wales gave her full coöperation, herself the ghost behind the writer—“Spare” is an unprecedented exposure of the Royal Family from the most deeply embedded of informants. The Prince in exile does not hesitate to detail the pettiness, the vanity, and the inglorious urge toward self-preservation of those who are now the monarchy’s highest-ranking representatives.

It’s not clear that even now, having authored a book, Harry entirely understands what a book is; when challenged by Tom Bradby about his decision to reveal private conversations after having railed so forcefully about the invasive tactics of the press, Harry replied, “The level of planting and leaking from other members of the family means that in my mind they have written countless books—certainly, millions of words have been dedicated to trying to trash my wife and myself to the point of where I had to leave my country.” Pity the poor ghostwriter who has to hear his craft compared to the spewing verbiage of the media churn—by its commissioning subject, no less. (Man, what a piece of work.) Remarkably, Prince Harry has suggested that he sees the book as an invitation to reconciliation, addressed to his father and brother—a way of speaking to them publicly when all his efforts to address them privately have failed to persuade. “Spare” is, you might say, Prince Harry’s “Mousetrap”—a literary device intended to catch the conscience of the King, and the King after him.

If so, the ruse seems about as likely to end well for Harry as Hamlet’s play-within-a-play efforts did for him. Moehringer, at least, knows this, even if Harry may hope that his own royal plot will swerve unexpectedly from implacable tragedy to restitutive melodrama. In a soaring coda, Moehringer has the Prince once again reflecting on the royal dead, describing the family he belongs to as nothing less than a death cult. “We christened and crowned, graduated and married, passed out and passed over our beloveds’ bones. Windsor Castle itself was a tomb, the walls filled with ancestors,” Harry writes. It’s a powerful motif: the Prince—shattered in childhood by his mother’s death, his every step determined by the inescapable legacy of the countless royal dead—as an unwilling Hamlet pushed, rather than leaping, into the grave.

Recalling the meeting with his father and brother in the Frogmore burial ground with which the book began, Harry invokes the most famous soliloquy from the play of Shakespeare’s that he says he once slammed shut: “Why were we here, lurking along the edge of that ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns?’ ” Then comes a final, lovely, true, and utterly poetry-puncturing observation: “Though maybe that’s a more apt description of America.” In moving to the paradisaical climes of California, Harry has been spared a life he had no use for, which had no real use for him. The unlettered Prince has gained in life what Hamlet achieved only in death: his own story shaped on his own terms, thanks to the intervention of a skillful Horatio. You might almost call it Harry’s crowning achievement. ♦

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Spare review roundup: Critics remark on ‘chaotic’ yet emotional outpour from Prince Harry

‘if harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style,’ writes lucy pavia.

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Prince Harry ’s highly anticipated memoir that lifts the lid on his personal life and the inner workings of the royal family has been released today (10 January) to critics who describe the book as “absurd”, “chaotic” and “emotionally charged.”

The 416-page ghost-written autobiography, Spare , is the Duke of Sussex’s first book. Its contents, which are well-known by now, cover everything from family feuds to Harry’s virginity story and penile frostbite. It comes after Harry completes his confessional tour between TV broadcasters ( ITV , CNN, ABC) to promote the book that addresses his claims in greater detail.

The Independent’s Lucy Pavia writes that while the duke’s wife, Meghan, “might be the natural on camera”, Harry, “seems to hit his stride on paper, his voice more authentic than the Californian inflections he slipped into while being interviewed with Meghan for their great soufflé of a Netflix docuseries”. Pavia writes: “This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents.”

Pavia adds: “But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.”

The Guardian ’s Charlotte Higgins writes that while Spare is “compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd”, it’s a “failed attempt to reclaim the narrative” by Prince Harry. Higgins continues: “Harry is myopic as he sits at the centre of his truth, simultaneously loathing and locked into the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which his ghostwritten autobiography echoes.”

Meanwhile, Spare is described as a “therapy session” for the Duke of Sussex, according to The Times ’ James Marriott, where readers get a “weirder, more complex Harry” who is “quite a different Harry from the cool, square-jawed metrosexual Californian on the cover”. Marriott expresses that “there is not enough space here to detail how much Harry hates the press”, while pointing at the hypocrisy of the tell-all memoir: “although he claims to despise the intrusions of the press, Harry craves being the centre of attention.”

Both reviews in The Guardian and The Times note how Prince Harry has taken the press reportage of his and his mother’s life very personally. Higgins notes: “For years, it seems, he devoured every syllable published about him,” while Marriott states, “Harry reads what’s written about him and knows individual journalists by name.”

Both similarly note that, throughout the memoir, Prince Harry grumbles about the things that the average person might call luxury. Marriott notes how Harry “endlessly complains that he’s forced to inhabit pokier bedrooms than his brother”. Higgins remarks that Harry’s complaint about the darkness of his Kensington Palace basement residence, where the windows were blocked from the light by a neighbour’s 4x4, “will seem insulting to those who can’t find a home, or afford to heat one”.

The Telegraph ’s Anita Singh, however, writes that some things are better left unsaid, regarding the intimate details the duke shared about his personal life. The memoir, in Singh’s words, is a painful reminder that Harry is a “boy who never recovered from his mother’s loss”. Singh added: “Your heart breaks for him on every page that mentions Diana. He doesn’t want to let go of the pain because that is all he has left to remember her by.”

Financial Times ’ Henry Mance writes that out of the Sussex’s Oprah interview and six-part Netflix documentary, Spare“ is the most bearable and revelatory” of Prince Harry’s outpour. According to Mance, Spare is the “most insightful royal book in a generation”.

The reviews, on all accounts but one, note that Harry’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, who previously wrote tennis player Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open , has done a good job. The narrative and the writing itself are praised as “stylish” by The Independent , while The Financial Times claims Harry’s story “is told sensitively and at times movingly” and The Telegraph says “Moehringer has done a very good job here”.

Read The Independent ’s four-star review here .

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What critics are saying about Prince Harry’s memoir ‘Spare’

Whether or not critics like the book has not impacted sales — it’s already a best seller.

After months of anticipation, Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” has officially hit the shelves — not to be mistaken with the widespread leaks from the book which surfaced last week, as reported by the Deseret News .

So far, critics have not gone easy on the memoir. The Guardian called the book “a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative.”

Regardless of how critics feel about “Spare,” the book is a hit. According to The Washington Post , the memoir is already at the top of bestseller lists.

“As far as we know, the only books to have sold more in their first day are those starring the other Harry (Potter),” said the memoir’s publisher, per Sky News .

Here are the initial reviews from critics and fans on “Spare.”

First reactions to ‘Spare’

• “At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote for The New York Times .
• Sean Coughlan, a royal correspondent said “Spare” is “part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent,” per the BBC .
• According to Lucy Pavia with the Independent , the book “sets fire to the royal family.” Pavis claims the book is “beautifully” written and “doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents.”
• “Harry comes across as honest and reflective, but also angry, thin-skinned, disoriented” Henry Mance wrote in the Financial Times .
• The London Times called the book a “400-page therapy session for mystic Harry,” wrote James Marriott. “Open the book and you discover quite a different Harry from the cool, square-jawed metrosexual Californian on the cover. This is a weirder, more complex Harry.”
• The Economist called the memoir an “ill-advised romp.”

Fan reactions to ‘Spare’

Fans have gone easier on the book than critics. Some fans are sympathetic to Harry and what he has gone through, while some think it’s time Harry practice a little gratitude and others simply shared lighthearted jokes about the memoir.

I'm fifty pages into "Spare" and it's so desperately sad: the tone is very different to how all the out-of-context quotes make it seem. Although he keeps making jokes - mainly self-deprecating - it just ACHES. — Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) January 10, 2023

#PrinceHarry has the privilege and opportunities to have an amazing life. He has $100 Million in the bank, a wife and children and he wants us to go oh poor Harry he must speak his truth. He’s not 12, grow up and his invasion of his family’s privacy is creepy & sick. #Spare — The British Prince (@Freedom16356531) January 10, 2023

Pretty funny Harry is ridiculing Prince William’s “alarming baldness.” #Spare #BrotherBetrayal pic.twitter.com/ikzW1qr1J6 — DT Cahill (@DTCahill) January 10, 2023

#SpareUsHarry Anxiously awaiting Wills follow up Tell-Book in response to "Spare" pic.twitter.com/XXrGdf1pvh — Emily Harrison (@emharrison75) January 9, 2023

Prince Harry’s Spare Is Taking The Internet By Storm, But What Do The Critics Think?

What do the reviews say about Spare?

Between people watching Harry & Meghan, reading the leaks from Prince Harry ’s memoir Spare and now being able to read the entire book, his stories about the Royal Family have taken the internet by storm. However, what do the book critics think about this book from the Duke of Sussex? The reviews are mixed and complex, and many noted, even those who liked the book, how for a prince who desires privacy he sure does reveal a lot. 

Prince Harry’s Book Spare Has Taken The Internet By Storm

Before this book even came out there were lots of stories leaked from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare , and the revelations, allegations , and stories have been wild. 

For context, about a week before the book came out, an excerpt from it about the time Prince Harry wore a controversial Nazi uniform to a party went viral. The internet was ablaze with the updated version of this story as Prince Harry explained that William and Kate were involved. Other stories about the two brothers fighting also came up, as well as one story about how Camilla reportedly wanted Catherine to change her name after she married William. In the book, and in interviews Prince Harry has also spoken about his relationship with Camilla, and claimed she “sacrificed” him to the press . Those are only scratching the surface of the stories Prince Harry tells and the claims he makes in Spare . 

However, while the internet is all over these stories and revelations, the critics have now voiced their opinions on the book as a whole. 

What The Critics Think Of Prince Harry’s Spare

The New York Times critic Alexandra Jacobs explained that she wanted to like the memoir, especially since J.R. Moehringer helped write it, and he is a writer she adores. She then wrote that she did end up enjoying parts of it, but did not like others.

Like its author, “Spare” is all over the map — emotionally as well as physically. He does not, in other words, keep it tight.

Over at the BBC , the review has a headline that calls Spare , “the weirdest book ever written by a royal." Sean Coughlan, a royal correspondent, went on to call the book “the longest angry drunk text ever sent.” He also described the “ghost-written” book as a “fast-paced, quickfire account” of Prince Harry’s story, he also noted what he thinks is missing from the memoir:  

What's missing from the book is any sense of awareness of any wider context of the rest of the world outside. It's as if he has been blinded by the paparazzi flashlights.

After this, Coughlan noted that he thinks readers will be irritated by the book’s “self-absorption.” He wrote that while so many stories came out in this book that we’ve never heard before it all might be too much, making the last words of the review “TMI. Too much information…” 

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Joanne Kaufman at WSJ also talked about the immense detail Prince Harry goes into, noting that his “over-sharing” is a problem in the book. She referenced the frostbitten penis story that both aforementioned journalists also brought up, using the title of the book to make her point, the critic wrote: 

In his score-settling, setting-the-record-straight, ghost-written memoir, “Spare”—perhaps you’ve heard about it, then heard about it some more—Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, spills his tea about his frostbitten penis (spare us), the loss of his virginity (please, spare us) and his copious youthful drug use and alcohol consumption (who would have guessed?).

She also explained an opinion that many on the internet, especially those who criticized the docuseries Harry & Meghan , think, which is: 

What may gall the reader most is the hypocrisy. Harry claims to want privacy, but there he is putting it all out there for Oprah, Anderson and others.

Meanwhile, The Independent gave the book four out of five stars. Lucy Pavia wrote about the uncovering of many new stories, and thought it was well done and “breathtakingly frank.” She explained:

This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents. But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.

However, at the end of the review, Pavia noted something many critics also pointed out, including Victoria Murphy at Town and Country who wrote:

There is no doubt that Harry’s story is heartbreaking at times and it would be hard to come away from reading Spare without feeling some compassion for him. If you do end up caring about him when you finish this book, you may find yourself turning the last page and hoping that he does not wake up one day and wish he could take it all back.

I’ll leave you with a snippet from Charlotte Higgins review in The Guardian , which explains the mixed opinion many critics have, which includes seriously questioning how much information Prince Harry revealed. She wrote:

Spare is by turns compassion-inducing, frustrating, oddly compelling and absurd. Harry is myopic as he sits at the centre of his truth, simultaneously loathing and locked into the tropes of tabloid storytelling, the style of which his ghostwritten autobiography echoes.

It seems clear that many who reviewed this book are aware of the juxtaposition of Prince Harry wanting to not be the center of attention, but then doing all these interviews and releasing a book. While the reviews all talked about how Spare reveals many interesting unheard stories about the Royal Family, the ones mentioned here also seemed to question how much is too much. 

Spare is now available to read, and you can watch Harry & Meghan with a Netflix subscription . 

Riley Utley is the Weekend Editor at CinemaBlend. She has written for national publications as well as daily and alt-weekly newspapers in Spokane, Washington, Syracuse, New York and Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated with her master’s degree in arts journalism and communications from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Since joining the CB team she has covered numerous TV shows and movies -- including her personal favorite shows  Ted Lasso  and  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel . She also has followed and consistently written about everything from Taylor Swift to  Fire Country , and she's enjoyed every second of it.

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How did left-wing Guardian get a leaked copy of Prince Harry's book Spare? Red faces at Duke's publisher as New York-based reporter gets copy of bombshell autobiography six days early

• Details of Prince Harry's autobiography Spare have been leaked to the Guardian
• Publisher Penguin Random House said to have spared no cost in stopping leaks 
• Security arrangements echo those of the last Harry Potter book 16 years ago
• The memoir describes angry clashes between Prince Harry and Prince William

By STEWART CARR FOR MAILONLINE and SAM GREENHILL and REBECCA ENGLISH FOR THE DAILY MAIL

Published: 21:22 EST, 4 January 2023 | Updated: 03:39 EST, 6 January 2023

View comments

Questions are being asked about the leak of Prince Harry 's highly anticipated autobiography to the US edition of The Guardian, which has reported on its sensational claims about rifts among the royals .

The Guardian states it managed to obtain a copy of the book - already a bestseller - despite stringent security measures by publisher Penguin Random House ahead of its release next Tuesday.

The memoir's claims were detailed by the Guardian's New York breaking news reporter Martin Pengelly on its website .

Titled 'Spare', the book explores the prince's troubled relationship with the rest of his family as the younger brother of the heir to the throne.

The Duke and his publishers Penguin Random House went to great lengths to ensure 'Spare' is published simultaneously around the world next Tuesday 

The Guardian states it managed to obtain a copy of the book - already a bestseller - despite stringent security measures by publisher Penguin Random House ahead of its release next Tuesday (Pictured: The Guardian's New York site)

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One recollection by Prince Harry includes a clash with his brother William over Meghan Markle in the grounds of Kensington Palace in 2019. The Prince of Wales is said to have referred to her as 'difficult', rude' and 'abrasive', which Harry responds as a 'parrot[ing of] the press narrative'.

The Duke of Sussex goes on to claim that his brother 'grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and … knocked me to the floor.'

Elsewhere, Harry recalls another angry confrontation with his brother at Windsor Castle  after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in April 2021. He describes his father remonstrating with them, saying: 'Please, boys. Don't make my final years a misery.'

Elsewhere, the prince mentions names they used to refer to each other by  and adds that he later discussed their fallout with his therapist .

A source told The Times  they were unsure if the brothers' relationship will recover, adding: 'I think the book [will be] worse for them than the royal family is expecting. 

Not since the last 'Harry' book has security been so tight. As publication looms for the Duke of Sussex's memoir, the ultra-secure arrangements echo those of the final instalment of the Harry Potter series 16 years ago, insiders said yesterday 

'Everything is laid bare. Charles comes out of it better than I had expected, but it's tough on William, in particular, and even Kate gets a bit of a broadside. 

'There are these minute details and a description of the fight between the brothers. I personally can't see how Harry and William will be able to reconcile after this.'

Ultra-secure arrangements for the book are said to echo those of the final instalment of the Harry Potter series 16 years ago, insiders said this week. 

Back then, publishers spent millions of pounds trying to stop the plotline being leaked before it went on sale in bookshops. 

This week, an enormous logistics operation is under way around Prince Harry's bombshell biography Spare. 

The duke and his publishers Penguin Random House are going to great lengths to ensure it is published simultaneously around the world next Tuesday. 

Publishers spent millions of pounds trying to stop the plotline of the final installment of JK Rowling's Harry Potter series being leaked before it went on sale in bookshops. The author is pictured above at the launch of The Deathly Hallows in 2007

The hardback will be in UK bookshops when they open on Tuesday morning, with the e-book edition available to download on Kindle from shortly after midnight on the same day. 

Spare is being published in 16 languages including Chinese, Finnish, Hungarian, Spanish and Portuguese, but - in theory - no one in any country will be able to get their hands on an early copy. 

Although the official release date is January 10, readers in Australia - which is 11 hours ahead of the UK - have been left in no doubt that, for them, copies will only become available on January 11. 

In the United States, which is five to eight hours behind Britain, it will be the evening of Monday January 9 when e-book copies of the tome become available on Kindle, at the same moment as the clock strikes midnight on Tuesday morning in the UK.

Harry's tell-all book is expected to double-down on his attacks on the Royal Family. While King Charles may be spared the worst of the duke's rage, the book is understood to contain damaging details about his bitter fallout with his brother, with both William and his wife Kate coming under fire in its 416 pages. 

Spare tells Harry's story with 'raw, unflinching honesty', according to Penguin Random House. 

The Sussexes are said to have signed a $20million (£16.6million) four-book deal with the publishing giant. 

Harry's tell-all book is due to be released next Tuesday, but its contents have already been seen and reported on by the Guardian US

Publishing sources said arrangements for Harry's 'explosive' memoir's release were ultra-closely guarded and being managed in minute detail, with only a handful of senior executives aware of the exact details 

Publishing sources said arrangements for Harry's 'explosive' memoir's release were ultra-closely guarded and being managed in minute detail, with only a handful of senior executives aware of the exact details. 

Deliveries to bookshops are being scheduled to be last-minute to avoid unauthorised copies being leaked. Guarded sites across the world have been secured to house copies of the book prior to distribution. 

One likened the sophisticated security operation to the 2007 release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when JK Rowling was determined her young fans would not have the experience spoilt by learning of the boy wizard's fate before reading the seventh and final novel in the series. 

An army of guards, satellite tracking systems and legal contracts were all deployed to protect the 10 million first copies of the new Harry Potter book. 

When the finished manuscript was taken by hand from London to New York, a lawyer for the American publisher sat on it during the flight. 

When copies were sent out to retailers, lorries were fitted with satellite tracking systems which would reveal if any of the vehicles deviated from their intended routes. 

Share or comment on this article: How did the Guardian get hold of Harry's book Spare? Questions as autobiography leaks in the US

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Prince Harry Learns to Cry, and Takes No Prisoners, in ‘Spare’

At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame.

By Alexandra Jacobs

SPARE, by Prince Harry

Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and Man About Montecito, isn’t one for book learning, he reminds readers of his new memoir, “Spare.” And yet its pages are dappled with literary references, from John Steinbeck (“He kept it tight,” the prince writes admiringly of “Of Mice and Men”); to William Faulkner, whose line from “Requiem for a Nun” about the past never being dead, nor even past, he discovers on BrainyQuote.com; to Wordsworth and other poets. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” though, hit a little too close to home. “Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…?” Harry writes. “No, thank you.”

He prefers to sink into TV comedies like “Family Guy,” where he admires Stewie, the unnervingly mature baby, and “Friends,” where he identifies with the tortured Chandler Bing. Reading “Spare,” though, one kind of wants to snatch the remote control from his hands and press into them a copy of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” Not because of Harry’s military endeavors (unlike Yossarian, he seems to have felt sane only in active combat) but because of the seemingly inescapable paradox of his situation.

In the prince’s full-throated renunciation of fame and royalty with all its punishing invasions of privacy, he has only become more famous, if not more regal, trading his proximity to the throne for the No. 1 spot on cushioned chairs opposite Oprah and Anderson Cooper . With “Harry & Meghan,” the gauzy Netflix series preceding this book, he and the Duchess now might well be overexposed . (Maybe this is part of the grand plan, to drive away inquiring minds by boring them to bits?)

My interest in the English royal family tends to dwindle after the era of previous renouncers like Edward and Wallis and the dynamically dysfunctional Princess Margaret, who “could kill a houseplant with one scowl,” Harry writes. They weren’t close; Margaret once gave him a cheap pen wrapped with a rubber fish for Christmas. I devoured early episodes of “ The Crown ” but Season 5, with its focus on Charles and Diana’s marital troubles, left me delicately yawning.

Still, I expected to enjoy “Spare,” given that it was written with the help of the talented author J.R. Moehringer, whose own memoir, “ The Tender Bar, ” I adored before it was even a glimmer in Ben Affleck’s eye , and who helped the tennis star Andre Agassi’s autobiography, “Open,” transcend the locker room. And I did. In parts.

“Spare” — its title as minimalist as Agassi’s; its cover a similar full-frontal stare — is a thing of many parts, of shreds and patches, of bitter gibes (particularly at Harry’s older brother, William, the “heir” to his “spare,” whom he calls “Willy”) and sustained existential crisis. Its basic three-act structure of childhood, Army service and wedded bliss is as subdivided as a California lot into shorter episodes and paragraphs, many only one sentence long.

Harry’s distinctly English voice (he doesn’t like kilts, for example, because of “that worrisome knife in your sock and that breeze up your arse”) at times does weird battle with the staccato patois of a tough-talking private eye doing voice-over in a film noir. Describing his “Gan-Gan” at Balmoral: “She wore blue, I recall, all blue … Blue was her favorite color.” Then, like a gun moll, the Queen Mother orders a martini.

If there’s a murder Harry is trying to solve, it’s of course that of his own mother, Princess Diana, whose death in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in 1997 , under chase by paparazzi, is the defining tragedy of his life, and thus of this book. To her younger son, only 12 at the time, the click of cameras wielded by paps, as he derisively calls them, came to sound “like a gun cocking or a blade being notched open.” (From the looks of “Harry & Meghan,” which has plenty of sanctioned shots of the couple’s courtship and toddlers, he is fighting back by hand with his own iPhone.) Diana defended herself against the constant onslaught of photographers by lobbing water balloons and, more sinisterly, by hiding in the trunks of getaway cars, a trick Harry eventually picked up. “It felt like being in a coffin,” he writes. “I didn’t care.”

Mired in a “red mist” of grief and anger, the prince self-medicates at first with candy and then, as the hated tabloids report with varying degrees of accuracy, alcohol, weed, cocaine, mushrooms and ayahuasca. (More mildly he tries magnesium supplements, and I’m not sure anyone needs to know that this loosened his bowels at a friend’s wedding.)

Along with Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan — where, he observes, “you can’t kill people if you think of them as people” — he escapes repeatedly to Africa, whose lions seem less threatening than the journalistic predators at home. In one of the book’s cringier moments, he writes that Willy, who calls him Harold though his given name is Henry, stamps his foot over choosing the continent as a cause. “Africa was his thing,” Harry explains, mimicking his brother’s petulant tone. “ I let you have veterans, why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos ?”

Cattily he notes Willy’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” while dinging the Princess of Wales for being slow to share her lip gloss . Candidly he shows the then-Prince Charles doing headstands in his boxer shorts and his family’s charade of an annual performance review: the Court Circular.

Like its author, “Spare” is all over the map — emotionally as well as physically. He does not, in other words, keep it tight. Harry is frank and funny when his penis gets frostbitten after a trip to the North Pole — “my South Pole was on the fritz” — leaving him a “eunuch” just before William marries Kate Middleton. In an odd feat of projection, he gives the groom an ermine thong at the reception, then applies to his own nether regions the Elizabeth Arden cream that his mother used as lip gloss — “‘weird’ doesn’t really do the feeling justice” — and worries that “my todger would be all over the front pages” before finding a discreet dermatologist.

Therapy, in which he claims William refuses to participate, and a whiff of First by Van Cleef & Arpels, help Harry learn to cry, unlocking a stream of repressed recollections of Diana, and that’s when even the most hardened reader might herself weep. Charles’s own scent, Dior’s Eau Sauvage, and his marriage to Camilla, leave him relatively cold.

And yet when his father advises of the unrelenting and often racist press coverage of Harry’s union to Meghan — “Don’t read it, darling boy” — it’s difficult not to agree. The prince claims to have a spotty memory — “a defense mechanism, most likely” — but doesn’t appear to have forgotten a single line ever printed about him and his wife, and the last section of his tell-all degenerates into a tiresome back-and-forth about who’s leaking what and why. Maybe a little more Faulkner and less Fleet Street would be helpful here?

Still bitter over the late author Hilary Mantel, unnamed here, comparing the royal family to pandas — “uniquely barbarous” and dehumanizing, he writes, while admitting “we did live in a zoo” — Harry then turns right around and calls three courtiers the Bee, the Fly and the Wasp. He seems both driven mad by “the buzz,” as the royals’ inexhaustible chronicler Tina Brown would call it, and constitutionally unable to stop drumming it up.

SPARE | By Prince Harry | 407 pp. | Illustrated | Random House | $36

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs