Books I Read in March 2026

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams is an account of the author’s employment at Facebook as a director of global public policy, working closely with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for six years. Hailing from New Zealand with a professional background as a diplomat, Wynn-Williams joined the social media company in 2011 and was initially full of idealism about Facebook’s power to connect people around the world. According to Wynn-Williams, Sandberg did the total opposite of what she preached in her book Lean In about supporting women in the workplace. Her portrayal of Zuckerberg’s discomfort in meetings with world leaders are the main source of dark humour in the book. The success of the book has been driven by the Streisand effect of Meta attempting to block its publication, and while the toxic workplace culture, the role of Facebook in the genocide in Myanmar, the algorithms engineered to exploit vulnerable people and the social awkwardness of its creator have already been documented elsewhere, Careless People is a devastating exposé by a former senior employee which should be widely read.

Translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Hooked by Asako Yuzuki follows the enormous success of Butter in 2024. It tells the story of career-focused Eriko and her intense obsession with a lifestyle blogger called Shoko who presents herself online self-deprecatingly as a lazy housewife. Hooked was originally published before Butter in 2015 when more people read “traditional” blogs (hello to everyone still reading this one!) and before other social media platforms truly started to dominate the influencer world and people’s attention spans, so while some of the themes such as how to appear authentic online are still relevant and intriguing, the context feels amusingly quaint. The commentary on Japanese society’s standards for women adds weight to this slow-burn psychological thriller, which only slightly lacks the bite of Butter. Many thanks to 4th Estate for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024, Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan tells the story of the Green family who relocated from Waterford to south London in the 1980s, to escape the social stigma of Carmel’s teenage pregnancy and her brother Richie’s alcoholism. In 1990, when a toddler from their estate is found dead, Carmel’s now ten-year-old daughter, Lucy, is taken in for questioning about what happened. Meanwhile, the Green family are put up in a hotel by Tom Hargreaves, an ambitious tabloid journalist trying to extract information from them about their past to add colour to his reporting. It’s an excellent framing device for exploring “ordinary human failings” and Nolan deftly explores shame and generational trauma in this impressive novel about a dysfunctional family quietly attempting to move on from the past.