The frantic attempts to decode his behaviour reminds me of self-help relationship babble in the 1990s. Then, as now – it’s not you, it’s him

Until it finally opens, there remains much speculation over precisely which artefacts will occupy Donald Trump’s eventual presidential library. My current view is that you could do a lot worse than fill it with all the volumes of text that have been written in the cause of “understanding” him. These increasingly read like the most futile female-targeted self-help books of the 1990s. You Have to Understand He is Very Transactional. Take Him Seriously But Not Literally. Guys, please – no more. We all urgently need rescuing from the Mind, Body & Statecraft section of the bookshop.

As I say, so many gazillions of words have been expended on this cause that Trump reminds me a lot of the men of the 1990s – indeed, he was one. Back then, he had emerged from a decade of valiantly avoiding contracting STIs in 1980s Manhattan – a battle he would later describe as “my personal Vietnam”. For much of the 1990s, the rest of mankind – certainly womankind – felt that personal victories of their own must be just around the corner. It definitely helped that the economy was booming and history had ended. But it was a time when people believed you could change everything through self-control/hard work/the right roadmap. In fact, speaking of roads, one of the biggest nonfiction titles of the 90s in the US was M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, a hymn to personal growth that was treated by many as the key to all mythologies.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

The Iranian nuclear programme has been set back, but it may also have been entrenched and invigorated

• Middle East crisis – live updates

To the surprise of almost no one, all sides declared victory as they formally accepted Donald Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire on Tuesday morning, but the long-term winners – if any – and losers will take some time to emerge.

By midday in the Middle East, the dust had not even settled. More than two hours after the ceasefire was supposed to have started, at 05:00 GMT, Israel said it had intercepted at least two missiles coming from Iran heading for the north of the country. Iran denied having launched anything, but Israel vowed devastating retaliation.

In 2013, more than 4,000 people on a malfunctioning 13-storey holiday boat had to spend days defecating into bags. This catch-up with passengers makes for a fun hour of unintentional comedy

With the latest instalments of the series Trainwreck, Netflix appears to be trying to grant us some brief summer break from the worst kind of horrors the true crime genre can offer. In contrast to previous episodes, which looked at the Woodstock 99 riots and Astroworld tragedy that saw 10 people die in a crowd crush at a massive Live Nation-organised concert – including a nine-year-old child – it has suddenly pivoted in tone.

Last week it gave us Mayor of Mayhem, the tale of Rob “I am not a crack addict” Ford, the crack-addicted mayor of Toronto and his very un-Canadian way of doing municipal business. In coming weeks, there will be accounts of the balloon boy’s story, a private investigation agency run by soccer moms, and “the greatest shitpost ever made”. Whether this tonal change comes as a relief from having your hopes for humanity further ground down or as psychologically jarring (should such disparate subjects as child death and municipal confusion be yoked together in the same anthology series?), will vary.

Health networks in other US cities fear the Ice operations seen in LA will be replicated in their communities

On a Wednesday morning earlier this month, Jane*, the coordinator for a mobile clinic at a temporary housing campus in Downey, just southeast of Los Angeles, was weaving through the line of patients, helping them fill out routine forms.

Everything was normal, she recalled, until she glimpsed, from the corner of her eye, the facility’s security guard whisk away the cone that had been propping open the gate for the clinic, letting it swing shut. What had welcomed care now suddenly threatened capture.

Turn the volume down, don’t use cotton buds and get your hearing tested before it’s too late. Here’s what experts recommend to keep your ears healthy

Hearing loss can make life difficult and lead to social isolation. But with extremely loud devices in our pockets, and earbuds in near-constant use, we are at more risk than ever. How can you take care of your ears to avoid problems?

We’d like to hear from couples who are tying the knot this weekend in the Veneto capital at the same time as Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ plans to marry his fiancee, former TV journalist, Lauren Sánchez in Venice this weekend have been met with protests from locals who feel the event is taking over the city.

According to reports in the Italian press, wedding planners have fully booked five of Venice’s plushest hotels and reserved almost the entire fleet of the city’s water taxis as well as a dock for Bezos’s mega-yacht, with hundreds of guests expected.

Jack Watkin, who featured in Rich Kids of Instagram, lured people to invest large sums on designer bags that failed to materialise

A fraudster who described himself as the “Kardashian of Cheshire” persuaded people to invest thousands of pounds in luxury handbags that failed to materialise by flaunting his luxury lifestyle on social media.

Jack Watkin, 26, of Alderley Edge, had gone on trial at Chester crown court on Monday, but on Tuesday – the second day of the trial – he changed his plea to guilty.

Extreme heat is bringing a stifling, dangerous, start to summer across much of the eastern US this week

A rare June heatwave is bringing a stifling, dangerous, start to summer across much of the eastern US this week, with forecasts for temperatures to get even hotter on Tuesday.

On Monday, just the second day of summer, the National Weather Service placed extreme heat warnings in effect from the Carolinas to Maine, advising against any outdoor activities under the conditions.

Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist and climate journalist based in Minnesota

The Alaska senator, who helped deal Trump’s first big legislative setback, believes there can be only so much fear that Americans can handle

Late one night about six months into Donald Trump’s first term, John McCain stepped on to the Senate floor and with a dramatic thumbs-down gesture dealt the president his first major legislative setback by defeating an attempt by his fellow Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

It was the last major political effort of the Arizona senator, who would die the following year from brain cancer, but his no vote would not have been effective had he not been joined by fellow Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who gives that incident, and many other brushes with Trump, a prominent place in Far from Home, the memoir she released on Tuesday.

Australia coach Joe Schmidt has lifted team from lowest ebb and made a country feel it can win again

Australian rugby liked what it saw – and didn’t see – last week, as the British & Irish Lions got their 2025 tour off to a losing start against Argentina. Sure, it was the opening game of a 10-match odyssey and Andy Farrell’s men were lacking cohesion after only two weeks in camp. But for a young Wallabies side rising fast under their head coach, Joe Schmidt, it put blood in the water and proved the tourists are very beatable.

Schmidt’s 6-7 record in his first season in charge of the Wallabies might not cost Lions fans much sleep but Farrell, his former second‑in‑command at Ireland, will sniff the seeds of ambush. In their last start in November, the Wallabies led Ireland 13-5 only to lose 22-19. Schmidt won’t let that happen again. The 2025 Wallabies these Lions face are light years from the lambs Eddie Jones led to slaughter at the 2023 World Cup in France.

Administration will be allowed to deport immigrants to countries other than their own

It’s Richard Luscombe in the US taking over from my colleague Tom Ambrose, and I’ll be here to guide you through the day’s political developments.

The conflict consuming Israel and Iran is dominating headlines, and you can follow happenings in our Middle East crisis liveblog here.

Right now, the bill is held together with happy thoughts and spit. I think we’ll eventually pass something, I just can’t tell you when.

• Updates from the final day at Headingley, 11am BST start

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Here come our teams. Bring it on!

“A fantastic final day in store,” reckons Krishnamoorthy V. “While all the attention shall be on Bumrah (rightly so), I have a feeling that it is Ravindra Jadeja who is going to be the matchwinner, should India win this match. A Root century is going to be inevitable whether England wins it or loses it.”

Principality Stadium, Cardiff
The US singer-songwriter graduates to the UK’s biggest venues with a theatrical show to match, featuring a house on fire, Allen Ginsberg recitals and some very real tears

Lana Del Rey is standing in a blue-on-white summer dress in front of a wood-panelled house, crying real tears next to plastic weeping willows, momentarily overcome by the size of the audience staring back at her. This sort of tension, the push-pull between genuine vulnerability and an exploration of aesthetics, has always been there in her music, and her wonderfully ambitious first stadium tour runs on it. Its theatrical staging and big ideas are all the more remarkable thanks to some very human moments of doubt.

Opening with Stars Fell on Alabama, one of several new songs foreshadowing a country record that might be around the corner, Del Rey’s voice is barely there, with its final notes followed by a dash to the wings to kiss her husband. But she stays on the rails. During Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Ultraviolence, she falls to the floor in Busby Berkeley-esque arrangements alongside her dancers, her vocals now steely as power chords and pulsing red lights ratchet up the drama.

The show about retro football is back with a Homeric series on how the sport evolved at the end of the 20th century

By Nessun Dorma

The European Championships of 1980 and 2000 were only 20 years apart. They also belonged, both literally and figuratively, to different millennia. Euro 80 was a violent mess of negativity, apathy and hooliganism, Euro 2000 a joyous, sunkissed celebration of 21st-century football.

That jarring contrast was the spark for the latest series of Nessun Dorma: an odyssey through the history of football in the 1980s and 1990s. Our aim is to highlight, via a series of subterranean dives into each football season, how it went from being a “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people” – as a Sunday Times editorial called it in 1985 – to a multi-gazillion pound industry.

Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther

Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed.

Shrouded in secrecy, the US law enforcement agency has become a kind of domestic stormtrooper for Maga’s agenda

Across the US, group chats and community threads have started spiking with warnings. Not just the typical alerts about traffic or out of service subway stations, but where and when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid was last seen. What places to avoid. What the plainclothes agents might look like.

“Hey all,” a Brooklyn, New York, resident wrote in a closed chat with neighbors last week. “A little birdie just told me ICE is out.”

The hosts have lost the veteran Ramona Bachmann but Lia Wälti’s leadership gives them hope

This article is part of the Guardian’s Euro 2025 Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 16 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from two teams each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 2 July.

Eliza Lynch was at her warlord partner’s side in a cataclysmic war and died in obscurity in Paris but is now being honoured – although not without controversy

By the time she turned 21, Eliza Alice Lynch had fled famine-stricken County Cork for Paris, married and left a French officer, become entangled with a South American warlord-in-waiting, and returned with him to Paraguay.

Ten years later, her partner – by then, president and grand marshal Francisco Solano López – led Paraguay into a cataclysmic four-year war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Half of Paraguay’s population was wiped out. López was cornered and shot on a jungle battlefield called Cerro Corá, along with their 15-year-old son.

The former governor, now a New York City mayoral candidate, marks the party’s drift into boorishness and cruelty

As the far right has gained ascendancy, and the 2024 election is historicized as a blowout victory for Donald Trump rather than the relatively close contest that it actually was, members of the Democratic establishment and party leadership seem to be settling on the lesson that they will take into the second decade of the Trump era: if you can’t beat him, imitate him.

It’s long been the impulse of the party to move right, chasing Republican victories by replicating Republican policy positions, and since their loss last November many Democrats have followed in this decades-old tradition, shifting their rhetoric still further rightward on border policy, crypto, foreign policy, trans rights and DEI. They respond to polling and to a vague sense of the cultural zeitgeist, aiming less to persuade than to imitate. Often, Democrats seem as if they are not offering a different policy vision for the country so much as they are offering a different stylistic one: the same austerity, cultural revanchism and inequality but in a more polite package.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Peake stars opposite Jason Isaacs, as Politkovskaya’s husband, in this sentimental look at the life of a woman who, 19 years after her death, remains a folk hero

This British-American co-production offers a dramatised portrait of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (played by Maxine Peake) who was assassinated in 2006. Politkovskaya’s gutsy, impassioned reporting on the second Chechen war was highly critical of the Kremlin, the Russian army and Vladimir Putin personally. (The fact that she was murdered on his birthday was surely no coincidence.) Nineteen years after her death, she remains a folk hero worldwide for resistances to autocracy, especially given the rise in repression everywhere and constant threats to journalists.

Given all that, the film deserves respect for the subject matter, even though this is a pretty basic rendition of Politkovskaya’s story, a little too sticky with hagiographic sentimentality and the cliches of crusading journalist-led movies. It also should be noted that Politkovskaya’s family haven’t given the film their blessing; some of them may not be happy, for instance, with the thinly written characterisations of their fictional counterparts, like her son Ilya (Harry Lawtey) who is made to seem peevish and self-absorbed even when his feelings are understandable. (“I’m not watching you die!” he bellows at one point.)

My talent for attracting coffee stains and mud splatters brings misery to my friends – especially the ones who lend me their pristine white shirts

I have a friend who curates her wardrobe pretty carefully – there’s nothing in it she doesn’t wear – and consequently she gives, sells or lends me a lot of things, and her taste is nonpareil so I never say no. Maybe one item in 10 is white, which unleashes dismay: she has to watch while I stain a pair of cream jeans she has kept pristine for five years, as fast as you can say, “Ooh, what’s this delicious salad dressing?”

Once, I splashed mud all the way up the back of a skirt she’d given me while she was cycling behind me, saying, “We’ve really got to get you some mudguards if you want to wear white.” Once, I got Tabasco sauce on her white bra, which was fine because who would see it? And yet, not fine, because how do you get sauce on your bra? Once, I spilled espresso down a white shirt, and that ain’t never coming out – but it actually wasn’t hers, it was her mother’s, so I’d trashed three decades of spotlessness in a moment.

By refusing to slash funding to poorer nations, Spain became an outlier in the new world disorder. Next week it hosts a UN summit in Seville to prove it

Spain swims against the tide. At a time when much of Europe is grappling with economic crises, caving in to populist anti-aid narratives and slashing development budgets, the country is increasing its financial support for the global south. Instead of planning future aid cuts, Spain has put ambitious goals for 2030 into law.

Moreover, at a time when much of the world is looking inward and retreating from multilateralism, Spain will host a UN summit in Seville this month, the first of its kind in the global north. Dozens of heads of government, state and multilateral organisations will discuss how to finance development in a post-aid world, suffocated by military spending and unpayable debt in dozens of countries, particularly those in Africa. For the Spanish government, the forthcoming Seville summit is a clear political statement.

Our cartoonist visits Poenari Castle on Mount Cetatea to see what nonsense Vlad Dracula III has spouted this time

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• David’s new book, Chaos in the Box: buy it now

Researchers say urgent conservation efforts will be needed to mitigate the ‘shocking statistic’ that threatens to unravel ecosystems

More than 500 bird species could vanish within the next century, researchers have found, calling for urgent “special recovery programmes” such as captive breeding and habitat restoration to rescue unique species.

Birds such as the puffin, European turtle dove and great bustard will be among those to disappear from our skies if trends continue, according to the paper. Their loss threatens to unravel ecosystems across the globe.

The rapper is booked to headline the Rubicon festival in Bratislava, which protesters have called ‘a debasement of all victims of the Nazi regime’

A petition has been launched calling on the mayor of Bratislava to prevent Kanye West – legally known as Ye – from headlining a festival in Bratislava, calling the planned appearance “an insult to historic memory, a glorification of wartime violence and debasement of all victims of the Nazi regime”.

The Rubicon festival in the Slovakian capital claimed that they had secured an exclusive performance by the “hip-hop visionary, cultural icon and controversial genius” for mid-July.

• Wallabies coach says agreement is not to release all players

• Schmidt highlights clash between Waratahs and Fiji games

The Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt has hit back at the British and Irish Lions management, insisting Australia are adhering to the tour agreement regarding the release of international players for pre-Test games and that his front-line home players were only unavailable because they were preparing to face Fiji on Sunday week.

The issue has flared up again this week after the Lions chief executive, Ben Calveley, said he expected Schmidt to release Wallaby players back to their Super Rugby franchises for their respective games against the touring team. Some fringe Wallabies are due to feature for Western Force this Saturday but it is set to be a different story for the subsequent games against the Reds, the Waratahs and the Brumbies.

HR manager said he was ‘devastated’ by criticism but judge says he suffered no unfavourable treatment

Pointing out that an employee’s work is messy and full of mistakes is not harassment, a tribunal has ruled.

Bosses need to be able to identify workers’ weaknesses in an attempt to improve their performance, an employment judge said.

• Trafford was disappointed deal fell through last summer

• Newcastle ready to sell Longstaff or Willock but not Isak

Newcastle hope to succeed where they failed a year ago by signing the Burnley and England goalkeeper James Trafford for a fee that could approach £40m.

The 22-year-old has long been admired by Eddie Howe, with the Cumbrian’s excellent footwork a key reason why Newcastle’s manager was disappointed a £20m move for Trafford foundered last summer.

The maverick behind Tom Holland’s Romeo and Nicole Scherzinger’s Sunset Boulevard is now stunning passersby with Rachel Zegler’s Palladium balcony scene

Rarely can a balcony have caused such a kerfuffle. But the row about the extramural staging of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina in Evita at the London Palladium is a sign of its director’s increasing celebrity status. Indeed I’m tempted to rephrase a number from an earlier Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical: “Jamie Lloyd Superstar, Do you think you’re what they say you are?” What, in short, does it tell us about our theatrical culture that this puckishly likable director has become a figure famed on both sides of the Atlantic?

His beginnings, as a recent Vogue feature pointed out, were relatively modest. He grew up in rural Dorset, was turned on to live theatre by seeing Michael Jackson on tour and attended the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. But, right from the start, there was something there. The first production of his that I saw was The Caretaker, which in 2007 transferred from the Sheffield Crucible to what was then the Tricycle in London. Two things made it original: the use of a creepy score by Ben and Max Ringham to give the play a film noir feel and the insistent presence of Nigel Harman’s Mick reminding us that the work is about the fraternal bond between him and the brain-damaged Aston, which Pinter’s intrusive hobo fails to understand.

The award-wining composer of soundtracks to video games including Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is composing again for the first time since a traumatic pandemic

For the fortunate among us, the Covid lockdowns have, years later, become a memory – if not distant, then certainly ever-so-slightly faded. We have had a few years now, to get out there, to rebuild careers and relationships, to travel, to live in the world again. That’s not the case for everyone. Award-winning composer Jessica Curry, who crafted the beguiling, elegiac soundtracks to games such as Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, has only just emerged. Diagnosed with a degenerative disease in her mid-20s and seriously immunocompromised as a result of her condition, she began isolating at the start of the pandemic, and for the next five years barely left her home. While there, unable to work or write, her world began to collapse.

“Like many people I had an extraordinarily painful and difficult pandemic,” she says. “I watched my dad die on Zoom, and then my auntie and more family members. Then they found a tumour in my ovary, and I had major abdominal surgery, but the operation had gone wrong, so I nearly died in 2022. While I was recovering from the third operation, the roof of our house fell in. It felt like a metaphor for everything. If a novelist had written this, no one would believe the story. And things just kept going wrong. So I wasn’t writing music, I wasn’t even listening to music. All of a sudden, I couldn’t bear it. I’m still trying to work out what that rejection was about – I was just in too much of a mental crisis. I wasn’t even feeding or dressing myself.”

Leftwing Zohran Mamdani sees surging support in race against former governor for Democratic nomination

New Yorkers are headed to the polls on Tuesday in a primary election that is both likely to decide the city’s next mayor and have major political implications for the future of the Democratic party.

The race pits two drastically different Democrats against one another. Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist endorsed by the progressive wing of the Democratic party, is the main challenger to Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who has been backed by the party’s centrists and billionaire donors.

The NBA postseason remains a psychodrama of moments, memes and memories unlike anything in sport. We look back at the biggest takeaways

If a single, overarching lesson can be taken from this year’s NBA postseason, it’s this one: no game is over until the clock hits 00:00. Whether it was the New York Knicks stealing victory from the jaws of defeat against the Celtics in Boston in round two, Aaron Gordon’s buzzer-beating dunk sealing a crucial win for the Nuggets against the Clippers in Los Angeles in round one, or the Indiana Pacers defeating the odds over and over again with their clutch time brilliance throughout the playoffs, a lead has never felt less safe in the NBA.

The Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, is about to descend on Venice with his fiancee, some ex-Marines and his limitless credit card. We meet the Italian activists who are saying: enough

When she heard that Jeff Bezos was getting married in Venice this June, Heather Jane Johnson felt worse than she had in her entire life. Twenty-five years ago, she ceased trading as a bookseller in Boston, Massachusetts. “I lost a lot because of Bezos and the complicity of Americans in the making of Amazon,” the 53-year-old says. “A big reason I moved to Italy is because I felt betrayed by my countrypeople.”

So when posters went up calling a public meeting in the city she now calls home, she went, and she has been to every meeting of anti-Bezos activists since, including one the day before her own wedding last week. “These young people have really restored my faith in humanity,” Johnson says.

We would like to hear about the best new podcasts you have listened to this year so far and why

We would like to hear about the new podcasts you have particularly enjoyed listening to so far this year.

Is there a podcast from this year that has you rapt? Are there any new releases that you would recommend?

Oil has fallen to its lowest level since June’s conflict began, while stock markets have jumped across Asia and Europe

• Oil prices sink after Iranian strike on US airbase reduces fears of market disruption

Travel and leisure stocks across Europe are rallying too.

This has pushed up the STOXX Europe travel and leisure index by 4.1% in early trading, which Reuters reports it the biggest one-day jump since 10 April.

PM says current system is ‘broken’ and there is a ‘clear moral case for change’

• Labour MPs launch major rebellion to stop welfare bill

Frances Ryan reports for the Guardian:

Downing Street’s disability cuts will have a “devastating” impact on women’s health and dignity and could breach equality law, the government has been warned.

Nato secretary general urges alliance to push for military investment before arrival of US president this evening

• Analysis: Summit set to be triumphant for Trump but deflating for Ukraine

Whittaker also says that he is expecting US president Donald Trump “might deliver some remarks” on his views on the summit, as he stresses that “we need to make sure that everyone’s investing in the common defence of the Alliance.”

“I don’t want to … sort of … steal what he might say, nor do I claim to be able to read his mind and know what he’s going to say. But I think he has demonstrated through, again, decisive action leading to peace.”

“And again, that’s good for Europe, because there’s been a lot of irregular flows of migrants through Europe, from the Middle East because of the instability.

And so hopefully, with Syria now appearing to be stable, with Iran, maybe in check a little more than they had been, I think we could really see a generational moment here where the Middle East is more stable than it has been in a while.”

“That strength is what’s going to deliver peace for generations to come, because no one will want to mess with Nato and the Alliance.”

“I have said that many times, and I know you have heard me say it, the United States is going to be a reliable ally, and as you see, and as you’ve seen over the last several days, the United States has certain capabilities that you want an alliance to have.”

“We’ve never been more engaged, that’s the thing.

I sound like a broken record, and I am sure there are people in this room that have heard me say this in many different places, whether it’s in Estonia or Latvia or in Turkey wherever I’ve been.

Today’s rumours are still feeling that late-Sunday file

Despite a breakthrough season at Paris Saint-Germain, where he registered double digits for both goals and assists in Ligue 1 and made a sizeable contribution to the club’s maiden Champions League triumph, Bradley Barcola finds himself as the odd one out in Luis Enrique’s forward line. Ousmane Dembélé, Désiré Doué and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia appear to be in the box seats for PSG’s starting XI, the latter signing in January from Napoli, which has meant the absurdly talented Barcola could move on this summer. Europe’s elite are lining up, fluttering their eyelashes at the 22-year-old, with Arsenal, Bayern Munich and Liverpool all seen as frontrunners, should Barcola (and PSG) decide to move on.

Nothing stirs the heart quite like the words “Japanese wonderkid” and the latest J1 League star to make his way to England is Kōta Takai, who is on the verge of a £5m move to Tottenham from Kawasaki Frontale – which would constitute a record sale from the Japanese league. The 20-year-old centre-back is already a senior international and, standing at 6ft4in, is expected to slot straight into Thomas Frank’s first team, competing for a place alongside Micky van de Ven, Cristian Romero, Kevin Danso and Radu Dragusin.

Low-cost and quickly discarded products are playing a key role in world’s fastest-growing waste problem – electronics

It is cheap, often poorly made, and usually ends up in the bin or buried among the other knick-knacks, takeaway menus and birthday candles in the kitchen drawer.

Known as “fast-tech”, these low-cost electronics are increasingly common – from mini-fans and electric toothbrushes, to portable chargers and LED toilet seats, often bought for just a few pounds online.

All seems perfect for these rich and successful New Yorkers – until a bond is violently shattered in this sharp and pleasurable debut

Amos and Emerson are the best of friends; everyone knows this. They are a model of male intimacy and understanding: confiding in each other, trusting each other, hugging each other (“real, loving hugs, clutches without irony”). Theirs is truly a friendship for the ages.

Or so it seems. For on the weekend of Emerson’s 52nd birthday, an occasion at the centre of Hal Ebbott’s probing and insightful debut novel, something happens that changes everything – and raises the question of whether we can ever truly know anyone.