I worked at a bookshop in west London in the 2010s. The shop was split into two halves: turn right through the door and you reached fiction; turn left and you hit non-fiction. 

Each day I would watch the customers bifurcate. Parents of young children would be dragged towards the shelves with and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Tourists and retirees would enjoy a slow peruse of our classic literature selection, tenderly cradling the spine of a Brontë or Austen. And middle-aged men would stride in after work and lift Peter Frankopan’s historical tome or Antony Beevor’s doorstopper about the Ardennes offensive, like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world.

Why don’t men read more fiction? This is a question that has spurred a flurry of conversation within the publishing world, interrogating the premise, the causes and the possible solutions. 

It is, in a way, part of the discourse about toxic masculinity. To read fiction is to imagine other lives, to empathise with them, to unlock new wells of understanding. It is an antidote to misogyny, to extremism, to fascism. Yet men are, in the eyes of many, recusing themselves from this, moving through society like automata, scrolling, dead-eyed, through social media, and then going home to play Call of Duty and watch porn. But have men actually stopped engaging with fiction?

In a YouGov survey this autumn, 32 per cent of British men said they had read no books in the previous three months, compared with only 20 per cent of women.

In an Arts Council-funded survey of reading habits last year, 15 per cent of male respondents described themselves as “non-readers” (versus 10 per cent of women), while women were 11 per cent more likely to say that they “enjoyed” reading.

It is a discrepancy that starts early. In June, the National Literacy Trust published a report on children’s reading habits. From ages five to eight, 56.3 per cent of boys reported they enjoyed reading, compared with 67.1 per cent of girls; from eight to 18, that percentage fell to 28.8 per cent of boys and 42.3 per cent of girls. 

There are roughly four-and-a-half million boys aged between eight and 18 in the UK. More than three million of them would not say that they “enjoy” reading. 

This despite a curriculum dominated by male authors. Research published by the End Sexism in Schools campaign in 2023 found that only two per cent of GCSE English literature students study a book or play written by a female author. Eighty per cent of all GCSE students in 2022 studied JB Priestley’s , while 72 per cent read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Everywhere boys turn, the traditional dominance of male authors is being reasserted. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s dominated cinemas all summer. A new series of Amazon’s JRR Tolkien-inspired The Rings of Power is about to launch on streaming. Fortnite has released a series of “skins” so that players can look like characters from Frank Herbert’s novels. Male authors are all around them, yet boys are lagging behind girls.

Some, though, would say that today’s male fiction writers are struggling to be heard. The critic Jude Cook founded Conduit Books, a publishing house specialising in male authors, in 2025. He was motivated by a sense that “in the small and relatively negligible niche of literary fiction, new or young male authors are not coming through”.

He cites the statistic that almost 80 per cent of fiction commissioning editors in the UK are women “and so want work that resonates with them”. 

Women want to publish stories about women, and so men are starved of stories about men, his thinking goes. “If young men don’t see themselves represented in the pages of fiction, they’re less likely to pick up the quill themselves,” Cook adds.

Certainly, research commissioned by The Women’s Prize in 2022 suggested that men bought just 20 per cent of the books sold by the 20 bestselling female authors, while women bought 44 per cent of the books sold by the 20 bestselling men.

Men, it seems, have a stronger allegiance to their own gender, when it comes to books. But does that necessarily mean that men are underrepresented on the page? This year’s Booker Prize, won by a man, featured four men on its six-person shortlist, while the two novels by women – Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King and Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say – both deal with issues surrounding masculinity.

Cook points, instead, to this year’s Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, which was won by Perry from an all-woman shortlist. 

The link between representation and writing is well established, though it does raise the question of where these young female novelists found their inspiration. After all, 76 per cent of the authors covered in Key Stage Three English (studied in early secondary school) are male.

The more I dig into this question, the more confused I feel by the differing perspectives. “What’s missing from our literary culture is a positive portrayal of traditionally masculine characters,” Liza Libes, an American books influencer who has railed against the exclusion of men from fiction, tells me. “There appears to be a general stigma against positive depictions of traditional masculinity.”

Across social media, however, fans of Larry McMurtry’s 1985 Pulitzer-winning western have celebrated the novel’s resurgence. Like James Clavell’s , it is a beefy novel, enamoured with rugged traditional masculinity (and, like , imminently the subject of a lavish TV adaptation). “I imagine that the publishing industry would bring in a whole new readership if it were open to pushing out more books of this nature,” says Libes.

Yet both Perry and Strout’s celebrated novels present male gentleness as aspirational. For every novel like Caro Claire Burke’s potboiler or David Szalay’s Booker-winning , which depict difficult and/or violent men, there are plenty of books that are popular at present that place men on the right side of history. And there is also the fact that crime and thrillers, the most profitable genre in fiction (among both male and female buyers), is still dominated by male authority figures doling out justice.

So the conditions seem to be in place for male readers to thrive, yet the evidence suggests they are just not engaging.

Tom Willis is one of the bright young things of London’s resurgent literary scene. He founded the Soho Reading Series, a live literary event held at various London venues, in an attempt to make public declamation of fiction sexy again (or sexy for the first time). 

“I really deplore the whole sociology around this,” he tells me, when I ask him what’s wrong with men. “I wish men would do cooler things than play video games alone all day.”

His events have been repeatedly cited as an example of fresh energy being injected into literary fiction, countering the narrative of decline. “I’m in the business of celebrating literary culture, not complaining about it,” he adds. Yet, for all that he is the foppish figurehead of the shows, appearing in immaculate suits like a young Gay Talese, his events feature 70 per cent women writers.

What if this is a crisis in publishing that isn’t unique to this gender split? Time and again, I speak to people in publishing who are depressed by the limited opportunities to publish work that isn’t a sequel by a celebrity author.

Year-on-year, book sales by volume have been falling since the pandemic. Frequently I meet people who feel like podcasts have killed the non-fiction market, giving punters witty 40-minute versions of books that, a decade ago, they would’ve spent 20 quid on. 

The one consistent growth area in all of publishing right now is audiobooks. It is as if publishers are making a compromise, trying to repurpose dusty old books for the modern era.

But while long-form non-fiction is facing the biggest squeeze right now (in 2025 sales it was down 6 per cent year-on-year), that is not necessarily reflected in independent bookshops. “We probably sell more non-fiction than fiction,” says Roland Bates, who runs the independent Kirkdale Bookshop in south London. “What draws people in is variety.”

And while the evidence supports the claim that women are reading more books than men, it is also true that men account for more than 60 per cent of traffic to UK news websites. Is it qualitatively better to read Sarah J Maas and Richard Osman than it is to tear through live blogs of the US  midterms?

“The argument for bringing fiction into men’s diets is that the best novels are engines for empathy,” says Conduit’s Cook. “And in the current political climate, men badly need to see variant views of the world they live in.”

And there we return, again, to the true anxiety about men: the reality of the male reading crisis might be marginal, but the sense prevails that fiction could perform a curative function on the male psyche.

“When you spend time playing a video game and you go out into the world afterwards, the world is denuded,” says Willis. “If you spend time reading and go out into the world, your world is much improved.” 

If there is a crisis within masculinity – with young men and misogyny and fascism – then the tools of the imagination, the drivers of compassion, must be deployed. It is a lofty ambition for fiction, but one that offers some hope that all is not actually lost.