You Are Here by David Nicholls review – love is in the fresh air
Alex Preston
Thrillers of the month
Crime and thrillers of the month – review
Alison Flood
An unreliable narrator keeps her husband and readers guessing; the welcome return of burned-out cop Jake Jackson; a multilayered family thriller; and a disturbing boarding school secret
Memoir
Knife by Salman Rushdie review – a story of hatred defeated by love
An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi review – an insider’s take
Simukai Chigudu
Autobiography and memoir
A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton review – anatomy of hypochondria
Fiona Sturges
Memoir, cultural history and bleak humour characterise this brilliant personal exploration of health anxiety
Biography books
Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah by Ian Buruma review – a man of his time… and ours
Joe Moshenska
A brisk and engaging biography of Baruch Spinoza, the man who inspired many secular Jewish thinkers, is least convincing when it offers him as an example of ‘cancel culture’
Autobiography and memoir
The Half Bird by Susan Smillie review – a life less ordinary
Alex Clark
History books
Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster review – no place like home
Kathryn Hughes
Politics books
Head North by Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram review – northern mayors’ manifesto for hope
Benjamin Myers
Society books
A Necessary Kindness by Juno Carey review – demystifying abortion: an insider’s account of its long and painful history
Barbara Ellen
Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.
Novelist Percival Everett on American Fiction and rewriting Huckleberry Finn
Michael Magee
There’s a disbelief at how I’ve ended up
The Belfast novelist on moving between memoir and fiction in his prize-winning debut, turning down a spot on Granta’s best young British novelists list and why Lords of the Rings was his ‘gateway drug’
‘I will defeat Richard Osman!’
Holly Jackson on being Britain’s top selling female crime author
Lucy Knight
The YA novelist talks about her early love of Tomb Raider, true crime and fangirling the cast of the BBC adaptation of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
Helen Garner
People would give me death stares in the street
Rachel Cooke
Liu Cixin
I’m often asked – there’s science fiction in China?
Mat Osman
I wanted to write about a real London – dirty, dangerous, working class
Ursula Kenny
Barbi Marković
The real horror story is life itself
Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.
Regulars
The books of my life
Marian Keyes: ‘Books have one shot to impress me and if you miss, you miss’
Big idea
The big idea: are we about to discover a new force of nature?
The wealth of emerging evidence suggest that physics may be on the brink of something big
Where to start with
Where to start with: Patricia Highsmith
Thanks to Netflix’s moody adaptation, Ripley, there’s more awareness of Highsmith’s skills as an expert writer of guilt, ambivalence and moral dilemmas at odds with reality
Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.
