Author will highlight the ‘enormous disadvantage’ handed to children without access to books, and call on government to improve early-years literacy

Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce is calling on Keir Starmer’s government to “stand up and give a visible sign that this country values its children�.

The author is holding a summit on children’s reading in Liverpool on Wednesday, at which the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, and former children’s laureates Michael Rosen and Cressida Cowell are also set to speak.

In frank and hilarious style, the author recounts the significant encounters that helped make him who he is

In this, Edmund White’s sixth memoir, the American novelist and critic observes that a universal prudishness about sex sits alongside the fact that it is constantly on our minds. Sex, White writes, with the nonchalant wisdom that runs throughout this book, is “a language one speaks� that is both “communal and isolating�. Transcribing the vocabulary of sex – especially sex between men – has been White’s lifelong literary project, most famously in the semi-autobiographical 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story. Loves of My Life approaches the task with refreshing candour. The result is something like an erotic almanac, charting the shifting sexual mores and conventions of gay life through seven decades, from the “oppression of the 1950s� to the “brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labelled ‘woke’�.

White begins the memoir by confessing that, despite having “a small penis�, he has been “stung� by sexual desire since the age of 10. This early moment of authorial undress is a typical piece of self-satire, part of his puckish compulsion to make himself the butt of the joke. It is, he admits in one of many sharp asides about the mechanics of life writing, an auto-fictive sleight-of-hand, an act of “literary daredevilry� which here makes him a consistently endearing, amiable narrator. The book’s funniest moments arise in dialogue that White has himself speak as a delightfully dry and “curiously wise� adolescent. In one scene, he gauges the receptiveness of an apparently straight potential lover by inventing a tall tale about a promiscuous queer schoolmate. Noticing that his audience has become aroused, he announces: “Well it’s me. I’m the cocksucker.�

This history of international justice is an important primer for our dark times and surprisingly optimistic about our chances of putting today’s despots in the dock

On a Monday morning last month the Russian general Igor Kirillov left his flat in Moscow. A powerful bomb hidden in an e-scooter blew him up. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said it was behind the assassination. The previous day it had charged him with war crimes: the use of banned chemical weapons that had poisoned more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

His killing was a brutal extrajudicial moment. Since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s embattled government has sought justice in two ways. Its agencies have targeted perpetrators responsible for murdering Ukrainians – the commanders who give orders, technicians who design long-range missiles used in nightly attacks.

Nicci French’s latest gem; an unsettling brainteaser from Japanese enigma Uketsu; the tensions that mar the maiden voyage of an airship; and a sojourn on a scary Scottish island

I try not to repeat myself too much when it comes to the authors I pick for this column. But there is one name I always make an exception for: Nicci French, because this husband and wife duo just keep going from strength to strength. Their latest, The Last Days of Kira Mullan (Simon & Schuster), follows Nancy North, who is recovering from a mental breakdown and being cared for solicitously by her boyfriend, Felix, as they move to a new flat in Harlesden, north-west London. She meets her new neighbours – including, briefly, Kira, whom she bumps into the evening before Kira is found dead by her own hand. Nancy, though, doesn’t believe Kira took her own life, and begins investigating when the police quickly close the case.

The trouble is, nobody takes Nancy seriously. Once people know about her illness, “they look at you in a different way. Every odd thing you do, anything you say, if you get a bit sad, a bit angry, people think that might be a sign of you going crazy again.� As she shouts into the void – “Being angry is not being haywire. Being suspicious is not being paranoid. Wanting answers is not a sign of paranoid delusion� – her life begins to unravel. This is the pair’s 26th novel, and they are still keeping me up far too late, rushing through the pages in a panicky, obsessive fashion as I race to the conclusion.

Large, gruesome, brutal and gluttonous: Donald Trump is the archetypal ogre. So how did he manage to stomp back for a second term?

The animated film Shrek opens with the eponymous hero wiping his bottom on a book. Shrek then emerges from the toilet and we follow his swamp-savvy morning routine. He bathes his huge and oddly luminous body in mud. He brushes his teeth with slime. He kills fish for his supper with his flatulence. So far so good.

But Shrek’s life is about to be interrupted. Lord Farquaad, the punctilious local potentate, is rounding up various misfits and banishing them to Shrek’s swamp. The film has Shrek put up “keep out� signs; he dreams of building a wall; and he frightens anyone who comes into his swamp with fierce-but-fake-but-fierce shows of aggression. But it’s no good. Shrek soon feels himself overwhelmed by “squatters� (as he calls them) and is furious.

Smell has an outsize effect on our thoughts and moods, so it’s worth paying more attention to it

If you have been on holiday recently, do you think you could recall and describe what the place smelled like? You probably don’t get asked that question very often. And yet, the characteristic smell of a place seems to contain its special essence. Photos can’t truly bring back the feeling of being there, but smell has that power.

Our sense of smell develops before we’re born, and it is strongly linked to brain centres associated with creating new memories and perceiving emotions and bodily sensations. As a result, smells can merge these together, forming vividly personal memories. Most of us have smells that act as a trigger, transporting us to another time and place; for some it is the ocean breeze in summer, for others it might be urban smells of coffee houses, exhaust fumes or a hot pavement on a sunny day. I remember moving to Chicago after completing my PhD in Sweden 15 years ago. In the taxi from the train station, amid the gloomy midwestern winter, I realised the entire city was doused in the most incredible chocolate smell. I opened the window and took a deep sniff. That familiar scent, coming from a chocolate factory on the west side of town, immediately made me feel at ease. I believe Proust was right when he wrote that smells contain “the vast structure of recollection�.

Beecher’s beautiful memoir, written partly in response to the death of her brother aged 25, describes in startling detail the highs and lows of existence

The title of Anna Beecher’s first work of nonfiction can be read in various ways – an expression of triumph, relief or anticlimax. She uses it as a punchline to the book’s opening chapter, which recounts a car accident she experienced as a graduate student in the US. Here she conjures in vivid detail the violent shock of impact, the moments of silent disbelief in the immediate aftermath as she waits for understanding to catch up with physical sensation, dreading the discovery of what happened to the occupants of the other car, now spinning on its roof.

In the event, no one is hurt, but Beecher pictures all too readily a parallel reality in which the crash resulted in several deaths, and she and her friend return home carrying the weight of that knowledge. “Our lives are punctured by moments of impossibility when the future unlatches from the present and a gap opens, which we must find a way to step over,� she writes. Her memoir is structured around these points of shock in her own life, and for the most part the experiences she relates are recognisable, even ordinary: being bullied at school, brushes with binge drinking and bulimia, various heartbreaks, a breakdown, a parent’s illness, the loneliness of leaving family and friends to move continents. “Looking back at this chain of non-disasters, from which all parties emerged bruised but alive, I now see loss,� she says. But the cumulative toll of these ruptures is so significant because they are satellites orbiting the central tragedy of her life – the death of her elder brother from cancer at the age of 25: “Little losses, against the vast loss of John.�

We All Come Home Alive by Anna Beecher is published by W&N (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

A new Sally Rooney, the return of le Carré’s George Smiley, plus real-life revelations from Al Pacino and Salman Rushdie ... Guardian critics pick the year’s best fiction, memoir, children’s books and more

From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – Justine Jordan picks this year’s highlights in fiction.

From a radical retelling of Huckleberry Finn to Al Pacino’s autobiography, novelists and nonfiction writers reveal the books they will be giving as gifts – and the volumes they would love to find in their own stocking
Illustrations by Lehel Kovács

Author of the award-winning Brooklyn (Penguin) and Long Island (Picador)

From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – this year’s highlights in fiction

In a year of surprises – a posthumous fable from Gabriel García Márquez, a superhero collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves – the biggest news, as ever, was a new Sally Rooney novel. Intermezzo (Faber) landed in September: the story of two brothers mourning their father and negotiating relationships with each other and the women in their lives, it is a heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief. With one strand exploring the neurodiverse younger brother’s perspective, and a conflicted stream-of-consciousness for the older, it opens up a more fertile direction after 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.

A new novel from Alan Hollinghurst is always an event, and in Our Evenings (Picador) he is at the top of his game, mapping Britain’s changing mores through the prisms of class, race, politics and sex in the memoir of a half-Burmese actor whose scholarship to public school catapults him into the world of privilege. Tender, elegiac and gorgeously attentive to detail, it’s a masterly evocation of the gay experience over the past half century.

From a boy on a snowy midnight adventure to a gothic family caper via a young offender inspired by poetry, our critics pick their favourite titles of the year

• The best books to give as gifts this Christmas

In the imagination of a small child anything is possible. Animals talk, humans can fly and a bedroom can turn into a forest in the blink of an eye. And it’s in the place where a child’s everyday reality and wild fantasy overlap that great stories are often born: books about tigers unexpectedly popping by for tea, or a snowman springing to life in the night.

Salman Rushdie’s account of his near-fatal stabbing, a 360-degree view of Queen Elizabeth II and Al Pacino’s rags to riches career are among this year’s most compelling personal histories

There are myriad ways to tell the story of a life, as shown by this year’s best biographies. Craig Brown’s doorstopper A Voyage Around the Queen (4th Estate), about the reign of Elizabeth II, dispenses with linear storytelling in favour of a patchwork of diary entries, letters, vignettes, second-hand anecdotes and even dreams (the writer Paul Theroux once dreamed of being nestled in Her Majesty’s bosom). The result is an unorthodox and wonderfully irreverent book which, alert to the absurdities of the monarchy, reveals as much about how others saw the Queen as the woman herself.

Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman (Virago) is a rich and riveting portrait of another seemingly unknowable aristocrat. The daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, Harriman was, says Purnell, a canny diplomat who exerted remarkable influence on mid-20th-century politics through her three marriages and numerous affairs with powerful men (her lovers included a prince, a shipping magnate and a celebrated US broadcaster). Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz (Atlantic Books) is a luminous joint biography of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, inspired by newly unearthed correspondence between the two writers that reads like “a lovers’ quarrel�. Anolik traces both women’s lives and their fraught friendship in the late 60s and early 70s, which fell apart after Didion was hired to edit Babitz’s first book. Reader, she fired her.

Cosy crime, eco-thrillers, political memoirs, YA fantasy: there’s something for everyone in our pick of the books to look out for in the months ahead

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
(Jonathan Cape, out now)

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from an examination of the British Empire to gripping crime novels

From befriending the last African enslaved in the US to meeting with zombies in Haiti, the folklorist, anthropologist and Harlem Renaissance writer – who has a novel posthumously published today – was a sensitive chronicler of other people’s lives

Today, on what would have been Zora Neale Hurston’s 134th birthday, a posthumous novel by the American writer and cultural anthropologist has been published. The Life of Herod the Great, which Hurston was working on when she died in 1960, is a sequel to her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, and up until now has been accessible only to scholars. As readers get their hands on this final work, writer Colin Grant takes the opportunity to look back at some of the gems in Hurston’s long and varied career.

***

Authors, journalists and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month

I enjoyed Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox. I am a guilty user of the word pretentious, which the book methodically rebukes over its hundred-and-something pages. Art moves forward because people aspire to things they are not (I certainly feel this as a writer). It’s also a word with deeply classist roots, made even worse by the fact that its meaning is often unclear. Instead of saying pretentious, I now think of other words that more accurately describe why I dislike something, such as vapid, poorly written or ugly.

A professor turns human guinea pig as he attempts to discover the secret to a longer life

To publish a book in January is to signal to the world that you hold the secret to miraculous self-improvement. Venture into a bookshop today and you’ll find brand new volumes on how to eat better, drink better, sleep better, prevent dementia, overcome anxiety, heal intergenerational trauma, and generally become invincible in the process. It is, quite frankly, exhausting.

And then there’s professor of immunology John Tregoning, who opens his new book Live Forever? by pointing out that you are definitely going to die. No matter what you do, he writes, time is guaranteed to defeat you. “It wants your heart to stop and your lungs to fail … and you to fade from the world, your only traces residing in the memories of others.� And a happy new year to you too, professor.

Think prejudice is overblown? A social psychologist provides the receipts in this densely informative but highly readable account

It was over schnitzel and mash that my friend’s Bavarian grandparents decided to call me a “black devil�, chuckling all the while. Breaded chicken has since been my madeleine, taking me back to racially charged moments I’ve not known quite how to interpret. Is it really racist if they didn’t mean to be rude? What if they have dementia? And if racism = prejudice + power, was being called a black devil while I choked down some potatoes even that big a deal, given that I felt in no way disempowered in the company of my tiny, elderly hosts?

In his succinct and bingeable book The Science of Racism, professor of social psychology Keon West begins by acknowledging that society doesn’t agree on even the most basic aspects of racism, let alone its finer points. Indeed, roughly half of Britons don’t believe minorities face more discrimination than white people in various areas of life. Yet far from being a set of hazy, unanswerable philosophical questions, many of the unknowns about racism are empirically testable, especially if researchers design clever studies.

The former child star on Hollywood’s ridiculous expectations of women – at every age

From an early age, the model and actor Brooke Shields has been accustomed to seeing herself through the eyes of others. At 11, she played a teenage prostitute in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, at 14 a castaway discovering sex in The Blue Lagoon, and had her face licensed to doll manufacturers in the 1980s. When she was 15, Barbara Walters asked her about her measurements on national TV.

Shields had hoped that, by her late 50s, those days of physical scrutiny would be behind her. Yet now she finds herself fending off judgment about her age. Recently, she was at a party where the male host was crestfallen when she told him the year she was born – 1965 – and said he wished she hadn’t mentioned it. “The fact that I, presumably someone he remembers best as a pin-up from his childhood, could be close to 60 ruined something fundamental for him,� Shields notes. “The implication was that I should keep my ‘vintage’ a secret or be ashamed that I have the audacity to be almost 60, because that meant I could no longer be the dream girl or have sex appeal.�

A historic papal autobiography offers unique insights into the challenges faced by the leader of the Catholic church, but skates over scandals

At 88 years of age, Pope Francis is the oldest pontiff for more than a century. Yet, after major surgery in 2023, and persistent knee problems that require the use of a wheelchair, he shows no sign of calling it a day. Now, he has decided that an autobiography, originally planned to be published after his death, should come out to coincide with the Jubilee year he has called for the Roman Catholic church in 2025.

As the first ever memoir by a sitting pope, Hope is a publisher’s dream, with a rich backstory culminating in Francis’s election in 2013. It recounts how, as Jorge Bergoglio, grandchild of Italian immigrants to Argentina, he grew up in a sprawling family, loved football and the tango (which he calls “an emotional, visceral dialogue that comes from afar, from ancient roots�), studied chemistry, then joined the Jesuit order and became a priest. After dallying with Peronism and enduring the Argentinian junta, he became the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires. Then, just as he was planning his retirement, Benedict XVI resigned and he was chosen as his successor.

A bracing contemporary account of the philosopher’s age-old prescription for living

I beseech you,� wrote Oliver Cromwell, in his letter to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland, “in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.� Cromwell’s pungent entreaty is often cited in conversations about the importance of self‑enquiry and the perils of overconfidence. It’s an odd but telling choice, given that he was asking others to question their assumptions, while leaving his own unexamined. He had just purged parliament, overseen the execution of Charles I, and was in Scotland leading an army in a pre-emptive strike. Naturally, he wanted the Scottish forces massing for battle to think again. The obvious retort is: “No. You.�

This is one of several thorny problems philosopher Agnes Callard tackles in Open Socrates, an exploration of Socrates’ “substantive ethics of enquiry�; an approach to knowledge that, she argues, can’t merely be tossed into our usual repertoire of rhetorical flourishes, but rather detonates the bedrock on which we claim to stand: “People will announce, ‘Question everything!’ without noticing they have just uttered not a question, but a command.� The Socratic method is an approach with “colossal ambitions� and not just some antiquated curio we might repurpose to get an edge in business meetings. In fact, its power is so great that we must wield it with great care.

In this fascinating book, the neuroscientist makes a strong case for the therapeutic force of music, describing ways in which it can be a beneficial part of recovery for patients

That great music can up be uplifting, transportive, transcendent – and conversely sorrowful or deeply unsettling – is a given, but its power to heal in the medicinal sense strikes me as a much more difficult proposition to prove. In Music As Medicine, Daniel Levitin makes a valiant attempt to do just that, citing in his introductory chapter heavyweights such as Confucius – “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without� – and Plato – “More than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way into the inmost soul and take hold upon it�.

While both these statements attest to the deep pleasure to be derived from music – its soothing rather than healing properties – perhaps the most pertinent quote comes from the late Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of bestselling books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and The Island of the Colourblind. Sacks was an enthusiastic piano player who, according to Levitin tackled Bach fugues “with great joy and exuberance�. He once described his clinical approach as essentially a musical one – “I diagnose by the feeling of discordancy or some peculiarity of harmony.� As Michael Rossato-Bennett’s 2014 documentary Alive Inside shows, the impact of music on people can sometimes be spectacular: one 92-year-old man, Henry Dryer, whose days in a nursing home were passed in a near catatonic state, suddenly became excited when played music from his youth – as Levitin puts it, “singing joyfully and reminiscing�.

From run-ins with Hemingway in Havana to gunmen in Guatemala, this colourful collection of the late writer’s long-form journalism shows why Graham Greene was an admirer

The travelogues of Norman Lewis, which are much admired for the extraordinary burnish they attain, were written by him in a spidery longhand. The author of acclaimed accounts of the Sicilian mafia and the exploitation of Indigenous tribes in South America, he scribbled his rewrites on fresh scraps of paper and, with the help of his wife Lesley, pasted them over earlier drafts until his manuscript crackled like parchment. I observed this process for myself when I interviewed the writer, by then in his 90s. We were at his home, an old rectory in deepest Essex enclosed by a wild garden which grew as high as an elephant’s eye. Here he recuperated between adventures in an “introspective, almost monastic calm�, or so the blurb on his book jackets improbably claimed. Rangy and moustachioed, he had been an early adopter of zoot suits, a crack shot, and a zealous if foolhardy racer of Bugattis. His life had included strenuous ardours and undercover work in Cuba for MI6 and the CIA. Lewis died in 2003. Now many of his best articles are being published between hard covers for the first time in this collection, its title as uncharacteristic of its author as his claims of monk-like meditation.

By the time I met Lewis, he was enjoying a deserved Indian summer. His backlist had been rediscovered thanks to his indefatigable publisher, Eland, whose red-and-cream livery has become an earnest of good writing. At this stage of his career, it wasn’t only Lewis’s glue-stiffened manuscript that took the form of a palimpsest. He was revisiting his experiences from long ago, overlaying them with the gloss of hindsight. “He started to take the past as his literary object,� according to the writer Julian Evans, who published a biography of Lewis five years after his death. One of his greatest books, Naples ’44, about his service as an allied intelligence officer among the embattled Neapolitans, took the form of a diary, but Evans found that Lewis kept no journal at the time and made only a handful of notes. The finished text, said Evans, was an “invented diary… scored and coloured by its detached and sensitive remaking�. These revelations threatened to damage Lewis’s reputation. My view, for what it’s worth, is that his later books are like a great artist’s prints, deftly elaborated works run off from plates etched many years earlier.

This acutely portrayed reckoning with contemporary Indian sociopolitics traces the faultlines of caste, class and religion

Devika Rege’s debut is not a definitive state-of-the-nation novel. Nor can it be characterised as the next “great Indian novel�, although it holds greatness within its pages. This chorus of the collective contains a multitude of ideologies and perspectives.

It is 2014, and the Bharat party – a thinly veiled version of the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP – is newly in power. It was a choice between “the weak governance� of the preceding ruling party, synonymous with decades of corruption, “and fascism�, and India has voted in favour of the rightwing party promising to clean the Ganga river, holy to the Hindu majority.

Havoc by Christopher Bollen; Strange Pictures by Uketsu; Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor; Murder Mindfully by Karsten Dusse; The Day of the Roaring by Nina Bhadreshwar

Havoc by Christopher Bollen (Borough, £16.99)
The narrator of American author Bollen’s latest novel, 81-year-old Wisconsin widow Maggie Burkhardt, has an insatiable desire to meddle in other people’s lives. Her methods, which include spreading rumours and planting false evidence of adultery, are designed to “change people’s lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not�. Sequestered in European hotels since the death of her husband six years earlier, the start of lockdown finds her a resident of the once-grand Royal Karnak Palace in Luxor, Egypt. It’s clear from the off that her attempts to “liberate� people haven’t always ended well – “I don’t like to talk about the murder� – but Maggie, whose inconsistent account of her past soon has us starting to doubt her reliability, just can’t help herself. When a weedy, bespectacled and sly eight-year-old boy comes to stay at the hotel with his mother, Maggie meets her match. Young Otto realises what she’s up to and starts blackmailing her; carnage ensues as the pair end up locked in a death-spiral. Beautiful writing and expertly torqued tension add up to a delightfully nasty page-turner.

Funny, spooky and surreal, this shapeshifting novel from the Francophone author explores Congolese politics

Best known to English-language readers for his novels African Psycho, Broken Glass and Black Moses, Alain Mabanckou, a social satirist of breathtaking originality, is a leading name in contemporary Francophone literature. His books, which draw on his Congolese heritage, tend to be exuberantly imagined, a tad absurd, very funny and focused on off-kilter and off-centre perspectives. In his piquant and spunky new offering, Mabanckou tells the story of Liwa Ekimakingaï, who returns from the dead in search of closure. Told in the second person and engagingly translated by Helen Stevenson, the novel opens in a cemetery in the port city of Pointe-Noire, where the 24-year-old has risen from his grave in a seismic flurry, attired in an orange crepe jacket, a fluorescent-green shirt, purple flares and shiny red shoes. (If you are new to Mabanckou, you might be interested to know that he employs a personal stylist, and that his own sartorial preference tends toward the bold and bright.) Liwa is a classic Mabanckou character: orphaned, irresistibly charming but cruelly bereft of luck.

Once risen, Liwa falls asleep and begins “the longest dream of his death�, in which images from his four-day funeral mingle with memories of growing up: being raised by his maternal grandmother in the Trois-Cents neighbourhood; getting into mischief with his friends; turning for guidance to the Pentecostal church, officiated by a man later executed for ritual murder; and landing a job as a commis chef in the kitchen of the French-owned Victory Palace Hotel.

This powerful debut plunges the reader into a raging battle between a young Afghan woman’s cultural identity and desire for freedom

Nila is the wild, rebellious daughter of Afghan doctors who fled their home before she was born and settled in a brutalist social housing block in Berlin. After 9/11, the family learned to lie (“To resent ourselves with precision�), to hide parts of themselves that seemed too much like “those people�; Muslims in a city where Nazis were alive and well. Then her mother died, and Nila began looking for a way out. Venturing out of her neighbourhood, she saw “people drinking mulled wine at Christmas markets, and between them, everywhere, there was a Mohammed or an Ali or an Aisha trying to get by�. And she hated them, “hated everyone who had the same fate as I did … I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life.�

Poet Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl, follows the grieving Nila as she comes of age in the nightclubs of Berlin. At The Bunker, Nila does ecstasy and falls into an unequal romance with a charismatic American author who dominates and desires her in just the way the damaged creature inside her craves. Marlowe Woods offers her an escape from the Afghan ideal of a “good girl�. He is also a tedious narcissist who pontificates about art, obliviously invites neo-Nazis into his house, and finds foreign cab drivers (some of whom are Nila’s uncles) too depressing to talk to. At the same time, he seems to give himself credit for Nila’s artistic awakening as a photographer: an awakening that is rooted in her otherness, in the yearning both to estrange herself from and depict her parents, to make them beautiful to Europeans. Nila loves literature and art because they make her “a person incomprehensible� to her parents, and yet photography gives her access to her mother’s “secret inner life, adrift in our strange city … an unknowable loss marking her eyes�.

This episodic, multi-layered debut crosses decades and continents to shine a light on the universality and uniqueness of women’s experience

Catherine Airey’s debut novel opens in New York on 9/11. Sixteen-year-old Cora, who is playing truant, watches the news from her apartment, and knows that her father is dead. Michael was an accountant who worked on the 104th floor of the North Tower. Cora’s mother Máire died seven years earlier, so she is now an orphan.

Cora tells us all this herself. Absconding from her convent school, she has the jaded, unworldly voice of the affluent Manhattan teen (in fiction, at least – The Catcher in the Rye, which is referenced, or Gossip Girl). This is her recollection of her mother’s death: “The morgue had comfy armchairs in the lobby, and I can remember being annoyed that it didn’t take longer for my father to identify the body. I was reading Little Women and would have quite happily sat there all day. I was nine.�

An aspiring English journalist enters the life of a fabled painter in this seductive debut of art, love and family secrets

A love story wrapped in a mystery, Lucy Steeds’s vividly poetic debut novel begins cinematically and with a prophetic hint of myth: the arrival of a stranger on a dusty road, in his pocket a paper bearing the single-word summons, “Venez�. The year is 1920, in a Europe that is still under the pall of the war that should have ended all wars, and Steeds’s stranger is approaching a remote farmhouse in the Provençal village of Saint-Auguste where fabled painter Edouard Tartuffe – Tata, “the Master of Light� – lives with only his niece Ettie for company.

The newcomer is young Englishman Joseph Adelaide, a disappointed artist and aspiring journalist, in flight from the tragic consequences of a war that has robbed him of his beloved brother and estranged him from his family, after his overbearing father branded him a coward for his conscientious objection. Hoping to begin a new career as a writer on art, Joseph has petitioned Tartuffe for an interview. He asks more in hope than expectation, as Tartuffe is an enigma around whom myths swirl, and has shut himself away from the world for decades. But then the summons comes, and it seems that Joseph may begin his new life.

This provocative novel contains two narratives: the memoir of an activist starting a new life and the violent manifesto of a spy cop who knew her

Anna McCormick, as many people did, is discovering that the first pandemic lockdown is playing havoc with time. Becalmed in her deliberately fortress-like London home with her young adult son Paul, she is simultaneously under pressure – teaching primary school children on Zoom, maintaining her stockpile of tinned goods, attempting to communicate with her mother’s care home – and forced into unnatural, unwanted inaction. As a survivor of domestic abuse, and several other threats to her safety and sanity, she is aware of the immense prize – a sanctuary, a job, meaningful relationships – she has secured, but also of its precariousness. Amid these conditions of unbidden contemplation, she begins to write a sort of memoir.

So too does Buster, the shape-shifting, monstrous undercover cop who once infiltrated the OrKestrA, the “merry little band of very harmless kazoo players� who 20 years previously travelled the country juggling, breathing fire and singing songs to bring hope to the hopeless; Anna herself, as Annanka Ladystrong, was one of their number. But whether Buster’s disjointed, weird document – which he hand-delivers to Anna’s house – is confession or manifesto is unclear. For the reader, these two wildly different accounts of personal and political events begin to resolve into an exploration of identity and purpose – or, in their less convincing passages, as very different civics lessons, at their most successful as a meditation on either adopting or escaping from nihilism.

From ecology-saving zombies to a murderous tattoo and a chilly new school for magic, the new year launches with fresh twists on familiar themes

In with the new! Publishing can be slow to wake from its Twixtmas carb-loading. But the early months of 2025 boast a few fresh takes to offer on familiar storytelling tropes, and a handful of first-time authors inaugurating brand new series.

Cosy crime has a well-thumbed playbook, but returnee author Niyla Farook ensures that her Murder for Two (Bonnier) is full of twists, turns and non-parochial perspectives as Ani and Riri probe the death of a beloved local cafe owner. The estranged siblings alternate perspectives: neurodiverse Ari is into sleuthing and lives in Yorkshire with her dad; visiting Riri was raised in California by her mum, wears a hijab and wants to be president. Was it the disgruntled chef? The shady YouTuber? When the twins’ dad is framed for murder, the stakes only get higher in this whodunnit full of matter-of-fact diversity, Greek food and surprisingly laissez-faire local police.

Sibling rivalry, a massive shark, anti-Nazi resistance in Norway, a brilliant romcom, and a tale of power and betrayal

All Aboard the Bedtime Bus by Karl Newson and Tim Budgen, Little Tiger, £7.99
Ding! Ding! The Bedtime Bus is on its way in this friendly, cuddly, pastel picture book, with gentle repeating verses to help toddlers wind down to sleep.

How We Share Cake by Kim Hyo-eun, translated by Deborah Smith, Scribble, £12.99
Sharing can be challenging as one of five children, and this funny, acutely observed picture book for 4+ brilliantly distils the struggle for sibling justice over everything from fried chicken to chores, bathroom time to birthday cake.

Ulrich Boschwitz, who wrote the recently rediscovered thriller The Passenger, left another gift behind him when his life was tragically cut short. I had the honour of reinterpreting it for today’s children

This story begins in a fever. It was the spring of 2021 and I’d contracted my first bout of Covid. Confined to bed, I turned to the pile of books that had been staring at me guiltily for weeks, if not months. The one I pulled out was a soon-to-be released noir-ish thriller called The Passenger. It was set in the Germany of the 1930s, following a man on the run from the Nazi authorities, hoping to make his escape by hopping on and off trains crisscrossing the country. As the Gestapo net around him tightens, he plunges into paranoia and breakdown. Perhaps the coronavirus intensified the experience, but I was gripped. I tweeted that it was part Franz Kafka, part John Buchan and completely riveting.

But there was a twist. This was not a new book, but one written nearly a century earlier. The author was Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, just 23 years old when his novel was published in 1938 and a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. In 1935, he had made his way across Europe to reach Britain, where he was promptly classified as an “enemy alien� and interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. He was held with more than a thousand other émigrés, among them a remarkable number of artists, musicians, writers and intellectuals on what Simon Parkin has called the island of extraordinary captives.

Her bestselling debut Elizabeth Is Missing was inspired by her grandmother’s dementia. Now the novelist has drawn from her own experiences for a thriller about the power dynamic between personal trainer and client

Emma Healey’s two previous novels explored themes vivid in her own life. The protagonist of her bestselling debut, Elizabeth Is Missing, for which Healey won the 2014 Costa first novel award, is Maud, who has dementia but is forced to turn detective in the hunt for her missing friend. Magnificently rendered by Glenda Jackson in the BBC adaptation, she was in part inspired by Healey’s desire to see the world through the eyes of her grandmother, who had the disease. Her 2018 follow-up, Whistle in the Dark, allowed Healey to consider what her teenage depression might have been like for her mother. Her new novel has an autobiographical element, too.

Sweat is a psychological thriller about coercive relationships, the futility of revenge and when self-control turns pathological. It’s the latter that bled into the plot from Healey’s life. An exercise and fasting regime following the birth of her daughter in 2017 became obsessive and damaging, just as it does for Cassie in the book after she meets Liam, “man of my dreams, star of my nightmares, my mentor, my shadow�. A personal trainer, Liam is physically perfect, from the curl of his eyelashes to the way his muscles “hum�, and when he meets Cassie, he wants to help her be just as perfect. Soon he controls everything from her punishing runs to her calorie intake.

When his friend, the legendary songwriter, had a catastrophic stroke, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin put together a programme of music therapy. Now he’s recommending it for a whole range of conditions

In 2015, Joni Mitchell suffered a catastrophic stroke. According to her friend, the musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, “when she got back from the hospital, she couldn’t walk and she couldn’t talk, and the doctors were so pessimistic about her recovery, they hadn’t scheduled any follow-ups�. For a while it looked as though one of the most gifted songwriters of the 20th century would be permanently silenced.

One day, though, the nurses caring for her at her home found Levitin’s number on a piece of paper in the kitchen, and called him. They had noticed that Mitchell perked up when she heard music coming from their phones, and wondered if he had any suggestions for songs she might respond to. Remarkably, he’d helped her compile a CD of her favourite tracks for a series of albums called Artist’s Choice back in the early 2000s (it was a short-lived project from Starbucks, which had bought a record label in order to pipe music into its coffee shops). Their picks ranged from Debussy to Marvin Gaye and Leonard Cohen.

The New York-based Kittitian-British author on why he set his new novel in the immigrant community of 1960s Notting Hill, the pitfalls of celebrity, and how he never misses a Leeds United match

Caryl Phillips, 66, was born in Saint Kitts and raised in Leeds. The author of 12 novels, including 1993’s Booker-shortlisted Crossing the River, he lives in New York and for the past 20 years has taught creative writing at Yale University. He and I met on Portobello Road in Notting Hill, the location of his new novel, Another Man in the Street, in which a young West Indian finds himself collecting rent for a 1960s slumlord.

Tell us how this book began life.
A few years ago I was wandering around these streets, thinking it doesn’t look like the place I used to wander around as a student: no reggae shops, no guys on the corner smoking dope. It’s where Beckham lives! David Cameron’s got a house here. I began to think about how Notting Hill changed, and the nature of that change, and my own relationship to this gentrified, almost theme-park area of London that years ago meant something entirely different to me.

He’s worked with some of the biggest names in music, but his latest book claims there’s an artist in all of us. Brian Eno and co-author Bette Adriaanse discuss the myth of genius, and how to really unlock your creativity

Brian Eno’s studio in Notting Hill is tucked away at the end of a cobbled mews, its facade a quarter of the normal size. The effect is like a kind of fairy-door, and as you enter, it opens on to a vast light-filled room with a spiral staircase at the centre. On one side, Eno, in a purple shirt, is hovering silently over a table top making marks on something. On the other, his latest collaborator, the Dutch artist and writer Bette Adriaanse, busies herself with the same task (they’re signing copies of their new book about art). An airy piano melody wafts over the scene: entering it feels like exhaling.

It does for me, anyway. I’ve been anxious about this interview, not least because of a warning from Eno’s assistant to avoid talking about his musical history, which he doesn’t feel is relevant; she apologises for flagging it up but thought she had “better be safe than sorry�. Eek. A few years ago a Guardian interviewer was given short shrift for daring to ask about Eno’s famous collaborations (“I so don’t want to talk about this,� a sleep-deprived Eno snapped). Is this going to be a case of never meet your heroes?

As her ground-breaking biography of Aboriginal activist Tracker Tilmouth is re-issued, the acclaimed Australian author remembers her late friend and talks about her latest novel, Praiseworthy

On the day she decided she had finally finished Praiseworthy, after almost a decade of writing and rewriting until she was happy with every one of its 700-odd pages, Alexis Wright went out to her garden in Melbourne’s north-east, and started furiously weeding. “It was like another edit!� she laughs. “And that garden was weeded within an inch of its life.�

Wright, an Indigenous Australian novelist – one of the Waanyi people from the Gulf of Carpentaria – has written four novels since 1997. Her most recent, Praiseworthy, described by the New York Times as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century�, was an exhilarating, exhausting labour. “It took me a while to come down from it,� the 74-year-old says. “I didn’t realise how much emotional, physical energy I was putting into it.�

The US novelist and co-writer of The Wire on why his new book isn’t about cops and robbers, his 80s drug addiction and the authors who have inspired him

Richard Price, 75, is a screenwriter and author whose books include the 600-page drug-war epic Clockers (1992), which was filmed by Spike Lee and inspired the HBO crime drama The Wire, co-written by Price. Michael Chabon has called him “one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature�. Born and raised in the Bronx, he lives in Harlem – the setting for his new novel, Lazarus Man, in which four strangers cross paths amid the collapse of a tenement block.

The book’s acknowledgments mention its “incredibly long gestation�...
I signed the contract to write this 17 years ago; if it was a baby, it’d now be applying to college. I’d just written Lush Life, a sort of panorama of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and I wanted to try to do the same for Harlem, but I’d only just moved there. New York City is 1,000 cities – move five blocks, you’re in a different one – so I had to live there a while to pick up the nuance. Plus, I was in a new relationship and it took about two years to calm down: it’s not just get up, write, sleep, get up, write, sleep, you know. And I needed dough – you can’t live on royalties from a novel – so I was doing TV serials. Also, honestly, I was intimidated: I’m a white writer in a time where people are very sensitive to who gets to write the stories of who. When I wrote Clockers, there wasn’t that policing of language; the whole world became hyperconscious, probably in a good way.

At 90, the author reflects on his friendship with Alan Turing, quantum realities and how his grandfather inspired his latest book

Alan Garner is a few days from his 90th birthday when we meet, and his plan for the day itself is “to be very quiet�. He says, “I sound antisocial but I’m not. I’m very sensitive to people and I don’t like more than three or four people in a room at a time.� Since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, he’s had a long and singular writing life, with a certain amount of gregariousness forced on him by its extraordinary late flowering over the last dozen years.

There was the surprise of a conclusion, half a century on, to those very first children’s fantasy novels: in 2012’s Boneland, the adult Colin seeks answers to childhood mysteries through astronomy, therapy and quantum physics. There was a vivid child’s-eye memoir, Where Shall We Run To?, setting down Garner’s wartime primary school years in rural Cheshire. Three years later he wrote the Booker-shortlisted Treacle Walker, which, in drawing on his childhood as well as local landscape and legend, seemed to distil the whole arc of his literary career into one riddling, playful, dizzyingly deep novella. And now comes Powsels and Thrums, a collection of essays, poetry and short fiction that ranges across his life and work, and showcases “a side of me I’ve used in research that has never appeared until now�.

The British-Libyan author on Hemingway’s craft, finding comfort in Joseph Conrad, and spending six months drowning in Austen

My earliest reading memory
From as far back as I can remember, before I could read, I was read to mostly from the same book, The Arabian Nights, feeling the reverberations of Shahrazad’s sentences against my mother’s lap, and suspecting that it must be so: that to tell a story is to postpone death, that after she asks her would-be murderer, “Do I have your permission to tell a story?�, the world is made a little less certain.

The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 13 I read Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s Rain Song. I can’t claim to have understood it, but those poems ripped open a veil. The experience of being overrun by language, of being caught in the wake of lines that were just beyond reach, showed me how literature can be both the translation of an experience and also its manifestation.

Author and narrator Nate DiMeo zooms in on stories of mishap, invention and adventure in these pithy yet profound historical lessons

Podcast listeners may have come across The Memory Palace, the longrunning series comprising bite-size vignettes about forgotten moments in history, set against a gently tinkling soundtrack. Written and hosted by Nate DiMeo, it eschews the long-winded approach of many audio historians, instead zooming in on small details and stories, from a teenage human cannonball to a small-town alien hoax to the day Niagara Falls stopped falling.

Now, DiMeo has turned his podcast into a book, which has in turn spawned an audiobook version. This might seem a little superfluous given the project stems from a podcast, but the audiobook has a slightly different flavour, featuring a cast of narrators comprising podcasting and acting royalty. They include Latif Nasser, of Radiolab fame, bringing his customary sense of wonder to A History of Martian Civilisation 1877-1906, about the Italian astronomer who claimed to have discovered human-made canals on Mars; Deadpool’s Ryan Reynolds reading The Nickel Candy Bar, about a publicity stunt involving scores of chocolate bars attached to tiny parachutes being dropped on American towns and cities, causing havoc as they landed; and Dominic Hoffman delivering one of my favourites, The Glowing Orbs, about the 1960s astronaut John Glenn who thought he saw angels in space; in fact, the floating yellow seraphim were small droplets of urine that had been ejected from his space capsule.