Barrister turned novelist Harriet Tyce is playing a blinder in the fourth series of the show. As a thriller writer myself, I recognise the traits that make her such a formidable Faithful

This time last year a rumour swept through the close-knit British crime-writing community, not whispered in a quiet moment in the billiard room but shared on group chats and message boards. The producers of The Traitors were recruiting contestants for 2026, and wanted one of us to take part. Of course they did! The Traitors is a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of the golden age country house whodunnit, which is itself a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of real-life murder. It is crime writers’ job to examine the dark side of human behaviour. Betrayal of trust and manipulation are all in a day’s work. We often write from multiple perspectives, identifying with victim, perp and detective, giving us a unique kind of empathy. We spent the rest of the year wondering who it would be. (I didn’t get the call.)

Last November, in that howling no man’s land between the finale of Celebrity Traitors and the transmission of series four, I went along with 13 fellow crime novelists to the Traitors Live Experience in Covent Garden. Despite being professional pattern-finders with highly tuned powers of observation, none of us at the replica round table guessed that the Chosen One was among us, and had already completed her stint on the real thing.

Family trauma shapes a student’s affair with her teacher in this bleak and funny fiction debut from the American memoirist

When it was published in 2022, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir lit a touchpaper to a nascent cultural conversation. I’m Glad My Mom Died introduced her mother Debra’s narcissistic personality disorder into a world eager to discuss adult child and parent estrangement. McCurdy had also suffered sexual abuse, and claimed her mother had contributed to her developing an eating disorder. The memoir was a bestseller, walking readers through the realities of generational trauma; a step change for the former Disney child star who had been “the funny one� on obnoxious Nickelodeon kids’ shows.

In her debut work of fiction, Half His Age, McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora’s box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers’ room.

The death of a friend and the attempted murder of her husband Salman Rushdie loom large in the poet’s moving memoir

The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one had heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail and staff at her hotel said she hadn’t checked in. “We’ll find her. She wouldn’t miss your wedding,� Griffiths’s sister, Melissa, assured her. But the next afternoon, in the middle of her wedding reception, Griffiths learned that Moon had died alone at home in Atlanta of unknown causes. On hearing the news she collapsed, hit her head on a table and blacked out. Paramedics pried open her eyes to shine a torch on them: “A particle of light that is so distant from the world I once knew.�

For Griffiths, 47, the death of her best friend and “chosen sister� was one in a series of upheavals stretching across a decade. It began with the death of her mother, who was her greatest cheerleader and fiercest critic. She had instilled in her daughter the importance of “independence above everything. I was raised not to lose myself in the stories of others, especially men.�

Wood wins the award for fiction for his ‘utterly immersive’ novel Seascraper while Perry picks up the nonfiction prize for her memoir Death of an Ordinary Man

Booker-longlisted author Benjamin Wood has won this year’s Nero book award for fiction for his novel Seascraper.

Meanwhile, Claire Lynch won the debut fiction category for A Family Matter, and Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man took the nonfiction prize. Jamila Gavin was awarded the children’s fiction prize for My Soul, A Shining Tree.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Penguin Books Ltd, £14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The footballer and author are supporting a nationwide campaign, Go All In, which aims to reverse the ‘worrying decline’ in reading for pleasure among children in the UK

Leah Williamson, Michael Morpurgo, Julia Donaldson and Richard Osman are among those who have thrown their weight behind a new nationwide push to get people reading for pleasure, as the government and the National Literacy Trust launch the National Year of Reading.

The year-long campaign, called Go All In, aims to reverse what organisers describe as a “worrying decline� in reading enjoyment among children and young people. Just one in three 8- to 18-year-olds now say they enjoy reading in their spare time. Only 26% of boys read for pleasure, compared to 39% of girls. More than a quarter of children are leaving primary school having not reached the reading age of an 11-year-old.

A sociologist talks to the people putting their faith – and their hearts – in the hands of robots

If much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead.

To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in “synthetic personas�.

Wild success of television series drives huge demand for Game Changers novels, with Australian booksellers reporting significant customer orders

A seventh book in Rachel Reid’s gay romance series that inspired the TV drama Heated Rivalry will be out later this year but Australian fans are still struggling to get their hands on a physical copy of any of the preceding six books.

Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author’s Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from a festive mystery to a kaleidoscopic ode to the animal kingdom

New novels from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ian McEwan, plus the return of Slow Horses and Margaret Atwood looks back … Guardian critics pick the must-read titles of 2025

The Guardian’s fiction editor picks the best of the year, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count to Thomas Pynchon’s return, David Szalay’s Booker winner and a remarkable collection of short stories.

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Ever since my father presented me with a copy of The Unicorn, beautifully translated into my mother tongue, I have been an ardent admirer of Iris Murdoch’s. I went on to read all of her novels, plays and poetry with great enthusiasm. Before Christmas, I returned to her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, having remembered very little of it. Yet from the very first page, I was reminded why I have always loved her work so deeply: the prose is rich, precise, disciplined and meticulously detailed; the many characters are so vividly rendered that none appears two-dimensional; each experiences and processes reality in a way that feels distinct and unmistakably individual; and the pacing of events feels perfectly judged. Although the novel is threaded with philosophical reflections on goodness and love, these never feel laboured or artificially imposed. Rather, they emerge naturally as an integral part of the novel’s dense and intricate tapestry.

An expert in both disciplines makes a bold attempt to convince sceptics, and partially succeeds

Vladimir Nabokov notoriously dismissed the “vulgar, shabby, and fundamentally medieval world� of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whom he called “the Viennese witch doctor�. His negative judgment has been shared by many in the near 90 years since Freud’s death. A reputational high-water mark in the postwar period was followed by a collapse, at least in scientific circles, but there are signs of newfound respectability for his ideas, including among those who once rejected him outright. Mark Solms’s latest book, a wide-ranging and engrossing defence of Freud as a scientist and a healer, is a striking contribution to the re-evaluation of a thinker whom WH Auden described as “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion�.

It would be difficult to improve on Solms’s credentials for the task he sets himself. He is a neuroscientist, expert in the neuropsychology of dreams, the author of several books on the relationship between brain and consciousness, a practising psychoanalyst and the editor of the 24-volume revised standard edition of Freud’s complete works. He is also a wonderfully witty and lucid writer.

The novelist and writing tutor delivers bracing advice that demolishes familiar ‘stick to what you know’ nostrums

Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world.

What writers used to say to small circles of students in an attempt to help them improve their storytelling technique has become a familiar way, often parodic and self-knowing, of interpreting the grand and not-so‑grand narratives of our time. “Don’t worry about Liz Truss’s YouTube series – she’s just having a main character moment.�

How billions of trees left their mark on an empire’s psyche – shaping ideological and literal battles up to the present day

When Sophie Pinkham opens her fascinating book with the claim that “Russia has more trees than there are stars in our galaxy�, it might seem as though she is merely using a poetic turn of phrase. But the statistic is correct: while the Milky Way is estimated to have roughly 200bn stars, Russia has something in the region of 642bn trees. Stretching from the Arctic tundra to central Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the Russian forest is vast, mighty and inhospitable. Yet while it is a source of potential danger, it is also a place of great beauty and potential riches, providing furs, minerals and rivers overflowing with salmon.

Pinkham, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University whose last book explored the intricacies of post-Soviet Ukraine, here charts the landscape’s influence on the Russian psyche, and its imprint on history, society and literature. The forest is deeply entwined with Russian national identity – the country is often symbolically represented as a bear – yet attitudes towards it have fluctuated. Different leaders have proposed different strategies for extracting value from the land, leading to cycles of deforestation and tree-planting depending on whether the priority was boosting agriculture, building Peter the Great’s imperial fleet, extracting minerals or constructing hydroelectric dams. Politically, it has been a place of resistance and of ultranationalist rhetoric glorifying the idea of Russian self-sufficiency.

From Duolingo to GDP, how an obsession with keeping score can subtly undermine human flourishing

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

With its cast of thinkers, gamers and artists, this romp across Europe explores our desire to define reality – even as it slips from our intellectual grasp

Joanna Kavenna’s two decades as a writer have seen her beat a gorgeously unconventional path through a plethora of subjects and genres, from polar exploration to motherhood to economic inequality, and from travelogue to academic satire to technological dystopia. “I like genre,� Kavenna said in a 2020 interview, “because there’s a narrative and you can kind of work against it, test it.� That being said, her seventh published book, Seven, is a curiously uncategorisable, protean thing: a slim, absurdist novel, but chunky with ideas.

Of all the genres Kavenna has worked within – or, more accurately, vexed the boundaries of – Seven (Or, How to Play a Game Without Rules) is probably closest to an academic satire. We first encounter the novel’s thoroughly anonymised first-person narrator in Oslo in the summer of 2007, where he or she or they are employed as a research assistant to a renowned Icelandic philosopher named Alda Jónsdóttir. Jónsdóttir is described as “eminent, tall, strong and terrifying�, and likes to host dinner parties for her histrionic institutional peers. The hapless narrator’s job is to help facilitate her work in “box philosophy�: “the study of categories, the ways we organise reality into groups and sets […] the ways we end up thinking inside the box, even when we are trying to think outside the box�.

Godfall by Van Jensen; The Salt Bind by Rebecca Ferrier; The Poet Empress by Shen Tao; A Hole in the Sky by Peter F Hamilton; Hello Earth, Are You There? by Brian Aldiss

Godfall by Van Jensen (Bantam, £20)
The debut novel by a popular comic-book writer is set in a small town in Nebraska, after the landing of a three-mile-long alien figure dubbed “the Giant�. Local sheriff David Blunt is struggling to do his job following the sudden boom in population: in addition to scientists, government agents and soldiers at the highly classified research area established around the mystery from outer space, many more enthusiasts flood to the town, possibly including a serial killer. Two people have been killed in a horrifically brutal way when the FBI takes over and tries to shut him out. But when the next victim is a man he’s known all his life, Blunt is more determined than ever to catch the killer. His investigation draws him to infiltrate a doomsday cult and to discover more about the tangled lives of the people he grew up with, along with the possibility that there could be a clue in the physical composition of the Giant. A suspenseful, well-written blend of science fiction and serial killer thriller.

The Salt Bind by Rebecca Ferrier (Renegade, £18.99)
In 1770s Cornwall, Kensa’s father was hanged as a smuggler, and she now feels a despised outsider, especially in contrast to her quiet half-sister. Only when the local wise woman, Isolde, accepts Kensa as her apprentice can she imagine a future in which she could be respected as a healer. But there’s more than useful potions and a helpful dose of trickery to the role: the wise women of Cornwall are responsible for making sure an ancient pact between land-dwellers and the creatures of the sea continues to hold. Kensa has learned little of the Old Ways when she must suddenly act alone. She has seen Isolde summon the Father of Storms from under the sea, but when she does the same, she finds she has made a horrifying bargain. If she can’t put things right, the sea will rise and drown the whole area. A moving exploration of sisterhood and community, this is an evocatively written folkloric fantasy.

This poignant debut about two strangers who fall in love offers a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain

“Love is not an easy thing … It’s both the disease and the medicine,� a character says in Manish Chauhan’s meditation on modern love. This poignant and perceptive coming-of-age story, about two strangers who become star-crossed lovers, is a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain, and of love as home, hope and destiny.

Newly arrived in England following an arranged marriage with British-Indian Rajiv, Mira feels increasingly out of place as she finds out that Rajiv holds secrets and loves someone else. On the eponymous Belgrave Road in Leicester, entire days go by “without sight of an English person�, and Mira feels “disappointed that England wasn’t as foreign or as mysterious as she had hoped�. She takes English classes, finds companionship in her mother-in-law and fills her days with household chores, but nothing shifts her deep loneliness.

Drawing on his own near-death experience, the author finds a powerful intensity in this tale of a young man’s convalescence in a Cornish village

“I had to pick through the wreckage, blind at first. I had to find all the pieces of me, scattered all around, and put them back together, one by one.� Following a cardiac arrest which left him clinically dead for 40 minutes, Jago Trevarno, the young narrator of Patrick Charnley’s moving debut novel, has retreated to the Cornish village where he grew up, to shelter under the protection of his “off-gridder� uncle, Jacob.

His mother dead of cancer and his father long gone, at 20 Jago’s world seems to have shrunk to nothing but the hard daily labour of working a subsistence farm high above the rugged Atlantic coast. The life Jago had begun to construct in the city, “a runaway train� in flight from his mother’s death and everything that reminded him of her, has evaporated abruptly in the aftermath of his near-death experience. He has “gone from someone who needed to slow down, to be present, to someone having no choice about it�, and must start from scratch.

The return of Charlie and Lola; the second lives of trees; the dangers of time travel; a YA Bluebeard retelling and more

The Street Where Santa Lives by Harriet Howe and Julia Christians, Little Tiger, £12.99
When an old man moves in on a busy street, only his little neighbour notices; with his white beard and round belly, she’s convinced he’s Santa. But when Santa falls ill, other neighbours must rally round to take care of him. Will he be better in time for Christmas? This sweet, funny, acutely observed picture book is a festive, joyous celebration of community.

I Am Wishing Every Minute for Christmas by Lauren Child, S&S, £12.99
Twenty-five years after their first appearance, this delightful, engaging new Charlie and Lola picture book is filled with Lola’s excited impatience as she and her big brother get everything ready for Christmas.

The healing power of gardens; celebrating an abolitionist; hope in the toughest times; a gladiator romantasy and more

The Butterfly House by Harry Woodgate, Andersen, £12.99
Miss Brown’s wild garden scares most people, but when Holly discovers her reclusive neighbour’s sadness, she decides to help turn the wilderness into a butterfly haven. A beautiful, moving picture book about the healing power of gardens and community.

The History of We by Nikkolas Smith, Rock the Boat, £8.99
Via rich, dynamic paintings and thoughtful pared-back text, Smith answers the question “What does the beginning look like?� with this powerful picture book, the shared story of humanity’s first ancestors in “the fertile cradle of Africa�.

A bothered bear; a great guide to drawing; a life of Josephine Baker; a role model daughter; a search for words and more

Bear’s Nap by Emily Gravett, Two Hoots, £12.99
Someone is cheeping and keeping Bear from sleeping in this increasingly uproarious picture book filled with forest-dwelling creatures and their noises. A joy to read aloud.

This Is Who I Am by Rashmi Sirdeshpande, illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane, Andersen, £12.99
A moving celebration of heritage and identity, this softly coloured picture book follows a little girl with “a foot in two worlds�, who is both “the richness of all the worlds she belongs to� and uniquely, proudly herself.

A huge brolly; sibling revelry; poetic Paris; first aid for youngsters; Regency blackmail; blackly comic YA fiction and more

A Totally Big Umbrella by Sarah Crossan, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, Walker, £12.99
Rain ruins all Tallulah’s favourite things until she finds a really huge umbrella – but it’s so big it holds her back. Could there be worse things than getting wet? Enchanting and imaginative, this gentle, playful picture book addresses an anxious child’s need to find control.

The Elephant and the Piano by Colette Hiller, illustrated by Nabila Adani, Magic Cat, £7.99
Short-tempered and destructive, Bonti the elephant is all alone – until the music of a piano reaches him. A luminous, touching picture book, based on a true story.

A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change

If there can be a downside to receiving a lifetime achievement award, it can surely only be the hint of closure it evokes. I put this as tactfully as I can to Alan Hollinghurst, this year’s winner of the David Cohen prize, which has previously recognised the contribution to literature of, among others, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien. It does have “a certain hint of the obituary about it�, he concedes, laughing. “So I’m very much doing what I can to take it as an incentive rather than a reward.�

But there have been plenty of rewards recently. Hollinghurst was knighted in this year’s New Year honours list, a couple of months after the publication of his novel Our Evenings, the story of actor Dave Win’s journey from boarding school to the end of his life, which received rave reviews. In the Guardian, critic Alexandra Harris announced it his finest novel to date, noting that it “forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole�.

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,� he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.�

Democracy, birds and hangover cures – famous fans put their questions to the visionary author

After the ­phenomenal global success, not to mention timeliness, of the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017, Margaret Atwood has been regarded as “a combination of figurehead, prophet and saint�, the author writes in her new memoir Book of Lives. Over 600 pages this “memoir of sorts� ranges from her childhood growing up in the Canadian backwoods to her grief at the death of her partner of 48 years, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019, with many friendships, the occasional spat and more than 50 books (including Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace and the Booker prizewinning The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) in between.

The author, who turned 86 last week, always likes to take the long view, often from a couple of centuries’ distance. As Rebecca Solnit notes below, she now has a long view of our times. Age and the freedom of being a writer (as she says, she can’t get sacked) make her fearless in speaking out.

The author on the trouble with the Brönte novels, what she gained from reading John Updike and Martin Amis – and the brilliance of Barbara Pym

My earliest reading memory
Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome, aged seven. I didn’t learn to read in the first years of school and became entrenched in illiteracy until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened. I loved the Swallows and Amazons series, and especially Swallowdale in which a shipwreck is redeemed and the adults provide exactly the right support when the children mess up.

My favourite book growing up
The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose politics I now find obviously objectionable. I often tell students that what you don’t get is what gets you, and I’m sure the obsession with rugged independence and the repression of foundational violence did me no good, but I liked the landscapes and the combination of domesticity and adventure.

Forget puritanical self-discipline – the way to really make a new habit stick is to lace it with instant gratification

Like many people, I spent New Year’s Eve making a list of the goals I want to achieve in the year ahead – a habit that never fails to arouse the ire of my boyfriend. “Why do you always have to put yourself under pressure?� he’ll ask, rolling his eyes. “It’s so puritanical!�

And he has a point. When most of us turn our minds to self-improvement, we assume that we need to put pleasure on pause until we’ve reached our goal. This is evident in the motivational mantras that get bandied about – “no pain, no gain�, “the harder the battle, the sweeter the victory�. If we fail, we tend to think it’s our own fault for lacking the willpower needed to put in the hours and stick at it, probably because we’ve given in to some kind of short-term temptation at the expense of long-term gain.

Surreal humour and sharp performances from Diane Morgan and Arabella Weir alongside the comedian himself bring his tale of an unemployed bathroom salesman to life

Matt Giles, the thirtysomething protagonist of The Long Shoe, is having a run of bad luck. Shortly after losing his job as a bathroom salesman, he learns that he and his girlfriend Harriet are being evicted from their flat. Can life get any worse? Apparently, it can. Matt finds a note from Harriet saying she has left him and that he shouldn’t contact her. But then he receives a call from a stranger offering him a job that comes with a luxury apartment, leading him to wonder if his fortunes are turning.

Perhaps Harriet will come back if she knows they have a fancy new home. The third mystery novel from comedian Bob Mortimer comes with his trademark quirky touches including a talking animal in the form of Matt’s cat, Goodmonson, and whimsical metaphors; for Matt, trying to place a familiar face is akin to “trying to find a mouse’s handbag in a builder’s skip�.

From an almost whimsical beginning, these verses on wishing to overcome mortality grow lyrical and deeply moving

Dream-Pedlary

i.