What if Descartes had melted his brain on acid? Find out in this mind-expanding exploration of thought and consciousness

This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité has ingested. They include psilocybin, LSD, cannabis; quetiapine and Xanax (for anxiety); venlafaxine, Prozac, Lexapro and tricyclics (antidepressants); caffeine (“I have drunk coffee every single day without fail since September 13, 1990�); and, at least for him, the always disappointing alcohol.

The really trippy thing, though, is not so much Justin Smith-Ruiu’s descriptions of his drug experiences, but the fact that they’re written by a tough-minded analytic philosopher, one as familiar with AJ Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge as Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-inspired The Doors of Perception. Moreover, they’re presented with the aim of melting the minds of his philosophical peers and the rest of us by suggesting that psychedelics dissolve our selves and make us part of cosmic consciousness, thereby rendering us free in the way the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined it (paraphrased by Smith-Ruiu as “an agreeable acquiescence in the way one’s own body is moving in the necessary order of things�).

This deeply comforting tale of record collecting, magical creatures and a lovingly knitted cardigan rambles across England

Ursula K Le Guin had her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction; I have my comfy cardigan theory. What Le Guin proposed is that human culture, novels included, didn’t begin with technologies of harm, such as flints and spears, but with items of collection and care, such as the wicker basket or, nowadays, the carrier bag. And so, if we make them that way, novels can be gatherings rather than battles.

Tom Cox’s third novel fashions an escape from the dangerous outside world into something soft, comforting and unfashionable. It might once have been a Neanderthal’s armpit, but now it’s more likely to be a cosy cardigan. Or a deeply comforting story.

20 authors, including Viet Thanh Nguyen and Abdulrazak Gurnah, call on the French president to restart scheme to help creatives evacuate

Sally Rooney, Deborah Levy, Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen are among 20 authors urging French president Emmanuel Macron to resume a “lifeline� programme for evacuating Palestinian writers, scholars and artists from Gaza.

The Pause programme for writers and artists in emergency situations, as well as a student evacuation programme, were abruptly suspended by the French government at the beginning of August over a Palestinian student’s allegedly antisemitic online remarks, a decision that the letter-writing authors said amounted to a “collective punishment�.

A century from now, a literature scholar pieces together a picture of our times in a novel that quietly compels us to consider the moral consequences of global catastrophe

The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle� of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.

These thoughts were provoked by a brief passage in McEwan’s future-set new novel that describes the “Inundation� of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, wipes out everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the British Isles is not mentioned. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan’s future history, you’d never know it. I began to think of What We Can Know as another of McEwan’s deeply English stories. It has, I thought, the familiar partialities of vision. Has Brexit, endlessly backstopped by those pesky six counties, taught English liberals nothing?

The bestselling authors of The Thursday Murder Club and the Slough House series will take on your questions

Richard Osman and Mick Herron have cracked the code to writing thrillers that captivate audiences. During his stellar career in television, Osman presented the hugely popular gameshows Pointless, which he also created, and Richard Osman’s House of Games. More recently he has illuminated the world of show business with the Guardian’s Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment podcast. Five years ago, he published the first instalment of The Thursday Murder Club, in which four retirees – former spy Elizabeth, psychiatrist Ibrahim, trade union leader Ron and nurse Joyce – pit their wits against assorted murderers and ne’er-do-wells, aided and abetted by canny builder Bogdan and a sometimes reluctant local police force. The fifth in the series, The Impossible Fortune, is out this September – just a few weeks after Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie played the amateur detectives in the first film adaptation of the series.

The first in Mick Herron’s Slough House series appeared 15 years ago, with an intriguing conceit at its heart: what happens to spies who have messed up on the job? Leading Herron’s group of undercover misfits is Jackson Lamb, whose thoroughly unappealing exterior conceals a steeltrap mind and a strong moral code. The undercover agents made the transition to screen in an award-winning AppleTV+ series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Jack Lowden, with an original theme tune by Herron fan Mick Jagger. Clown Town, the ninth book in the series, is out now, and sees Lamb and his team, including stalwart sidekicks River Cartwright (Lowden) and Catherine Standish, once again battling against the establishment.

For me it started with Colombia and Gabriel García Márquez. As I read 200 books from different regions, I gained a clarity news reports seldom give

• Sign up for our new weekly newsletter Matters of Opinion, where our columnists and writers will reflect on what they’ve been debating, thinking about, reading and more

Dear reader, are your shelves heaving under the weight of books by dead white folks? Do your eyes glaze over at the mention of foreign fiction? Is your reading diet missing the vibrant flavours of stories from Africa, Asia and Latin America? Restricting your reading to novels from Europe and North America is like going to an all-you-can-eat Mexican buffet and just eating tortillas. Why do that?

I have been getting to know about countries in the global south through literature. Being an intrepid traveller, current events addict and avid reader led me inexorably to read books from around the world. The book that most reeled me in to the ability of literature to open the door to another country was Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a dazzling, magic-realist ride through Colombia’s fortunes and misfortunes. Eventually, a cocktail of wonder, wishfulness and wanderlust inspired me to write a book about the joy of seeing the world through books.

Pushpinder Khaneka is a journalist and the author of Read the World: The Best Books on Africa, Asia and Latin America

Library of Congress, which has been under fire from Trump administration, appoints author and translator, 74

At a time when its leadership is in question and its mission challenged, the Library of Congress has named a new US poet laureate: the much-honored author and translator Arthur Sze.

The library announced on Monday that Sze, 74, had been appointed to a one-year term, starting this fall. The author of 12 poetry collections and recipient last year of a lifetime achievement award from the library, he succeeds Ada Limón, who had served for three years. Previous laureates also include Joy Harjo, Louise Glück and Billy Collins.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from a must-read graphic history to a tale of lost love

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights

Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.

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

One of my favourite reads recently has been Childish Literature by Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a mixed-genre book of memoir, short fiction and poetry on the theme of parenting and new fatherhood, with lots of lucidity, humour and humility throughout.

The bestselling author returns with an account of how her homeland has changed – and the personal costs of fame

Remarkable success notoriously brings its own problems. Wild Swans, first published in 1991 and written by Jung Chang with the help of her husband, Irish-born historian and writer Jon Halliday, had a global impact few authors dare to dream of. It told the story of three generations of women in 20th-century China – Chang’s grandmother, her mother and herself – and became one of the most popular nonfiction books in history, selling more than 13m copies in 37 languages and collecting a fistful of awards and commendations. For any author, following that would be a challenge. Now, Fly, Wild Swans returns to the story, picking it up after Chang’s own departure from China in 1978, and revisiting episodes from the earlier work with added detail.

Wild Swans was Chang’s second book: her first was a biography of Soong Ching-ling, the wife of the early 20th-century revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, which, she volunteers, had deservedly little impact. Wild Swans was different: animated by a powerful family story, set against the dramatic political background of war and revolution and enlivened by Halliday’s formidable narrative talent, it was an instant hit.

A data scientist rebuts 50 arguments against green technology with lively pragmatism and authority

What are we going to do about the climate crisis? As extreme weather events become the new normal, we still hear from “sceptics� who think the energy transition is unnecessary, a massive leftwing plot. Hannah Ritchie, a global development data scientist and the author of Not the End of the World, has followed that work up with a book that addresses 50 objections to the adoption of greener technology.

To start with, we need some tough love. It’s time, Ritchie insists, to abandon the slogan “Keep 1.5 alive�, referring to an aspiration to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. “The 1.5C target is dead,� she announces flatly. “The public – who are repeatedly told that 1.5C is still within reach – will start to lose trust when we pass that target.�

A British civil servant’s revelatory account of negotiations to avert climate catastrophe

When it comes to the climate, Peter Betts is one of the most important people you’ve probably never heard of. If the world does manage to avoid the worst ravages of global heating, it will be thanks in part to the countless late nights he spent in windowless rooms, arguing over the placement of commas in impenetrable legal text.

Betts would probably have disagreed. He disliked ostentation and grand statements, preferring to get on unfussily with his job – for years, he was the UK’s main negotiator on climate, and leader of the EU’s team on the 2015 Paris agreement.

The Eat Pray Love author’s account of her relationship with her late partner Rayya is solipsistic and self-indulgent

The first chapter of Elizabeth Gilbert’s much anticipated new memoir closes on a four-page love letter to Gilbert from her late partner Rayya, who, dead for five years, comes to her in a “visitation�. In Rayya’s voice, Gilbert calls herself babe, baby, or “sunshine baby� multiple times, emotes in all-caps, and grants herself permission to write the details of Rayya’s terrible, humiliating final year. “Let me just look at you for a minute,� “Rayya� says to Liz. “Look at your little rainbow eyes! Look at your sparkling tears! You’re so beautiful!� The letter is deeply self-indulgent and excruciating to read. “You’re going all the fucking way this time – all the way to the enlightenment.�

I believe that the dead are gone and that artists don’t need their permission to evoke them. But I was stunned that this solipsistic mess opens the book, because Gilbert is a terrific storyteller – Eat Pray Love, her memoir of self-acceptance and healing, was read by millions. So, I scrubbed the false start from my mind, reminding myself that great literature shows people as they are, which means that at some point in every good memoir, we should see the narrator being awful.

Scabrous satire drives this camp, goofy sequel about a cabal of writing students at an Ivy league university – its hot-boyfriend golems are adorable

We Love You, Bunny, is the much-anticipated sequel to Mona Awad’s beloved campus horror/satire of 2019, Bunny. Both books are set at an Ivy League university in a crime-ridden New England town; from various well-seeded clues, we can identify this as Brown University. Here it is called Warren, because the Bunnyverse is unabashedly silly and self-referential. Rabbit jokes abound.

The first book followed Samantha, an alienated, cash-strapped creative writing student cold-shouldered by her workshop cohort, a cabal of four ultra-feminine rich girls who all call each other Bunny. The Bunnies wear fluffy dresses, eat mini food and – as Samantha learns when she’s finally inducted into their cult – express their creativity through demonic rites that involve exploding rabbits. Samantha has to transcend them to find her voice as an artist. The story of Bunny is the result.

The Naked Light by Bridget Collins; Exiles by Mason Coile; Alchemised by SenLinYu; Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei; Big Time by Jordan Prosser

The Naked Light by Bridget Collins (Borough, £18.99)
The latest from the bestselling author of The Binding is set in England and focuses on three “surplus women� after the first world war: bored, lonely Florence, her fey niece Phoebe, and Kit, a bohemian artist haunted by memories of wartime France, where she painted masks for wounded soldiers to wear over horrifically damaged faces. Their village is on the Sussex Downs, overlooked by an ancient face carved into the chalk, reputed to protect inhabitants from a hungry spirit. But since the death of the last member of the family traditionally bound to look after it, the face is fast disappearing beneath the grass, and something frightening is stirring in the land. Atmospheric, psychologically astute and beautifully realised, this is a brilliantly original literary take on folk horror.

Exiles by Mason Coile (Baskerville, £16.99)
In 2030, three astronauts arrive on Mars, on a one-way mission to prepare for full-scale colonisation. They find their robot-built base, the Citadel, severely damaged, and one of the robots missing. The remaining two offer different explanations: the missing robot malfunctioned and caused the damage before fleeing, or the Citadel was attacked by an unseen, hostile alien force, and the third robot went in pursuit and has not returned. A taut, terrifying thriller, sadly the last work from Mason Coile, a pseudonym of award-winning author Andrew Pyper, who died in January.

Medea tells her side of the story in a reimagining of the ancient Greek stories that puts women centre stage

The women of myth have been talking – and they’re pointing the finger at us. Myths are “mirrors of us�, writes Natalie Haynes in Pandora’s Jar, her book of essays on the women of Greek mythology. “Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth.�

Considerations of culture and bias have been central to the recent wave of mythic retellings focused on women, from Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s Iliad trilogy to Haynes’s own triad of novels set within the classical Greek world (The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind). This latest is a reimagining of the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece and, true to form, it centres the women.

This novel fizzes with energy as it follows the parallel lives of two siblings and exposes the crushing divides of gender and class

I admired Dur e Aziz Amna’s precise and lyrical first novel, American Fever; the protagonist – an exchange student from Pakistan to rural Oregon – staying with me long after I encountered her. She has now delivered a superb second novel that features another fascinating central character, though in a much darker, more disturbing context.

A Splintering is the story of Tara, one of five siblings from a poor farming family in the hinterlands of Pakistani Punjab. This is the kind of landscape where age-old codes of manhood, with brother or son as provider and adjudicator of women’s lives, still rule. Tara, gazing at the stars from their courtyard at night, wants to get away from the squalor of Mazinagar (literally, past city), where most people live and die unnoticed, and build a life full of money and possessions in the city. She has no romantic notions about the soporific countryside. “I have no nobility. I come from darkness and filth.�

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 picture of patience; first days at school; a cruise ship detective; a terrible storm; time travellers; rebels in love and more

Put Your Shoes On by Polly Dunbar, Walker, £12.99
Late for a party, Mummy really wants Josh to put his shoes on – but he’s too lost in his imagination to hear until she shouts. Featuring a child’s inner world vividly evoked by Dunbar’s own sons’ drawings, this tender, relatable picture book encourages patience and communication.

The Tour at School (Because You’re the New Kid!) by Katie Clapham, illustrated by Nadia Shireen, Walker, £12.99
This irrepressibly bouncy tour of all the school essentials (including toilets, emergency meeting tree and library with possibly more than a million books) humorously distils the scariness of starting school and the thrill of making a new friend.

A girl with super strength; anarchic doughnuts on a mission to rule the world; boys in the Blitz; an Igbo YA fantasy and more

The Bear-Shaped Hole by John Dougherty, illustrated by Thomas Docherty, Frances Lincoln, £7.99
This sensitive, gentle, straightforward story of friends who must part will help small readers weather the painful emotions that come before a loved one dies.

Wild by Katya Balen, illustrated by Gill Smith, Walker, £12.99
A little girl who loves the woods’ wildness is bereft when she moves to the city. When the rolling, twisting river shows her “the secrets hidden under its tongue�, she realises her wildness never left her. A lush, poetic picture book, with words by a Carnegie-winning author.

A gosling grows up; a campaign to save trees; the impact of partition; thorny dilemmas; wearing a hijab in Essex and more

Gozzle by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie, Macmillan, £12.99
When a bear finds a goose egg, rather than breakfast, it hatches sweet, tenacious Gozzle, who’s convinced goslings can do everything bears do. But what will happen when she learns to fly? A comically adorable picture book about family, growth and change.

Leave the Trees, Please by Benjamin Zephaniah, illustrated by Melissa Castrillon, Magic Cat, £12.99
Zephaniah’s posthumously published picture book, featuring a dynamic repeated refrain and soaring, swirling illustrations, calls on young listeners to safeguard trees and the riches of the natural world.

Len Pennie won praise and faced criticism for exploring domestic abuse in her award-winning debut. She talks about partying sober, writing in Scots, and why she’s rooting out stigma in her follow-up collection

When Len Pennie’s debut, poyums, won the discover book of the year prize at this year’s British Book awards, it was the first poetry collection to do so for 10 years, and the first winner written in Scots as well as English. It’s likely that the 25-year-old can claim another first: she must be the only winner to have had her ID checked at the awards ceremony to verify her age.

It’s true that Pennie is strikingly fresh-faced. She doesn’t drink alcohol (she often finds herself tidying up and doing the recycling at parties, and when I suggest that she must be a popular designated driver, she laughs and tells me she hasn’t got a licence. “I’m useless and sober!�). But she has been through experiences that by rights might put years on a person.

The Priestdaddy author on quitting social media, Maga conspiracies and how her second novel grew out of a period of post-Covid mania

There is a thing Patricia Lockwood does whenever she spots a priest while walking through an airport. The 43-year-old grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American midwest, an eccentric upbringing documented, famously, in Priestdaddy, her hit memoir of 2017, and a wellspring of comic material that just keeps giving. Priests in the wild amuse and comfort her, a reminder of home and the superiority that comes with niche expertise. “I was recently at St Louis airport and saw a priest,� she says, “high church, not Catholic, because of the width of the collar; that’s the thing they never get right in TV shows. And I gave him a look that was a little bit too intimate. A little bit like: I know.� Sometimes, as she’s passing, she’ll whisper, “encyclical�.

This is Lockwood: elfin, fast-talking, determinedly idiosyncratic, with the uniform irony of a writer who came up through social media and for whom life online is a primary subject. If Priestdaddy documented her unconventional upbringing in more or less conventional comic style, her novels and poems since then have worked in more fragmentary modes that mimic the disjointed experience of processing information in bite-size non sequiturs. In 2021, Lockwood published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, in which she wrote of the disorienting grief at the death of her infant niece from a rare genetic disorder. In her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, she returns to the theme, eliding that grief with her descent into a Covid-induced mania, a terrifying experience leavened with very good jokes. A danger of Lockwood’s writing is that it traps her in a persona that makes sincerity – any statement not hedged and flattened by sarcasm – almost impossible. But Lockwood, it seems to me, has a bouncy energy closer to an Elizabeth Gilbert than a Lauren Oyler or an Ottessa Moshfegh, say, so that no matter how glib her one-liners, you tend to come away from reading her with a general feeling of warmth.

The author’s blackly comic breakout novel won her awards and tattooed superfans. As she releases a follow-up, she talks about growing up as an outsider – and the best advice she received from Margaret Atwood

Mona Awad was trying on a forest-green, deer-patterned dress when she realised that the psychotically twee characters from her 2019 novel, Bunny, had burrowed back into her psyche.

“I looked in the mirror and thought: This isn’t a dress for me, this is a dress for Cupcake,� she says, referencing one of the antagonists from her breakout book. “I started thinking about her, and the other bunnies,� says the Canadian author, “and I was like: I have to go back.�

The US author on his early love of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the genius of Judy Blume, and finding perfection in Agatha Christie and Gustave Flaubert

My earliest reading memory
I recall lying in the bath, age seven or eight, reading the final page of Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself, then turning to the novel’s opening and beginning again. Memory is untrustworthy, but Blume is a genius who has that effect on her reader.

My favourite book growing up
We’re always growing up; we’re always choosing a new favourite. For me, once, this was Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. Later I’d have said JD Salinger’s Nine Stories. Later, still, John Cheever’s Collected Stories, Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, my favourite changing as I did. Maybe I’m finally old enough to understand that favourite is impossible to designate. Or maybe I’d say my current favourite is Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

People are understandably wary of new technology, but human error is often more lethal

We expect our doctors to be demi-gods – flawless, tireless, always right. But they are only human. Increasingly, they are stretched thin, working long hours, under immense pressure, and often with limited resources. Of course, better conditions would help, including more staff and improved systems. But even in the best-funded clinics with the most committed professionals, standards can still fall short; doctors, like the rest of us, are working with stone age minds. Despite years of training, human brains are not optimally equipped for the pace, pressure, and complexity of modern healthcare.

Given that patient care is medicine’s core purpose, the question is who, or what, is best placed to deliver it? AI may still spark suspicion, but research increasingly shows how it could help fix some of the most persistent problems and overlooked failures – from misdiagnosis and error to unequal access to care.

A chatty, self-deprecating memoir recalls the podcaster’s start in TV and his lifelong friendship with comedian and film-maker Joe Cornish

The writer and comic Adam Buxton’s first memoir, Ramble Book, dug into his childhood and his relationship with his father, who featured as the cantankerous BaaadDad in Buxton’s 1990s pop culture series The Adam and Joe Show. I Love You, Byeee is the follow up in which he remembers his late mother, Valerie, and reflects on his TV career which began with him landing a job at Takeover TV, a showcase for new talent on Channel 4, where he brought in his childhood friend Joe Cornish.

Fans of The Adam and Joe Show will find reminiscences about the pair’s toy movies, where they recreated films such as Titanic and Trainspotting, and their radio shows on XFM and 6Music. Buxton is candid about the strain of their working relationship and his feelings of insecurity when Cornish went off to direct his first film, Attack the Block, without him.

What counts as grace is intriguingly rethought in a sly retelling of humankind’s biblical Fall

The Butcher of Eden

Now God made Adam and Eve coats of skins and dressed them.
– Genesis 3:21