This powerful new book examines the moral contradictions of the west and asks what liberal values mean in the face of such brutal and sustained obliteration of human life

Like many people, I have followed the unrelenting horror that has unfolded in Gaza since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 mainly through the medium of social media. The Instagram reels of citizen journalists on the ground have become for me and countless others the most powerful testimony to the slaughter, destruction and trauma visited on the already beleaguered Palestinian population. Recorded at great risk, they are often heartbreaking and enraging: so many dead infants; so many maimed and traumatised children; so many obliterated families and communities.

Some of these witnesses have achieved heroic status among their millions of followers, the likes of Motaz Azaiza, a photojournalist who was evacuated to Qatar after 108 days covering the carnage at close hand; Wael Al-Dahdouh, the Al Jazeera correspondent, whose wife, daughter, son and grandson were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in the Nuseirat refugee camp; Bisan Owda, who shares videos of the destruction that begin with the same defiant mantra of survival: “This is Bizan from Gaza and I am still alive.�

A globe-spanning study of the waste industry reveals how wealthy nations dump their garbage on the poor while the rate at which we produce near-indestructible rubbish only increases

You know the drill: plastic and glass containers go in the blue recycling bin, paper and cardboard in the blue sack, vegetable matter in the green compost bin, and the rest in the grey general rubbish bin. Households up and down the land go through variations of these familiar refuse-sorting tasks each week. But where does it actually all go?

Into the trucks that pick them up, yes, but after that? It’s a kind of act of faith that we imagine our detritus that we’ve carefully – or not so carefully – categorised is transported to the right location where appropriate measures are taken to dispose of it in the most sensible and ecological manner.

The journalist’s debut novel about a London girl gang of the 1950s expertly toys with gender and explores young people’s place in the world

In Kelly Frost’s fast-paced debut novel, girls rule the streets. It’s 1957 in Finsbury Park, north London, and the boys that make up the Coshers gang are away on national service. In their place, the Seven Sisters are guarding their turf, but not without backlash from a neighbouring group of young women – the Kings – who aren’t happy watching a rival gang get their way.

The book opens with Tony in 2017, as she waits to meet her old mates in the pub that was once their meeting place. “Not long after the millennium, someone suggested we start these reunions – although there wasn’t much union left to re,� Frost writes, setting the book’s jocular tone. We learn that Tony escaped Finsbury Park for an international modelling career. What about the rest of them?

In the American writer’s wry, understated second short story collection, the past comes back to jolt her largely middle-aged characters

Curtis Sittenfeld is irresistibly drawn to the awkward: to the geeks, and to those who are not quite as attractive, confident, rich or successful as the peers with whom, often to everyone’s surprise, they find themselves sharing space and time. Her readers, one suspects, feel a strong pull of identification with these less accomplished and veneered characters, not least because Sittenfeld allows us to believe there are significant compensations on this side of the social balance sheet. She took that optimistic outlook to its limits in her last novel, Romantic Comedy, in which a dating-averse backroom TV writer finds love with a front-page celebrity.

Sittenfeld might also have titled this collection of a dozen short stories The Hare and the Tortoise, although it is not always entirely clear that slow and steady does win the race. Many of her protagonists, who are often also narrating their own stories, find themselves in middle age, in domestic and familial circumstances of varying contentedness and stability; and whatever their feelings towards husband, wife, children or job, they are inclined towards looking back, perhaps to stave off the less certain prospect of looking forward.

Artists, gallerists and collectors vie for power in a rollicking mystery that pokes fun while also examining desire and regret

James Cahill’s debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, was full of interesting things but weakened by implausibilities. In his second novel, he gets around this by setting it in the world of modern art, where the implausible and ridiculous are de rigueur.

After a punchy intro in which a young man falls to his death in London (“abruptly, he toppled back – his body separating from the building�), we’re introduced to three vivid characters, each circling the others. There’s Leo Goffman, a New York-based octogenarian real estate mogul and art collector, a man who sees money everywhere. His walls are lined with Richters and Warhols, and to mark his character for the reader, he obligingly yells at his housekeeper when she throws out his favourite magazine.

The Hungarian-English author on addressing what it’s like to be a male body in the world, learning the tricks of literature from Frederick Forsyth, and the feeling of nearly winning the Booker

David Szalay, 51, grew up in London and now lives in Vienna with his wife, having previously moved in 2009 to Hungary, his father’s birthplace. In 2016 he was shortlisted for the Booker prize with his fourth novel, All That Man Is, nine separate stories “self-assembled in the reader’s mind into a sort of collage-novel� (London Review of Books). His new novel, Flesh, follows the fluctuating fortunes of a young Hungarian ex-convict who makes his life in the UK after serving in Iraq.

Tell us how Flesh came to be.
I decided to abandon a book I’d started in 2017. It just wasn’t working, so it felt like a weight off my shoulders; nevertheless, I was under contract and had to come up with something. Literally nothing in Flesh is directly autobiographical, but it started with my underlying experience of being poised between two places and feeling not 100% at home in either of them. I no longer really feel like a native of London, but nor do I feel entirely Hungarian. Even for the decades I lived in London, just by virtue of the name that I have, there was always a sense of being... outsider is too strong a word; I was more of an outsider in Hungary, certainly, but a kind of insider-outsider, because I come from a Hungarian background but don’t speak Hungarian very well. That sort of grey zone interests me.

The novel implies that all the tumult of the protagonist’s life begins with the shock of puberty. What made you want to dramatise that idea?
My aim was to try to be as honest as possible about what it’s actually like to be a male body in the world – to be a body that has its own demands, and how you manage, accommodate, satisfy and fail to satisfy those demands, and what experiences that leads you into.

Money is pivotal to the story, as it tends to be in your work.
It structures our society in a deep way. I say that as someone who’s not Marxist or anything like that; anyone can see that money exists as a way of distributing power. The need for money, or wanting more money, or just sort of having to have money, is central in all our lives. Often it’s underplayed in the same way as physical experience – a bigger part of our existence than you’d think from reading fiction.

In form and style, Flesh resembles Turbulence [2018] and All That Man Is, which seemed to mark a break from your first three novels.
With my earlier books, I was doing something completely different after each one. Looking back, that was born out of not yet having found what really works for me. I enjoy books made of free-standing units of writing that are somehow in dialogue with one another, where what happens in the gaps is as important as the chapters themselves. The way that the reader has to do their own imaginative work means they might come away with a sense of having read a book that covers a large amount of human experience, without having to plough through a 1,000-page 19th-century novel. I don’t think anyone’s seriously going to deny that we live in an era of short attention spans, which probably isn’t good, but we’re going to have to work with it the best we can.

Flesh is published on 6 March by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

From George Orwell to Hannah Arendt and John le Carré, thousands of blacklisted books flooded into Poland during the cold war, as publishers and printers risked their lives for literature

The volume’s glossy dust jacket shows a 1970s computer room, where high priests of the information age, dressed in kipper ties and flares, tap instructions into the terminals of some ancient mainframe. The only words on the front read “Master Operating Station�, “Subsidiary Operating Station� and “Free Standing Display�. Is any publication less appetising than an out-of-date technical manual?

Turn inside, however, and the book reveals a secret. It isn’t a computer manual at all, but a Polish language edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s famous anti-totalitarian novel, which was banned for decades by communist censors in the eastern bloc.

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 exciting new paperbacks, from politicians’ visions for the UK to a Booker shortlisted novel

From sparkling dialogue to surprise character traits, wit, humour and tragedy, this is the year to appreciate Austen

This year marks what would have been Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, and getting stuck into the great Regency writer’s brilliant work is the best way to celebrate. Perhaps you’ve seen the film adaptations, or dipped into Pride and Prejudice, but what about the more obscure Lady Susan? Writer and professor John Mullan has come up with a handy guide to Austen’s writing.

***

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

Everyone else got there a long time ago but I’ve only recently read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s sci-fi masterpiece Children of Time. Cautionary, richly imaginative and deeply, unexpectedly humane, it was both utterly unputdownable and a welcome relief from the current resignation to dystopia.

A deep dive into the world of making things that means you’ll never look at your kettle in quite the same way again

It’s some measure of the extent of urbanisation that the bookends to our day may not be birdsong but the sound of a kettle as the water in it reaches boiling point. That “tock� is made by a miniature device, a small disc consisting of alternating strips of two different metals. When exposed to heat, the metals expand at different rates, the disc gradually curves, and a switch is tripped, cutting off electricity to the kettle. Few of us know this; we write odes to nightingales, not thermostats, even though it is the latter that provides our morning soundtrack, those sonic notches that mark the passing of each day. Tock, tock, tock.

I thought little about those metallic notes until I read Tim Minshall’s new book, an ambitious exploration of the world of manufacturing. In it, he examines the myriad things that surround us, from transistors to ice-cream: the intricate, ingenious ways in which they are made, then shuttled around the world to reach our doorstep. For Minshall, manufacturing has been overlooked and undervalued, with perilous consequences. He writes that it “has become like a sewage system: essential for our lives, yet out of mind until things go wrong�.

A dogged account of how the quest for a treatment may have been set back years by fraudulent evidence

Living to old age is quite literally the best thing that any of us could hope for, given the alternative. It’s a cruel irony, then, that many of us who make it that far will begin to lose our sense of who we are due to dementia. If you’re 65, you’ve got about a one in 20 chance of developing the most common form, Alzheimer’s disease, in the next decade. At 75, it’s about one in seven, while those fortunate enough to reach 85 face a one in three chance.

Given the toll this illness takes on sufferers and those around them, hundreds of millions of families around the world are desperate for a medical breakthrough – and for years, headlines have suggested that it might be imminent. Scientists had identified the cause of Alzheimer’s, they promised, and potential cures were already being tested.

The complicated life and passionate love affairs of Great Britain’s first monarch

Five years before the gunpowder plot, an attempt was made on the life of James Stuart. That was what he claimed, at any rate. Yet the facts of the matter remain mysterious. The story goes that James – already king of Scotland and future king of England – was out hunting, when one of his entourage, the handsome young Alexander Ruthven, suggested they stop in at his family seat of Gowrie House. After lunch, he invited James to accompany him to another part of the castle. As they made their way, he locked one door after another behind them, the king apparently making no objection.

Minutes later, a tower window was flung open and James’s soldiers in the courtyard below caught a glimpse of their master screaming, “Treason! Treason! Treason!� before he was dragged back out of sight by Alexander. Using hammers to smash their way through the series of locked doors, they burst in to find the king holding Alexander at bay with his hunting knife. They instantly slew Alexander, and soon after, his older brother the Earl of Gowrie, who was racing to his aid.

A Marxist critique of left-liberal politics that delivers its message with punch and panache

The British left used to be a force to reckon with. Edward Heath’s government was famously felled by the miners in 1974 – the only instance in postwar European history when working-class power resulted in the overthrow of a ruling party. These days, however, the concept of the working class has an almost retro feel. Trade union membership has plummeted. Expressions of collective solidarity have likewise vanished. Disaffection has far from disappeared, only now it manifests in the form of petty crime and race riots.

In Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar blames the rightwing press for this shift. Thanks to tabloid agents provocateurs and their political creatures in Westminster, she says, the lower orders have abandoned class war for the culture wars. Accordingly, more and more of them spend their weekends not on the barricades but behind computer screens, fuming over small boats and gender ideology.

The TV reporter’s struggles with depression and the suicide of his father, whose own father killed himself, prompt this incisive, highly personal investigation

James Longman is an English broadcast journalist who was the BBC’s man in Beirut before joining US network ABC, where he is now chief international correspondent. He has reported from wars in Syria and Ukraine and covered Covid lockdowns, the queen’s funeral and the 2018 cave rescue in Thailand.

On screen, Longman is the type of British journalist that Americans love: eloquent, charismatic and unflappable. Behind the composure, however, runs a tragic legacy of mental illness. In 1996, when he was nine, Longman’s father John, an artist who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his 20s, died after setting fire to his Notting Hill flat. Longman’s paternal grandfather also killed himself, and his mother, too, has endured mental health struggles. Longman’s own experiences with depression from his mid-20s onwards have prompted him to wonder: “Does sadness run in families? Have I inherited mental illness?�

The Inherited Mind by James Longman is published by Hyperion Avenue (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

This courageous, melancholy memoir, about the author’s struggle to reconcile his faith with his sexuality, argues that homophobia is a cultural phenomenon, not a religious edict

A few years ago I wanted to write about gay life in Algiers, where homosexuality is illegal and, if you’re not careful, can get you killed. There is, however, a busy, if well-hidden, gay underground in the city, as there is in most Arab countries. I found it relatively easy to make a few contacts, who all insisted that we meet in a “neutral� restaurant in the embassy district of Hydra, which is well guarded by government and foreign soldiers and a difficult place for hardline Islamists to penetrate. The watchwords for being gay in Algiers, I learned, were secrecy and discretion. There were no clubs or bars to go to, but rather invite-only private “parties�, along with the riskier, potentially lethal business of cruising the port area and main boulevards. Significantly, everyone I spoke to was upper-middle class, which ensured a certain immunity from suspicion and accusation, and they were diffident about their Islamic faith. To be working class and gay in Algiers, as well as a devout Muslim, is quite another matter.

Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed grew up in a working-class family in Algiers; from the earliest age he knew he was gay and had no idea what to do about it. It did not help that his father was a sometimes violent man – the very incarnation of “rajul�, the Algerian dialect word for a man and his machismo – who hated his son’s effeminacy. Zahed was also a pious Muslim, experiencing real spiritual feeling, which persists in him to this day. The first part of this book is a gripping description of living two realities at once: the life of a religious young man who is ever aware that his sexuality, as it develops, is anathema to his religion, his family, his friends and society at large. Zahed’s fears are deepened against the background of the civil war that took place in Algeria in the 1990s, when hundreds of thousand of people were killed and Islamist guerrillas massacred as many “miscreants� as they could, including homosexuals.

In the Yorkshire author’s first memoir, she recounts in tender, sometimes showy prose her difficult relationship with her complex mother and brushes with danger in her thrill-seeking years

Adelle Stripe is the author of one novel, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (2017), one work of nonfiction, Ten Thousand Apologies (2022) – a biography of the wilfully dysfunctional band Fat White Family – and various short stories in sundry collections. Now the North Yorkshire writer has trained her focus inward with a coming-of-age memoir that recounts the story of growing up with a complex mother and how she herself became a “reckless daughter�. Authors who turn to memoir face certain dilemmas. They must wrestle with precisely how much to reveal and what to conceal; which are the most resonant parts and how to avoid self-indulgence. The best in the genre manage such issues with invisible aplomb, while others can seem like leafing through family photo albums whose pictures mean more to the subject than to anyone else.

The fact that Stripe has elected to write hers in the second person is jarring. Second person can work effectively in fiction, but memoir is all about intimacy, disclosure. “Come in,� she seems to be saying here, “but stay over there. No, further back.�

Base Notes: The Scents of a Life by Adelle Stripe is published by White Rabbit (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

The scorned woman thriller deftly reimagined, preposterously gripping murders at an ice skating training camp - and a frantic search for a missing daughter

The protagonist of Chris Bridges’s Sick to Death (Avon) is not your run-of-the-mill thriller heroine. Emma is sick with a neurological condition that leaves her crushed by fatigue, prone to blackouts, unable to work. Hers is a disease “without concrete evidence, without affirmative scans or validated cause�, and she is constantly having to justify herself to her family – her mother, cruel stepfather Peter, stepsister and daughter – with whom she shares a tiny council house. “Everyone has their limits of what they can tolerate. It turns out that they couldn’t take me being ill. I can’t stand their lack of care. Why wouldn’t I become angry?� says Emma. When she falls for her handsome neighbour Adam, a doctor, her vague plans to get rid of Peter start to take shape – particularly when she learns more about Adam’s wife, Celeste, and the trouble Adam is in. “My illness doesn’t mean that I have to be relegated to a supporting role, the background character who dies at the end or fades away. I can even be the villain if I want to.� Bridges, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020, writes in an author note that he had had enough of the “tired tropes� around sickness in fiction, from the “sickly sweet ill woman�, to the unwell person who is shown to be a fraud. Sick to Death turns these tropes on their head: Emma is a force to be reckoned with, and although the plot does become increasingly tangled, this is deliciously dark and twisted, and a lot of fun.

Fun is also at the heart of CL Pattison’s First to Fall (Headline) – if you’re prepared to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy this tale of murderous figure skaters. We open with a newspaper report about deaths “at the home of legendary German figure skater, Lukas Wolff� during an extreme blizzard. Wolff, we’re told, is famous “for a spectacular sequence of skating moves called ‘the Grim Reaper’�. Our heroine is Libby, a promising but poor young skater who jumps at the chance to go to Wolff’s training camp in the Bavarian forest. Wolff puts Libby and her fellow trainees through their paces, a harsh but brilliant taskmaster, until the blizzard descends, the mobile reception goes, and Libby’s fellow skaters start dying. Pattison is a great writer, Libby a brave and brilliant character, and it turns out that reading about tricky skating moves is more fun than I’d anticipated. Throw in a corker of an escape down an icy river and you’ve got yourself a winner.

O’Donnell brings the spare intensity of her award-winning short stories to her first novel, a compulsive tale of one woman’s escape intensified by Dublin’s housing crisis

When it comes to escaping an abusive relationship, it’s said that leaving is the simple part; the real challenge is not returning. For Ciara Fay, pregnant and with her two small girls in tow, the difficulty is magnified by Dublin’s housing crisis, still one of the worst in Europe. Having finally bundled the kids into the car, along with a few impulsively grabbed necessities and the little cash she’s been able to save, hidden in a nappy, she’s faced with a stark question: where are they to go?

Nesting, Roisín O’Donnell’s compulsive debut novel, makes of Ciara’s bid for safety and freedom a minutely observed, heart-juddering drama. To the casual onlooker, husband Ryan is a well-dressed, mass-attending civil servant, but over the course of their five-year marriage he has subjected Ciara to relentless emotional abuse and more, isolating her from friends, preventing her from working, controlling their finances. “Things happen at night,� Ciara imagines saying out loud. “My body doesn’t feel like my own.�

Family relationships are explored in this finely executed tale of two brothers drawn into bear poaching in rural Montana

The setting of Callan Wink’s second novel is the American wilderness. Brothers Thad and Hazen struggle to make a living logging and sawing firewood on their rugged, isolated smallholding in Montana’s Beartooth mountains, bordering Yellowstone national park. Their father had laboured at this business until illness took his savings and his life, leaving his sons with a mountain of medical bills, and a lien for unpaid property taxes that brings them to the verge of losing their family home. The brothers are reluctantly drawn into the dirty, risky work of poaching, shooting black bear out of season for their skin, skull and claws, and even more valuable gallbladder. “Hazen could find and excise this organ by feel, his face pointed up and away, his eyes closed with concentration, his hands moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer.�

Sacajawea, the brothers’ “sporadic mother�, returns after many years away, parks her “hippy van� outside their house and gets a job in the health food store in town. Thad is 27 years old to Hazen’s 26, and has taken on the role of responsible adult, his brother living a prolonged, chaotic adolescence. Thad is angry at their mother. She left shortly after teaching him how to read: “he remembered for a long time thinking if he had continued to stumble over words, his mother would have never gone�. Hazen is content to have her home, fishes for her and, without his brother realising, the two form a close relationship.

A slice-of-life portrait of a community suffering the after-effects of the second world war

Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler is known for his restrained and sensitive novels that illuminate the struggles and joys of peripheral lives. His debut, A Whole Life, centres on a man who barely leaves his mountain home. The Tobacconist is a coming-of-age novel set against the rise of fascism in Vienna. The Field introduces a chorus of the dead who tell the story of their village.

Like The Field, The Café With No Name uses a narrow lens to tell the story of a whole community. At the centre is 31-year-old Robert Simon, an itinerant worker who assists the stall holders of the Karmelitermarkt in Vienna. In the late summer of 1966, Simon notices that the cafe on the corner of the market has closed. He decides to take on the lease in order “to do something which would give his life a positive affirmation. To one day stand behind the bar of his own establishment.�

This book within a book weaves a writer’s struggles with scenes from their Africanfuturist tale of post-apocalyptic robots

In Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor, one of the most acclaimed science fiction writers of our time, moves into mainstream literary fiction. Her protagonist is Zelu, a prickly, mercurial, iconoclastic writer who gets high in inappropriate situations, hooks up promiscuously, and ends up quarrelling with everyone, especially her large, overprotective Nigerian American family. She is also paraplegic, and has PTSD from the accident that left her disabled at the age of 12.

As the book begins, she loses her job as a writing professor for giving an entitled student a brutal critique, on the same day that her novel is rejected by a 10th publisher, and while she is at her sister’s wedding, under an onslaught of uncensored judgment from all her most conservative family members. It’s at this moment, when “[her] face was crusty and itchy with dried tears … her mind cracked so wide open that all her demons had flown in�, that she’s inspired to begin a new project, about robots on a post-human Earth, though she’s never written anything like it, and doesn’t even read science fiction.

The Tiepolo Blue author’s impressive second novel is an enthrallingly intricate portrait of the art world

James Cahill’s first novel, Tiepolo Blue, charted the sexual liberation and psychic disintegration of an uptight Cambridge art historian. It was a bravura performance that more than lived up to its extravagant pre-publication praise. But can his second, The Violet Hour, live up to his first?

Cahill himself is more than aware of the reputational tightrope walk that is a creative career. The Violet Hour features a fictional contemporary artist, Thomas Haller, whose own eminence, from the 1990s onwards, is contrasted with the downbeat experience of perhaps equally talented female artists who are hitting their heads against glass ceilings and brick walls. Despite his success as an abstract painter who has defined himself against the YBA aesthetic, Haller has been on the receiving end of one devastatingly negative review, brilliantly and wittily ventriloquised by Cahill. The motives for it turn out to be complicatedly personal.

In a nuanced stand-alone sequel, the Irish novelist revisits the lovers from her second book – and finds two lives even more complicated, messy and human than before

In literary terms, Britain was a duller place 15 years ago: Booker judges looked for novels that “zip along�, editors were saying no to Deborah Levy and the publisher Jacques Testard couldn’t get a job. There was nothing for it but DIY: new houses, like Testard’s Fitzcarraldo Editions, and new prizes for new authors shut out by the risk-averse mentality that prevailed after the 2008 recession. Leading the way was Liverpool-born, Ireland-raised writer Eimear McBride, whose 2013 debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, a looping soliloquy published by Norwich startup Galley Beggar Press, won the inaugural Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction as well as the Women’s prize (then known as the Baileys), traditionally a more commercial award, in a sign that the thirst for novelty perhaps wasn’t so niche after all.

McBride’s new novel, The City Changes Its Face, is a stand-alone sequel to her second book, 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians, which was told by teenage drama student Eily, who comes to London from Ireland in the mid-90s and falls for Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, with an estranged daughter Eily’s age, living overseas after her mother couldn’t hack Stephen sleeping around – a snag for Eily, too.

A bookshop becomes a sanctuary in a post-apocalyptic romance, a connection is forged through food – and a codebreaker learns the language of big beasts

Let the Light In (David Fickling) sees award-winning writer Jenny Downham join forces with her son, Louis Hill, to create a powerful story of siblings coming to terms with the death of their father. Seventeen-year-old Leah finds solace in a secret relationship with a married man while her younger brother, Charlie, is tempted by a seemingly unmissable opportunity to make money, their actions ultimately colliding in a shock wave of secrets and lies. It’s a compassionate, tenderly told family drama, with complex, nuanced characters at its heart.

Ravena Guron, a rising star of the YA thriller genre, is back with Mondays Are Murder (Usborne). Returning to her sleepy home town a year after the death of best friend Ivy, Kay is greeted with a sinister anonymous note promising an alliterative crime for each day of the week, culminating in her murder on Monday. Who is behind the threats and what is their link to Ivy? Meticulous plotting and killer twists drive Kay’s quest to uncover the culprit in this deliciously compulsive read.

Animal magic, little dinosaurs, dangerous strangers, death-flies and zombies, four lost girls who live wild in the woods and more

Our Love by Fátima Ordinola, Post Wave, £12.99
This adorable animal-themed picture book conveys the love between parent and child, “bigger than any river� and “stronger than any shield�, in soft, bright watercolour scenes of protection, consolation and joy.

Ten-Word Tiny Tales of Love by Joseph Coelho and Friends, Walker, £14.99
These touching 10-word stories of sibling bonds, beloved pets and the healing power of the natural world are each illustrated by a different artist, and should encourage 4+ storytellers to try creating their own.

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.

At 83, The Accidental Tourist author discusses the secret to a good marriage, publishing her 25th book and why she can no longer keep politics out of her novels

“I’m ashamed,� Anne Tyler says of the publication of her new novel, Three Days in June, a typically Tyleresque off‑kilter romantic comedy about a long-divorced, mismatched couple. “I didn’t even realise I was up to 25. If you look at a writer’s work and you see that many titles you think, ‘Well, it can’t be very serious work.’ But that’s what happened.�

The seriousness of Tyler’s fiction, which includes much-loved novels Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and the Pulitzer prize-winning Breathing Lessons, has bothered critics for decades. How could a writer of such witty, warm, kind novels about middle-class families that contain very little historical context, no politics or sex, even, really be one of America’s finest living novelists, as so many have claimed? Not to mention her prodigiousness. The author herself couldn’t give two hoots. Unswayed by literary fashion or criticism, she has been writing the novels that interest her, and her devoted readership, for 60 years. “How we handle day-to-day life as we go through it, with its disappointments and its pleasures, that’s all I want to know,� she says.

It’s been 11 years since she published a novel. In that time, the author has lost both parents, seen Trump become president twice – and finally returned to fiction after a bruising reaction to her comments on gender

I arrive early to meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian-American writer, feminist, author of Americanah. Her home, just outside Baltimore, looks Scandinavian somehow amid the snow crust and woodland. Adichie is mid-photoshoot, but the stylist shows me through to the kitchen, telling me to help myself to roast chicken and rice. At a desk in the corner, Adichie’s nine-year-old daughter is wearing headphones and absorbed in what looks like homework. In the middle of the room, watched over by a nanny, are two smiling, 10-month-old boys, one sitting in an activity centre, shrieking with joy, the other gnawing a toy. I’d read a lot about Adichie’s life in the last few years: the sudden death of her father, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, in 2020, the second shock of her mother’s death months later in 2021. I’d heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2023 discussing how motherhood is a glorious gift that comes at a cost: “I could probably have written two novels had I not had my child.� Nowhere had I heard that she’d had twins.

“You’ve met my babies,� Adichie laughs when she appears in a vibrant orange dress. She sits to remove the hair extensions she has worn for the shoot. “I want to protect my children. I’m OK with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them.� Later, she tells me that for a long time people didn’t know she had a husband, either – she married Ivara Esege, a hospital physician, in 2009. “So, here’s the thing, Nigerians are … � Nosy? “They want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it.�

The leftwing political commentator on gen Z’s disillusionment with democracy, why she’s a ‘Mantel stan’ and the moral panic behind her first book

Ash Sarkar, 32, is a journalist and political commentator. She grew up in north London and is a contributing editor at the leftwing website Novara Media. A regular pundit on TV and radio, she made waves with a viral 2018 appearance on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, where she clashed with Piers Morgan, telling him: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot.� Her first book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War (Bloomsbury), is a lively analysis of how the ruling classes purposefully misdirect political blame by stoking the fear that minorities are working to oppress the majority.

What does “minority rule� mean to you?
I realised that every moral panic – whether it was trans rights, BLM [Black Lives Matter], Extinction Rebellion – was 1,000 doors opening on to the same place. The story was: here are these minorities who want to tell you how to live. But at the same time, I believe society is governed by minority rule – oligarchic power, corporate power, the way in which electoral systems devalue the votes of people who live in densely populated areas. So minority rule describes both this moral panic and the true state of affairs.

The author and journalist on ‘modern London corruption’ and his Orwell prize-shortlisted novel Caledonian Road, how he helped Jonathan Franzen and the last book he gave as a gift

Journalist, novelist and cafe owner Andrew O’Hagan, 56, grew up in Ayrshire and lives in London, the setting for his most recent book, Caledonian Road, now out in paperback. Shortlisted for last year’s Orwell prize for political fiction, it follows 60 characters over 650 pages and has been praised as an “extremely readable how-we-live-now novel� (Margaret Drabble) that “captures London in all its messy, multicultural glory� (Yotam Ottolenghi) and “instantly feels like a box set waiting to happen� (the Standard).

Tell us how Caledonian Road came about.
I was writing a lot of big stories for the London Review of Books – working with Julian Assange [on a memoir that Assange disavowed, an experience O’Hagan reported on], with another guy who claimed to have invented bitcoin, with people who were reinventing themselves on the net – and a lot of that reporting came together in the character of Campbell Flynn, a kind of falling man at the centre of modern London corruption. I got some insight into the British aristocracy’s relationship with dirty Russian money, and following that money led to street gangs, migrant traffickers, fashion brands and high-street businessmen. In my head, a kind of Dickens and Zola energy was pulsing. The research became huge: I was at the polo in Windsor one minute, with the queen attending, or with rap gangs or inside Leicester sweatshop factories the next. I was sort of amazed at the real-life connections and wanted to give inner life to them.

With protests on the streets of Seoul, the celebrated writer talks about the painful process of uncovering her country’s brutal past - and how it felt to win the Nobel prize

On 10 October last year, the novelist and poet Han Kang had just finished having supper with her 24-year-old son at home in Seoul. They were discussing which tea to have – peppermint, berry or chamomile – when the phone rang. It was the Swedish Academy in Stockholm calling to tell her she had been awarded the Nobel prize in literature. Her first thought was to check the news, which confirmed that she was indeed the first Korean writer to become Nobel laureate. At 54, she is young by Nobel standards. She couldn’t call anyone, not even her parents, because her mobile phone was “on fire� with messages. She turned the sound off and she and her son returned to the question of tea. They plumped for camomile. “I thought we needed to calm down,� she laughs on a video call from Seoul. “It was a very, very peaceful evening.�

It was not so serene in the rest of the country. Han Kang fever swept across South Korea: government meetings were interrupted to celebrate the news; the printing presses couldn’t keep up with the demand for her books; the price of secondhand copies rocketed, and a trend for transcribing her work and posting it on social media took off. Han was not prepared for her new status as national hero. “Too much attention is not very good for writers,� she says, in her careful English. “You need anonymity, to be able to take a stroll in the street. You really need your calm inside.�

The award-winning author on his move from short stories to novels, writing marginal characters in small-town Mayo and the Irish fiction he rates most

Born in Canada in 1982, Colin Barrett was raised near Ballina, County Mayo, and though he left as a teenager, studying creative writing at University College Dublin, Mayo has provided the setting for almost all his writing to date. His debut short story collection, Young Skins, came out in 2013, winning the Guardian first book award and yielding a film adaptation, Calm With Horses, starring Cosmo Jarvis and Barry Keoghan. He followed it with the 2022 collection Homesickness and last year’s Booker-longlisted novel Wild Houses, which revolves around a poorly-planned kidnapping in Ballina. Winner of the Nero debut fiction award, it is now out in paperback. Barrett lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.

What sparked Wild Houses?
The first scene I wrote was the opening one. Dev Hendrick wakes up in the middle of night and there’s a car outside. Two men bring a teenage boy to the door. The men turn out to be Dev’s criminal cousins and Doll, the boy, is a bargaining chip in a haphazard blackmailing scheme. What attracted me was writing from the perspective of Dev, who is on the periphery. I was very taken with that situation, where a passive and withdrawn character is pushed right up against this dramatic and potentially traumatic event.

As he embarks on a quartet of novels following one family, the Malaysian author talks about storytelling, family silences – and the legacy of colonialism

Twenty years into his life as a published novelist, Tash Aw is considering the creative freedom that comes with surrendering control: of allowing himself to write without fully understanding how a novel will eventually take shape, what its characters’ trajectories will look like, what they’re thinking and feeling. We are talking about The South, the first in a planned quartet of novels exploring the lives of the Lim family; Aw is halfway through writing the second instalment, which, he tells me, is “not going to plan, but going well�.

Ambiguity and suggestiveness have been present in his previous four novels – 2005’s The Harmony Silk Factory, which won the Whitbread prize for a debut novel and was longlisted for the Booker; Map of the Invisible World (2009); Five Star Billionaire (2013); and 2019’s We, the Survivors – but now his impatience with fiction that declares itself too certain of its material, of the realities and contours of the lives it depicts, seems palpable.

The poet and novelist on having his heart broken by Animal Farm, imagining Ibsen and Chekhov characters as Nigerian, and ditching physics for Plato

My earliest reading memory
In London, reading my dad’s copy of the Times at four. It embarrassed my mum, who hurried me out of the room when visitors came.

My favourite book growing up
In Lagos, in my teens, I discovered Ibsen’s plays and Chekhov’s stories. I transplanted the characters, imagining them as Nigerian. That’s the magic of reading.

From seeing things to hearing voices, there’s a finer line between hallucination and reality than you might suppose

When did you last hallucinate? “The visionary tendency is much more common among sane people than is generally suspected,� wrote the 19th-century psychologist Sir Francis Galton. Setting aside the vivid, often emotive, cinema of our dreams, we are all more vulnerable to “seeing things� than we might at first suppose.

Around four fifths of people who have recently been bereaved report an encounter with their loved one: most commonly a lively sense of their presence, but some hear, see or speak with them. Up to 60% of people who lose sight in later life see things that aren’t there, sometimes extravagant images such as the “two young men … wearing magnificent cloaks … their hats … trimmed with silver� who appeared in the first reported case of Charles Bonnet syndrome, as this phenomenon is known, before “dissolving� away. A 20-year-old woman blindfolded for 12 hours saw “cities, skies, kaleidoscopes, lions and sunsets so bright she could ‘barely look at them’�. After losing a limb, most people carry a “constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member�, as Weir Mitchell, the American neurologist who coined the term phantom limb after studying 90 cases from the American civil war, put it. Pilots on long flights, travellers through snowstorms and deserts, prisoners and hostages held in darkness; their restless brains are all prone to see the things of which they’re being deprived.

A wide-ranging and thoroughly entertaining portrait not just of Queen Elizabeth II but of the psyche of her subjects

The funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 was watched by around 28 million people in the UK alone. In her lifetime, she was one of the most photographed and scrutinised figures in the world. Yet few could say they knew the late monarch since, says biographer Craig Brown, she kept “her interior world screened from public view� and was “a human looking-glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those she faced�.

Little wonder, then, that A Voyage Around the Queen does not follow the usual conventions of a biography. Instead of a chronological account of its subject, it is a patchwork of news reports, letters, diary entries, secondhand anecdotes, tweets and even dreams. The result is a wide-ranging and thoroughly entertaining portrait not just of the woman but the psyche of her subjects. You don’t have to be a royalist to enjoy such titbits as Kingsley Amis anxiously loading up on Imodium prior to meeting the queen lest he fart in her orbit, or the list of wedding gifts given to the royal couple in 1947 which includes bibles, tea cosies, bookends, paperweights, 500 cases of tinned pineapple from the state of Queensland and 148 pairs of nylon stockings “from Americans sensitive to Britain’s postwar shortage�.