From Maigret to Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple, authors choose the whodunnits they love to hunker down with at this time of year

A Maigret Christmas and Other Stories by Georges Simenon

From The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to Black Hearts in Battersea, Joan Aiken’s tales of plucky orphans surviving in industrial Britain are a keystone of children’s literature

There was once a poor widow with two young children who wrote to her agent to ask what had happened to the novel she had sent him. Her husband had died, leaving nothing but debts, and matters were becoming desperate. However, she was not quite the usual aspiring author: for one thing, she was the daughter of a Pulitzer prize-winning poet; for another, she had already published two collections of short stories.

It turned out that her agent had forgotten all about it. Her manuscript had been sitting on the windowsill in his office for a year, unread.

The Nobel prize winner pushes at the veil between this world and the next in the immersive tale of a solitary fisherman

How should one write about death – not as experienced by those who merely witness it, but by the people doing the actual dying? Many attempts have been made, but some favourites barge to the front. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy terrifies both us and his eponymous magistrate with the “black sack� into which Ivan is being pushed by “an invisible, invincible force�. In Tobias Wolff’s Bullet in the Brain, a book critic is shot by a bank robber, triggering “a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmission� that throws up a random memory of a childhood game of baseball.

Will Self, in The North London Book of the Dead, looks beyond the moment of oblivion, suggesting that when we die we move to Crouch End or Grays Thurrock. In Immortality by Milan Kundera, the “other world� is a place where Goethe, out for a stroll, can bump into Hemingway. After the two men spend a bit of time discussing the rather judicial-sounding affairs of the afterlife, Goethe remembers he is in a postmodern novel and remarks, “You know perfectly well that at this moment we are but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist who lets us say things we would probably never say on our own.�

The Booker-winning novelist on her teenage crush on Winston Graham’s character, the beauty of CS Lewis and how Hermann Hesse changed her life

My earliest reading memory
Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian. This book will always stay with me; it was perhaps the first one I read on my own that disturbed me, and presented me with a world in which there was pain, neglect and suffering, and also towering kindness. The older I get the more grateful I am to my parents for filling my early life with books – for the joy of them, and also an understanding that life is out there.

The book that changed me as a teenager
It’s weird how voraciously you read as a teenager and how books arrow into you. I remember reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and there began my dabbling with ideas of Buddhism and taking myself off to silent retreats; it also seeded my decision to study philosophy, and got me interested in ideas-led fiction. So, life-changing in some ways. (Thank you, Hermann Hesse.)

What is Bertie Wooster’s middle name and in which novel did James Bond get married? Test your knowledge with questions by William Boyd, David Baddiel, Sara Collins, Tom Holland, Ali Smith and more

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The Booksellers Association spoke to staff who also highlighted James by Percival Everett, and everything from Chris Hoy’s autobiography to a book about fishing by a dog

This year’s Booker prize winner will be the Christmas No 1 bestseller, predict UK booksellers.

The Booksellers Association (BA) asked bookshop staff which book they think could reach the festive top spot, and Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the most popular response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The best books to give as gifts this Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some exciting new paperbacks, from a unique history of Russia to nail-biting crime novels

Shortlisted for the Booker, passed among families and picked up by Cillian Murphy for the big screen, the Irish writer’s razor-sharp fiction leaves you wanting more

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2022, is a fitting December read – a quiet yet powerful book set in the lead-up to Christmas which is short enough to read in snatched moments between festivities. Once you’ve read it, you can also go and see its newly released film adaptation, produced by and starring Cillian Murphy. And if you can’t get enough of Keegan’s razor-sharp fiction after that, there are plenty of other stories by the acclaimed Irish author to try. Novelist Megan Nolan suggests some good places to begin.

***

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

I have recently enjoyed Doppelganger by Naomi Klein: a miraculously lucid laying-out of what is really happening in the world via the dark web, the interested parties behind fake news and the human psyche. It is at once personal and universal and not in any way hectoring.

A biography of the bard of rural England reveals an unexpectedly adventurous sex life

Ronald Blythe is most acclaimed for Akenfield, his 1969 portrait of an English village from the late 19th century onwards. Latterly, the saintly author, who lived hermit-like in a remote farmhouse, was revered for his poetic, and profound writing about rural life. In several million published words, Ronnie – as he was affectionately known – could be personal but never revealed his relationships or anything remotely raunchy.

So it is unexpected to find this definitive biography, which spans the 10 decades of Blythe’s life, fairly steaming with sex. There are early adventures in a haystack; “some of the best sex ever� with fellow second world war conscripts; seduction by a jeweller from Bath in a Cornish field lit by glowworms; and casual assignations with everyone from a “blonde Adonis� of a civil servant to a notoriously slothful 21-stone rector.

A rich and vivid history of the Plantagenet cousins and rivals for the English throne

‘Richard II tried first being a Good King and then a Bad King without enjoying either very much. Then being told he was unbalanced, he got off the throne whereupon his cousin Lancaster (spelt Bolingbroke) quickly mounted the throne and said he was Henry IV, Part 1.� This, anyway, is how it goes in 1066 and All That, the classic parody of garbled schoolroom rote-learning. And while Helen Castor, a historian of great nuance and meticulous scholarship, would not put it quite so baldly, this remains pretty much the through-line of her luminous 600-page study of the Plantagenet cousins who between them generated the plots for three of Shakespeare’s history plays.

The Hart of Castor’s title is Richard II, who came to the throne at the age of 10 in 1377 and never stood a chance. His early accession was a consequence of his father’s death the previous year. Edward, the Black Prince, had led England to its first big win in the hundred years war at the Battle of Crécy, after which France gave up a third of itself to England. And now in his magnificent place came this thin-skinned, spoilt, effeminate boy. Harts – male deers – are generally depicted in heraldry as beefy, bulky, russety animals with a forest of antlers. But Richard chose a white hart as his personal emblem instead and commissioned artwork, which features on Castor’s cover, showing a pale animal, as slender as a greyhound, tethered to the ground by a heavy golden chain.

The leftwing intellectual may be a master of self-justification, but in this book he is clever, cultured and good company

One afternoon in the early 1980s, Tariq Ali, wearing only a towel, leapt into a room in Private Eye’s Soho offices. His mission was to liberate the magazine’s editor, Richard Ingrams, from a tiresome interview with Daily Mail hack Lynda-Lee Potter. “Mr Ingrosse, sir,� said Ali, posing as an Indian guru, “Time for meditation. Please remove all clothes.�

It’s a terrible shame Potter is dead because I’d love to have heard her side of the story. Did she, as Ali reports, nearly faint before making her excuses and leaving? Was she taken in by the ruse that concluded with Ingrams and Ali giggling over pastries in the nearby Maison Bertaux? Or did she, as seems more likely, immediately recognise Britain’s foremost Lahore-born, Oxford-educated Trotskyist intellectual, after whom the Rolling Stones reportedly named their song Street Fighting Man – if only from his fabulous moustache? We will never know.

You Can’t Please All by Tariq Ali (Verso Books, £35). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The first volume of Cher’s extraordinary memoir mixes hard times with the high life

In the preface to volume one of Cher’s memoir, she gives us a heads up on the kind of story that is to follow. “Often when I think of my family history,� writes the 78-year-old superstar, “it sounds like the opening of a Dickens novel.� Cher, an Emmy, Grammy and Oscar winner, isn’t known for the modesty of her statements, but in this case she isn’t exaggerating. The book, which takes us up to the 1980s and the beginning of her acting career, is so fraught with drama, danger and reversals in fortune that it unfolds like an American picaresque.

One thing that has always elevated Cher above the vast majority of people in her fame bracket has been her ability to poke fun at herself. The voice of this memoir, which has somehow survived seven years of rewrites and many fired ghostwriters, sounds at least as authentic as her outbursts on X. The young woman in these pages is bouncy, guileless, sardonic, flip – as keenly sensitive to her own absurdity as she is to that of others. “Oops,� she writes, when something bad happens. Of her entry into the music business: “I was utterly clueless.� Her wide-eyed enthusiasm survives early success so that, years into her celebrity, she still exclaims, “I felt like a million dollars!� after getting herself a new dress.

A collection of articles, talks, letters and unpublished writing fills important gaps in the great naturalist’s life story

‘Gerald Durrell was magic� chirrups David Attenborough across the cover of this collection by the beloved naturalist and author who died in 1995. Chosen by Durrell’s widow ahead of his centenary in January, it includes magazine pieces, radio talks, letters, introductions to other people’s books and a selection from the vast archive of his unpublished writing. What binds the pieces is the signature magic of which Attenborough, whose own career parallels and counterpoints Durrell’s, speaks. It might best be described as the gift of finding wonder everywhere. Here is Durrell, in an unpublished scrap of memoir, on the four years he spent as a child in prewar Corfu. “Leaf to bud, caterpillar to butterfly, tadpole to toad or frog, I was surrounded by miracles. I was surrounded by magic as though Merlin had passed through and casually touched the island with his wand.�

It is ironic of course that Durrell claimed to hate writing, and only embarked on the first of his 40 books in 1953, as a means of funding his animal-collecting trips to Africa and South America. In a letter written the following year to his older brother, the novelist Lawrence Durrell, he expresses near-contempt for what he wryly calls my “‘literary’ achievement�: “the only thing that worries me is how long the great British Public is going to continue to read this sort of slush without getting bored by it. Hart-Davis [his publisher] seemed to think that I can do several more without spoiling my market.� He ends by asking “Larry� to lean on any “stinking rich� friends who might be prepared to stump up £10,000 to enable him to start a “Trust or organisation … for the breeding of those forms of animal life which are on the borders of extinction.� At this point he was imagining the Caribbean as a likely site, but five years later it was on another enchanted isle, Jersey, that he was able to open the zoo and wildlife conservation trust that still bear his name.

A look at wrath, gluttony and the rest from a medical perspective offers valuable insights – but is disease a good guide to normal functioning?

‘From Adam has sprung one mass of sinners and godless men,� wrote St Augustine, arguably the key architect of the Christian doctrine of original sin. The notion that babies are born with this indelible stain, the residue of Adam’s fall in Eden, can seem one of the most pernicious features of Christian dogma. But as Guy Leschziner argues in Seven Deadly Sins, we could interpret Augustine’s austere judgment as an acknowledgment that we are inherently inclined to do things we shouldn’t. The catalogue of seven direst vices first adduced by Tertullian and immortalised in Dante’s Divine Comedy – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth – may seem arbitrary, but we can all recognise aspects of them in ourselves.

Leschziner, a consultant neurologist at Guy’s Hospital in London, explores the physiological and psychological roots of these “failings� and argues that, in mild degree, all might be considered not just universal but necessary human attributes. The goal, he implies, is not to renounce them but to align our natural impulses with the demands of living healthily and productively in society. Seven Deadly Sins takes the case-study format pioneered by Oliver Sacks in using dysfunction to explore the neurological origins of behaviour. It is a profoundly humane book, occasionally compromised by excessive clinical detail and perhaps more so by its lack of wider context.

The britpop bassist tears himself away from cheese just long enough to play with his old bandmates in this joyfully chaotic memoir

Last July, Blur played the biggest shows in their history over two weekend nights at Wembley Stadium. For Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree, it was a signal moment in an objectively great band’s history. They weren’t just huge gigs, but emotional, powerful concerts, with Albarn in tears on stage at one point.

I was surprised, both while attending one of the concerts and watching the accompanying documentary film To the End, at the band’s awe, almost surprise, that they were playing Wembley. You are, you want to remind them, one of the best and most beloved bands in Britain. In Over the Rainbow, his memoir of Blur’s comeback year, Alex James is either naive or a little disingenuous when he ponders if they would be able to fill the national stadium: “Would anyone,� he wonders, “really be persuaded to go to downtown Brent on a Saturday night in summertime?�

A writer takes his elderly mother on a road trip through the Swiss Alps in an attempt to break with his privileged family’s dysfunctional past

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist who writes in German. He has been publishing since 1995, when his debut Faserland won him favourable comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis and Nick Hornby. Despite Kracht’s high profile among German-language readers, Eurotrash is only the third of his novels to be translated into English. The first was 2012’s Imperium, inspired by the life of the historical figure August Engelhardt, an eccentric who founded a utopian cult in the South Seas based on sun worship and eating coconuts.

Eurotrash works a smaller, more personal canvas. It tells the story of a middle aged Swiss-German writer called Christian who wrote a novel called Faserland in the 1990s and now finds himself in Zurich, visiting his elderly mother. The apparently autofictional form might seem tricksy, if the revelations that follow weren’t so heartfelt. Christian’s mother is in her 80s, frail, mentally ill and medicating herself with a mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs.

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is translated by Daniel Bowles and published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

A widower sets out to understand his wife’s death in this tale of memory, trauma and German reunification, from the author of The Reader

Bernhard Schlink is best known for his 1995 novel The Reader, which has become a classic of Holocaust literature. It tells the story of a 15-year-old boy, living in postwar Germany, who falls into a passionate love affair with an older woman. Later he discovers that his former lover was a guard in a Nazi concentration camp.

Since then, Schlink has published two short story collections and a series of novels: some literary fiction and some crime. Like The Reader, most of these books explore the difficulties of trying to lay the past to rest. This new novel returns again to themes of memory, trauma and the impossibility of reconciliation. However, this time his subject is German reunification and the legacy of the German Democratic Republic.

The author of sprawling SF mega-novels has switched gears for a fast-moving adventure set between Russia and the US

Neal Stephenson is known for enormous, sprawling, infodumpy mega-novels: all-encompassing works that extrapolate technological and social change into the near future or trace them through the past. His breakthrough book, 1992’s Snow Crash, is a cyberpunk technothriller set in part in the “metaverse� – Stephenson coined this term for immersive virtual reality long before Zuckerberg’s Facebook appropriated it. He followed it up in 1999 with the 918-page Cryptonomicon, about Alan Turing, code breaking, maths, finance, gaming and many other things. The 18th century-set The Baroque Cycle (2003-04) is the best part of 3,000 pages long, stuffed with data historical, scientific, speculative, digressive. Reamde (2011), another stonking technothriller more than 1,000 pages long, was extended further with the near-900 pages of 2019’s sequel, Fall or, Dodge in Hell. For Stephenson, more is more.

Polostan looks like a change of direction: a brisk 320 pages of sharply plotted, quick-moving historical adventure, set in the 1920s and 30s. The story follows Dawn Rae Bjornberg, born in the United States to a communist Russian father and American mother, who spends her upbringing between the two nations: she is Dawn in the US, Aurora in the USSR. She travels with the Reds in the US, tangles with the FBI, runs machine guns. Returning to the Soviet Union, she works on the construction of the gigantic industrial city of Magnitogorsk, until she is locked in a psychiatric hospital – because the authorities assume her various stories, of playing polo with a young George Patton, her talk of Bonnie and Clyde, of giving birth to a monstrous baby, are delusions. When they discover it’s all true they assume she is a spy sent by the Americans and interrogate her. A sequence where she is tied, naked, to a metal bed frame and dipped repeatedly into the freezing Ural river is brilliantly horrible, like a scene from an early James Bond novel. Eventually she is released. She meets Beria and agrees to spy for the Soviets, or seems to.

Abruptly the hangar doors were hauled open, letting in a fanfare of bleak sunlight and a fist of cold air. A truck towed the gondola, which was mounted on a trailer, out to the field where the balloon was beginning to mound up … The whole time the balloon just kept getting bigger, peeling itself off the ground and growing to a size that would have astonished Aurora if she hadn’t seen one like it before. And then at some point physics took precedence over story and the thing just sprang into the air. What had seemed so huge became tiny over the space of a few minutes. For a while it was a white star in the northeastern sky. Then it rose up through a veil of high, icy clouds and disappeared.

A photographer sets out to make a ‘personal geography’ of his native Germany in this poetic tale of loss and belonging

For Paul Scraton, a British writer who has lived in Berlin for over 20 years, place is what you carry around in your imagination. The acknowledgments to his second novel inform us that on Holy Island/Ynys Gybi in north Wales there is a rock face called A Dream of White Horses. The novel transposes this name to the Baltic Sea, which surrounds an unnamed island – evidently Hiddensee on the German coast – where an itinerant photographer, Pascal, once spent his childhood summers. His grandfather was originally from German Swinemünde, which became Polish Świnoujście, and his parents lived in the GDR before moving to Lancashire when he was nine.

They are all exiles from Germanys that, in a memorable phrase, have been “separated from their dead� by the redrawing of European frontiers. All three generations restlessly seek escape and rest from escape, and all return to a beloved island where none of them was born. The desire for homeland is not an atavistic birthright but a voluntary sense of belonging to Europe’s “continent of refugees�.

Invisible Dog by Fabio Morábito; Indeterminate Inflorescence by Lee Seong-bok; The Epic of Cader Idris by Samatar Elmi; A Kiss for the Absolute by Shūz� Takiguchi

Invisible Dog by Fabio Morábito, translated by Richard Gwyn (Carcanet, £12.99)

Mexican writer Morábito is a real discovery: reading him is like being in the room with someone who trusts you enough to think aloud. Immaculately translated, this selection covers 40 years’ worth of unusually direct and intimate work. It mostly consists of columnar, free-verse poems that track the light and dark of thought and are by turns witty, sentimental, proverbial and nostalgic. In Journey to Pátzcuaro, dignity collapses into laughter when with “the radiance / of my sixteen years … I was within a hair’s breadth / of acting my age�. Thirty years later, the speaker calculates that “All distances / were born from the fruit / that we must pick / on the next branch, / on the nearby tree,� before arriving, viscerally, at love and desire and his lover, whom “I pluck every day / and bring you to this side of the river / and eat you and bite you and keep you / and fear that you will rot.�

This frustrating novella by a star of global fiction imagines the formative years of Mexico’s first Indigenous president, exiled to New Orleans in the 1850s

Every novel by Yuri Herrera teaches you how to read it in the opening scene. His debut, Kingdom Cons, begins with a musician watching a king shoot a drunk man in his court. The victim’s offence? He refused to pay the musician for his song. The novel unfurls into a parable of patronage and art, cartels and complicity. Signs Preceding the End of the World opens with a young woman named Makina witnessing a sinkhole swallow a man, a car and a dog. I’m dead, Makina thinks, and the novel plunges into a journey from Mexico to the United States to find her brother, its chapters modelled on the underworlds of Mexican mythology. The Transmigration of Bodies starts with a hungover man stumbling out of his house in search of water. He notices the silence first, then “a dense block of mosquitos tethering themselves to a puddle … as though attempting to lift it�. The puddle is blood, and the silence is death. A plague has arrived in the night.

Like his previous novellas, Season of the Swamp follows a nimble, reluctant interloper as he learns to navigate a dangerous new environment. It also calibrates our attention in the opening scene, but even before teaching us how to read it, this novel teaches us why to read it. In a preface, Herrera writes: “1853. Benito Juárez has served as a judge, deputy, and governor of the state of Oaxaca. But he has yet to become the man who will lead his country’s liberal reform, first as minister and then as president, and he is certainly not the hardheaded visionary who will lead the resistance against France’s invasion of Mexico and restore the republic.� In his autobiography, “Juárez says not a word about his nearly eighteen months in New Orleans … despite the fact that it is there he evolved into the liberal leader who would transform the trajectory of his country�. Benito Juárez, orphaned at the age of three, would one day become Mexico’s first Indigenous president, prying his country back from the vice-like grip of the aristocracy and the Catholic church. Biographers agree that his exile in New Orleans was formative, but no one knows what, exactly, happened there. Who could bring this story to life better than Herrera? A novelist of unparalleled tonal agility and negative capability, one with a passion for archival research, who has split his time between Pachuca, his home town, and New Orleans for the past 13 years.

The American author sets out to write a “feelgood� romance that honours her commitment to language as a charged, living entity

‘Imagine my surprise when I found it was possible to be both narrative and anti-narrative at the same time,� Renee Gladman wrote in Calamities, her 2016 collection of meditations on living and writing. She made this discovery during an evening out with friends, but now in My Lesbian Novel she has found a way to express it in a novel as well. This is, as the title promises, a scorching lesbian romance, ending, as the best romances do, in bed, but throughout the book, scenes from the novel alternate with conversations between Gladman and an imaginary interviewer. Curiosity about the novel and curiosity about love wind round each other as she opens up about her structural dilemmas and girds herself to write the next scene.

Gladman is an American author and artist, and sometime architect and mathematician. She writes prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction; she draws architectural plans and planetary fantasies, and she sees all these not just as connected but as one unified project. She’s drawing lines that may or may not erupt into paragraphs of text, exploring crossings and geographies, mapping the landscapes of our inner and outer worlds. Previously, her fictional urges have found expression in a quartet of novels set in the imaginary world of Ravicka, which comes complete with its own language and is reeling from an ecological crisis that has left buildings disappearing and reforming at will.

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

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

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

A sensational sleigh ride; joyous poetry; amazing animals; a sinister seaside town; a deadly forest; a thrilling heist and more

I Am Cat by Jackie Morris, Otter-Barry, £20
A ginger cat curls up “ammonite tight� and dreams of ranging the Earth as tiger, cheetah, lynx and other big cats in this huge, gorgeous edition of Morris’s 2012 classic. Condensed, poetic text, glorious watercolours and additional information about each creature make this a picture book with serious growing room.

Mr Santa by Jarvis, Walker, £12.99
This soft, light-infused rhyming picture book follows an inquisitive child on a pastel-blue sleigh ride with “Mr Santa�, asking artless questions (“Can you eat clouds?� “Is my brother naughty or nice?�) and waking with a full stocking to wonder: “Was it really real?� Sure to become a seasonal bedtime favourite.

A dark fantasy in the vein of Alan Garner, a raw but hopeful tale of teenage alcoholism, and a cosy romcom with a neurodivergent angle are among this month’s selection

Liz Hyder won the older readers’ category in the Waterstones children’s book prize for her memorable debut Bearmouth. Now, in The Twelve (Pushkin), Kit and her friend Story must travel back in time to find Kit’s sister, who goes missing close to an ancient stone circle on the eve of the winter solstice. Channelling the dark menace of classic British fantasy writers such as Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, this is a beguiling tale of ancient magic, good and evil, deeply rooted in the Welsh landscape. Haunting illustrations by Tom de Freston add to the eerie atmosphere.

Jandy Nelson weaves an unforgettable tapestry of love, loss and magic realism in When the World Tips Over (Walker). Following the sudden departure of their father many years earlier, the three Fall siblings still bear scars and the arrival of a rainbow-haired stranger triggers a tumultuous emotional journey for each of them. Nelson’s lyrical writing has a folksy, dreamy quality in this rewarding and complex multigenerational epic, which spans more than 500 pages.

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

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

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

The author and artist’s latest gothic novel is inspired by his lifelong love of theatre. He talks about his journey from stage to page – and why his house in Austin is home to a 4ft doll of Madame Tussaud

“I need to take a picture of this for my wife. She absolutely adores Kenneth Williams.� We’re in the recently revamped performance gallery of the V&A, a dazzle of theatrical memorabilia. “This� is Kenneth Williams’s costume from Carry on Cleopatra, worn while protesting “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!� And wielding the cameraphone is British novelist Edward Carey, visiting from his home in Texas to launch his eighth novel, Edith Holler. It’s an irresistible, darkly gothic story set in a theatre and full of the author’s trademark illustrations – so the gallery makes a fittingly immersive interview location.

We dart between costumes, playbills and set models. For Carey’s heroine, a 12-year-old girl in 1901 Norwich, the Holler theatre is all she knows: she believes that to step outside the building will bring disaster. “She has been fed on fancy, on nothing,� Carey says. “But to her, all these fanciful ideas are real.�

The hugely popular author reveals his excitement at the release of his latest Stormlight saga, how he extracted himself from Amazon and why JK Rowling should have stuck to novels

It’s 1pm in American Fork, Utah, and the author of one of the biggest books of the year – in physical size and sales potential – is in his bedroom, having just woken up. This, it turns out, is typical. “I usually write until about 4am, then get up around noon,� Brandon Sanderson tells me over video call, leaning forward in a large chair.

The Nebraska-born author has been writing through the night ever since he was a student some 25 years ago, when he spent his graveyard shifts at a hotel drafting a succession of unpublished novels. In 2005, his debut, Elantris (about religious extremists and a cursed city) was published to acclaim. His hugely successful Mistborn series (metal-fuelled wizards battle an immortal tyrant – then deal with the consequences) began a year later. But the Stormlight Archive, a saga that sits somewhere between Final Fantasy and Ragnarok with a sprinkling of Paradise Lost, is Sanderson’s defining work, accounting for more than 10 million of the 34 million copies he has sold throughout his career.

The novelist’s cult book about a stay-at-home mother who turns into a dog is now a film starring Amy Adams. She talks about modern parenting, breaking taboos, and how Trump’s win spurred her to write

Rachel Yoder knows exactly why she wrote her bestselling debut novel, Nightbitch. “After the 2016 US elections, I was in shock and I was also vibrating with anger.� Facing Donald Trump’s first term, she didn’t know what to do with all her “rage and disbelief and confusion� – especially because she was experiencing the same feelings about early motherhood.

Published in 2021, Nightbitch is a strange and unforgettable story about a sleep-deprived stay-at-home mother who, after apparently growing extra nipples, sharper canine teeth and a tail, develops an “exhilarating and magical� ability to literally become a powerful bitch.

As new national poet, the Gaelic speaker is looking at all of the languages spoken in the country, to see ‘what we can learn between them’

Peter Mackay seems to write poetry as he speaks. An island, he ponders, “can be seen as bounded by the sea or as infinitely connected�. He is interested in the parallels between Federico García Lorca’s Andalucía and “the wet deserts of the outer Hebrides�. Poetry, he believes, “can create whole worlds and make them matter�.

It is appropriate, then, that 45-year-old Mackay was announced yesterday as Scotland’s new makar, or national poet. He is the youngest makar to date, and the first one who writes primarily in Gaelic. He is “flabbergasted and delighted� by the honour, but also “slightly bemused,� he says.

The acclaimed novelist thought he had finished with ‘serious’ books. But now, at 78 and still grieving the loss of his wife, he has a new project on the go

I’m going to get a glass of wine, will you have one?� John Banville asks. “I mean, we’re OK, it’s just about noon.� We’re sitting in Banville’s upstairs living room in the harbour village of Howth, just outside Dublin. The low, deep house is in a terrace that rises up behind the seafront. There used to be a good view across the bay from these top windows, he says, but he had to sell the parcel of land across the street and now they are building “a monstrosity� on it. The novelist has lived here since the early 1980s; it is where he has written nearly all of his books – including the 2005 Booker prize winner The Sea. For someone who, it is said, has spent eight to 10 hours a day writing for all of his adult life, Banville insists he is no lover of solitude. “You’re not really alone when you are writing,� he says, “and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.�

These days he shares this house with his 51-year-old son. His sometime estranged wife, the textile artist Janet Dunham, died three years ago and he is still, he says, in a “fugue state� of grief. It didn’t help that it happened during the pandemic. “She was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer,� he says, “and got Covid five days after, and died four days after that.� He couldn’t write for months and remains, he says, not himself. “I now realise that there are only two kinds of people in the world. People who are bereaved and those who are yet to be bereaved,� he says. “And it’s no comfort really that you know it happens to every [couple]. Because those other people, they didn’t lose the person you loved.�

The Hamnet author talks about bringing her bestselling Shakespeare novel to the screen, working with Paul Mescal, and how her speech disorder inspired her latest children’s book

• Discover 10 more inspirational page-turners for kids

It was a live radio broadcast that made Maggie O’Farrell realise she finally had to tackle her stammer. In 2010, she was just about to appear on Woman’s Hour when she was unexpectedly asked to read from her Costa prize-winning novel, The Hand That First Held Mine. “I thought, God, I don’t know if I can,� O’Farrell says when we meet in Edinburgh, where she lives with her family. Ever since childhood, O’Farrell has had a stammer. To get through readings at literary events she always sticks to a meticulously rehearsed passage, chosen to make sure it doesn’t include any verbal trip-hazards. But this time she was caught off guard.

“Jenni Murray looked at me over her half-moon spectacles and then she turned and looked at the producer through the glass,� O’Farrell recalls of her hesitation. To make matters worse, her protagonist was called Elina, which she couldn’t say. “Why the hell did I call her that?� she remembers thinking. In her panic she decided to refer to Elina as “she�. To her, the pause felt like an hour, but only her husband, novelist William Sutcliffe, listening nervously at home, noticed. She survived the interview but decided it was time to seek help. She finally started speech therapy in her late 30s.

A way to personally connect with wildlife is vital when statistics alone can’t convey the scale of the loss

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth, causing the extinction of around 75% of all species. This event was so significant that we now use it to define the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. There had only been four extinction events of this magnitude up until then; today, we are living through the sixth – and we are its cause.

News of the sixth mass-extinction often comes in the form of statistics – 1 million species threatened with extinction; extinctions now occurring up to 1,000 times more frequently than before humans – and we are left none the wiser about what it is we are losing. A few years ago, I asked the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for a list of species that had recently gone extinct. I wanted to understand what was happening to the natural world, beyond the numbers. The list they sent back contained species from all over the world. One in particular, however, stood out to me.

Ambika Mod, Thandiwe Newton and Mackenzie Crook are among the lineup in this cinematic telling of Dickens’s classic

“The sun is dead and the city mourns,� sighs the narrator at the start of this all-star adaptation of Bleak House. Executive produced by Sam Mendes, it opens with a coach and horses pulling up in London’s Piccadilly, where the air is shrouded in smog and the streets slathered in mud. There a lawyer from Kenge and Carboys solicitors is waiting to meet Esther Summerson (Ambika Mod) and accompany her to an appointment at the Court of Chancery. Meanwhile, Lady Dedlock (Thandiwe Newton) sits dolefully in her London townhouse with her maid Hortense, who tries to persuade her to share her troubles.

Dickens’s novel tells the story of the Jarndyce family, a disputed fortune and a legal case that has “become so complicated no man alive knows what it means�. Connected to the lawsuit is Lady Dedlock, who endures mind-numbing updates from her lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, until one day she glimpses handwriting on a legal document that causes her to faint. Also connected to the case is Esther, whose godmother has recently died and whose new legal guardian has hired her as a companion for his ward, Ada, and sent them to stay at Bleak House, the Hertfordshire home owned by the Jarndyces.