Demon Copperhead, the author’s retelling of Dickens during Virginia’s opioid crisis, was a global success. Now she has used royalties from the novel to open a recovery residence

In the spotless kitchen of a white clapboard house in the Appalachian mountains, a retired deacon, a regional jail counsellor and I form an impromptu book club. The novel under discussion is Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which is set in this area, Lee County, Virginia, during the 1990s, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. I say that I loved the novel, that it was vivid and brilliant, heart-warming and tragic. Their reaction is more complex – there’s a real sadness behind it. Julie Montgomery-Barber, the jail counsellor, tells me she found the book “hard to read�. The Rev Nancy Hobbs agrees that reading it was painful, “because I felt like: I knew these people. At every level, from foster care to the football coaches to Demon. I knew Demon.�

Hobbs and Montgomery-Barber sit on the board of Higher Ground, the recovery residence recently established by Kingsolver using royalties from the novel. We are viewing the house together as part of its official launch party, on a sunny Saturday in June. The house is a bright and welcoming space. It provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery. Some of its residents have come directly from prison; one was living in a tent before she moved in; current ages range from 33 to 65 years old. Higher Ground gives residents a roof over their heads and supports them in myriad ways, from transport to AA appointments (most have lost their driving licences), to access to education and help with finding employment. The women can stay for between six months and two years. It opened in January and will be at full capacity later this month, when its eighth resident arrives, though there are plans for expansion.

This blackly comic debut is an astute and funny examination of the pain and pleasure of first love

The heart is a peculiar organ. It wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson wrote. Especially when you’re young and have no previous experience of love and desire, or the deleterious effects of time on both. This is the core subject of 24-year-old Harriet Armstrong’s debut novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, published by the consistently adventurous independent press Les Fugitives.

When the unnamed narrator, a third-year psychology student, meets fellow student Luke in their campus kitchen, she falls hard. They begin sharing meals and confidences in her room, which bears a “suicide beam� running the length of the ceiling. This memento mori is archly juxtaposed with the narrator’s breathless infatuation, which feels as if “some great transition was occurring inside me, something was aligning, I could actually feel it�. She finds herself “wide open and completely soft like a small trembling animal held in two hands, two hands which could crush it completely but which would not�.

The One Day author on laughing hysterically at Adrian Mole and coming around to Persuasion

My earliest reading memory
The Very Hungry Caterpillar. There wasn’t much to read – the prose is what’s now called “spare� – but I vividly remember the pleasure of poking a finger through the holes punched in the page. And that final twist!

My favourite book growing up
I was a fanatical member of the Puffin Club at school, and so many of those books embedded themselves in me; E Nesbit’s Dragons, Narnia, of course, the Molesworth books, which I barely understood and found hysterical. But my favourite were Tove Jansson’s Moomins, particularly the chilly later books, with their very particular melancholy. Other books seemed to be reaching for laughter or excitement, but there was a pleasure in all that sadness and solitude.

Mouth by Mona Arshi; The Anchorage by Bernard O’Donoghue; Guaracara by Fawzia Muradali Kane; Bunting’s Honey by Moya Cannon; Old World by Robert Crawford; Joy Is My Middle Name by Sasha Debevec-McKenney

Mouth by Mona Arshi (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
We open with Mouthed, a hideous image of forced speech in which a tongue is bitten out, a head hacked off. The stakes for language here – who is allowed to bear witness, and who is not – are high. The book’s opening section also includes scenes of near drowning, parental bullying, breakages, loss and childish torturing of animals. Only gradually do we realise we’re being prepared for the second section, Palace, in which Antigone mourns the death of her brother; as the poet mourns the brother who is her book’s dedicatee. This vivid collection forces us to witness the violence inherent in grief. Mourning may be socially inconvenient; Mouth opens up some of the space it needs. But by the end of the book, set at Cley nature reserve, bereavement has been neither resolved nor made tenable.

The Anchorage by Bernard O’Donoghue (Faber, £12.99)
These masterly portraits of rural Irish farming life, and of community life in Oxford, explore place, time and belonging; they are full of human feeling, yet never sentimental. Walking the Land tells how the family farm was sold off, “that cold March of 1962�, and lovingly lists old field names that mean nothing to the “shrewd and thoughtful men� lining up to buy it. In the title poem’s study in neighbourliness, “all the farmers in the parish� rally round to replace a year’s hay harvest lost in a barn fire. Such interconnected kindness matters, O’Donoghue shows us, yet cannot “repair the loss� of the chained dog burned along with the barn. A collection valedictory in tone and full of dedications, homages and memories reminds us that, after the craic is over, we will all be “free to pack up and make for home�.

A subtle, intriguing sequel revisits two girls as they grow into adults and question the impact of their unconventional upbringing

Esther Freud’s childhood on the Moroccan hippy trail inspired her 1992 debut Hideous Kinky. That novel was told through a young child’s limited perspective, so daily life was described vividly – almond trees and coloured kaftans – while bigger issues, such as why she didn’t see her father, remained vague and mysterious.

Some 30 years later, Freud has returned to the same narrator, Lucy. But in this accomplished new novel, she explores how Lucy grows up and starts to question the impact of her unconventional upbringing. My Sister and Other Lovers opens with teenage Lucy, her mother and sister once again on the move. It’s the 1970s, her mother has a new son from another failed relationship, and they are on a ferry to Ireland, as they have no money and nowhere else to go.

This warm, funny account of a mercurial talent gone to waste teems with love for its subject

When the music journalist Will Hodgkinson proposed writing a book on Lawrence, ex-frontman of the post-punk band Felt and latterly of Go-Kart Mozart (recently re-christened Mozart Estate), he was told there would be conditions. Lawrence – who goes by his first name only – said he couldn’t speak to any old bandmates. Furthermore, there could be no anecdotes or use of the word “just�. Asked what is wrong with “just�, Lawrence tells him: “I just don’t like it.�

A simultaneously entertaining and melancholic account of an overlooked musician, Street-Level Superstar depicts the sixtysomething Lawrence as a pallid eccentric who passes his time walking around London, who lives on liquorice and milky tea and is fearful of cheese – “We know that in nature if something smells, it is dangerous to eat.� We learn that Lawrence hasn’t had a girlfriend for years. Reflecting on sex, he says: “I was a two-minute wonder. They’re not missing much.�

As demand for audio content grows, companies are looking for faster – and cheaper – ways to make it

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When we think about what makes an audiobook memorable, it’s always the most human moments: a catch in the throat when tears are near, or words spoken through a real smile.

A Melbourne actor and audiobook narrator, Annabelle Tudor, says it’s the instinct we have as storytellers that makes narration such a primal, and precious, skill. “The voice betrays how we’re feeling really easily,� she says.

From dazzling debuts to unmissable memoirs, prize-winning novels to page-turning histories … Plus our pick of paperbacks and children’s fiction

• Leading authors choose their perfect holiday reading

• The 10 best audiobooks for summer

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A rich exploration of female experience, Adichie’s first novel in 10 years charts the lives and loves of four women in Nigeria and the US, from a “dream count� of ex-boyfriends to a section inspired by Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a Guinean hotel worker in 2011. Magisterial, wide-ranging and delicately done.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some fantastic new paperbacks, from a Booker-shortlisted novel to a groundbreaking history of a continent

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

I’ve just mainlined Rebecca Solnit’s latest collection of essays, No Straight Road Takes You There, in two sittings. It’s such a stirring, sinewy antidote to despair that I want to prescribe it to everyone. Solnit stares unflinchingly at the facts of our age – Trump, Gaza, climate catastrophe, the assault on truth – and argues for the power of uncertainty as opposed to foregone conclusions. Yes, the future looks bleak, but that does not mean we are doomed. Only giving up guarantees that. Instead, persevere.

This unfinished biography evokes Corfu and Alexandria – but leaves disturbing questions unanswered

Spirit of Place is a collection of minor travel pieces published by Lawrence Durrell in 1969. “Spirit of Place�, though, could easily serve as a descriptor for the entire arc of Durrell’s literary output: Prospero’s Cell (1945), an account of three years spent on Corfu before the second world war, the Cypriot memoir Bitter Lemons (1957), and the career-making Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). The islands and littorals of the Mediterranean gave Durrell his subject, remade by him into a theatre in which men and women, displaced by the political and social violence of the mid-20th century, stumbled towards each other amid the ruins of ancient civilisations.

It feels right, then, that this biography of Lawrence Durrell, only the second major one since his death in 1990, is by Michael Haag, who spent his career writing about the eastern Mediterranean. Haag’s best book was Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), which drew on the writings of Cavafy, EM Forster and Durrell to reconstruct the polyglot culture of the Greek, Italian, Jewish and Arabic population that flourished for centuries on the shores of north Africa. By the time of his own death in 2020, Haag had completed this biography of Durrell up to the year 1945, and the decision was made to publish posthumously. The result reads like an abbreviated account of Durrell’s life rather than an amputation: despite not becoming a significant literary figure until 1957, most of Durrell’s formative experiences had taken place by the time he left the city at the end of the war.

A compulsive new history suggests the crimes of Ted Bundy et al were – at least partly – down to the air they breathed

In 1974, the year Caroline Fraser turned 13, Ted Bundy committed his first confirmed murders. Bundy was handsome, charming, extremely intelligent and sociopathic – “a sexual virus masquerading as a person�. There is persuasive evidence that he began killing much earlier but never this gluttonously. Almost all of his victims had long brown hair, parted in the middle. Sometimes he broke into the women’s houses while they slept, or snatched them off the street. Sometimes he would put on a sling or plaster cast and lure them into his car to help with some fabricated task. If one refused, he tried another, convinced that he would never be caught because they would never be missed. “I mean, there are so many people,� he reasoned. “It shouldn’t be a problem.� Fraser lived on Mercer Island, Washington, near Bundy’s first hunting grounds. Recalling the moment he was first charged with murder in October 1976, she writes: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.�

Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfield, known as the I-5 Killer, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Its murder rate rose by more than 30% in 1974 – almost six times the national average. In Tacoma, the city where Bundy grew up, Ridgway lived and Charles Manson was incarcerated for five years before starting his Family, murder was up 62%. It was as if a malevolent cloud had enveloped the region.

Mental health services are under undeniable strain, but this account by a former nurse fails to ring true

In 2018, Christie Watson’s memoir about what it means to be a nurse became a publishing sensation, spending more than five months in the bestseller lists. The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story was tenderly distilled from the two decades that Watson had worked for the NHS, capturing the essence – and importance – of what it means to care for patients. Counsellor Bella Jackson will presumably be hoping that her account of two years spent training as a mental health nurse will resonate in a similar way.

Jackson worked in social care for five years before embarking on her nursing degree. The book is “pieced together from scattered notebooks and scribble�. But from the outset, it is not entirely clear what is fact and what is fiction. She explains that she has constructed three “composite� settings from her contemporaneous notes: an acute psychiatric ward, an A&E department and a community psychiatric team. Although based on real situations, the stories she tells are also composites in which names and identifying details are changed. So too are the healthcare professionals depicted.

A revelatory cultural history of our relationship with native wildlife, from newts doing handstands to Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport. The male deposits a packet of sperm on an underwater leaf for the female to collect and insert into her own reproductive tract. The whole business is best thought of, says Karen R Jones, as a “sexually charged game of pass-the-parcel�.

This kind of anthropomorphising often strikes naturalists as unscientific or even downright distasteful. But Jones is an environmental historian and her methodology allows, indeed impels, her to start from the principle that Britain’s human and animal populations are culturally entwined. Consequently, we cannot “see� a fox, hedgehog or newt without bringing to it a rich stew of presumptions and fantasy, drawn from childhood picturebooks, out-of-date encyclopedias and, in my case, the 1970s TV classic Tales of the Riverbank, in which small critters say funny things in the West Country burr of .

Alien spaceships, parallel worlds… the Israeli writer’s seventh collection is vast in reach, yet grounded in the bewildering absurdity of modern life

‘It’s time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener. Giyora Shiro, may he rest in peace, was thinking all this while standing in line to get into the next world …�

That’s quite the opener for a story, isn’t it? The apt but just slightly ridiculous metaphor, which is then revealed as not an authorial pronouncement but a character’s ruminations. And then we meet the character – excellently specific name – and we find out he’s dead, and, in that drolly formulaic aside “may he rest in peace�, we meet the author too.

Stretching from Indiana to North Korea, the US writer’s sixth novel is a study of absence, alienation and affection in a family rocked by tragedy

The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They’re big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled.

While it’s less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi’s Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi’s sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires.

This Catalonian tale of a botched pact with the devil has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting

Margarida is trapped in Mas Clavell, a farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, with Bernadeta. Bernadeta is dying in an annoying way, with “deep, raspy snores�. Margarida herself has been dead for some time. Rather than ascend to heaven, she has been “dragged downstairs by the ghastly, insufferable women of the house�. Irene Solà’s teeming third novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, follows these women, both dead and alive, as they prepare for a party. They cook and scrub, tell stories and make fart jokes. The novel begins at dawn and ends at night, but the historical era jumps around without warning. Now the viceroy’s men are arriving on horseback. Now a teenager is calling everyone a “dumbass�. Now local women are fleeing from Nazi soldiers. Characters shape-shift as much as the timeline. A he-goat becomes a bull, then a cat, then “an unusually long, skinny man with the toes of a rooster�. Now the viceroy’s men are demons, dragging Margarida into a “sea of blood�.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness references Mrs Dalloway, and shares the modernist interest in formal experimentation and action that unfolds over a single day. Instead of tracking interior sensation, Solà presents a seemingly inexhaustible slew of bodily description, held together by the opaque, vindictive logic of a folk tale. There are wonderful lists: of the different kinds of shit on the mountain, of cheese-making equipment, of body parts fondled by hands in the dark. I read the book twice in quick succession and every time I opened it, I found something to savour. The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

This flamboyant tale of fakers and forgery, straddling the turn of the 20th century, is a smart and witty investigation into love and authenticity

We become ourselves by copying others, whether dutifully or audaciously, in acts of homage or appropriation. What is education if not a prolonged process of copying, and isn’t the same true, Nell Stevens asks in her latest novel, of falling in love? Suddenly besotted with another young woman, her protagonist Grace begins to wear her scarf at the side of the neck as her lover does, and to feel “clearer and more deliberate and more like myself� as she does so. “When we fall in love with a person, we fall in love with the copy of them, inexpertly done, that we carry around with us whenever they aren’t there.�

At its heart The Original has two strands of copying: both are preoccupations of the late-Victorian era the book is set in. There are the pictures made by Grace when she’s brought, penniless, to her uncle’s house aged 10 after her parents are sent to lunatic asylums (though her uncle and aunt may well be more dangerously mad than her loving parents). She copies her cousin Charles’s paintings so well that he declares her a magician – or possibly a machine – and then she makes her way to secret independence by creating clever forgeries and then successful copies of famous works of art, from Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. And there is cousin Charles himself, who is lost at sea only to return 13 years later, possibly as a brilliant fake, his jaw a little too heavy but his voice and manner so perfectly attuned to the original that his mother welcomes him delightedly back into the household. All this is playing out in a book that is at once a fake – a copy of the Victorian sensation novel – and distinctly idiosyncratic, the original the title proclaims.

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.

A classic Yeti romp with 28 possible endings, a Blade Runner-style thriller and more adventures on the Thames with Jessie Burton

Before video games dangled dopamine hits and a sense of agency, there were Choose Your Own Adventure books, where the reader could go through the portal – or turn to face the monster. The 1980s-90s franchise still holds much affection, cropping up in a forthcoming Stranger Things homage spin-off, Heroes and Monsters, for one.

A new Pushkin Children’s reboot features six pacy titles by one of the most prolific original authors in the series, the late RA Montgomery: romps such as The Abominable Snowman, which has 28 possible endings, and Journey Under the Sea. The hope is to lure children back into their imaginations.

Sleepy monsters; a wacky broken robot; a search for magical treasures and more

Hello Bunny! by Sharon King-Chai, Two Hoots, £8.99
An entrancingly bold, shiny board book, full of bright creatures, joyous greetings, and a baby-pleasing mirror at the end.

Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob by Huw Aaron, Puffin, £7.99
Featuring a catalogue of sleepy monsters from cyborg to yeti, winding down alongside the cute little blob of the title, this rhyming bedtime picture book is a witty, tender mix of the adorable and the appalling.

The winner of this year’s fiction prize on growing up as an outsider, why we’re all guilty of complicity, and using her acceptance speech to reveal that she is intersex

It has been a dramatic couple of years for 37-year-old Dutch author Yael van der Wouden: her first novel, The Safekeep, a love story that deals with the legacy of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, was the focus of a frenzied bidding war and shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. Last night it won the Women’s prize for fiction.

“I wrote this book from a place of hopelessness,� she says when we meet. “I was looking for a ray of sunshine.� This morning in London the sun is blazing. She could never have expected that her novel would see off shortlisted authors including Miranda July (of whose work she is a big fan) and Elizabeth Strout.

The Story of a Heart, which won this year’s award for nonfiction, tells how one child saved the life of another. The author talks about the amazing families involved, campaigning for a better NHS, and how being a doctor frames the way she writes

To read Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, which has won this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction, is to experience an onslaught of often competing emotions. There is awed disbelief at the sheer skill and dedication of the medical teams who transplanted the heart of nine-year-old Keira, who had been killed in a head-on traffic collision, into the body of Max, a little boy facing almost certain death from rapidly deteriorating dilated cardiomyopathy. There is vast admiration for the inexhaustible compassion of the teams who cared for both children and their families, and wonder at the cascade of medical advances, each breakthrough representing determination, inspiration, rigorous work, and careful navigation of newly emerging ethical territory. And most flooring of all is the immense courage of two families, one devastated by the sudden loss of a precious child, the other faced with a diagnosis that threatened to tear their lives apart.

To write such a story requires special preparation. “I was full of trepidation when I first approached Keira’s family,� Clarke tells me the morning after she was awarded the prize. “I knew that I was asking them to entrust me with the most precious thing, their beloved daughter Keira’s story, her memory.� The former journalist trained as a doctor in her late 20s, and has spent most of her medical career working in palliative care. Subsequently, she has also become an acclaimed writer and committed campaigner, publishing three memoirs: Your Life in My Hands, Dear Life and Breathtaking. She turned to her medical training for guidance when writing The Story of a Heart. “I said to myself, my framework will be my medical framework, so I would conduct myself in such a way that they would, I hoped, trust me in the same way that someone might trust me as a doctor. And if at any point they changed their mind, then they could walk away from the project.�

One year on, Jonathan Haidt talks about the way his book changed the global conversation around children and digital devices – and explains how he handles his own teenagers

Jonathan Haidt is a man with a mission. You’ll have to forgive the cliche, because it’s literally true. The author of The Anxious Generation, an urgent warning about the effect of digital tech on young minds, is based at New York University’s business school: “I’m around all these corporate types and we’re always talking about companies and their mission statements,� he tells me. So, he decided to make one for himself. “It was very simple: ‘My mission is to use my research in moral psychology and that of others to help people better understand each other, and to help important social institutions work well.’�

This is characteristic of Haidt: there’s the risk that writing your own brand manifesto might seem a bit, well, pompous. What comes across instead is the nerd’s desire to be as effective as possible, combined with the positive psychologist’s love of self-improvement (one of his signature undergraduate courses is called Flourishing, which sets students homework such as “catch and analyse 10 automatic thoughts�).

Strange as it may seem, it’s hard to refute the arguments for truly universal suffrage

Two years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn’t let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination.

Her case was thrown out, but it wasn’t the first time the voting age was challenged and it won’t be the last. The issue of whether the limit should be removed entirely has been raised periodically since at least the 19th century, and the ageless voting movement has been gaining momentum since political philosopher John Wall wrote a manifesto for it in 2021. More recently, children’s author and education researcher Clémentine Beauvais published a short tract in her native France making the case for it.

A drunk old man’s report of sighting an angel opens on to much broader mysteries

Nest Box

When the drunken old fool
saw the barn owl,