After his heart stopped beating for 40 minutes, the former lawyer experienced weeks of hallucinations. The visions he experienced during his recovery set him on the path to a new career

On the evening of Monday 1 February 2021, during the third Covid lockdown, my wife Alexa and I sat down on the sofa to have sausages and chips in front of the TV. The children were tetchy, and we were worn out from trying to home-school them while working from home, me as a lawyer in the music industry and Alexa as a charity fundraiser. But at least, Alexa said to me, we had made it through January.

Then I started making strange noises. “Are you joking?� she asked. Then, “are you choking?�

After 35 years of teaching fiction writing, the prize-winning author shares her wisdom. First tip? Don’t write what you know…

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to write a first sentence so idiosyncratic, so indelible, so entirely your own that it makes people sit up or reach for a pen or say to a beloved: “Listen to this.� A first line needn’t be ornate or long. It needn’t grab you by the lapels and give you what for. A first line is only a demand for further attention, an invitation to the rest of the book. Whisper or bellow, a polite request or a monologue meant to repel interruption. I believe a first line should deliver some sort of pleasure by being beautiful or mysterious or funny or blunt or cryptic. Why would anyone start a novel, “It was June, and the sun was out,� which could be the first line of any novel or story? It tells you nothing. It asks nothing of you.

The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien; Plastic by Matthew Rice; Retablo for a Door by Michelle Penn; Jonah and Me by John F Deane; Intimate Architecture by Tess Jolly

The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien (Picador, £12.99)
This sombre collection showcases O’Brien’s varied use of forms and subject matter, exploring themes of history, remembrance of war and political conflict, death, time, the passing of friends and loved ones as well as human desire and culpability. A central sequence entitled Impasse is inspired by Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. These poems plunge us into the landscape of the detective hero’s world, a process O’Brien describes as “analogous to dream-life, where certain motifs (cities, railway stations, libraries in my case) recur without ever abolishing the mystery that animates them�. The penultimate poem of the final sequence ushers in an elegiac, pensive tone as the speaker reminds us not to forget “birdsong / the descant of the rising lark / that never ends, composed of silence�. The book reinforces O’Brien’s authority as a chronicler of our times, “love and death consorting as they must�.

Plastic by Matthew Rice (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
This book-length poem explores the experiences of a night worker turned poet. Structured as a continuous narrative, it illustrates the frustrations, inequities and relentless cycle of 21st-century manual labour: “The night is proletarian, a morgue of ghosts / given the present is a borderline�. Rice documents the tragic incidents and surreal imaginings that occur within the nightmarish confines of a plastic moulding factory. “Once, in this building, a kid clocked off night shift / for good at the end of a rope / another’s heart gave out at 3am / performing a task as menial as mine.� This sardonic, bleakly moving book interrogates ideas of working-class masculinity and intergenerational trauma, with “hell as an idea of what work could be�; there are glimpses of hope in poetry itself, “the treasure buried in my father’s field�.

The novelist on how The Rainbow made him want to write, the strange genius of Penelope Fitzgerald and finding comfort in Tintin

My earliest reading memory
Sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not always a patient teacher, and I was often a slow learner, but the scene, the tableaux, in memory, has the serenity of an icon.

My favourite book growing up
Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. It’s a story set in Roman Britain; the Eagle is the lost standard of the ninth legion. I was a boy already obsessed by all things Ancient Roman (the alternative to the kind of boy obsessed with dinosaurs). One of the places I remember reading it is in bed with my dad. On Sunday mornings my brother and I would climb into the big bed. My parents had long since split up. There was a picture on the wall, a modest reproduction of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. To me, this voluptuous woman gazing at herself in a mirror was my mother. It’s interesting to me how the setting in which you read is such an integral part of the reading experience.

In this energisingly original novel, an emotionally detached English student at college in New York tells a big lie

Lies offend our sense of justice: generally, we want to see the liar unmasked and punished. But when the deception brings no material gain, we might also be curious about what purpose the lie serves – what particular need of their own the liar is attempting to meet. This is precisely what Grace Murray’s witty, assured debut explores: not just the consequences of a lie but the ways in which it can, paradoxically, reveal certain truths.

At a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year by claiming that her father has just died of a heart attack. In fact, he is alive and well back in Lichfield, England. This lie is the jumping-off point for an unpacking of Charlotte’s psychology, as well as the catalyst for her relationship with fellow student Katarina, a quasi-love story that forms the book’s main narrative.

The science writer pragmatically shows how optimism can bring about real improvements in everyday life and change in the wider world

Can optimism influence events in your life? Does fate smile upon those who see the glass as half full? The science writer Sumit Paul-Choudhury believes so. The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World is his hymn to positivity, though fear not: it’s not a self-help book and there is more to it than platitudes about manifesting and living your best life.

The author realised he was a natural optimist following the premature death of his wife from cancer. In the aftermath, he made an active decision “not to spend any more time in limbo than I already had� and “cultivated the idea that the future would be bright�. Optimism is, he says, “central to the human psyche�. It fosters social progress and encourages individuals to be resilient and withstand stress, to be more successful at work and create stronger bonds with friends and family. Among the models for optimism offered here are Ernest Shackleton who, along with his crew, survived being stranded in the Antarctic, and Helen Keller, who lost her hearing and sight after a childhood illness and later, in her 1903 essay Optimism, wrote about discovering hope and joy.

Her voice soundtracked the 60s and 70s, but the revolution silenced her. The legendary singer finally has her say, in this uneven memoir

If you ask any Iranian to name the most important female pop star in our country’s history, they’ll say Googoosh. Nobody else comes close. Over six decades of revolution, suppression and exile, Googoosh has gone from singer to cultural icon, a symbol of a country’s grief for its murdered, imprisoned, and muzzled artists, and a living link between pre-revolutionary Iran and the diaspora.

Googoosh was just three years old when she started singing in small halls and cabaret venues where her father worked. By her teens she was a film actor and a fashion icon. In the 60s and 70s, when my mother was a teenager, Googoosh was everywhere: on television, in films, magazines, on the radio. She kept recreating herself – her style, her moves, her hair. (My mother and many of her university classmates copied Googosh’s famous wispy haircut.) For a while, this bold, creative young woman shaped how westerners saw Iran, and how a generation of Iranian women understood modernity, femininity and public life.

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

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

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

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

I finally got round to Thoreau’s Journal. It is determinedly down-to-earth and soaring, lyrical and belligerent, humane and cantankerous. Walt Whitman thought Thoreau suffered from “a very aggravated case of superciliousness�, but as Walt also said (of himself) the Journal of this brooding, solitary figure is great; it “contains multitudes.�

Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson is published by Cassava Republic. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

A vivid account of the creation of one of literary modernism’s greatest achievements

In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in the least expect you to read it,� he wrote. “It is a highly problematical and ‘German’ work, and of such monstrous dimensions that I know perfectly well it won’t do for the rest of Europe.�

Morten Høi Jensen’s approachable and informative study of The Magic Mountain positions Mann as a writer who was contradictory to his core: an artist who dressed and behaved like a businessman; a homosexual in a conventional marriage with six children; an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption. Very much the kind of man who would send someone a book and tell them not to read it.

A vivid and chilling account of the deadly voyage that triggered the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade

Over the nearly four centuries during which the transatlantic slave trade operated, 12.5 million Africans were trafficked by Europeans to the Americas. 1.8 million of them perished on the voyage under scarcely imaginable conditions of overcrowding, filth and disease. Some threw themselves overboard. And others were thrown into the sea.

In The Zorg, Siddharth Kara tells two stories. The first is of a harrowing incident aboard the eponymous slave ship – the murder of 132 Africans by the British crew. The second relates how that event came to play a role in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, in large part through the work of a dazzling array of committed campaigners. One of these was Olaudah Equiano, author of one of the few surviving accounts of the Middle Passage from the perspective of an enslaved person, in which he described it as “a scene of horror almost inconceivable�.

A deep dive into the creation of eight buildings from the 1700s to the 1900s tells some very human stories

History used to be about wars and dates, but to the architecture writer and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, it’s more about floors and grates. In his new book, he takes a keen-eyed tour of eight English houses, from Northumberland to Sussex, dating from the early 1700s to exactly 100 years ago, and ranging from an outlandish gothic pile to one of the first council flats. In Cruickshank’s pages, classical influences from Rome and Greece give way to a revival of medieval English gothic and the emergence of modernism.

He is particularly interested in who commissioned and built his chosen dwellings, and how they got the job done. It’s a new spin on the recent fashion for historians to explore the homes of commoners, as opposed to royalty and aristocrats, in order to tell the life stories of their occupants. This probably began with the late Gillian Tindall, who wrote a highly original book about the various tenants of an old house by the Thames next to the rebuilt Globe theatre. That was followed by several series of A House Through Time, fronted by Traitors star David Olosuga.

Shroud-chewers, lip-smackers and suckers populate this fascinating study of ‘the unquiet dead’ across the centuries

The word “vampire� first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojević, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to demand his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was disinterred, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers staked the corpse and then burned it. In 1745, the clergyman John Swinton published an anonymous pamphlet, The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, in which it is written: “These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.� And so a modern myth was born.

But it is not so modern, or exclusively European, as this extraordinary survey shows. Instead, the author, a historian and archeologist, argues that belief in the unquiet dead is found in many cultures and periods, where it can lay dormant for centuries before erupting in an “epidemic�, as in Serbia. Where there is no written source, John Blair makes persuasive use of archeological finds in which bodies are found to have been decapitated or nailed down. In 16th-century Poland, a buried woman “had a sickle placed upright across her throat and a padlock on the big toe of her left foot�. Someone, our author infers reasonably, wanted to keep these people in their coffins.

Two brothers attempt to escape their father’s gangland past in a tense, tender debut that moves between Thatcher-era Northumberland and southern Spain

Andalucía is famous for its variety: high alpine mountains and snow-capped peaks, river plains and rolling olive groves, sun-baked coastlines and arid deserts. It is the perfect setting for Neil Rollinson’s debut novel, which is its own kind of spectacular mosaic. Built from short, seemingly discrete chapters that take us between Spain in 2003 and the coalfields of Northumberland in the 70s and 80s, The Dead Don’t Bleed coheres into an extraordinarily tense and tender portrait of two brothers trying to escape their father’s gangland past.

Until now, Rollinson has been known as a poet; his collection Talking Dead was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa poetry prize. Here he brings his talent for compressed evocation to an exploration of fraternal rivalry and the enduring impact of a violent patriarchy. If you took Frank and his brother Gordon apart on the autopsy table, he writes, “you’d find the same bones, the same blood. Almost everything interchangeable. The corkscrews of DNA, the cells, the posture, the downcast glance.� But from a young age, change is afoot within Frank. He knows his father has “high hopes for him� in the family business of petty crime: “Frank Bridge. King of Northumberland�. But Frank wants to be a different kind of king. He carries within himself a “yearning for something more expansive� – the kind of dream that could get him killed in his family’s closed world of criminal secrecy.

Set in a colonial city after the first world war, this story of a battle of wills between an elderly widow and her young servant is deftly told

The second novel by South African author Nadia Davids, winner of the 2024 Caine prize, is set in a “small unnamed city in a colonial empire�, shortly after the end of the first world war. We might imagine it as a version of Cape Town – birthplace of the author, and of JM Coetzee, whose endorsement appears on the back cover.

Soraya, a 19-year-old woman from the Muslim quarter, is sent by her mother to work as a maid in a wealthy part of town. Her new employer, the elderly Mrs Hattingh, is a settler who fondly recalls her days “when I was a girl in England�. When the novel opens, in 1920, Mrs Hattingh lives alone: her husband is dead, and her son, Timothy, fortunate to have survived the war, lives far away in London.

From an acclaimed short-story writer, this epic of power and class across generations in Pakistan is brutal, funny and brilliantly told

Imagine a shattering portrayal of Pakistani life through a chain of interlocking novellas, and you’ll be somewhere close to understanding the breadth and impact of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first novel. Reminiscent of Neel Mukherjee’s dazzling circular depiction of Indian inequalities, A State of Freedom, it’s a keenly anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed short-story collection with which he made his debut in 2009, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders – also portraying overlapping worlds of Pakistani class and culture.

We begin in the squalor and bustle of a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, where the heartbreaking figure of a small child, abandoned to his fate and clutching a pair of plastic shoes, is scooped under the protection of a tea stall owner. He proceeds to raise the boy as his own son, having only daughters, but Yazid is also adopted by the stall’s garrulous regulars, who teach him both to read and to pay keen attention to the currents of class, wealth and power which flow past him every day.

The Belgian author’s genius comes to the fore in a dark domestic drama

The more one reads of Georges Simenon, the stranger the writer and his writings become. His novels, most of them composed in a week or two, are simple, straightforward, shallow-seeming even, but below the surface lie dark and fathomless depths.

Many readers will know him as the creator of Commissioner Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, the most unpretentious, humane and convincing of the great fictional detectives. However, his finest work is to be found in what he called his romans durs, or hard novels, including such masterpieces as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes and the jauntily horrifying The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. Now, Penguin Classics has launched a series of 20 of the romans durs in new translations, starting with The Cat, originally published in French in 1967.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From companionship to psychotherapy, technology could meet unmet needs – but it needs to be handled responsibly

There is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis� has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collective anxiety has been compounded by studies showing that young people are increasingly embracing the idea of AI relationships; half of teens chat with an AI companion at least a few times a month, with one in three finding conversations with AI “to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real‑life friends�.

But we need to pump the brakes on the panic. The dangers are real, but so too are the potential benefits. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that – depending on what future scientific research reveals – AI relationships could actually be a boon for humanity.

This haunting poem depicts an elusive, dangerous figure of overwhelming destructive power

The Man in the Wind

The man in the wind
who keeps us awake tonight
is not the black monk of the wind
cowering in corners and crevices,
or the white face under the streetlight
stricken with the guilt of his noise,
or the great slapping hand of the wind
beating and beating the rainy alleyways
while the torturer proceeds with the interrogation
and the prisoner’s risen voice
bleeds over cymbals and timpani.