Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir lays bare the life-wrecking impact of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes – but it is also the story of how a young woman becomes a hero

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There is a strand running through Nobody’s Girl – a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April this year – in which the activist and survivor of Jeffrey Epstein grapples with something more insidious than abuse. “I know it is a lot to take in,� she writes after a gruelling early passage detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.� After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she writes, “I need a breather. I bet you do too.�

Throughout the book, Giuffre beguiles, apologises and cheerfully breaks the fourth wall in an effort to soften the distaste she assumes her story will trigger. Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way in which institutions sided with the perpetrator over his victims. Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, outcomes largely enabled by Giuffre’s testimony. But it is also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet here she is, having to charm us out of shrinking from her in horror.

An elegy to the poet’s personal physician is full of vivid detail delivered with infectious warmth

On the Death of Dr Robert Levet by Samuel Johnson

Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blast or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.

From shadowing a cocaine-addled David Bowie to winning over Joni Mitchell, deliciously readable tales by the director of Almost Famous

Cameron Crowe spent his youth being in the right place at the right time. In 1964, aged seven, he was taken by his mother to see “a kid named Bob Dylan� play a local college gym. By the age of 14, living in San Diego, he was writing record reviews for a local underground magazine whose main aim was to bring down Richard Nixon. Shortly after that, he started interviewing the bands of the day as they came through California – first Humble Pie for Creem, and then the Eagles, the Allman Brothers Band and Led Zeppelin for Rolling Stone.

Crowe previously fictionalised his story in the 2000 film Almost Famous, which he wrote and directed. His lyrical and compulsively readable memoir The Uncool is bookended by the opening of a musical version, which coincides with the death of Crowe’s mother Alice whose aphorisms, including “Put some goodness in the world before it blows up�, are scattered throughout the book. Alice insisted that Crowe skip two school grades, driving his precocity; she was also dead against rock’n’roll on account of its unbridled hedonism. When Crowe asks her what Elvis did on The Ed Sullivan Show that was so subversive he had to be filmed from the waist up, she “clinically� replies: “He had an erection�.

The German actor’s real-life meltdown is the springboard for this compelling autofictional account, in which the author sets out to write about Kinski during lockdown

A show-stealing villain in spaghetti westerns and slasher flicks with titles such as Schizoid and Psychopath, the German actor Klaus Kinski – “a demented Teutonic version of Dennis Hopper�, as one tribute had it – is known best for his testy collaboration with Werner Herzog, whose 1982 film Fitzcarraldo put Kinski in the title role, lugging a steamship over the Andes. A terror on set as well as on screen, he was offered a part in Indiana Jones but told Steven Spielberg the Raiders of the Lost Ark script was a “pile of shit�.

Benjamin Myers’s new novel plunges us into Kinski’s fevered mind during one of his last performances, a recorded solo stage show in West Berlin in 1971, where he delivered a ferocious monologue as Jesus, “the freest and most modern of men, who preferred to be massacred than rot alive with all the others�. Showcased in a documentary released in 2008 by Peter Geyer, the act descended into chaos, Kinski arguing with hecklers before ending his monologue in a near-empty auditorium.

Serial killers and violent criminals dominate the headlines. What if we covered ecocide and pollution in the same way?

Whenever you read, watch, or listen to the news, you’re likely to be exposed to stories of violence and murder. As a criminal psychologist, I’m often asked to comment on these cases to pick apart the motives of the perpetrators. People want these kinds of insights because murders feel frightening and horrifying, but also oddly compelling. There’s a level of focus and fascination, and the way these crimes are covered profoundly influences our perception of what the most urgent problems facing society are.

One day it struck me that the world would be a very different place if environmental crimes were treated in the same way as murders. So, why aren’t they? And should they be?

The American author discusses our need for fiction in an age of disconnection, the challenges of growing up with 14 step-siblings, and why she’s going ‘all in’ on romance

The cover of Lily King’s new novel, Heart the Lover, features an abstracted face sobbing white tears on a tangerine background. It is an appropriate image, given that so many early readers – from BookTokkers to fellow authors – have reported weeping uncontrollably during the book’s final third.

For King, the reaction was unexpected. “I certainly felt a lot of emotion while I was writing. Not sobbing, more a deeper grief,� she says. But she describes the writing of her sixth novel, which begins with a 1980s college love story then revisits the same characters in middle age, as a joyful experience. “It was really great to just go back to the 1980s and college. It was a relief.�

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from chilling short stories to a biography of a duke

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

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

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

I am really excited by Namanlagh, the first poetry collection in 10 years from the great Tom Paulin. A tone-perfect meditation on illness and recovery, partnership and writing, violence and historical neglect, it is an absolute cracker. There are subtle nods to Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney, and many of the poems are filled with a sense of late style and unfinished business.

An indie-pop darling details his rise to fame and subsequent public humiliations with appealing frankness

Evan Dando’s autobiography opens in early 2021. The singer is living in a mouldering trailer on Martha’s Vineyard. He has a $200-a-day drug habit and is subsisting off a diet of cigarettes and cheeseburgers that he can’t chew because the heroin, cocaine and amphetamine he’s injecting have caused his teeth to fall out.

It’s all a very long way from Dando’s brief burst of fame as frontman and solitary longstanding member of the Lemonheads: two big albums in 1992’s It’s a Shame About Ray, and 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads, a huge hit cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson, an era with Dando’s face taking its place alongside the Betty Blue and magic eye posters on halls of residence walls, the Docs-shod female student’s pin-up of choice. But it’s also not totally unexpected, at least if you have even a glancing knowledge of the singer’s subsequent travails. Mainstream success was short-lived: Dando succeeds in sabotaging his own career in a blaze of hard drugs and wildly unpredictable behaviour. For the last 35 years, drugs and unpredictability – rather than music – is what Dando has become known for. The book’s blurb mentions “heroin chic�, but in truth, Dando’s dissipation is almost impossible to put any kind of romantic gloss on. To his credit, he doesn’t bother, instead recounting one public humiliation after another with a what-can-you-do? shrug.

A cocktail of heroin and cocaine puts paid to a show designed to impress investors who’ve just bought a share of Dando’s song publishing for $300,000, but it’s just one of many gigs that collapse into chaos: he falls offstage, or the police are called and he’s led away from the venue in handcuffs. The Lemonheads miss their slot at Glastonbury because Dando is holed up in a hotel, doing heroin: when he does eventually turn up, he performs an unscheduled solo set, but the crowd throw bottles and boo him offstage. He hangs around Oasis in their pomp, even writing a song with Noel Gallagher: it has to be removed from a Lemonheads album at the last minute, because Gallagher deems it an “embarrassment�.

From prosthetic testicles for dogs to sociable reptiles, a behavioural scientist explains what we get wrong – and right – about animal minds

In the 1970s a former Soviet naval officer named Igor Charkovsky popularised a concept which came to be known as dolphin-assisted birth. Likely inspired by New Age theories, he urged expectant mothers to dip in the ice-cold water of the Black Sea, commune with dolphins, and give birth underwater. In the “very near future,� he claimed, “a newborn child would be able to live in the ocean with a pod of dolphins and feed on dolphin milk�.

The oddest thing about Charkovsky was not so much his theory, but its remarkable resilience within both Soviet and western culture, as Justin Gregg sets out in his illuminating and lively new book. Gregg’s work is both a dissection and an ode to the irresistible allure of anthropomorphism, our tendency to apply human characteristics to non-humans, whether animals, objects, AI, or God. An expert on animal cognition who also teaches improv, Gregg deftly guides us through our alternately charming, destructive and wrong-headed fantasies about everything from marine mammals to our iPhones.

Clambering up bell towers, dancing the night away and falling in love – how ‘saint’ Malala forged a new identity

Lying in her Birmingham hospital bed in the weeks after she’d been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai used to imagine the conversation she would have with Taliban leadership. “If they would just sit down with me … I could reason with them and convince them to end their reign of misogyny and violence,� she writes in her new memoir.

Malala kept a notebook by her bed, filled with rhetorical strategies and talking points – the names of journalists who might be able to broker a meeting with the Taliban, the Qur’an verses she could cite to show that girls do have a right to education in Islam, the things she could say to establish her own credentials as a God-fearing Muslim. Of course, that conversation never happened. Much later, after the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, it made her wince to recall her naive belief that the Taliban would ever listen to her.

The playwright’s only living descendant traces the shadow cast by his trial – and his rehabilitation as a gay icon

Today, Oscar Wilde is one of the most celebrated writers in English, both instantly recognisable and actually read. His plays are performed. His words are quoted. He reclines in effigy on both the Strand and the King’s Road. He even has a commemorative window in Westminster Abbey. But it was not always so.

When he died in Paris, in 1900, aged just 46, the obituaries were not generous. There was a feeling of relief that an embarrassing figure had been removed the scene, and a general hope that he and his works would soon be forgotten. The Pall Mall Gazette suggested that nothing he wrote had “the strength to endure�.

Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan; The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves; The Long Shoe by Bob Mortimer; Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet; The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek

Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan (Zaffre, £20)
Dismissed from his role as a back-room boffin in the British secret service, Major Boothroyd, AKA Q, returns to his market-town roots in Khan’s excellent James Bond spin-off. This Q is currently in his 50s; his backstory includes a fling with Miss Moneypenny, and emotional baggage in the form of his retired history don father. What’s drawn him home is the mysterious drowning of his old friend, quantum scientist Peter Napier, who has left him an encrypted note; although the coroner has ruled the death to be accidental and Q’s old flame, DCI Kathy Burnham, is not minded to reopen the case. The stakes here are worthy of the Fleming canon – Napier’s revolutionary work may have terrible consequences – and even if you’re not a Bond fan, you can’t fail to enjoy this solidly plotted and unexpectedly funny blend of nostalgia and new technology.

The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan, £22)
Bestseller Cleeves’s latest novel is billed as the return of Jimmy Perez, as Perez and his life partner DI Willow Reeves, now living on the Orkney Islands with their young son, team up to solve a murder. It’s nearly Christmas when Jimmy’s old friend Archie Stout is found dead at the site of an archeological dig, felled by a Neolithic stone purloined from the local heritage centre. Suspects soon proliferate: the artist with whom roving-eyed Archie may have been having an affair; teacher and local history enthusiast George Riley; mediagenic archeology professor Tony Johnson, and even the deceased’s wife. With an evocation of place that is second to none, Cleeves keeps the narrative plates spinning beautifully to create a complex plot that takes in both the thorny issue of who controls heritage and the pernicious effects of online misogyny.

A kidnapping goes the way of the occult in a gory, wildly entertaining romp from Ned Beauman, writing under a pseudonym

As we meet Luke, a nervous footsoldier in a revolutionary cell, he is on the point of carrying out his first proper operation. He and his colleagues – veteran activist Cam, and fire-in-her-belly true believer Rosa – are about to kidnap Adeline Woolsaw, 23-year-old scion of an obscenely wealthy clan who run an outsourcing company called the Woolsaw Group.

The company’s parasitic, money-grabbing, cost-shaving, data-siphoning activities stand for everything that is sinister and wrong with the conjunction of capitalism and state power. But the problem its opponents have is that the Woolsaw Group’s activities are so far-reaching, and its public profile so blandly corporate, that the public can’t be persuaded to pay any attention to its wickedness: “it’s ‘the largest public service outsourcing company in the UK’, which is so boring your brain just switches off. Which is good for the Woolsaw Group.� The hope of our wee terror cell, essentially, is that kidnapping the Woolsaws’ daughter will wake people up by putting a human face on it.

This French bestseller, in which a girl and her grandfather visit Paris museums, aims to be a Sophie’s World for art history – but the conversations are sentimental and simplistic

The complaint that cynics often make about modern art is that most of it looks as though it were made by children. (If your 10-year-old is pulling out crumpled Kandinskys from their schoolbags on a regular basis then lucky you, I say.) But what about art criticism? Could a child’s understanding of art be as radical as John Berger’s or as wise as Sister Wendy’s, for instance? Art historian Thomas Schlesser thinks so. His debut novel, a bestseller in France, has been translated into 38 languages. Perhaps in one of them it lives up to the hype.

In Mona’s Eyes, a 10-year-old girl embarks on an artistic adventure with her grandfather, visiting the most famous works in Paris museums over the course of a year. They pledge to gaze at these works intently and to discuss them deeply. The resulting conversations are intended to be charming and moving. The kindest observation to be made about this book is that they are not.

In the latest novel from the acclaimed avant garde author, the narrator considers the impact of the relationships she’s left behind

“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way,� Claire-Louise Bennett wrote in her first book, 2015’s Pond, a series of essayistic stories by an autofictional narrator. What was her first language, then? She doesn’t know, and she’s still in search of it. “I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.�

Bennett was concerned then – and remains concerned now – with finding words to make inner experience legible, and to make familiar objects, places and actions unfamiliar. Pond was a kind of phenomenology of 21st-century everyday female experience, concentrating on the narrator’s momentary physical and mental feelings and sensation, isolated from the larger social world. Bennett became an acclaimed avant garde writer, and if acclaimed and avant garde may seem at odds, then that tension has powered her books ever since, as she’s been drawn to working on larger scales. In Checkout 19 she showed this phenomenological vision unfurling across a life. It was a kind of Künstlerroman, a messy, sparkling book that threw together the narrator’s early reading history with her early story writing (she retold the picaresque antics of her first literary protagonist, Tarquin Superbus) and her experiences of menstruation and sex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A decade after her debut became a cult hit, the US author talks about the true crime that inspired her latest novel, #MeToo overreach and being married to an addict

Chris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the New York Review of Books, not being a character on a sitcom,� Kraus says now. Her commercial success was a financial boon, of course. “But who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago? It was massively embarrassing to go out and support the book as if I’d written it last year.�

She had, however, promised herself that if she ever achieved mainstream success she would write about it with the same candour that she brought to her struggles. “I’m going to write about all of it. Not just about youth, but about middle age,� she says. “Middle age is so much harder to write about, because youth is kind of like a trope. We’re very familiar with reading books about the aspirations or disappointed aspirations of youth, but middle age is much crazier ground. It’s not as sexy, it’s not as familiar. So, to write about middle age in the same way takes commitment.�

At just 20, the poet is one of the most vivid witnesses to the conflict. She talks about dreams of Oxford, the deaths of friends and how tragedy has shaped the person she has become

Batool Abu Akleen was having lunch in the seaside apartment that has become the latest refuge for her family of seven, when a missile struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza City. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window shook,� she says. Within an instant, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that was reported around the world. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,� she adds, with the nonchalance of someone numbed by living with horror.

But this impression is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding a language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies.

SenLinYu’s debut started life as Harry Potter fanfiction. The Alchemised author shares why they were drawn to a war-torn love story, how a conservative upbringing shaped their writing, and the snobbery around fanfiction

In recent days, bookish pockets of TikTok and Instagram have been talking about one thing only. “I’ve been looking forward to this day more than I look forward to my wedding day,� says one creator, holding up to the camera a copy of the 1,040-page novel that was Penguin’s most pre-ordered debut of the year and has already netted a potentially record-breaking seven-figure film rights deal.

How does a first-time novelist get out of the starting blocks quite like that? The thing is, the author behind the doorstopper dark fantasy novel, Alchemised, is no unknown debut: SenLinYu, 34, started off writing Harry Potter fanfiction that blew up online during the pandemic, racking up more than 20m downloads. Sen’s Draco and Hermione (“Dramione�) fanfic, heavily inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale, has now been rewritten – with third-party IP necessarily removed – and published traditionally as Alchemised. But if you didn’t know about Alchemised’s origins, you would be unlikely to clock them: even squinting, it’s hard to see any trace of Harry Potter in the revamped version, set in a different world and magic system.

The poet and playwright on queer classics, cinematic TS Eliot and the comforts of a ghost story

My earliest reading memory
I was around five when my mum first pulled out Clement C Moore’s The Night Before Christmas, a bumper blue book with vivid illustrations. There was such suspense in the poem, such inexorable music, the sonic possibilities matching the mystery.

My favourite book growing up
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. I used to spend every spare moment in Bacup library, Lancashire, bag of sweets to the right and a book open before me. I had read all of Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books, thought Famous Five were all a bit dry, and picked up Weirdstone in a swoon of nine-year-old despair. The darkness was delicious, exciting because many of the landmarks in the story were from my local area.

Hekate is a traumatised youngster looking for love and a sense of belonging in this novel imagined in verse

Hekate, the Greek goddess of magic and the underworld, is the prototypal witch known to many from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where she chastises the weird sisters for their meddling. Along with witchcraft and necromancy, Hekate is also associated with boundaries and crossroads, acting as protector and guide to lost travellers. In art, she is commonly depicted holding torches to show the way, and accompanied by a black dog or serpent.

In Hekate the Witch, the poet Nikita Gill reimagines the life of this enigmatic goddess in verse. Born during a war between the old Titan rulers and new Gods of Olympia, Hekate is birthed alone by her Titan mother, Asteria, who tells her she is destined for greatness. The pair live alone in a dilapidated palace but are forced to flee when Zeus and Poseidon come to enslave them. Seeking refuge in the Underworld, Asteria is denied entry but Hekate, still a Godling, is admitted and taken into the care of Styx and Hades. There, she briefly meets her father, Perses, chained to a mountain after the Titan defeat, who predicts a future for his daughter in which “the dead will bow to you as you move in their wake�.