The actors are lending their supporting to the campaign by Wordsworth’s great great great great granddaughter to keep Rydal Mount in the Lake District open to the public

Actors Brian Cox, Miriam Margolyes and Tom Conti as well as the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce are among those calling for the home of William Wordsworth to be saved as a site of literary heritage.

The Romantic poet lived at Rydal Mount in the Lake District from 1813 to his death in 1850. The property has five acres of gardens which were designed by Wordsworth.

Ten years on from his death and just before what would have been his 77th birthday, take a deep dive into the funny, fantasy works of one of the most loved British writers

With more than 75m copies of his books sold around the world, Terry Pratchett is one of the most loved British writers, best known for his comic fantasy novels set on a fictional planet, Discworld. Ten years on from the author’s death, and justbefore what would have been his 77th birthday, Pratchett’s biographer Marc Burrows has put together a guide to his hero’s work.

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People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

Korean retailers report strong sales for Light and Thread, featuring speeches, essays and poems by novelist

A book featuring Han Kang’s Nobel prize lecture sold 10,000 copies in its first day on sale online.

Light and Thread, which takes its title from Han’s December lecture, is her first book to be published in South Korea since she was announced as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature last October.

A social and personal history that refuses to gloss over the rage, envy and hurt that form part of every close bond

Falling out with a friend can feel oddly shameful. Romantic relationships are meant to have passionate highs and lows, but by the time you reach adulthood, you expect your friendships to have reached some kind of equilibrium. I have this image in my head of myself as an affectionate, devoted friend – but sometimes I examine my true feelings towards the women who are closest to me and feel shocked by my own pettiness. It is embarrassing to be a grownup but still capable of such intense flashes of rage, and envy. When my friendships become distant or strained, I wonder why I still struggle to do this basic thing.

Bad Friend represents a kind of love letter to female friendship, but doesn’t gloss over how difficult it can be. Tiffany Watt Smith is a historian, and this book is a deeply researched study of 20th-century women’s relationships, but the reason for writing it is intensely personal. In the prologue, she says that she fell out with her best friend, Sofia, in her early 30s, and has been battling with the feeling that she is incapable of close friendship ever since. In one passage, she describes hiding a sparkly “BFF� (best friends forever) T-shirt from her five-year-old daughter, because she felt so conflicted about having no BFF of her own. But the idea that underpins this book is that we expect too much of female friendship, and that leaves every woman feeling inadequate.

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.

The author’s hypnotic reading evokes the desires and existential crisis of a 45-year-old woman on a wild road trip

In the second novel by writer, actor and film-maker Miranda July, a nameless Los Angeles-based artist who has had success “in several mediums� leaves behind her husband, Harris, and their young child, Sam, to drive across America. She is due at a meeting in New York and has decided to get there via a leisurely road trip. But what starts off as a fleeting break from the mundanity of marriage and motherhood turns into a wild and wonderfully odd unravelling. Just half an hour into her journey, she impulsively leaves the freeway and checks into a scruffy motel. There she is electrified by a younger car hire worker who has “a Huckleberry Finn/Gilbert Blythe look that I used to flip out over as a teenager.� After the two lock eyes while he squeegees her windscreen (not a euphemism), she decides to pursue him in an unusually chaste love affair.

All Fours – which has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for fiction – is narrated by July whose pacy, hypnotic reading skilfully evokes the internal monologue of her protagonist, who pinballs between drily funny and existentially bereft. The book has been called a menopause novel on the basis that it centres on a 45-year-old dismayed at being halfway through her life and past her peak (both her grandmother and aunt killed themselves and she worries she is next in line). But there’s more than just dwindling oestrogen in this frank and subversive tale which reflects on desire, freedom and creativity, and shines a light on the complex inner life of a woman.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from an engrossing study of Chinese women to a fun, loveable novel

• This article was amended on 7 April 2025. In an earlier version, the author Kevin Barry’s surname was misspelled as “Berry�.

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

When HHhH by Laurent Binet came out in 2012, I was scared away by the impenetrable title. I still don’t like the title much because it gives no sense that this book is going to be so welcoming, playful and immersive. HHhH tells the true story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich – the high-ranking Nazi officer, “the butcher of Prague� – but it also describes Binet’s research on the subject, an obsession which verges on mania. The book makes a convincing case that Heydrich’s botched assassination was the single most significant event of the 20th century. (It also makes a convincing case that Binet is so deep into the subject matter that his opinion should not be entirely trusted.)

Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst has just won the Nero book of the year prize so it really does not need my recommendation. Nevertheless, I recommend it! It jolts you awake from the very first page, telling a true and uniquely weird love story about a British couple whose boat is sunk by whale-strike while they are sailing around the world. Elmhirst finds moments of transcendence even as Maurice and Maralyn are beginning to starve and decompose, physically and mentally, while adrift in a leaky dinghy in the middle of the Pacific.

The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod is my favourite poetry anthology. The poems are presented in reverse chronological order so that the book starts with recent work from Anne Carson and Patricia Lockwood then steadily dives backwards through time: Eileen Myles to Allen Ginsberg to Gertrude Stein before finally ending in 1842 with Aloysius Bertrand writing beautiful prose poems before the term even existed. Every time I come back to this book I find new gems.

A journalist’s bracingly honest account of interviews with musicians from Brian May to Shaun Ryder

When the journalist Kate Mossman was a child, she developed an obsession with the rock band Queen. Mossman came of age in the 1990s, but the irony and snark of that decade left her cold. Instead, she lived for the “middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jacket and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before�. Watching Queen’s posthumous single These Are the Days of Our Lives on Top of the Pops in 1991, she “felt something within myself ignite�. Though she was captivated by the strange longing of a monochrome Freddie Mercury, who had died weeks earlier, it was drummer Roger Taylor who became the focus of her obsession. On the mantelpiece of her childhood home sat a holy relic: a beer glass he had drunk from during a solo gig. Twenty years later, while on her way to interview Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May for a magazine profile, Mossman confesses: “I think I’m going to black out.�

Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman’s work previously published in the Word, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19 encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting, Dave Gahan, Jon Bon Jovi, Nick Cave and Terence Trent D’Arby. Mossman tops and tails the articles with present-day thoughts, reflecting on her expectations, the preparation, the long journeys to far-flung homes, and the peculiar and sometimes fraught dynamic between interviewer and interviewee.

A bracingly hopeful call for high-flyers to ditch corporate drudgery in favour of something far more ambitious

This is not a self-help book,� the author tells us, firmly. Appearances might suggest otherwise: it is written and presented almost entirely in the familiar style of that genre, with largish print, short sentences, snappy maxims in italics and lots of lists and charts (“six signs you may be on the wrong side of history�). Its proposals are delivered with all the annoyingly hectic bounciness of the genre.

But it is worth taking Bregman (a thirtysomething historian and author labelled “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers� by the Ted network) at his word. He begins from the deep and corrosive anomie experienced by so many gifted young professionals who find themselves making substantial sums of money in exhausting and (at best) morally compromising jobs. The “moral ambition� of the title is about recognising that serious financial, organisational, technological and analytical skills – the kind that in the US will get you through, say, law school with a secure ticket to prosperity – can be used to make tangible improvements in the lives of human and nonhuman neighbours.

Philadelphia’s Speling Reform Asoshiashun wasn’t the only group to demand a simpler way of putting things in print

You may be familiar with the ghoti, the shiny animal with fins that lives in the water; perhaps you even have your own ghoti tank. Ghotis evolved long ago, but they didn’t get their name until the 19th century, when jokesters noted that, thanks to the weirdness of English spelling, the word “fish� might be written with a “gh�, as in “rough�, an “o�, as in “women�, and a “ti�, as in “lotion�.

The idea of the ghoti is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries. From “through� to “though� and “trough�, whether you’re a child or learning English as a second language, getting the spelling right is a nightmare. Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.

Stephen Witt’s entertaining study of the rise of chip company Nvidia portrays its leader, Jensen Huang, as a remarkable entrepreneur – sometimes energised by anger

This is the latest confirmation that the “great man� theory of history continues to thrive in Silicon Valley. As such, it joins a genre that includes Walter Isaacson’s twin tomes on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, Brad Stone’s book on Jeff Bezos, Michael Becraft’s on Bill Gates, Max Chafkin’s on Peter Thiel and Michael Lewis’s on Sam Bankman-Fried. Notable characteristics of the genre include a tendency towards founder worship, discreet hagiography and a Whiggish interpretation of the life under examination.

The great man under Witt’s microscope is the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, a chip design company that went from being a small but plucky purveyor of graphics processing units (GPUs) for computer gaming to its current position as the third most valuable company in the world.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

The strange stories of the agents who lived apparently normal lives in the west as part of Soviet espionage programmes make compelling reading

One muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking at the door. The family was celebrating Tim’s 20th birthday at their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after lunch in a restaurant. Tim’s mother went to answer the door, calling out as she did so that some of his friends must have arrived to wish him a happy birthday. Instead she found a group of men dressed in black waiting on the doorstep. Bellowing “FBI�, they barged their way into the house and handcuffed Ann and her husband, before marching them outside and driving them away.

Alex assumed that there had been a terrible mistake; his parents were much too boring to warrant such a dramatic arrest. But there was no mistake. His parents were not Don Heathfield and Ann Foley, prosperous Canadians living in the US, but Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, Russian spies who had assumed false identities before Alex and his brother were born. Together with their parents, the two boys were stripped of their Canadian citizenship and flown to Moscow. Alex was handed a Russian passport, identifying him with a name he could not even pronounce properly. “Typical high school identity crisis, right?� he remarks, with a wry smile but an undertone of understandable bitterness, while being interviewed by the author of this book, Shaun Walker, an international correspondent for the Guardian who was based in Moscow for more than 10 years.

A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movie

Most people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road� and the “Great North Road� (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone� of Britain.

As a frequent shuttler between north and south, I prefer the North Road to its rival, the bland, homogenous M1. It has verges and laybys, eccentric pit-stops where the coffee is not necessarily Costa, and a scruffy, improvised air, suggesting something organically arisen from the landscape. But whereas I have merely driven along the road, Cowen has communed with its ghosts.

The Pulitzer-nominated journalist recounts how modern misogyny has been shaped by a mass culture attuned to male desire and all-pervasive pornography

In 2021, JD Vance told Fox News that senior Democrat women were just “childless cat ladies�, lacking cultural or social value compared with their married and procreating counterparts. When Taylor Swift looked down the barrel of this insult with a post on Instagram showing her posing with beloved feline Benjamin Button (from Time magazine’s photoshoot naming her 2023’s person of the year), she embraced the role of killjoy, rejecting Vance’s attempt to divide women. But even this gesture of defiance and solidarity was not enough to push back the red tide of misogyny and corruption: Trump was elected to a second term, the US was denied a female leader, and millions of women held their breath.

When Sophie Gilbert, a Pulitzer-nominated journalist and critic at the Atlantic, was writing Girl on Girl, the 2025 Trump administration was just a worrying possibility. But Gilbert’s account of women’s degradation since the early 90s through pop culture sounds a crescendo of doom towards this present moment. With what she calls a “wry nod� to lesbian porn, you’d be forgiven for concluding from her title that Gilbert thinks women are the problem. But it’s the patriarchy, stupid.

From humans with robotic body parts to robots with human emotions, a vibrant debut set in a unified Korea examines what it means to be a person

Silvia Park’s debut novel is about people, robots and cyborgs: that is, humans enhanced or augmented with robotic technology. Ruijie is a schoolgirl afflicted with a degenerative disease: “affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customised circuitry to aid her ability to walk�. As the novel opens, Ruijie is in a robot junkyard, scavenging for spare parts and better legs. Here she meets a robot boy, Yoyo, discarded despite being a highly sophisticated model. Ruijie takes the quirky Yoyo to school with her, and a group of friends assemble to protect him from scavengers and exploitation in the robot-fighting ring.

This element of the novel reads like a YA adventure, though the rest is more adult-focused: cyberpunk, violent and sexualised. In an author’s note, Park says that they began writing Luminous as children’s fiction, until a bereavement took the work in a different direction, making the novel “a shape-shifter, no longer so appropriate for children�. There’s an awkwardness to this mix of tone, although we could say it reproduces, on the level of form, the book’s central topic of hybridisation, cyborgification, different elements worked together, as the novel’s setting – a future unified Korea – does on the level of geography.

This outrageous skewering of the modern dating landscape confronts toxic masculinity and the contradictions of female desire

Nearly every page in Sophie Kemp’s debut is smart, jarring and wickedly funny. Set in Brooklyn in 2019, this wild, absurdist take on the millennial novel tracks the adventures of Reality Kahn, a 23-year-old waterslide commercial actor and zine-maker who determines to become “the greatest girlfriend of all time�, after her drug-dealing sex partner, Emil, casually suggests that she gets herself a man. Prior to that point, Reality had just been living her life, no strings attached. “Would having a special guy around really make me happier? Was this the life purpose I was looking for?� A boyfriend, she decides, might “add colour to my life as well as provide intrigue�. And, New York City being “a place where nefarious individuals got ideas�, he could also protect her from “getting raped so much�.

Reality’s quest kicks off with a hunt for “intel�. Where do guys who make good boyfriends usually spend their time? Farcical as it is, her inquiry touches on that most sobering of cliches about true love: that it is darn hard to find. Emil responds with confusion: “Where do they hang out? Girl, I think you’re sexy as fuck and fun, but for serious, you are on some sort of insane-ass trip these days. They’re not a pack of wildebeests in the plains.� Desperate for better advice, Reality turns to Girlfriend Weekly, Kemp’s cheeky homage to the time-honoured world of women’s magazines. It has all the answers she’s looking for, even if they are hilariously fusty and over the top: “Bring a little charm with you everywhere that you go. For example, when you are at the grocer’s, be sure to give a smile and a wink to the dashing gentleman in the porkpie hat. Say: ‘Gee whiz, woo-woo, you are a beautiful specimen and I am a virgin.’�

The poet’s debut novel is a transcendent portrait of gay desire that pays homage to the English literary tradition

Seán Hewitt, the author of two acclaimed poetry collections and an equally acclaimed memoir, now publishes his debut novel Open, Heaven – a tender, skilled and epiphanic work which I suspect will meet the same response. It takes its title from William Blake’s poem Milton, which speaks of wandering through “realms of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions of varied beauty� – a line that quite nicely describes the reader’s experience of this book.

Its opening recalls – with the sense of a deliberate engagement with literary tradition – TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, or LP Hartley’s The Go-Between: “Time runs faster backwards. The years – long, arduous and uncertain when taken one by one – unspool quickly … the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms in reverse.� Our narrator James, a librarian who loved but never desired his husband, is a man arrested in time past. Directed by doctors to rest after the “bewildered weeks� that follow his divorce, he returns endlessly to thoughts of his youth, “hoping to find the answer to something left unfinished�. He searches online for properties in the village of Thornmere, where he was once a solitary teen who loved – with disastrous single-minded loyalty – a boy called Luke. He discovers a farmhouse for sale which is achingly familiar; so he is prompted to return to Thornmere in person, having never really departed it in spirit, and we are plunged into the body of the novel.

This startling debut follows a young woman on a surreal and bluntly graphic quest to be the perfect girlfriend

Set in upstate New York, Sophie Kemp’s surreal satirical debut puts us in the uneasy company of a part-time model who calls herself Reality as she sets out on a crazed quest to become the perfect girlfriend. The chief beneficiary of her self-education is a crack-smoking postgrad and wannabe musician named Ariel, who cheats openly, gives her an infection and – in the reader’s eye – sees her as little more than a sex toy able to fetch snacks. But Reality is besotted, ignoring her own doomsaying conscience – what she refers to with typical idiosyncrasy as “the familiar voice� – as well as her best friend, Soon-jin, who thinks Ariel looks like a “school shooter�: “I think what she was saying was: Ariel is a unique bad boy who often wore a leather jacket.�

What ensues is akin to a TikTok Stepford Wives for the Pornhub era. Taking tips from a magazine, Girlfriend Weekly, which magically appears every so often bathed in light and accompanied by a cor anglais, Reality leans with alarmingly good cheer into the notion that the perfect girlfriend must be permanently ready to service every last whim. “I loved the feeling of being sliced open in the butt by a nice, girthy, yet not too large cock,� she tells us, wiping her belly with a sock Ariel gives her after one of many bluntly described couplings. Reality presses him on whether she’s actually his girlfriend now. “What? Oh yeah. OK, sure.� “My life had become beautiful,� she tells us.

The style is George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh, filtered through – at a rough guess – 4chan, mumblecore and 18th-century marriage manuals. There are arch intertitles (“In which the quest begins with three pieces of evidence�), faux-naif chattiness, narcotised dialogue and any number of left turns making a wild premise wilder still: when Reality participates in a clinical trial of a mysterious pill, ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR), designed to aid would-be perfect girlfriends, she ends up on the run from a machine-gun-wielding medic.

It’s safe to say your mileage may vary, not least because the piss-taking can feel ultra-specific (Ariel attends a seminar known to Reality as his “James Joyce Opinions Class�) and the lingering sense that it’s all a kind of alt-lit prank a la Tao Lin (a suspicion heightened by the cover of the US edition, which displays an anime Eve in the garden of Eden, with Kemp’s name in Comic Sans). Yet Paradise Logic rarely feels slack in the way that kind of fiction can; Kemp knows exactly what she’s doing, and tonally the novel is a feat, expertly switching between laughter, shock and heartache, sometimes in a heartbeat. In one of many startling moments, Ariel forces himself on Reality when she’s drunk with a head wound. The narrative splits in two to show us what she’s thinking – the phrase “I love you� 100 times – before cutting to inside Ariel’s mind: “The band is called Computer. We will perform in midsize venues all over the country and Europe, too.�

Gary Shteyngart is quoted on the cover calling it the funniest book of the year. And it is funny – right from the Emily Dickinson epigraph, which finds new resonance in the poet’s use of “hoe� – but ultimately it’s a comedy about misogyny in the way that Percival Everett’s The Trees is a comedy about lynching. Witness the moment when Soon-jin says Ariel looks like a school shooter: “It was so clear that she was jealous,� Reality thinks, “but I felt sad. Me and Soon-jin had been through a lot together. Each time I got raped in college she was always so nice to me after.� Every few pages, a sucker-punch line like that bares the teeth behind the book’s smile, and to even call it a comedy ends up feeling a kind of weird category error that doesn’t get near Kemp’s full-spectrum effect. How she follows this is anyone’s guess.

In this blazingly honest collection, the Canadian poet catalogues humanity’s destructive impact on the natural world

It is human nature to prefer our landscapes neatly framed – walls and wooden fences create the illusion that the great outdoors can be controlled and contained. Yet Karen Solie’s wildly unpredictable collection Wellwater flips the script. In this blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm, we celebrate instead the contemporary landscapes refusing to be tamed.

Solie, who teaches at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in western Canada, where vast prairies supply much of the world’s pulse crops. This fertile expanse in Wellwater, however, seems tired of endless service. The poem Red Spring witnesses how “weeds jump up unbidden, each year a little smarter�. They are trying, almost courageously, to outwit what Solie condemns as “zombie technology�, whose genetically modified “terminator seeds� sprout terrifying plants that are “more dead than alive�.

Zink’s seventh novel, about a night of conversation and adventure, is full of wit and marvellous writing, but ultimately trails off

California-born, Berlin-based Nell Zink is an idiosyncratic writer. You never quite know where her sentences are going to go. “Oh God, Toto, you won’t believe what just happened,� says Avianca, a character in her new novel. “This angel stole my hat. Like a winged monkey. It was blue and kind of glowing and had feather wings.�

Such delightfully surprising lines are frequent in Sister Europe, Zink’s seventh novel, which follows acclaimed titles The Wallcreeper, Doxology and Avalon, and is set over the course of a Tuesday night in 2023.

Sister Europe by Nell Zink is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty; All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman; This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen; The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie; Death and Other Occupations by Veronika Dapunt

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty (Picador, £16.99)
Award-winning short-story writer Hegarty’s debut opens with guests arriving at an Irish Airbnb country house for a murder mystery-themed birthday party. Abigail has organised the celebration for her brother Benjamin, and old friends, including his former fiancee, are invited, as well as his colleague Barbara – but the morning after the festivities, he is found dead in his locked bedroom. So far, so run-of-the-mill, but the book then splits into competing storylines, with the action oscillating between a metatextual golden age narrative, complete with butler, gardener, maid and esteemed amateur detective, and a naturalistic and sometimes heartbreaking account of grief. With plenty of in-jokes for golden age aficionados and a remarkably assured handling of the necessary tonal shifts, this engaging, ingenious Möbius strip of a book is undoubtedly the most original crime novel you’ll read all year.

All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman (4th Estate, £16.99)
Harman’s debut novel is set around west London private school St Angeles, where parents rich enough to be unperturbed by the imposition of VAT on fees fork out hefty sums for their little darlings’ primary education. Ageing party girl and failed singer Florence Grimes is very much the odd mum out in this glossy milieu, but when her 10-year-old son’s classmate Alfie, an entitled bully who is the heir to a frozen food empire, goes missing on a school trip and young Dylan becomes a person of interest to the police, she gets on the case. Whether you warm to this hot-mess-turns-amateur-sleuth tale rather depends on whether you find Florence enraging or endearing, with her habit of asking a neighbour to listen out for Dylan while she goes out for hook-ups, and a preternatural talent not only for self-sabotage, but also for landing other people in it up to their necks. That said, it’s funny, pacy and very readable, with the social satire absolutely on point.

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.

Laughter abounds with tales of mini beasts at bedtime, a box filled with babbling babies and an odd-couple comedy from Julia Donaldson

The day is done. It’s time for little ones to go to bed. But first, one poorly demon needs his Calpol, there’s a tiny cyborg to plug in and charge, and the slimy green star of Huw Aaron’s latest story, Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob (Puffin), must be dragged away from the Lego.

Welsh author, illustrator and graphic novelist Aaron has flipped the traditional bedtime story on its head to create a delightfully different rhyming tale about child monsters and villains settling down for the night. But, rather than causing a fright, it brims with just the right amount of loving cosiness to help mini humans drift off. Mummy blob narrates from inside an almost normal house but, beyond the potted plants on the window ledge, dragons and aliens swoop outside, and when Mum plops her precious slimeball into bed, the pillow is “lovely and damp�. Sharp, fun and brimming with attention to detail, it’s also guaranteed to be the year’s only book with the line: “The Sentient Meteor is snug in her cot.�

The Convenience Store Woman author is renowned for challenging social norms in darkly weird near-future fiction. She discusses sex, feminism and her struggles to be an ‘ordinary earthling’

“I have had relationships with humans, but I’ve also loved a lot of people in stories,� Sayaka Murata, the Japanese author of the bestseller Convenience Store Woman, confides a few minutes into our interview. “I’ve been told by my doctor not to talk about this too much, but ever since I was a child, I’ve had 30 or 40 imaginary friends who live on a different star or planet with whom I have shared love and sexual experiences.�

It is 7pm in Tokyo, mid-morning in London. Sitting upright at a desk in an empty publisher’s office, the 45-year-old author – wearing a cream silk blouse and with a neatly curled bob – might be reading the news rather than discussing imaginary friends. For context, her latest novel to be translated into English, Vanishing World, depicts a future in which people no longer have sex and the main character carries 40 “lovers� – plastic anime key rings – in her black Prada pouch. Our conversation is made possible thanks to the skilful translation of Bethan Jones, who relates Murata’s long, thoughtful and utterly unpredictable answers. As video calls go, the experience is so otherworldly the three of us might be beaming in from different planets.

The American author on the follow-up to her bestselling debut Such a Fun Age, why she loves characters you want to shake, and reading 160 novels for the Booker prize

When Arizona-raised novelist Kiley Reid, 37, debuted five years ago with Such a Fun Age, she attained the kind of commercial and critical success that can jinx a second book, even landing a spot on the 2020 Booker longlist. Instead, Come and Get It – which is published in paperback next month – fulfils the promise, pursuing some of the themes of that first work while also daring to be boldly different.

The story unfolds at the University of Arkansas, where wealth, class and race shape the yearnings and anxieties of a group of students and one equally flawed visiting professor. Reid, who has been teaching at the University of Michigan, is currently preparing to move to the Netherlands with her husband and young daughter. She is also on the judging panel for this year’s Booker prize.

The Japanese-American author of unsettling new novel Audition talks about why fiction isn’t frivolous, family life with fellow writer Hari Kunzru, and how US authors are facing a critical moment

Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.� The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,� she tells me. “I’m intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life … and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.�

The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college student, Xavier, who claims he is her son. As the story unfolds, the truth of their entanglement becomes ever harder to discern – is he a liar or a fantasist, or is she mad?

The author of bestseller The Ministry of Time on how lockdown telly, Terry Pratchett and her Cambodian heritage shaped her Arctic time travel tale

Kaliane Bradley, 36, lives in east London and works as an editor at Penguin Classics. Her debut novel, The Ministry of Time (Sceptre), was published last year to critical acclaim and a place in the bestseller charts and is out in paperback now. It’s a vivid time travel tale following Lieutenant Graham Gore, a crew member of Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition, who is brought back to life in the 21st century as part of a government experiment. He develops an unlikely relationship with his “bridge�, a contemporary character helping him assimilate to the modern world. It was longlisted for the 2025 women’s prize for fiction and the BBC has commissioned a TV adaptation.

What has the past year been like for you?
Lovely and discombobulating. I veer wildly between immense gratitude and intense impostor syndrome. But I’m still working 4.5 days a week, so I’m grounded by my job.

The Irish author on his new ‘violent seafaring epic’, his appetite for body horror and living his entire life book-first

Oisín Fagan, 33, grew up in County Meath and lives in Dublin. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse comic fiction prize with his first novel, Nobber, about the Black Death’s arrival in the Irish village that gives the book its title. His other books include the 2016 story collection Hostages, described by the Spectator as “DayGlo-Breugelish nightmares�; Ferdia Lennon calls him “one of the most strikingly original Irish writers working today�. His new novel, Eden’s Shore, is a violent seafaring epic centred on a Spanish colony in Latin America at the end of the 18th century.

How did this book begin for you?
It’s a confluence of things I’ve been interested in all my life: Latin American literature, history, revolutionary politics, spirituality. Like Nobber, it’s about a dying town with a proliferation of characters, which I like. That’s not new – it’s Balzac, it’s Dickens – but for some reason we’ve distilled novels down to chamber pieces of six or seven characters; to me, that’s theatre, which I also love, but novels can proliferate horizontally in a way that other forms can’t.

What draws you to set your novels in the past?
You can do things with language and form that might not be as accepted in contemporary work, but I don’t see myself as a historical novelist. Literary fiction seems quite contemporary at the moment; historical fiction seems to be slipping into “genre�, like fantasy. In other parts of the world, it’s just part of literary fiction. We’re living through a moment in Irish literature with a lot of very good Irish writers who are all very different and talented, but maybe they’re not experimenting in genre as much as they would do elsewhere in the world. Because I find myself an Irishman among these people, you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s different.’ In the 1960s in America, or Latin America in the 50s and 70s, you’d be like, ‘Oh, he’s just one of the lads.’

There are some pretty grisly scenes here. What were they like to write?
The nuts and bolts of novel formation are difficult for me – setting up a scene, getting from one place to another – but give me someone picking bullets out of someone’s gut and I think: here we fucking go. I’m writing for these moments where the body becomes real. Like, the eyeball scene... you should’ve seen the 300 words that were deleted; you’d have been seeing it for the rest of your life. I love my cousin to bits, but he had this fear of eyes as a child; mention the word “eye� and you’d see him kind of flinch. I tapped into that.

As Neige Sinno’s critically acclaimed memoir about being sexually abused by her stepfather is published in English, she reveals how writing her story has helped set her free

When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, won a swathe of prizes and became one of the most borrowed books in libraries across France when it was published in 2023. The Nobel prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux was so impressed that she made a public appearance in conversation with Sinno, saying: “Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it.�

Now published in English, Sad Tiger – the title is a reference to William Blake’s poem The Tyger – veers between the little girl’s memories of her stepfather blasting French rocker Johnny Hallyday from a cassette player as the hippy family restores a house in an Alpine village, and his attacks on her, during a period when he is scratching a living taking on part-time jobs. Sinno combines the inner world of an abuse survivor with a portrait of life in the French mountains. The book is also a study in society’s denial. The stepfather eventually faces trial, serves a prison sentence, remarries and has four more children after his release.

When Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, lawyer Philippe Sands was part of the prosecution. As his book about the case comes out, he talks to the Colombian novelist about literature and justice

What do law and literature have in common? Do they represent similar impulses towards understanding human motives and behaviour, or are they fundamentally different systems? In his new book, 38 Londres Street, lawyer and writer Philippe Sands revisits the attempts to extradite and prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, beginning in 1998, in which he was involved. He also finds himself on the trail of Walther Rauff, a former SS officer featured in Sands’s award-winning book East West Street, who went on to seek refuge in Chile, later becoming involved in the Pinochet regime’s arrangements for the detention, torture and murder of its opponents. The Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who trained as a lawyer but decided instead to write journalism and fiction, has addressed political violence and its legacy throughout his work, including in his acclaimed novel The Shape of the Ruins. The two friends met to discuss excavating the past, the limits of law and the potential of art.

Philippe Sands: We’ve known each other for quite a few years, and you’re one of those rare people who straddles the worlds that I’ve fallen into: you understand the world of law with your legal qualification, and understand far better than I do the world of literature. But you’re also from the region I’m writing about. Having been to Chile for this book six or seven times, and about to head off again, I’m conscious of being an outsider. It’s a Chilean story, and this Brit has stumbled across it in various ways. It’s a local story for you.

The Alex Rider author on being put off Dickens for a decade, why he reads poetry in the mornings, and how reading Sherlock Holmes made him want to be a crime writer

My earliest reading memory
I started with a comic: Valiant. Hardly great literature – but it provided escapism from my prep school. The tales of Kelly’s Eye and the Steel Claw enthralled me and I still dream of them now.

My favourite book growing up
I was always a fan of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise. She was a sort of female James Bond, a criminal turned government agent. My parents used to read each new book as it came out and then hand it on to me. It was one of the few things that brought us together as a family.

Skewed interpretations of classic works are feeding the dark visions of tech moguls, from Musk to Thiel

One can only imagine the horror the late Iain Banks would have felt on learning his legendary Culture series is a favourite of Elon Musk. The Scottish author was an outspoken socialist who could never understand why rightwing fans liked novels that were so obviously an attack on their worldview.

But that hasn’t stopped Musk, whose Neuralink company – which develops implantable brain-to-computer interfaces – was directly inspired by Banks’s concept of “neural lace�. The barges used by SpaceX to land their booster rockets are all named after spaceships from the Culture books.