Books
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During his presidency, Barack Obama read 10 letters from members of the public every day. He reveals what they meant to him -
Between 2005 and 2009, more than 130 Mennonite women were drugged and raped by men in the community. In new novel Women Talking, the ex-Mennonite tells their story
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The author recalls playing on buddleia-filled bombsites – and discovering the city’s slavery past -
In his novels, Naipaul showed we could be just as erudite and accom plished as the very best of our British hosts -
‘America’s greatest living record man’, who also brought the Smiths to the US, recalls hard living and spotting the right song
Not the Booker prize 2018
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Last year’s judges have finalised the 2018 shortlist, adding Marc Nash’s Three Dreams in the Key of G. Now we’re on the hunt for three new judges ...
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The author of global bestseller Sapiens is back, with a self-help guide for a bewildering age – and its sweeping statements are peppered with truly mind-expanding observations -
Two elegant cultural histories of mazes and labyrinths, from the Minotaur to Hampton Court, ask the reader to surrender to the pleasure of getting lost
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A clay baby becomes the narrator of this chaotic extravaganza in which Bosch meets Chagall, with touches of Tarantino -
Australian towns are disappearing in a thought-provoking novel that ranges from the banal to the apocalyptic -
The English writer brings the full range of his virtuosity to bear in a Napoleonic-era tale that veers from comedy and romance to outright menace
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Impressive debuts by Alexia Arthurs and Nafissa Thompson-Spires bring grit and wit to issues around racial identity -
A 40-year time frame, a large cast and shifting points of view bring nuance to this accomplished novel about consent, control and the transition to adulthood -
Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett; Tommy Catkins by Stephen Palmer; Sam Hawke’s City of Lies; One Way by SJ Morden; and Candas Jane Dorsey’s Ice and Other Stories
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The acclaimed children’s author on writing a memoir about his wartime upbringing in rural Cheshire -
The American author on his gut response to a friend’s death, how to get young people reading, and the value of crochet -
A mellow lion, a beach party with sharks, a rooftop paradise and the curse of a superpower
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4 October 1971 VS Naipaul talks about his new novel In a Free State as well as the journalistic assignments that can bring him to a state of near panic -
We explore the unhealthy nature of modern life with Haig in Notes on a Nervous Planet, while Dalcher talks about her thriller Vox -
Nicci Gerrard and her husband, Sean French, who write as Nicci French, share tips with new pseudonym on the block, Ambrose Parry – Chris Brookmyre and his wife, Dr Marisa Haetzman
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The novelist on the political intrigue of 1930s Suffolk and how a Ladybird book rekindled her interest in the natural world -
The Pakistani novelist, who has lived in the UK and US, has been well placed to write such prescient books as Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. But what he wants his next novel to do, he says, may be beyond him -
She hadn’t read a crime novel before writing her debut at 45. Now, the author of Snap talks risk-taking, genre snobbery and not needing to know whodunnit
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The Moonstone certainly has elements of breathless storytelling, but some of its thrills derive from the precision of its down-to-earth details -
For me – a middle-aged British man writing in the voice of a teenage Egyptian girl signing up with Isis – this is a tough question. Here is how I answer it -
What to read
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The author on Harry Potter, the book that changed his mind about pornography and his writer regrets -
From a novel by Jonathan Franzen to insights into the 2008 financial crash – five books to help us understand how political forces shape the markets -
Summer books 2018
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From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer
You may have missed
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Nobel prizewinning writer of novels, short stories and bleak accounts of displaced people starting from his own experience in his native Trinidad -
Viv Albertine, Deborah Levy, Lavinia Greenlaw and Rachel Cusk are redefining life after menopause, children or divorce – and it has never looked so good -
Since it began in the 1960s, fanfiction has been both loved and dismissed as the work of nerdy amateurs. Now, a new generation of authors is dissolving the distinction -
Her savage send-up of the London intelligentsia was panned by critics. But could Doctors of Philosophy now be about to hit its prime?
Ian McEwan I despise lying, ideological Brexiters