Books
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The books interview: After 10 years, the poet laureate is preparing to step down. She talks politics, swearing – and how poetry has changed since she started writing -
The nature writer and children’s author on his adventurous childhood on a hill farm, and how he learned to make use of his imagination
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The Channel 4 foreign correspondent talks about her new biography of the Sunday Times war reporter who was killed in Syria -
He believed he’d found the secret key to unlock all of Shakespeare’s work. Twenty years after Hughes’s death, this is the story of the lifelong fixation he feared would destroy him -
An eloquent case for the vitality of the vampire figure, from 18th-century Slavic folk tales to Twilight, via Dracula
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The author and journalist gives a chilling account of the financial sector’s stranglehold on the UK -
Did one novel written in 1839 inspire a lurid murder and an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria? -
An introduction to the brave new world of personal genomics argues that it solves the puzzle of nature v nurture
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From Darwin’s discoveries to the Trump era, a house in New Jersey is at the centre of this time-shifting study of social change -
There’s sharp social comedy to be found in JK Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike book – if you can navigate a complex murder mystery -
Gambling, hunting, philosophy and romance … life lessons from fathers to their sons make for a funny, quirky debut
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A predatory Athena and a playboy Narcissus bring flashes of brilliance to a reworking of Ovid that lacks rigour -
In this long-winded exploration of a marriage, the bestselling Spanish author is fascinated by uncertainty and self-deception -
Paintings become magic portals in this digressive, beguiling novel about an artist in flight from himself
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Sibling love drives this richly imagined adventure from the author of The Girl of Ink and Stars -
Moby-Dick is reimagined from the whale’s point of view in this lyrical, pacey tale -
Tracy Beaker is back, as a single mum living on a council estate. The bestselling author talks about ‘grit-fic’, selfie-culture – and what she won’t write about
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The Leeds-born writer remembers the series of accidents that allowed him to tell a story about fatherhood that’s both funny and emotionally exposed -
The books interview: his surreal stories are read by millions but the Japanese novelist is bemused by his celebrity. The eternal Nobel favourite reveals why his books appeal in times of chaos -
The author of The Poisonwood Bible is back with an ambitious novel charting the US in breakdown. She talks about the environment, victim-blaming – and being a hillbilly
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Her tales of female knights have made her a favourite for girl readers since the 80s. She talks about bringing ‘the rawness of reality’ to her fiction -
The Team of Rivals author has brought Lincoln together with Johnson and two Roosevelts to produce a timely study of what makes a great president -
The Colombian writer on the legacy of his country’s civil war and how literature can help us come to terms with the past
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The Lonely Londoners’ carefully ordinary observations are true to their period, but the frustrations his characters undergo are sadly not historical -
This ghostly Icelandic parable of patriarchy subtly defies predictable sexual politics -
What to read
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The American author on discovering black history, delighting in Didion, and her ‘scandalous’ struggle with Angela’s Ashes -
Following the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Ian Black picks five books that get inside the secretive kingdom -
Autumn books 2018
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From Haruki Murakami to Michelle Obama, what to read this season
You may have missed
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Secret interrogations, elaborately staged deceptions, conspiracies and murder ... John le Carré’s murky spy thriller could not be more relevant -
Funny, literary and irreverent, How to Eat reinvented the cookbook. Twenty years on, Bee Wilson explores how Nigella Lawson’s evocative, appetite-driven food writing influenced a generation -
A poet who samples hip-hop and household appliances, a Hansel and Gretel for the #MeToo era ... the avant garde is more diverse and engaged than ever -
Rows, gaffes and disdainful speeches have always kept the Booker prize in the news. But now, a creeping sense of bad decision-making is undermining its cachet
Posy Simmonds Women in books aren’t allowed to be total rotters
Exclusive extract: Cassandra Darke