Books
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Germaine Greer’s brilliance and taste for controversy still don’t make her an easy quarry for her biographer, Elizabeth Kleinhenz -
The former first lady’s wit and warmth shine through in her account of life inside and outside the White House
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The historian and author of The New Silk Roads on why we need to be less Eurocentric and his love of the great Russian novelists -
Can director Saverio Costanzo and a cast of non-professional actors do justice to Ferrante’s radical vision of postwar Naples? -
Denunciations fly, friends fall out and hurt is inflicted in Daniel Rosenthal’s rewarding collection of letters from directors, actors and writers
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This revealing memoir offers new insights into her upbringing on the south side of Chicago and the highs and lows of life with Barack Obama -
Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin’s case for understanding those people who want to ‘reassert cherished national identities’ claims to be myth-busting. But is it just flawed?
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This even-handed history by the Guardian’s former Middle East editor draws on 40 years of experience and exhaustive research
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A near-future story about a tech geek and a member of the Chinese elite takes in everything from quantum theory and revolution to shyness -
Newcomer by Keigo Higashino, Still Lives by Maria Hummel, The Stranger Diaries by Ellie Griffiths, A House of Ghosts by WC Ryan, Five Days of Fog by Anna Freeman and The Long Shadow be Celia Fremlin -
An inventive, immersive adventure vividly imagines a bleak near future shaped by sinister software
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David Small’s tale of a sad, isolated teenager and his angry father is timely in the age of Donald Trump -
This rich, engrossing novel explores how a penniless Swiss orphan caught up in the French Revolution came to found the famous waxworks museum -
The discovery of a body at an abandoned military base uncovers an eerie hidden history
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A slender, but beautifully written evocation of the travails of writing and the deep sources of horror -
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
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The books interview: the Booker prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo on exasperating his readers, kindness in an unkind world and why he wrote an operatic libretto set at a Trump rally -
On a 6,000-mile bicycle journey along the Silk Road, the author explored the notion of wildness – the Earth’s and her own -
‘The two things I love most are novels and birds, and they’re both in trouble,’ says The Corrections author, one of the world’s most famous birdwatchers
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Incest, dragons, gore ... with fans awaiting the next book in his hit series, the novelist talks about fame, expectations – and the new 300-year history of the Targaryens in Westeros -
On this week’s show, Robertson talks about his narrative poem The Long Take and McMillan explores adolescent rites of passage in Playtime -
Pedro Corrêa do Lago has built up a collection of 100,000 letters written by famous people
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From Proust’s explorations of consciousness to Olivia Laing’s meditations on isolation, solitude is literature’s friend -
On PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer, the Indian novelist addresses photographer Shahidul Alam, charged with criticising Bangladesh on Facebook -
What to read
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The Canadian author on miracles, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the life-changing philosophy of Andy Warhol -
Novelist Richard Powers, Nobel winner Wangari Maathai and Amazonian shaman Davi Kopenawa: five books about one of the most profound environmental changes of our time -
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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He started out filling the inkwells at a pulp magazine and ended up spawning an $11bn juggernaut. Our writer salutes a legend – and the musclebound crusaders who lit up his childhood -
This year’s Booker-winner Milkman has been criticised for being challenging. But are we confusing readability with literary value? -
The first of the author’s Neapolitan novels is about to hit TV screens in a hugely ambitious adaptation, made on location in Naples -
In 2004, Roberts’s wartime diaries were discovered in a Glasgow attic. A century after he went to war, Scotland’s makar remembers his contribution
Exiled Kamila Shamsie on the disturbing story of a citizen made unBritish