Facing homelessness and incurable illness, a couple sets out on a 630-mile hike in this lyrical memoir read by the author

A few days after Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, had their Welsh farm repossessed owing to a failed investment, Moth learned he had a rare and incurable neurodegenerative condition. With their world upended and nowhere to live, the couple decided there was only one course of action: to walk.

Their plan was to follow the South West Coast Path, a hiking trail taking them from Minehead in Somerset, along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, around Land’s End and Lizard Point, then back along Cornwall’s south coast, south Devon and ending in Poole in Dorset. The 630-mile walk, taking in secluded beaches and coves, wild moorland and quiet hamlets and coastal towns, is equivalent to climbing Mount Everest four times over. Armed with the essentials – clothes, a tent, sleeping bags, endless packets of dried noodles – they would be “sleeping wild, living wild, working our way through every painful action that had brought us here, to this moment”.

Hope is no casual platitude in this inspiring collection of essays; it’s the realistic mindset with which to approach existential challenges

According to Rebecca Solnit, a lot of us are suffering from something called moral injury. She describes this as the “deep sense of wrongness” that can infiltrate our lives when we realise we are complicit in something seriously bad.

The first time I experienced this in relation to climate change, I was changing my baby’s nappy soon after one of the worst Australian wildfire seasons on record in 2020. The nappy featured a smiling cartoon koala on the front. I immediately recalled the scene of a singed, parched koala being fed water from a plastic bottle by a human as it fled the inferno. A disposable nappy takes up to 500 years to decompose. I felt disgust and despair at the degree of consumption, waste and exploitation that even a modest lifestyle in a high-income country seems to entail.

The novelist’s meditation on grief, memory and radical acceptance contains both horror and comfort

In this quietly devastating account of life after the death by suicide of both of her sons, Yiyun Li refuses to use “mourning” or “grieving” because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” she writes, and words can only “fall short”.

She begins by laying out the facts. And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering: Vincent died in 2017, aged 16. James died in 2024, aged 19. Vincent, we learn, loved baking and knitting, and did not live long enough to graduate high school. James, a brilliant linguist studying at Princeton, where Li teaches creative writing, took his last Japanese class on a Friday. “Facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to,” she writes. Things in Nature Merely Grow is by necessity profoundly sad, but in the act of sharing details of the “abyss” she now inhabits, Li has created something both inclusive and humane.

Alternate political realities are compellingly explored in this sinister vision of a children’s home – but the echoes of Ishiguro are just too strong

In 2016 Catherine Chidgey published her fourth novel, The Wish Child, a child’s-eye view of Nazi Germany. Since then the much-garlanded New Zealander has contrived to be not only conspicuously prolific but also intriguingly unpredictable. Though she returned to wartime Germany in her Women’s prize-longlisted Holocaust novel, Remote Sympathy, her work has ranged from the coming-of-age psychological thriller Pet to The Beat of the Pendulum, a “found” novel that drew on everything from conversations and social media posts to news bulletins and even satnav instructions to create a picture of one woman’s life over a year. The Axeman’s Carnival, published in the UK last year, was partly narrated by a magpie. Like The Wish Child it won the Acorn prize for fiction, making Chidgey the only writer to win New Zealand’s most prestigious prize twice.

The Book of Guilt appears to mark another departure. Chidgey describes her ninth novel as her “first foray into dystopian fiction” and, while the book purports to be set in England in 1979 with a female prime minister newly ensconced in Downing Street, it is not the country we know. In Chidgey’s alternate universe, the second world war ended not in 1945 with allied victory, but in 1943 when the assassination of Hitler by German conspirators led to a swiftly negotiated peace treaty. Subsequent collaboration across Europe has ensured that progress in biological and medical science, already significantly advanced, has accelerated, fuelled by shared research that includes the grotesque experiments carried out on prisoners in Nazi death camps.

From Marx to Piketty, a sprawling but marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s naysayers

Capitalism has a way of confounding its critics. Like one of those fairground punching bags, it pops right back up every time a crisis knocks it down. Friedrich Engels learned this the hard way. “The American crash is superb,” he enthused in a letter to Karl Marx in 1857: this was communism’s big chance. Well, not quite. The US Treasury stepped in, recapitalising banks with its gold reserves; in Britain the Bank Charter Act was suspended to enable the printing of money. The rulebook was torn up and capitalism saved.

So it has always been. Every time we have teetered close to the precipice, big government has swooped down to save the day. The name of the game is “managed capitalism” and it has been a going concern for more than 200 years. This is the theme of John Cassidy’s new book, a marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s critics, written in good old-fashioned expository prose – if at times a touch workmanlike compared with some of his subjects, such as exhilarating stylists Marx and Carlyle.

Translator Deepa Bhasthi’s pick of 12 of Mushtaq’s ‘life-affirming’ tales about women’s lives in southern India becomes the first short story collection to win the £50,000 award

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won this year’s International Booker prize for translated fiction, becoming the first short story collection to take the award. The stories were originally written in Kannada, the official language of the state of Karnataka in southern India.

Described by the author and chair of judges Max Porter as “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation” of “beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories”, Heart Lamp’s 12 tales chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. They were selected as well as translated by Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the award. She chose them from around 50 stories in six collections written by Mushtaq over a 30-year-period.

A team of writers complete the vital book that Guardian reporter Dom Phillips was working on at the time of his murder

On page 165 of How to Save the Amazon, a black-and-white photo interrupts the text. Two wooden crucifixes stand in a freshly hacked clearing, lashed to tall, thin stumps. One of them bears the name Bruno Pereira. The other, Dominic Phillips, the author. The image splits the book in two. Before it, the pages are filled with Phillips’s vivid prose. After it, his friends and former colleagues have gathered and attempted to complete his work as best they can.

Erected on the bank of the Itaquaí river, in a remote part of the Brazilian Amazon, the crosses mark the spot at which – early on the morning of 5 June 2022 – Pereira and Phillips were murdered. The two men had been travelling downriver in a small motorboat when they were attacked. Pereira, a Brazilian forest protector and Indigenous specialist, was shot first: three times, including in the back. Phillips, a Guardian reporter, was shot once in the chest, at close range. His final word, according to his alleged killers, was “No”.

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”.

As Mrs Dalloway turns 100, here’s a guide to the greatest hits of one of the most celebrated British novelists of all time

As her much-loved novel Mrs Dalloway turns 100, now is a great time to celebrate Virginia Woolf. The 20th-century modernist author and pioneer of stream-of-consciousness narration is one of the most celebrated British novelists of all time. For those looking to become more familiar with her work, author and critic Francesca Wade has put together a guide to her greatest hits.

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

Even though it came out only last year, I was so impressed with Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires that I am on my second reread. As all around me institutions fall and norms fail, I feel the moment requires audacious re-imaginings of history or possibilities of thought, and on both a political and imaginative level, Enrigue delivers with his wild telling of the meeting between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma.

The food writer digs into her own and other’s cupboards to uncover the surprising emotional punch of kitchenalia

Two months after her husband left in 2020, Bee Wilson was startled by the clatter of a baking tin falling on to the kitchen floor. In one way this doesn’t seem particularly remarkable: Wilson is an esteemed food writer who presumably has a surplus of kitchen utensils crammed into her bulging cupboards. This tin, though, was different. For one thing it was heart-shaped. For another, Wilson had used it to bake her wedding cake 23 years earlier, taking care to leave out the cherries because her husband-to-be loathed them. (This now strikes her as ominous: “Maybe a man who was so fussy about cherries was not the man for me.”) Lurking at the back of Wilson’s mind had been the thought that she would soon be using the heart-shaped tin to bake a cake for their silver wedding anniversary. But now here it was, lying dejectedly at her feet and, she couldn’t help noticing, spotted with rust.

In this delightful book, part memoir, part anthropological investigation, food writer Wilson explores the way that kitchen objects have the power to move, soothe and even reproach us. There’s the plate you feel compelled to eat off because it makes everything taste nicer, or that bowl you keep but can’t bear to use because it reminds you too much of the person who gave it to you. In the maelstrom of her new living conditions, Wilson worries that she is overdoing the anthropomorphism: there is a big cast-iron knife that she can’t bear to pick up because it is the one her ex-husband always used and “to touch its smooth handle would have felt like holding his hand”.

I was all set to hate Buxton’s brand of self-deprecating chumminess, but his memoir somehow wins you over

One day Adam Buxton ordered two teas with oat milk from the trolley on the train. Unfortunately his came with cow’s milk and, because his need for vegan alternatives is apparently greater than his wife Sarah’s, he asked her to swap. Before Sarah had the chance to reply, the woman serving their drinks intervened, observing sensibly: “She might not want that one.” Buxton retorted with exaggerated gruffness: “She’s my wife, so she’ll have what she’s given!”

The comedian, radio and TV presenter recalls what happened next. Passengers shook their heads and looked at Sarah with pity and concern. Sarah sank mortified into her seat. The incident, Buxton writes, made him look “even more like the kind of controlling monster I had just parodied. But maybe,” he reflects, “a husband who makes a joke that lands so badly and embarrasses his wife as I just had is a kind of monster. On the other hand, perhaps I’m right and everyone else is wrong.”

A deeply-researched account of the public fascination with Diana Spencer takes in royalists, republicans, lookalikes and sex workers

A thriving industry of books, TV shows and films has kept Diana, Princess of Wales’s image alive since her death in 1997. Most focus on her flawed inner world, and claim to uncover her “true” self. Edward White’s lively, deeply researched Dianaworld gives us something very different.

White, whose previous work includes an acclaimed biography of Alfred Hitchcock, approaches Diana’s story through the people who saw themselves in her – the doppelgangers, opportunists and superfans who found parallels between the princess’s life of extraordinary privilege and their own. His subjects are the frequently ridiculed devotees who fuel celebrity culture: women rushing for the Diana hairdo; impersonators opening supermarkets; psychics jolted awake the night of the fatal crash. It is, White says, “less a biography of Diana, more the story of a cultural obsession”.

Dianaworld by Edward White (Penguin Books Ltd, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

A series of scattered recollections form the basis for this intimate, abstract memoir that riffs on human interdependence

Holly Dawson was suffering from seizures and having trouble retaining information and remembering faces. Brain scans revealed a damaged hippocampus and a tumour, probably benign. To improve her memory, doctors asked her to look at strings of numbers, and then reel them off backwards – an exercise she likens to “Cognitive Crufts”. She ruminates on the relationship between language, memory and time: “three gifts, co-dependent, that create and sustain each other”. Her first book, All of Us Atoms, is a memoir in snapshots, sketching a rough portrait of her life through a series of scattered recollections and reflections.

Dawson’s story begins in an unnamed industrial town, where the closure of the local steelworks had produced a surplus of “angry bored men, making mothers out of their wives”; her family decamped to a Cornish fishing village, where she spent the best part of her childhood. As a youngster she was “serious and odd” – morbid, obsessed with the past, a little solipsistic. Hers was among the last generations of pupils to access private schooling via the Assisted Places Scheme, shortly before it was discontinued by the Thatcher government. She later moved to rural East Sussex, where she is currently “reader-in-residence” at Charleston.

Can you tell the American story via ginseng? Thompson’s funny, moving and exquisitely drawn work has a go

Genre is a slippery beast at the best of times, but Craig Thompson’s new book is particularly hard to categorise. It’s a memoir, graphic novel, and piece of social commentary, all based around ginseng. Living in the dirt poor (literally) midwest in the 1980s, his family farmed the plant, with its weird humanoid roots, and Thompson and his brother spent their youths caked in mud and chemicals plucking them from the ground for a dollar an hour. Ginseng is an essential ingredient in many Chinese medicines, as well as a range of health gimmicks, and for various reasons, Wisconsin has been an unlikely centre of global production for several centuries.

Originally published in 12 issues from 2019 to 2024, Ginseng Roots is epic in length and breadth, but simultaneously pleasingly narrow in scope. It plays out in multiple strands that examine both the minutiae of a man’s life and the cultural history of a difficult-to-grow crop (once harvested, it cannot be grown in the same field again).

An eye-opening account of the old Soviet tactic of embedding secret agents where you’d least expect them

One of the best series of the golden age of TV drama, The Americans (2013-2018), centred on a pair of Russian sleeper agents operating in suburban Washington DC during the height of the cold war. By day they seemed to be a boring married American couple; by night they set honey traps, sabotaged facilities, recruited traitors and assassinated enemies.

That story was based in part on the real-life pair of “illegals” – as spies living under deep cover in civil society are called – Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who pretended to be Canadians living in Cambridge, Massachussetts, until their arrest and deportation in 2010. In reality, they weren’t so successful: owing to the turning of another Soviet agent, they were closely monitored by the FBI for years and never managed anything nefarious enough to make it worth charging them with espionage.

A definitive new biography takes in adventures on the Mississippi, racist stereotypes and get-rich-quick schemes

In his lifetime, Mark Twain was the greatest literary celebrity the world had ever known. In the US, he hobnobbed with presidents; on his many travels, he would dine privately with the German kaiser, the Austrian emperor, or the Prince of Wales. Visiting England to collect an honorary degree from Oxford University, he was cheered off his ship by the stevedores of the London docks, before making his way to Windsor Castle for tea with the king and queen.

He was the bracing, irreverently humorous voice of America. Like Charles Dickens, whom he heard read from his own work in New York, he became a performer as well as an author. In London he was feted when he read passages from his travelogue of the Wild West, Roughing It. Everyone loved the “twang of his drawl”. He went on to take his work in progress, Huckleberry Finn, round more than 100 American towns and cities, earning handsomely.

Never Flinch by Stephen King; The Sunshine Man by Emma Stonex; Heartwood by Amity Gaige; The Mourning Necklace by Kate Foster; The Search for Othella Savage by Foday Mannah

Never Flinch by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton, £25)
King’s latest brings back private detective Holly Gibney, who is consulted when the Ohio police department receives an anonymous letter stating that the writer is proposing to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty” as an act of atonement for the death of an innocent. It soon becomes clear that the death is that of Alan Duffrey who, wrongly convicted of possessing child pornography, was murdered in prison. Slips of paper with names in the corpses’ hands suggest that each one represents a member of the jury responsible for Duffrey’s incarceration. Meanwhile, women’s rights campaigner Kate McKay finds herself targeted by religious extremists while on a speaking tour, and calls on Holly’s services as a bodyguard. Intelligent, courageous and modest to a fault, Holly is one of the most appealing investigators in contemporary crime fiction. Despite some longueurs, Never Flinch contains plenty of King’s trademark chilling moments, with the two storylines expertly entwined.

The Sunshine Man by Emma Stonex (Picador, £18.99)
Stonex’s second novel is an ambitious revenge thriller that takes the reader on a journey from London to Devon, both geographically, and via flashbacks to the early years of the two main characters, who share the narration. Jimmy Maguire, scion of the local “bad family”, was 19 when he killed 15-year-old Providence. When he is released from prison in 1989, her older sister Birdie tracks him, illicitly purchased gun at the ready. Although the mystifyingly redacted swearwords are an irritant, and seasoned crime readers will realise early on that one aspect of Jimmy’s past is not what it seems, what makes this thought-provoking book well worth the read is the delicate and perceptive chronicling of how good intentions, childhood misunderstandings, throwaway comments and split-second decisions can pave the way for disaster.

This gloriously absurd Prague-set tale, in which one woman is split into seven selves, is a wild ride

How many selves do we house? Thousands, thought Virginia Woolf. Are they one and the same? Not according to the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, whose alter egos – writers just like him – came with their own distinct names, biographies, mindsets and hot takes on the world. Born of him yet operating independently, he called them “heteronyms”. Are our selves on the same team? You wish, Helen Oyeyemi might say, holding up her new novel, which features a protagonist split seven ways, one self for each day of the week, and no two ever in full agreement.

Oyeyemi made her debut in 2005 with The Icarus Girl, the story of eight-year-old Jessamy, troubled and imaginative daughter of a Nigerian mother and British father, whose mysterious playmate, a girl named TillyTilly, is possibly her own destructive alter ego. A New New Me may at first glance seem like a thematic cousin; tonally, however, it belongs with Oyeyemi’s more recent works: playful, self-aware tales that revel in the hijinks of storytelling.

An evocative debut charts the journey of a group of travellers as they seek refuge in the wake of an unstoppable pandemic

Gethan Dick’s dystopia begins at Elephant and Castle in London. The narrator, a young woman who considers herself unexceptional, recalls a break in a water main at the big roundabout, a rupture that revealed “white quartz pebbles being washed clean, rattling as they went like in any stream bed”. The surfaces we have built on the face of the Earth to sustain us are just that, only surfaces, easily cracked open to show what’s roiling beneath.

And this is how it is at the end of the world in Water in the Desert Fire in the Night. The setup for this slender, evocative debut will be eerily familiar to all its readers, albeit with the disaster quotient kicked up a notch. A pandemic arises and begins its cull, only this one is unstoppable: it results in whole streets full of the dead. Those who survive – and we don’t know why they do – must stick together, and so this is a tale of unlikely alliances between a group of travellers determined to reach a refuge in the south of France, a place called Digne-les-Bains.

Two sisters reckon with their past selves and the muddles of midlife in a comic tale of secrets, desire and ferocious loyalty

On the first morning of their holiday together in a remote part of Scotland, 42-year-old Sarah convinces her younger sister, Juliette, to clamber on to the roof of their mobile home for a better phone signal. Juliette has three layers of tinfoil wrapped around her limbs and a tinfoil cone hat plonked on her head before she clocks that she’s fallen for a prank. It’s a pleasing bit of sibling slapstick in Slags, the new novel from Emma Jane Unsworth about desire, dissatisfaction and the ferocious loyalty of sisters. And sisterhood, as Unsworth writes it here, is an unbreakable connection for which no prank antenna is needed.

When Sarah takes Juliette on a Highland road trip for her birthday they find themselves revealing secrets and reckoning with their younger selves. Candid and comic, Slags is Thelma & Louise with a campervan and without a clifftop. There are shades of Fleabag, too, in the fractious sisters, the sexual escapades of one countered by the suburban righteousness of the other.

The Send Nudes author’s follow-up conveys a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family

To be selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list two years before your debut novel comes out must bring a certain amount of pressure. Saba Sams had already been named a rising star for her short-story collection, Send Nudes; one of the stories, Blue 4eva, won the 2022 BBC National short story award. Now comes Gunk, titled for the grotty student nightclub managed by the thirtysomething protagonist, Jules. The fried egg on the cover hints at a sleazy edge: expect hangover breakfasts with a dawn chorus soundtrack. It’s also a playful nod to more tender themes of fertility panic, unplanned pregnancy and young motherhood.

At the heart of Gunk is a not-quite-love-not-quite-triangle between Jules, her feckless ex-husband Leon, nightclub owner and irredeemable waster, and the young, mysterious Nim. Nim arrives one night at the club and captivates both Jules and Leon with her shaved head, her alluring mouth (“big and wet and laughing”), and the sense that she’s on the run from her old life. Much of the novel is told through flashback. Before we encounter Nim at the club, we know that she has had a baby, left him with Jules, and vanished. Jules is alone trying to comfort a newborn that “knew by smell, by taste, that I was not his mother”. The main narrative consists of Jules telling us how this state of affairs came to pass.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie; The Incandescent by Emily Tesh; Land of Hope by Cate Baum; A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz, £25)
Bookish Brother Diaz is stunned to be made vicar of the Chapel of Holy Expediency, whose congregation – a necromancer, a vampire, a werewolf, and an elf – are tasked with escorting a claimant to the imperial throne to her coronation. This is Suicide Squad in a sideways medieval Europe, where instead of the son of god we have a daughter, instead of a cross, a wheel, and instead of Byzantium, Troy. The worldbuilding is one of the novel’s chief pleasures, combining the familiar – crusades, religious schisms and territorial disputes – with strange and alien elements, such as the lost empire of Carthage, which built most of the world’s major cities before succumbing to its own dark magic. Against this backdrop, the sardonic crew of the Chapel make their way through a series of elaborate, violent set-pieces, barely escaping with their lives while causing mass death and property damage, and quipping relentlessly. This is enjoyable, particularly as we get to know characters such as Vigga, a happy-go-lucky Viking werewolf, and Sunny, a supposedly soulless elf who is the novel’s most ethical character. Eventually, however, it becomes repetitive, and the book’s sequel-bait ending is not entirely enticing.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Orbit, £20)
Turning the magical school story genre on its head, Tesh’s follow-up to the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory focuses not on precocious teenagers but on their teacher. Saffy Walden is director of magic at the prestigious Chetswood boarding school. When her A-level invocation class accidentally call up a demon much more dangerous than they can handle, Saffy must rise to the school’s defence, while also juggling budget meetings, difficult colleagues and a board who want to blame the whole mess on a talented scholarship student. Tesh is doing a lot of things with this novel. It is first and foremost a love letter to teachers, repeatedly making the point that their work is not only hard, but multifaceted and creative; but it is also a meditation on the pleasures of growing up – past the age where, most school stories tell us, all of life’s adventures happen, but which the novel insists is where the joyful work of becoming yourself can actually begin. And it’s a sharp indictment of the fact that a truly top-notch education remains accessible only to a privileged few. The result is a clever twist on a familiar fantasy story, starring a winning, flawed, undeniably grown-up heroine.

The follow-up to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a tale of precarity and connection in smalltown Connecticut

Ocean Vuong’s second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise “as mist over the rye across the tracks” and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai –“19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light” – preparing to drown himself. There’s an almost lazy richness to the picture: the late afternoon sun, the “moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae”, the junkyard “packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia”.

His poetic credentials established, the author of the bestselling autofictional On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous gives narrative its head. Instead of jumping from the bridge, Hai crosses it, to be adopted on the other side by 82-year-old Grazina, a woman suffering mid‑stage prefrontal lobe dementia. He will become her proxy grandson; they will be each other’s support in a crap world. It will be a disordered but productive relationship.

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.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made him a literary superstar. Now the Vietnamese American author is exploring his working-class roots in an ambitious follow‑up

There are three kinds of family, muses the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong. There’s the nuclear family, “which often we talk about as the central tenet of American life”. There’s the chosen family, “the pushback”, the community and friendships built by people who have been rejected by their parents, often because of their sexuality or gender identity. And then there’s the family we talk about much less frequently, but spend most of our waking hours within – our colleagues, or what Vuong describes as “the circumstantial family around labour”.

Vuong’s forthcoming second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, encompasses them all. There’s its 19-year‑old hero Hai’s relationship with his mother, a poor Vietnamese immigrant who believes that he has fulfilled her desperate aspirations for him by going to university, when he has actually gone to rehab. (Vuong, who also struggled with drug addiction, didn’t dare tell his mother when he dropped out of a marketing course at Pace University in New York, before getting on to the English literature course at Brooklyn College that set the course for his life as a writer.) The core of the book is Hai’s relationship with Grazina, an elderly widow from Lithuania who has dementia, and who takes him in when she sees him about to throw himself off a bridge in despair. Then there are the eccentric and richly drawn staff members of HomeMarket, the fast food restaurant in which Hai works, with its manager who is an aspiring wrestler, and customers ranging from the snotty and entitled to the homeless and desperate.

The film version of A Pale View of Hills, the Nobel-winner’s tale of loss, exile and a pregnant radioactive bride, is about to premiere at Cannes. The writer explains why this story is so personal to him

Kazuo Ishiguro still remembers where he was when he wrote A Pale View of Hills: hunched over the dining room table in a bedsit in Cardiff. He was in his mid-20s then; he is 70 now. “I had no idea that the book would be published, let alone that I had a career ahead of me as a writer,” he says. “[But] the story remains an important part of me, not only because it was the start of my novel-writing life, but because it helped settle my relationship with Japan.”

First published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past. Now along comes a film version to provide a new frame for the mystery, a fresh view of the hills. Scripted and directed by Kei Ishikawa, it is a splendidly elegant and deliberate affair; a trail of carefully laid breadcrumbs that link a mothballed home in early 80s suburbia with wounded, resilient postwar Nagasaki. Middle-aged Etsuko is long settled in the UK and haunted by the fate of her displaced eldest child. Her younger daughter, Niki, is a budding writer, borderline skint and keen to make a name for herself. Niki has a chunky tape-recorder and plenty of time on her hands. She says, “Mum, will you tell me about your lives before, in Japan?”

The Send Nudes author, one of Granta’s pick of the best young British novelists, on young motherhood, feminism and why we need to break the rules around love

Saba Sams was in bed breastfeeding her two-month-old baby when she received an email saying that the publisher Bloomsbury wanted to offer her a book deal on the basis of some of her short stories. She was just 22 at the time. “I didn’t even think it was a book,” she says when we meet. “I was just learning how to write.”

Send Nudes, her first collection, about being a young woman in a messed-up world, was published in 2022. She won the BBC national short story award and the Edge Hill short story prize. The following year, she made the once-in-a-decade Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. “Then I was like: ‘Oh, this is actually happening. This feels like a big deal,’” she says.

The Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit author on being a good landlord to a grumpy ghost, her optimism about AI and the ideal size for cats

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Your debut novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit turns 40 years old this year. How do you feel about it at this point in your life?

Can you believe it? I find that astonishing. I’m always having to think about it because people keep bothering me about it! Its next iteration is a musical, and then I really hope that’s the end. Just let me go! Obviously I love Oranges and I revisited it again with [her 2011 memoir] Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? and the musical too. Surely, by the rule of three, this is it? Then I can live in peace and plant potatoes.

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 Slags on Patricia Highsmith, Judy Blume and her lifelong reaction to Yeats

My earliest reading memory
Probably a Garfield book when I was five or six. I loved Garfield. Mostly because he was funny, but also because he was an iconic ginger. He introduced me to lasagne, which I pronounced “la-sign”. It was the 1980s. I got told off all the time for reading at the dinner table.

My favourite book growing up
After my nanna’s Mills & Boons, stolen from her bedside table, I’d have to say Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Another iconic ginge. Also Anne and Gilbert were the greatest “will they/won’t they?” until Mulder and Scully in The X Files.

It’s human nature to trust strongmen, but we’ve also evolved the tools to resist them

A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

The results shocked a lot of people concerned about the rising threat of autocracy across the world, including me. Yet, on reflection, I don’t think we should be surprised. The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most machiavellian among us and to propel them into power. This seems like an intractable problem. But it’s what we do in the face of that knowledge that matters.