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Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the commentsI’m a huge fan of Muriel Spark, but wasn’t sure I needed another biography of her, yet James Bailey’s Like a Cat Loves a Bird was a winning blend of detail and readability. Continue reading...

Her unsparing fiction and true crime writing have made her one of Australia’s most controversial and celebrated authors. The author discusses relationships, resilience – and finding global recognition five decades into her careerA few years ago, when Helen Garner had an idea to write a book about Australian rules football, her heart soared then immediately sank. The impetus was Ambrose, her teenage grandson, who played for a local team. Garner enjoyed watching them and wanted to put this into writing. Then the dreary thought: “I’ll have to swot, read the rulebook.” People to whom she mentioned the idea assumed she’d be writing a polemic, “like what it means in society and how terrible it is and what violence means. And I’m going: ‘What a bore.’”As anyone familiar with Garner’s almost 50-year writing career will know, there is nothing more igniting to the 83-year-old than the invitation to outrun boredom by going off in an unauthorised direction. Garner, who is speaking to me via video call from her home in Melbourne, occupies that tiny category of writers famous enough to be recognised in public. Stopped by strangers in the street, she’s often treated to their strong views about her work. As a result, perhaps, she has perfected a very Garnerian obstinacy, enabling her to resist other people’s bossy opinions which, in the case of The Season, meant no tedious explainers about the rules, history or sociology of Aussie rules football. Instead, says Garner, she envisaged following a single season of Ambrose’s U16s team, the Flemington Colts, as “a nanna’s book”. During publicity, she’d turn up to an event at a library to find “the first five rows packed with nannas; all these white-haired women with hankies in their hands. And I feel nobody writes about nannas. I mean, sentimentally, yes; but I want to say what they’re really like.” Continue reading...

Minihorror by Barbi Marković; Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch; Hafni Says by Helle Helle; Googling for Soul by Hamid IsmailovMinihorror by Barbi Marković, translated by Jen Calleja (Faber, £14.99) This eccentric and fantastical collection of very short stories is bursting with weird life. Mini and Miki (the Disney mouse names in Serbian) are a sometime boyfriend and girlfriend living in Austria. They visit Mini’s family, who gather round a pit and make her climb down into it (when she told Miki “they’re dragging me down”, he thought it was a metaphor). They visit Miki’s family, where a dog Mini draws on a card comes alive and attacks her. Things swing from hopeful – “they’re having fun like a couple in an advert” – to dismal: a hair dye goes wrong and “Mini looks like a 13-year-old dog”. Minihorror combines a Bernhardian comic gloom (“in summary, everything’s tainted, and existence is a particular hardship”) with antic energy. “Miki isn’t sure what to think about life. Is it good? Is it bad?” It’s everything, just like this book.Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Peninsula, £12.99) “Stories, if you give them an order, aren’t stories but lies.” Catalan author Guasch makes the point vividly in this novel which flits briskly from present to past and from narrator to narrator. It’s set in a changed climate – “One only knows it’s winter now by the shrunken days and long nights” – where young men join a firefighting service and fight “wildfire simulations of blazes that could not be put out”. The central characters are friends Rita and Líton, but Líton is dead when the book begins – “twenty-four short years, a life as fleeting as a shooting comet” – so the story goes backward, to find out why. The jumpy narrative ranges from Rita’s childhood diary, to three “crafty old biddies” in the neighbourhood, to Líton and his lover René. But inside the hectic structure is a tribute to the value of friendship, and how a friend “has to be the net beneath the tightrope that is life”. Continue reading...

The British novelist on discovering Molly Keane, coming to Dickens late, and the books that taught her the importance of writing about historyMy earliest reading memory My mother always read me a bedtime story, but by around age three, I was not looking at the pictures but reading the text. After that, I read to myself, and would read four books a week from the library.My favourite book growing up As a child I read Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, and the combination of history and gothic fantasy was very powerful for me. It’s realistic and charming and frightening without being nightmarish. It started my love of historical fiction, and has since become a family favourite for my own children. Continue reading...

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize, this compelling interrogation of memory, justice and truth offers no easy answersThe Goldsmiths prize-shortlisted debut from British-Greek author Aea Varfis-van Warmelo opens with a confession: “I have never told this story before.” The narrator, who bears the author’s name, goes on to tell the reader that she is a liar. From Humbert Humbert’s self-justifying account of abuse in Lolita to the devastating misinterpretation at the heart of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the trope of the unreliable narrator exposes the dangerous gap between the stories we tell and the truths they obscure. In Attention Seeking Behaviour, the reader is asked to examine their own capacity for trust.A young woman aspires to be a writer – yet she has paused her postgraduate degree in poetry. She works unfulfilling jobs that demand little from her and has a lot of sex, which she describes as offering her “solitude”. She does all this while lying compulsively. She lies for fun, to flirt, to steal, for sympathy. She lies out of a desire to hurt others, but also to preserve her own privacy. Lying is, as the narrator claims, universal, though success at lying is not. She regards fraudsters and scammers with derision: they are “divorced from reality” and give her “second hand embarrassment”. In her eyes, her own lies are somehow purer. Continue reading...

Howe’s ‘exceptional’ Foretokens took the main £10,000 award, while Nur Turkmani, Tara Bergin and Biff Smith swept up the remaining categoriesSarah Howe has won the Forward prize for best collection, one of the UK’s most prestigious poetry awards, for Foretokens, a collection that explores new parenthood, the death of her father and her mother’s early life in Hong Kong.Howe was announced as the winner during a ceremony hosted by Joelle Taylor at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday evening, and will receive £10,000.Foretokens by Sarah Howe (Vintage Publishing, £12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Continue reading...

Jonathan Bailey, Ella Purnell, Aimee-Lou Wood, Maggie Gyllenhaal and more bring shock and gore to an immersive retelling with real biteDo we really need another retelling of Bram Stoker’s fabled horror novel, which has already yielded multiple films, plays and radio dramas? Perhaps not, but this new audio version of Dracula, directed by Mary Lambert and adapted by Robyn Ahern, justifies its existence with an unusually star-studded cast, a streamlined story and an immersive and frequently nightmarish sound palette.Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey is smooth and charismatic as the eponymous count who invites a young solicitor, Jonathan Harker (Louis Partridge), to his castle in Transylvania to assist him with the sale of a property. There, Harker becomes increasingly uneasy as he glimpses the count’s diabolical powers and realises that he is, in fact, a prisoner. Continue reading...

Move over Oasis – 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets to a masquerade ball to celebrate the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, while specialist bookshops catering for the genre report huge salesWhen The Spicy Librarian, a romance bookshop in Leamington Spa, announced a masquerade ball to celebrate the new Sarah J Maas novel, 6,000 people tried to buy 220 tickets. “We sold out within 13 minutes,” says the shop’s co-founder Ali Maynard James. “As soon as tickets went on sale, our website crashed”.The shop was one of many across the UK marking the release of A Court of Splintered Harmony, the first instalment of Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series in more than five years. On Monday night, bookshops threw parties and opened past midnight – and The Spicy Librarian hired a stately home to mark the occasion. Continue reading...

A fatal mistake sparks this juicy melodrama, in which a philosophy professor navigates the guilt of being a survivorWhat if, battered by cancer and cancer treatment, you decided to end your life? And what if it went wrong and you lived, but a friend died in your place? Would you tell the police the truth? Or reason that there’s no point punishing your grieving, bruised self any further, especially when – in the first bit of good news you’ve had for years – you learn that your treatment may finally be working?It’s the kind of moral question that London philosophy professor Esther Luck loves throwing at her students. But Jude Cook’s third novel makes the dilemma bracingly personal. As it opens, Esther, who has ovarian cancer, is waiting in a toilet cubicle on the fifth floor of her university building – the only one without CCTV – for the arrival of her dodgy French ex, Michel. He has agreed to shoot through the door and end her misery. But someone else arrives first. Laura is the department’s fragrant superstar, with her BBC presenting gig and handsome barrister husband. She finds an empty stall, Michel gets the wrong door, and Esther is left guilty, panicked and alone on the loo as Laura’s blood pools on the floor. Continue reading...

A foreign affairs expert’s bleak assessment of the state of global securityAre we on the brink of a new world war? This bleak subject is increasingly invoked by leaders, soldiers and officials, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to the heads of our military and intelligence services. It’s an urgent theme, then, for the FT foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman to explore in his latest survey of global diplomacy. Rachman draws his title from the expression, sometimes attributed to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” – the idea being that conflict doesn’t much care whether we like to think about it or not: it will come knocking on our doors regardless.Clearly, humanity is in a particularly unsafe spot right now, but seeing our security issues laid out like this, catalogued and mapped and analysed, they seem almost overwhelming. To summarise: the most powerful, nuclear-armed states – the US, China and Russia – are led by unscrupulous, self-dealing “strongmen”, each of whom is playing with the nationalist “Great Again” politics epitomised by Trump. Democracy is being rolled back around the world, and even bastions of liberalism such as the UK, France and Germany seem vulnerable to takeover by the Putin-friendly far right. The so-called rules-based international order and its institutions – the UN, the WTO, Nato – are being deliberately undermined by the aforementioned strongmen, and are as weak now as they have ever been. Continue reading...

What does it cost, to live your life in the hope of immortality? Li examines the gulf between talent and genius through the marriage of two real-life musiciansIn his recently published A History of the Novel in Britain, Philip Hensher makes a bold claim. Historical novels, he tells us, don’t last. However popular and prestigious a historical novel might be in its day, it will almost always get thrown overboard as the ship of literary culture sails on, piled high with novels of contemporary life. He might be on to something. Who now prefers Walter Scott to Jane Austen? The historical novel risks a double obsolescence, courting a future in which it has become an old-fashioned vision of an old-fashioned time.However much this news might dismay writers of historical novels, Hensher is untroubled: “As readers enjoying our contemporaries, we should not let our readerly pleasures be affected by the probability of ultimate oblivion.” Will the future, what there is of it, rate Wolf Hall as highly as we do? It doesn’t matter. Posterity, as Gore Vidal once wrote, is “a permanent darkness where no whistle sounds”. What matters is us, now, what we make of history and of our lives – in our novels and elsewhere. Continue reading...

Shortlisted for the Booker and Baillie Gifford prizes respectively, the novelist and biographer talk about working and living together – and giving a voice to Black queer historyThe literary power couple is a historically seductive concept. Two writers sharing a life, their private and creative worlds entwined, each becoming witness to and critic of the other’s work. Think Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Or, less auspiciously, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.Now, into this illustrious company steps a new pair: the novelist Marlon James and the biographer Nicholas Boggs, whose books have each been shortlisted for one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards – James for the Booker prize and Boggs for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. Between them, they have produced two formidable books, each the culmination of years of work, and each concerned with the lives of Black queer men whose stories have often been overlooked. Continue reading...