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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 MannahNever 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. Continue reading...

The Welsh novelist’s third novel, set on a Scottish island during the Highland Clearances, has won £10,000 for writing that ‘best evokes the spirit of a place’Clear by Carys Davies has won this year’s Ondaatje prize for writing that “best evokes the spirit of a place”.The Welsh novelist’s third novel is set on a Scottish island during the Highland Clearances, and follows two men as they form an unlikely bond. On winning the £10,000 award, Davies gave particular thanks to the Faroese linguist Jakob Jakobsen, as his dictionary of the now-extinct Shetland language, first published in 1908, was an invaluable source when she was writing. Continue reading...

Sam Altman’s extraordinary career – and personal life – under the microscopeOn 30 November 2022, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted the following, characteristically reserving the use of capital letters for his product’s name: “today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.com”. In a reply to himself immediately below, he added: “language interfaces are going to be a big deal, i think”.If Altman was aiming for understatement, he succeeded. ChatGPT became the fastest web service to hit 1 million users, but more than that, it fired the starting gun on the AI wars currently consuming big tech. Everything is about to change beyond recognition, we keep being told, though no one can agree on whether that will be for good or ill. Continue reading...

£20,000 award for writers aged 39 or under goes to story ‘tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour’A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut novel The Coin. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace. Continue reading...

Queen Camilla opens house, refurbished after 18-month fundraising campaign, where you can stay ‘in the same room the Brontës slept in’The refurbished house in Bradford where the Brontë sisters were born is now welcoming visitors, having been opened on Thursday by the queen.Nestled in a narrow street in the village of Thornton, the home where the literary dynasty spent the early years of their lives was officially opened by Queen Camilla during her visit to Bradford, this year’s City of Culture, with King Charles. Continue reading...

Perfectly emulating the tone of his father’s spy novels, this cold war tale also benefits from Simon Russell Beale’s impeccable readingIt is 1963 and, having retired from “the Circus”, spymaster George Smiley is looking forward to a trip abroad with his wife, Anne. But when a Soviet assassin has a sudden change of heart before murdering László Bánáti, a spy masquerading as a literary agent in London, Smiley finds himself back at work. He must find Bánáti and persuade him to become a British asset, a pursuit that leads him to an old foe.Dreamed up as the unflashy antithesis of James Bond, Smiley is, of course, the creation of the late John le Carré. But in Karla’s Choice, he is brought to life by Nick Harkaway, Le Carré’s youngest son. Harkaway, who also completed 2021’s unfinished Silverview, writes in a style barely distinguishable from his father, save for some necessary tweaks – a faster pace and more believable female characters. Continue reading...

This gloriously absurd Prague-set tale, in which one woman is split into seven selves, is a wild rideHow 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. Continue reading...

As Mrs Dalloway turns 100, here’s a guide to the greatest hits of one of the most celebrated British novelists of all timeAs 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.*** Continue reading...

A series of scattered recollections form the basis for this intimate, abstract memoir that riffs on human interdependenceHolly 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. Continue reading...

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

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 himKazuo 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?” Continue reading...

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