There may not be obvious successors to the likes of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie among today’s hotshot young writers. But is a new publisher dedicated to ‘overlooked’ male voices necessary?

‘Where have all the literary blokes gone?� is a question that has popped up in bookish discussions and op-eds from time to time in recent years. Who are this generation’s hotshot young male novelists, the modern incarnations of the Amis/McEwan/Rushdie crew of the 80s?

The question flared again this week as writer Jude Cook launched a new press, Conduit Books, which plans to focus, at least initially, on publishing male authors.

The author of Late in the Day pays tribute to the exuberantly inventive Yorkshire-born novelist who has died aged 96

Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96, was such an exuberant, inventive writer. It’s the sheer energy of the voice you notice first, picking up one of her books from the shelf; she had the easy authority of a natural storyteller. Her first book, A Long Way from Verona, was written for children and published in 1971, when she was in her early 40s. “I ought to tell you at the beginning,� announces Jessica Vye in the first sentence, “that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine.� In the book, clever bookish girls, at a private school in wartime, are hungry for adventures and also for tea with cress sandwiches and chocolate eclairs; they belong to that class beloved of British fiction in the old days, educated people fallen on hard times. Jessica’s father has left his job as a schoolmaster to follow his vocation as a poor curate. The Summer After the Funeral, published in 1973, begins with the death of Athene Price’s elderly vicar father, when his young wife and children have to move out of the vicarage with no money. Athene believes she’s a reincarnation of Emily Brontë; Jessica has mentioned Henry James, Chopin and Shakespeare by the end of her second chapter. These books belong to the tail-end of that rich period of English middle-class children’s writing, which depended upon an audience of sophisticated and informed young readers; it was partly through the books that their readers grew sophisticated and informed.

These books are set in the north of England; Gardam grew up mostly in North Yorkshire. The difference between the rugged north and the posh home counties, which are the other half of her subject, cuts across her fiction. In her adult novel Faith Fox she describes two tribes, “South and north, above and below the line from the Wash to the Severn, the language-line that is still not quite broken to this day.�

The author who founded the short story competition will be one of judges this year as the search begins for new writers of colour

A short story competition run by the Guardian and the publisher 4th Estate is now open to entries from unpublished writers of colour living in the UK and Ireland.

The 4thWrite prize, now in its ninth year, offers its winner £1,000, a publishing workshop at 4th Estate and publication of the winning story on the Guardian website.

The author on re-reading The Mill on the Floss, discovering the eccentric genius of Georges Perec and the comforts of Lee Child

My earliest reading memory
I remember very clearly being taught to read by my father, who had just returned from the second world war in Italy with the RAF. We were living in a council house in Pontefract, having been evacuated from Sheffield. I was three or four, and we used a primer called The Radiant Way which I loved. I later used the title for one of my novels.

My favourite book growing up
I loved the Alison Uttley stories and was shocked to find in later life that the creator of Little Grey Rabbit was not a good mother and did not like children. I also loved Mary Poppins by PL Travers. I didn’t like the film, which was saccharine, but I loved the much sharper book. Travers too was a very difficult person.

A professor’s quest to make sense of her eco-anxiety takes her from her ancestral village in China to Cop 26 and beyond

Eco-anxiety is not an official medical diagnosis, but everyone knows what it means. The American Psychological Association defines it as “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations�. Fear of the future, an ache for the past, the present awash with disquiet: into this turmoil Alice Mah’s new book appears like a little red boat, keeping hope afloat against all odds.

Mah is a professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow as well as an activist passionately concerned with pollution, ecological breakdown and climate justice. Her previous books, Petrochemical Planet and Plastic Unlimited, catalogued the catastrophic impacts of the petrochemical industry on the natural and human world. In Red Pockets, the trauma is personal.

Midden Witch by Fiona Benson; Dwell by Simon Armitage; Nature Matters edited by Mona Arshi & Karen McCarthy Woolf; Lode by Gillian Allnutt; Silk Work by Imogen Cassels; A History of Western Music by August Kleinzahler

Midden Witch by Fiona Benson (Jonathan Cape, £13)
In her fourth collection Benson turns her fierce attention to the individuals hounded as witches. Her language is rich with “a broth of sweat� that brings middens – dunghills – and sweeter smells to life. Men’s power to conduct legalised persecution of women through accusations of sorcery is never far from the surface: “The church will pay a killing / for a witch.� These are poems cast as beautiful, intricate spells, reminding us there is more to life than we can hope to explain: “Perhaps we are all waiting / for the watcher in the dark, / attending to the glow / of that private thing, the soul.�

Dwell by Simon Armitage (Faber, £10)
The poet laureate uses the conceit of where animals live, their setts, hives and warrens, to ruminate on how other species can thrive in the face of human domination. Armitage’s tone is delightful. A squirrel in her drey is living “a non-stop stop-motion life�. Rather beautifully, “every hare / is a broken heart / with legs�. Best of all are the Tripadvisor-style reviews in Insect Hotel: “Dark and dingy. Had to ask a glow-worm to show me to my room.� These are poems full of a winning, pleasurable charm.

History and autobiography are brilliantly intertwined as the Booker-winning author explores the choices and chance connections that shape our existence

At the start of this boldly experimental memoir, the Booker prize-winning author Richard Flanagan visits the site of a Japanese labour camp where his late father was interned during the second world war and where he ends up awkwardly having his photo taken with a former guard, Mr Sato. The war ended weeks after the US launched an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 60,000 people in less than a minute. That bomb also led to Flanagan’s father, then days from death, being freed, which in turn allowed him to father a child who would grow up to become a writer. “How many people need to die in order that you might read this book?� Flanagan asks.

Question 7, named after a riddle posed by Chekhov, is a book about the connections and choices that shape our lives, for better or worse. Flanagan is the narrator, his reading by turns mournful, reflective and quizzical as he plots a path through the lives of his parents, the writer HG Wells, Wells’s sometime inamorata, Rebecca West, and the physicist Leo Szilard, who masterminded the nuclear chain reaction that was instrumental in the creation of the bomb. These historical vignettes are intertwined with Flanagan’s own childhood memories of life in Tasmania, an island with a troubled history, and culminate in his account of a near-death experience at the age of 21, when his kayak became wedged underwater. As he assesses his own complex heritage and those of pivotal figures from the past, Flanagan reflects that “there is no memory without shame�.

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�.

Ten years on from his death and just before what would have been his 77th birthday, take a deep dive into the funny, fantasy works of one of the most loved British writers

With more than 75m copies of his books sold around the world, Terry Pratchett is one of the most loved British writers, best known for his comic fantasy novels set on a fictional planet, Discworld. Ten years on from the author’s death, and justbefore what would have been his 77th birthday, Pratchett’s biographer Marc Burrows has put together a guide to his hero’s work.

***

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

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 �lvaro 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.

A social and personal history that refuses to gloss over the rage, envy and hurt that form part of every close bond

Falling out with a friend can feel oddly shameful. Romantic relationships are meant to have passionate highs and lows, but by the time you reach adulthood, you expect your friendships to have reached some kind of equilibrium. I have this image in my head of myself as an affectionate, devoted friend – but sometimes I examine my true feelings towards the women who are closest to me and feel shocked by my own pettiness. It is embarrassing to be a grownup but still capable of such intense flashes of rage, and envy. When my friendships become distant or strained, I wonder why I still struggle to do this basic thing.

Bad Friend represents a kind of love letter to female friendship, but doesn’t gloss over how difficult it can be. Tiffany Watt Smith is a historian, and this book is a deeply researched study of 20th-century women’s relationships, but the reason for writing it is intensely personal. In the prologue, she says that she fell out with her best friend, Sofia, in her early 30s, and has been battling with the feeling that she is incapable of close friendship ever since. In one passage, she describes hiding a sparkly “BFF� (best friends forever) T-shirt from her five-year-old daughter, because she felt so conflicted about having no BFF of her own. But the idea that underpins this book is that we expect too much of female friendship, and that leaves every woman feeling inadequate.

A journalist’s bracingly honest account of interviews with musicians from Brian May to Shaun Ryder

When the journalist Kate Mossman was a child, she developed an obsession with the rock band Queen. Mossman came of age in the 1990s, but the irony and snark of that decade left her cold. Instead, she lived for the “middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jacket and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before�. Watching Queen’s posthumous single These Are the Days of Our Lives on Top of the Pops in 1991, she “felt something within myself ignite�. Though she was captivated by the strange longing of a monochrome Freddie Mercury, who had died weeks earlier, it was drummer Roger Taylor who became the focus of her obsession. On the mantelpiece of her childhood home sat a holy relic: a beer glass he had drunk from during a solo gig. Twenty years later, while on her way to interview Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May for a magazine profile, Mossman confesses: “I think I’m going to black out.�

Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman’s work previously published in the Word, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19 encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting, Dave Gahan, Jon Bon Jovi, Nick Cave and Terence Trent D’Arby. Mossman tops and tails the articles with present-day thoughts, reflecting on her expectations, the preparation, the long journeys to far-flung homes, and the peculiar and sometimes fraught dynamic between interviewer and interviewee.

A bracingly hopeful call for high-flyers to ditch corporate drudgery in favour of something far more ambitious

This is not a self-help book,� the author tells us, firmly. Appearances might suggest otherwise: it is written and presented almost entirely in the familiar style of that genre, with largish print, short sentences, snappy maxims in italics and lots of lists and charts (“six signs you may be on the wrong side of history�). Its proposals are delivered with all the annoyingly hectic bounciness of the genre.

But it is worth taking Bregman (a thirtysomething historian and author labelled “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers� by the Ted network) at his word. He begins from the deep and corrosive anomie experienced by so many gifted young professionals who find themselves making substantial sums of money in exhausting and (at best) morally compromising jobs. The “moral ambition� of the title is about recognising that serious financial, organisational, technological and analytical skills – the kind that in the US will get you through, say, law school with a secure ticket to prosperity – can be used to make tangible improvements in the lives of human and nonhuman neighbours.

Philadelphia’s Speling Reform Asoshiashun wasn’t the only group to demand a simpler way of putting things in print

You may be familiar with the ghoti, the shiny animal with fins that lives in the water; perhaps you even have your own ghoti tank. Ghotis evolved long ago, but they didn’t get their name until the 19th century, when jokesters noted that, thanks to the weirdness of English spelling, the word “fish� might be written with a “gh�, as in “rough�, an “o�, as in “women�, and a “ti�, as in “lotion�.

The idea of the ghoti is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries. From “through� to “though� and “trough�, whether you’re a child or learning English as a second language, getting the spelling right is a nightmare. Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.

Stephen Witt’s entertaining study of the rise of chip company Nvidia portrays its leader, Jensen Huang, as a remarkable entrepreneur – sometimes energised by anger

This is the latest confirmation that the “great man� theory of history continues to thrive in Silicon Valley. As such, it joins a genre that includes Walter Isaacson’s twin tomes on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, Brad Stone’s book on Jeff Bezos, Michael Becraft’s on Bill Gates, Max Chafkin’s on Peter Thiel and Michael Lewis’s on Sam Bankman-Fried. Notable characteristics of the genre include a tendency towards founder worship, discreet hagiography and a Whiggish interpretation of the life under examination.

The great man under Witt’s microscope is the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, a chip design company that went from being a small but plucky purveyor of graphics processing units (GPUs) for computer gaming to its current position as the third most valuable company in the world.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

The strange stories of the agents who lived apparently normal lives in the west as part of Soviet espionage programmes make compelling reading

One muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking at the door. The family was celebrating Tim’s 20th birthday at their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after lunch in a restaurant. Tim’s mother went to answer the door, calling out as she did so that some of his friends must have arrived to wish him a happy birthday. Instead she found a group of men dressed in black waiting on the doorstep. Bellowing “FBI�, they barged their way into the house and handcuffed Ann and her husband, before marching them outside and driving them away.

Alex assumed that there had been a terrible mistake; his parents were much too boring to warrant such a dramatic arrest. But there was no mistake. His parents were not Don Heathfield and Ann Foley, prosperous Canadians living in the US, but Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, Russian spies who had assumed false identities before Alex and his brother were born. Together with their parents, the two boys were stripped of their Canadian citizenship and flown to Moscow. Alex was handed a Russian passport, identifying him with a name he could not even pronounce properly. “Typical high school identity crisis, right?� he remarks, with a wry smile but an undertone of understandable bitterness, while being interviewed by the author of this book, Shaun Walker, an international correspondent for the Guardian who was based in Moscow for more than 10 years.

A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movie

Most people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road� and the “Great North Road� (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone� of Britain.

As a frequent shuttler between north and south, I prefer the North Road to its rival, the bland, homogenous M1. It has verges and laybys, eccentric pit-stops where the coffee is not necessarily Costa, and a scruffy, improvised air, suggesting something organically arisen from the landscape. But whereas I have merely driven along the road, Cowen has communed with its ghosts.

This comedy of manners set among Berlin’s cultural elite is a prescient interrogation of language, identity and power

On 7 March 2025 the New York Times published a list of words that the Trump administration was systematically culling from government documents and educational materials. This list, which includes the words “gender ideology�, “affirming care�, “confirmation bias�, “ethnicity�, “identity�, “immigrants�, “racism�, “prostitute�, “political�, “intersectional� and “privilege�, reads like a bingo card for Nell Zink’s astonishingly prescient new novel, Sister Europe, in which a large cast of racially, economically and gender-diverse characters convene over the course of a single evening to attend a literary awards ceremony in Berlin.

On its surface, Sister Europe is a comedy of manners set among Berlin’s exclusive and elusive cultural elite. The prose is searingly quick, revelatory and funny: Zink’s dialogue reads like our best plays. Entertaining banter could be this book’s largest trophy, were it not for the contents of the banter, which are so ambitious and ethically interested that they make it clear that Zink is one of our most important contemporary writers.

On reading [Masud’s] books, Demian discovered to his consternation a grating and persistent anti-Black racism. Was it excusable? He excused it, on the grounds that it would be hard for an anti-Black racist to do much damage in Norway, where anti-Muslim racism was a deadly threat (admittedly much of it intersectional, directed against Somalis). Was it patronising to suspend his ethical standards because the man was a genius, or Eurocentric not to suspend them, and which was worse?

He whispered hesitantly, speaking into the towel over her ear, “You want to change your life.�

“That was stupid,� she replied. “Life should change me. I don’t want to be destructive of a living thing, flattening it with my identity.� She said the word slowly. As though identities were something ubiquitous, but distasteful, like dust mites, that might be dispensed with, given careful hygiene.

From humans with robotic body parts to robots with human emotions, a vibrant debut set in a unified Korea examines what it means to be a person

Silvia Park’s debut novel is about people, robots and cyborgs: that is, humans enhanced or augmented with robotic technology. Ruijie is a schoolgirl afflicted with a degenerative disease: “affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customised circuitry to aid her ability to walk�. As the novel opens, Ruijie is in a robot junkyard, scavenging for spare parts and better legs. Here she meets a robot boy, Yoyo, discarded despite being a highly sophisticated model. Ruijie takes the quirky Yoyo to school with her, and a group of friends assemble to protect him from scavengers and exploitation in the robot-fighting ring.

This element of the novel reads like a YA adventure, though the rest is more adult-focused: cyberpunk, violent and sexualised. In an author’s note, Park says that they began writing Luminous as children’s fiction, until a bereavement took the work in a different direction, making the novel “a shape-shifter, no longer so appropriate for children�. There’s an awkwardness to this mix of tone, although we could say it reproduces, on the level of form, the book’s central topic of hybridisation, cyborgification, different elements worked together, as the novel’s setting – a future unified Korea – does on the level of geography.

This outrageous skewering of the modern dating landscape confronts toxic masculinity and the contradictions of female desire

Nearly every page in Sophie Kemp’s debut is smart, jarring and wickedly funny. Set in Brooklyn in 2019, this wild, absurdist take on the millennial novel tracks the adventures of Reality Kahn, a 23-year-old waterslide commercial actor and zine-maker who determines to become “the greatest girlfriend of all time�, after her drug-dealing sex partner, Emil, casually suggests that she gets herself a man. Prior to that point, Reality had just been living her life, no strings attached. “Would having a special guy around really make me happier? Was this the life purpose I was looking for?� A boyfriend, she decides, might “add colour to my life as well as provide intrigue�. And, New York City being “a place where nefarious individuals got ideas�, he could also protect her from “getting raped so much�.

Reality’s quest kicks off with a hunt for “intel�. Where do guys who make good boyfriends usually spend their time? Farcical as it is, her inquiry touches on that most sobering of cliches about true love: that it is darn hard to find. Emil responds with confusion: “Where do they hang out? Girl, I think you’re sexy as fuck and fun, but for serious, you are on some sort of insane-ass trip these days. They’re not a pack of wildebeests in the plains.� Desperate for better advice, Reality turns to Girlfriend Weekly, Kemp’s cheeky homage to the time-honoured world of women’s magazines. It has all the answers she’s looking for, even if they are hilariously fusty and over the top: “Bring a little charm with you everywhere that you go. For example, when you are at the grocer’s, be sure to give a smile and a wink to the dashing gentleman in the porkpie hat. Say: ‘Gee whiz, woo-woo, you are a beautiful specimen and I am a virgin.’�

The poet’s debut novel is a transcendent portrait of gay desire that pays homage to the English literary tradition

Seán Hewitt, the author of two acclaimed poetry collections and an equally acclaimed memoir, now publishes his debut novel Open, Heaven – a tender, skilled and epiphanic work which I suspect will meet the same response. It takes its title from William Blake’s poem Milton, which speaks of wandering through “realms of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions of varied beauty� – a line that quite nicely describes the reader’s experience of this book.

Its opening recalls – with the sense of a deliberate engagement with literary tradition – TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, or LP Hartley’s The Go-Between: “Time runs faster backwards. The years – long, arduous and uncertain when taken one by one – unspool quickly … the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms in reverse.� Our narrator James, a librarian who loved but never desired his husband, is a man arrested in time past. Directed by doctors to rest after the “bewildered weeks� that follow his divorce, he returns endlessly to thoughts of his youth, “hoping to find the answer to something left unfinished�. He searches online for properties in the village of Thornmere, where he was once a solitary teen who loved – with disastrous single-minded loyalty – a boy called Luke. He discovers a farmhouse for sale which is achingly familiar; so he is prompted to return to Thornmere in person, having never really departed it in spirit, and we are plunged into the body of the novel.

This startling debut follows a young woman on a surreal and bluntly graphic quest to be the perfect girlfriend

Set in upstate New York, Sophie Kemp’s surreal satirical debut puts us in the uneasy company of a part-time model who calls herself Reality as she sets out on a crazed quest to become the perfect girlfriend. The chief beneficiary of her self-education is a crack-smoking postgrad and wannabe musician named Ariel, who cheats openly, gives her an infection and – in the reader’s eye – sees her as little more than a sex toy able to fetch snacks. But Reality is besotted, ignoring her own doomsaying conscience – what she refers to with typical idiosyncrasy as “the familiar voice� – as well as her best friend, Soon-jin, who thinks Ariel looks like a “school shooter�: “I think what she was saying was: Ariel is a unique bad boy who often wore a leather jacket.�

What ensues is akin to a TikTok Stepford Wives for the Pornhub era. Taking tips from a magazine, Girlfriend Weekly, which magically appears every so often bathed in light and accompanied by a cor anglais, Reality leans with alarmingly good cheer into the notion that the perfect girlfriend must be permanently ready to service every last whim. “I loved the feeling of being sliced open in the butt by a nice, girthy, yet not too large cock,� she tells us, wiping her belly with a sock Ariel gives her after one of many bluntly described couplings. Reality presses him on whether she’s actually his girlfriend now. “What? Oh yeah. OK, sure.� “My life had become beautiful,� she tells us.

The style is George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh, filtered through – at a rough guess – 4chan, mumblecore and 18th-century marriage manuals. There are arch intertitles (“In which the quest begins with three pieces of evidence�), faux-naif chattiness, narcotised dialogue and any number of left turns making a wild premise wilder still: when Reality participates in a clinical trial of a mysterious pill, ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR), designed to aid would-be perfect girlfriends, she ends up on the run from a machine-gun-wielding medic.

It’s safe to say your mileage may vary, not least because the piss-taking can feel ultra-specific (Ariel attends a seminar known to Reality as his “James Joyce Opinions Class�) and the lingering sense that it’s all a kind of alt-lit prank a la Tao Lin (a suspicion heightened by the cover of the US edition, which displays an anime Eve in the garden of Eden, with Kemp’s name in Comic Sans). Yet Paradise Logic rarely feels slack in the way that kind of fiction can; Kemp knows exactly what she’s doing, and tonally the novel is a feat, expertly switching between laughter, shock and heartache, sometimes in a heartbeat. In one of many startling moments, Ariel forces himself on Reality when she’s drunk with a head wound. The narrative splits in two to show us what she’s thinking – the phrase “I love you� 100 times – before cutting to inside Ariel’s mind: “The band is called Computer. We will perform in midsize venues all over the country and Europe, too.�

Gary Shteyngart is quoted on the cover calling it the funniest book of the year. And it is funny – right from the Emily Dickinson epigraph, which finds new resonance in the poet’s use of “hoe� – but ultimately it’s a comedy about misogyny in the way that Percival Everett’s The Trees is a comedy about lynching. Witness the moment when Soon-jin says Ariel looks like a school shooter: “It was so clear that she was jealous,� Reality thinks, “but I felt sad. Me and Soon-jin had been through a lot together. Each time I got raped in college she was always so nice to me after.� Every few pages, a sucker-punch line like that bares the teeth behind the book’s smile, and to even call it a comedy ends up feeling a kind of weird category error that doesn’t get near Kemp’s full-spectrum effect. How she follows this is anyone’s guess.

In this blazingly honest collection, the Canadian poet catalogues humanity’s destructive impact on the natural world

It is human nature to prefer our landscapes neatly framed – walls and wooden fences create the illusion that the great outdoors can be controlled and contained. Yet Karen Solie’s wildly unpredictable collection Wellwater flips the script. In this blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm, we celebrate instead the contemporary landscapes refusing to be tamed.

Solie, who teaches at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in western Canada, where vast prairies supply much of the world’s pulse crops. This fertile expanse in Wellwater, however, seems tired of endless service. The poem Red Spring witnesses how “weeds jump up unbidden, each year a little smarter�. They are trying, almost courageously, to outwit what Solie condemns as “zombie technology�, whose genetically modified “terminator seeds� sprout terrifying plants that are “more dead than alive�.

Zink’s seventh novel, about a night of conversation and adventure, is full of wit and marvellous writing, but ultimately trails off

California-born, Berlin-based Nell Zink is an idiosyncratic writer. You never quite know where her sentences are going to go. “Oh God, Toto, you won’t believe what just happened,� says Avianca, a character in her new novel. “This angel stole my hat. Like a winged monkey. It was blue and kind of glowing and had feather wings.�

Such delightfully surprising lines are frequent in Sister Europe, Zink’s seventh novel, which follows acclaimed titles The Wallcreeper, Doxology and Avalon, and is set over the course of a Tuesday night in 2023.

Sister Europe by Nell Zink is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

A gosling grows up; a campaign to save trees; the impact of partition; thorny dilemmas; wearing a hijab in Essex and more

Gozzle by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie, Macmillan, £12.99
When a bear finds a goose egg, rather than breakfast, it hatches sweet, tenacious Gozzle, who’s convinced goslings can do everything bears do. But what will happen when she learns to fly? A comically adorable picture book about family, growth and change.

Leave the Trees, Please by Benjamin Zephaniah, illustrated by Melissa Castrillon, Magic Cat, £12.99
Zephaniah’s posthumously published picture book, featuring a dynamic repeated refrain and soaring, swirling illustrations, calls on young listeners to safeguard trees and the riches of the natural world.

A classic Yeti romp with 28 possible endings, a Blade Runner-style thriller and more adventures on the Thames with Jessie Burton

Before video games dangled dopamine hits and a sense of agency, there were Choose Your Own Adventure books, where the reader could go through the portal – or turn to face the monster. The 1980s-90s franchise still holds much affection, cropping up in a forthcoming Stranger Things homage spin-off, Heroes and Monsters, for one.

A new Pushkin Children’s reboot features six pacy titles by one of the most prolific original authors in the series, the late RA Montgomery: romps such as The Abominable Snowman, which has 28 possible endings, and Journey Under the Sea. The hope is to lure children back into their imaginations.

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.

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 bestseller The Ministry of Time on how lockdown telly, Terry Pratchett and her Cambodian heritage shaped her Arctic time travel tale

Kaliane Bradley, 36, lives in east London and works as an editor at Penguin Classics. Her debut novel, The Ministry of Time (Sceptre), was published last year to critical acclaim and a place in the bestseller charts and is out in paperback now. It’s a vivid time travel tale following Lieutenant Graham Gore, a crew member of Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition, who is brought back to life in the 21st century as part of a government experiment. He develops an unlikely relationship with his “bridge�, a contemporary character helping him assimilate to the modern world. It was longlisted for the 2025 women’s prize for fiction and the BBC has commissioned a TV adaptation.

What has the past year been like for you?
Lovely and discombobulating. I veer wildly between immense gratitude and intense impostor syndrome. But I’m still working 4.5 days a week, so I’m grounded by my job.

The Irish author on his new ‘violent seafaring epic’, his appetite for body horror and living his entire life book-first

Oisín Fagan, 33, grew up in County Meath and lives in Dublin. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse comic fiction prize with his first novel, Nobber, about the Black Death’s arrival in the Irish village that gives the book its title. His other books include the 2016 story collection Hostages, described by the Spectator as “DayGlo-Breugelish nightmares�; Ferdia Lennon calls him “one of the most strikingly original Irish writers working today�. His new novel, Eden’s Shore, is a violent seafaring epic centred on a Spanish colony in Latin America at the end of the 18th century.

How did this book begin for you?
It’s a confluence of things I’ve been interested in all my life: Latin American literature, history, revolutionary politics, spirituality. Like Nobber, it’s about a dying town with a proliferation of characters, which I like. That’s not new – it’s Balzac, it’s Dickens – but for some reason we’ve distilled novels down to chamber pieces of six or seven characters; to me, that’s theatre, which I also love, but novels can proliferate horizontally in a way that other forms can’t.

What draws you to set your novels in the past?
You can do things with language and form that might not be as accepted in contemporary work, but I don’t see myself as a historical novelist. Literary fiction seems quite contemporary at the moment; historical fiction seems to be slipping into “genre�, like fantasy. In other parts of the world, it’s just part of literary fiction. We’re living through a moment in Irish literature with a lot of very good Irish writers who are all very different and talented, but maybe they’re not experimenting in genre as much as they would do elsewhere in the world. Because I find myself an Irishman among these people, you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s different.’ In the 1960s in America, or Latin America in the 50s and 70s, you’d be like, ‘Oh, he’s just one of the lads.’

There are some pretty grisly scenes here. What were they like to write?
The nuts and bolts of novel formation are difficult for me – setting up a scene, getting from one place to another – but give me someone picking bullets out of someone’s gut and I think: here we fucking go. I’m writing for these moments where the body becomes real. Like, the eyeball scene... you should’ve seen the 300 words that were deleted; you’d have been seeing it for the rest of your life. I love my cousin to bits, but he had this fear of eyes as a child; mention the word “eye� and you’d see him kind of flinch. I tapped into that.

Intriguing advances hold out the possibility – but first we have to agree on what ‘life’ means

“Creation of Life�, read the headline of the Boston Herald in 1899. “Lower Animals Produced by Chemical Means.� The report described the work of the German-American marine biologist Jacques Loeb, who later wrote: “The idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as a creator, even in living nature.�

In fact, Loeb had merely made an unfertilised sea urchin egg divide by exposing it to a mixture of salts – he was not even close to creating life in the lab. No scientist has ever done that. But that ancient dream hovers today over the discipline called synthetic biology, the very name of which seems to promise the creation of artificial life forms. Take one of the most dramatic results in this field: in 2010, scientists at the J Craig Venter Institutes in Maryland and California announced they had made “the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell�.