Five of the best books about eating
From a pioneering 1940s ‘gastrography’ to a recent novel about a real-life 18th-century French peasant cursed with an appetite to eat just about everything
Manny and the Baby by Varaidzo review – dreamy debut of loss and unrequited love
A grieving son aims to connect with his late father through the cassette tapes he left behind, in a tale of jazz, black ambition and romance
‘Perhaps the great Australian novel’: Alexis Wright wins Stella prize for second time with Praiseworthy
The 73-year-old has won the $60,000 prize for Australian female and non-binary writers for her ‘genre-bending’ 736-page novel
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry review – cosmic strangeness
This defiantly old-fashioned tale of two misfits, a ghost and a blazing comet showcases Perry’s unerring capacity to make the earthly new and strange
Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generation
Witnessing ‘murder by the gods’ as a child drove the novelist’s work, which used postmodern playfulness to delight readers
‘Getting a book idea feels like a buzz in the head’: Paul Auster – a life in quotes
The author of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and 4 3 2 1 has died at the age of 77. Here are some of the most memorable quotes from interviews he gave throughout his life
The Two Loves of Sophie Strom by Sam Taylor review – a sliding doors tale of survival
A Jewish boy’s life splits in two and follows two different paths in this novel of trauma and enduring love in Nazi Europe
This Is How You Remember It by Catherine Prasifka review – an innocent online
Told in the second person, this account of an everygirl growing up with the internet will be devastatingly familiar
Swearing, snogging and spying: Cherub’s cool teenage secret agents hit 20
Robert Muchamore’s series of novels about young undercover intelligence operatives with troubled lives shook up the sanitised world of early noughties YA literature
CJ Sansom obituary
Lawyer turned novelist who enjoyed huge success with his bestselling Shardlake historical mysteries
CJ Sansom, author of the Shardlake novels, dies aged 71
The creator of the highly successful crime series, set in Tudor England, was a private person who ‘preferred to be known through his novels’
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry – a tale of cosmic beauty on the Essex marshes
The Essex Serpent author’s fourth novel, about a newspaper columnist who lives a double life, mixes themes of faith and physics to powerful effect
England Is Mine by Nicolas Padamsee review – a searing indictment of factionalism
The lives of two east London teenagers become fatally entwined in an assured debut novel addressing themes of masculinity and marginalisation
My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes review – love and shenanigans in a new Walsh sister story
In the bestselling novelist’s latest, Anna Walsh moves back to Dublin and falls for an old flame in a comical tale of grit, growth and self-acceptance
‘Generous and reflective’: letters show other sides to macho Ernest Hemingway
In the mid-1930s, the novelist, then a controversial war correspondent, encouraged aspiring writers with frankness and humour