The best recent crime and thrillers – roundup
Fox by Joyce Carol Oates; A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor; Death of a Diplomat by Eliza Reid; Actually, I’m a Murderer by Terry Deary; Can You Solve the Murder? by Antony Johnston
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie review – the joy of the hatchet job
Is giving an artist a one-star review an act of abuse? An influential theatre critic finds out in this smart story of #MeToo-era revenge
Wait Here by Lucy Nelson review – stories of childless women that are complex and wonderfully varied
Instead of reducing its characters to one-dimensional traits, this debut collection is a compassionate rendering of the many different ways to shape a family and a life
The 10 best audiobooks for summer
To soundtrack those long, lazy afternoons try Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s torrid love affair, a real-life pirate of the Caribbean or Peter Dinklage as Hercule Poirot
Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin review – privilege and race intersect in a fine debut
A young gay Black man escapes from grief into the hedonism of upper-echelon New York, in a lyrical tale of redemption
Waterstones debut fiction prize 2025 shortlist announced
Six ‘inspiring new voices’ made the list, which features a Saltburn-style summer holiday and a Swedish bestseller
Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski review – some of the best sex scenes I’ve read this year
In this page-turning romance, teenage sweethearts reunite as thirtysomething women
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine review – a polyphonic portrait of class and trauma in Belfast
The acclaimed short-story writer brings her characters vividly to life in this debut novel about a teenage girl’s assault and its aftermath
‘Odd things happened when she was around’: the unnerving vision of Muriel Spark
From blackmail to burglary, the events of Spark’s life often uncannily echoed those of her novels – no wonder the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie believed she could predict the future
‘The risk was worth it’: All Fours author Miranda July on sex, power and giving women permission to blow up their lives
The artist and author’s hit book had so much in common with her own life that even her friends forgot it wasn’t real. How did this revolutionary portrayal of midlife desire come to inspire a generation of women?
Women’s prize winner Yael van der Wouden: ‘It’s heartbreaking to see so much hatred towards queer people’
The winner of this year’s fiction prize on growing up as an outsider, why we’re all guilty of complicity, and using her acceptance speech to reveal that she is intersex
Women’s prize for fiction goes to debut novelist Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep
Nonfiction award goes to Rachel Clarke’s ‘beautiful and compassionate’ The Story of a Heart, about a lifesaving transplant seen from all sides
Salvage by Jennifer Mills review – urgent post-apocalyptic novel proposes a better way of living
In her mesmerising fifth novel set in the near-future, the Australian author offers a timely model of resistance to despair and passivity
John Noone obituary
Other lives: English lecturer and writer who turned from fiction to non-fiction – and back again
Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan audiobook review – love and conflict in Sri Lanka
The civil war transforms a young trainee doctor’s life as she copes with her feelings for a Tamil Tiger in last year’s Women’s prizewinning novel