The Outsider review – Stephen King slashfest is like CSI on sleeping pills

It has mutilated corpses, scary hooded figures and time-travel escapades. But King’s magic is missing from this glacially slow murder mystery

You’re Not Listening review – why we must listen to our opponents

Kate Murphy makes an inspiring plea for everyone to pay attention to those who disagree with us

The ‘cyberspace’ novelist’s century-hopping sequel to The Peripheral is vague and exhausting

Rye Curtis and Joanna Glen make promising debuts, while Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis offer career advice

A powerful tale of a woman’s descent into poverty in modern Harare

Emotions resonate across time in Chris Canders’s absorbing tale about a beloved Blüthner changing hands

In a poignant and candid memoir, the Scottish writer, who died last year, offers a reminder of her unique gifts

An eloquent study of five female writers who lived in the same London square

Andrea Bernstein delivers the goods on the bad business which propelled two New York families to Washington

From Jane Eyre to Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Kate Kellaway recommends the best reads about love

A Belfast writer provides an undogmatic, wry and wise portrait of Northern Ireland as Britain prepares to leave the EU

One of Norway’s finest writers charts Oslo’s recovery from Nazi occupation through small personal stories

Plain, awkward Mary steps out of her siblings’ shadow in this engaging addendum to Austen

Restaurants are noisy, social media connections are shallow, giving a TED talk is living the dream. What happened to conversation?

Brilliant detective work reveals that a famous study of psychiatric hospitals was mostly fiction, but what are the implications?