Lucy Cooke: ‘I loved to drink, smoke and have a good time. Getting cancer at 45 marked an end to that’
The zoologist talks about how breast cancer was a positive experience for her, and how she’s now a lot healthier thanks to the joys of gardening
Book clinic: do editors often have to cut authors down to size?
Overwriting is a common problem among beginners, but it happens to the best of them – ask a professional editor
Rosie by Rose Tremain review – a tale of two unloved daughters
The novelist refuses to give her mother a free pass, yet isn’t sorry for herself, in this memoir jangling with grievance
Circe by Madeline Miller review – myth, magic and single motherhood
A nymph faces the joys and lonelinesses of independence in this feminist reworking of Greek myth from an Orange winner
Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima review – tales from Tokyo
This short, powerful novel translated by Geraldine Harcourt follows a single mother’s struggles to build a life in the city
The best recent crime novels – review roundup
The Woman in the Woods by John Connolly; The Hunger by Alma Katsu; Paper Ghosts by Julia Haeberlin; American by Day by Derek B Miller; Body & Soul by John Harvey
The One Who Wrote Destiny by Nikesh Shukla review – funny and profound
The editor of The Good Immigrant draws on that anthology’s themes for an ambitious family story
Mothers by Jacqueline Rose review – an indignant defence
Are mothers really held accountable for the world’s ills? Why does our society punish women?
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society review – an outbreak of world war twee
Populated by Downtown Abbey graduates, this glutinous postwar rom-dram is a load of cobblers
Trick by Domenico Starnone review – a compelling tale of calamity
One of Italy’s most accomplished novelists spins a wonderful story about an elderly illustrator and his four-year-old grandson
Municipal Dreams by John Boughton review – the rise and fall of council housing
An important and timely book, in the wake of Grenfell Tower, which emphasises how public investment enriches lives
A Clockwork Orange review – a chilling, ultraviolent cabaret
Peppered with the novelist’s own songs, this musical makeover of Anthony Burgess’s classic finds plenty of contemporary resonances
Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce review – a winning wartime romp
Stiff upper lips all round: a comic novel about an agony aunt in wartime London proves as hilarious as it is moving
All in the Downs by Shirley Collins review – the English Folk Revivalist’s revival
A memoir from the singer who lost her voice that celebrates her roots and is unsparing about the London scene’s leading lights
Elastic by Leonard Mlodinow review – unplug to think creatively
In praise of procrastination and getting drunk … a theoretical physicist and Star Trek writer on the importance of imaginative thought