Stalk, slice, bludgeon: how ‘femgore’ is reinventing horror fiction

From Boy Parts to Brainwyrms, novels by female writers are carving out a new subgenre – but is it a cathartic feminist statement or an internalised version of the misogyny it seeks to subvert?

Eley Williams: ‘I trusted people far less once I’d finished that novel’

The writer on how a creepy, psychological thriller blew her 13-year old mind, her early outrage at unreliable narrators and taking comfort in Saki

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner review – trials of the wealthy

The follow-up to Fleishman Is in Trouble explores the fallout from a kidnapping in a rich American family

Big Time by Jordan Prosser review – a lush, drug-fuelled adventure in a future Australia

Blending dystopic soothsaying and raucous imagination, Prosser’s debut novel is a bit Philip K Dick, a bit Jennifer Egan and a bit entirely unique

Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki review – an 18th-century hoax

The remarkable story of how, in 1726, the medical establishment believed that a poor woman had given birth to rabbits

Robert Irwin obituary

Author, scholar and historian who enjoyed success with his 1983 novel The Arabian Nightmare

Napalm in the Heart by Pol Guasch review – the aftermath of apocalypse

Love, death, war and occupation are explored in a gripping and poetic examination of the human condition

The Unwilding by Marina Kemp review – dark family secrets

A young female writer is drawn into the family of a revered novelist and patriarch, in this powerfully compelling dissection of the creative process

Where to start with: Milan Kundera

The Czech writer didn’t only leave us The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he wrote a series of playful, philosophical books examining relationships, sex and mortality

Crime and thrillers of the month – review

A luminous tale of abducted teens, a page-turning marriage to a mass murderer – and a deadly gameshow

Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review – the master who never wasted a word

A Franz Kafka scholar’s perceptive annotation and translation highlights every subtle shade of humour and brilliant aphorism in these singular tales

I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson – family dynamics poisonously awry

A bullying brother’s death is the spur for an extraordinary and chilling portrait of sibling enmity in the second novel by the author of little scratch

The Material by Camille Bordas review – when life is one long joke

Students on a comedy course devote their every moment to mining material for their on-stage routine in a novel that relies on how much it can make the reader laugh

Goodlord by Ella Frears review – this email to a landlord is dark and dazzling

The poet’s stream-of-consciousness complaint to an estate agent is a witty and compelling reflection on the state of the housing market and young womanhood

In brief: CS Lewis’s Oxford; True Love; Loosely Based on a Made-Up Story – review

A fascinating study of CS Lewis’s years in his adopted city; an excellent gritty romance by Paddy Crewe; and James Blunt enters the music memoir hall of fame