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
Love Forms by Claire Adam review – the power of a mother’s loss
Forty years on, a Trinidadian woman has never stopped looking for the daughter she gave up for adoption, in a quietly devastating novel
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney review – a satisfying tale of memory and place
Stories within stories give fascinating depth to the prize-winning author’s third novel, about a woman’s return to her family home in the west of Ireland
Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal review – an ambitious Indian panorama
In the first novel from the author of We Move, descendants of a proscribed intercaste marriage are connected across continents and centuries
Frederick Forsyth obituary
Foreign correspondent who went on to become a hugely successful thriller writer best known for The Day of the Jackal
Frederick Forsyth, Day of the Jackal author and former MI6 agent, dies aged 86
Writer used his experience reporting on De Gaulle’s France to plot his thriller, and continued to draw on real-world research for subsequent bestsellers