The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani review – meet the terrible parents
Therapy brings childhood trauma to light in this ambitious tale of family rupture – a smash hit in Italy that fails to live up to its hype
‘Stop telling people it’s weird’: Andrew Upton on his strange new novel, and having Cate Blanchett read it first
An allegory in the spirit of Animal Farm, the Australian playwright’s debut novel about a disfigured chicken is a fantastical fable that’s both funny and ‘a bit bleak’
‘People treat each other as disposable’: dating columnist turned novelist Annie Lord on love and sex in the age of apps
Her breakup memoir and Vogue column made her the voice of modern dating. As her debut is published, she talks about single life, oversharing and why she still believes she’ll find love
Pressed for time? 20 brilliant books you can read in a day
From novels by James Baldwin and Han Kang to a guide to quantum physics – a former Booker prize judge recommends immersive one-sitting wonders
The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup
Sublimation by Isabel J Kim; Last Day of a Prior Life by Andrés Barba; Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay; The Carrier by Ruth Newton; Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd
A Short History of Longans by Mirandi Riwoe review – a moving family portrait devoured in one sitting
Riwoe’s commanding new book traces a Chinese Australian family across four generations – all connected by one old longan tree
Trouble Was by Charlotte Edwardes review – a sharp child’s-eye view of adult neglect
A young boy and his two siblings stay with their aunt in the West Country, in this haunting debut set over the long, hot summer of 1976
Service by Lauren Mooney review – a very modern ghost story
The chills are genuinely spooky in this haunted-house tale about contemporary precarity – a debut that speaks to our times
Shahrnush Parsipur, Iranian author of Women Without Men, dies at 80
The revered writer and political exile’s publisher says her ‘legacy in literary history can’t be compared to anyone else’s’
‘It still haunts me’: the puppet show Dracula that’s definitely not for small children
The dreaded bloodsucker will be getting his fangs into the Edinburgh fringe this year – in a deeply creepy, liberty-taking show with a sisterly twist. We meet its director
Country People by Daniel Mason review – a joyful follow-up to North Woods
This fantastical journey through family, folktales and a world beneath our feet is witty, uplifting and gorgeously written
‘It’s more than just fairy smut’: Inside the UK’s first romantasy bookshop
Between enemies-to-lovers and ‘shadow daddies’, BookTok has fallen in love with the spicy stories combining romance and fantasy. But there is more to the subgenre than sex, say the fans who queued for hours outside the brick-and-mortar Oxford store
Contrapposto by Dave Eggers review – this portrait of an artist falls flat
The story of a lifelong friendship between two art-world mavericks from the working-class midwest is disappointingly pious
Susanna Clarke: ‘I had been ill for 11 years. I felt like I was about to fall off the world’
One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of storytelling to shape our experience of sickness
How AI is changing language
As allegations of LLM use rock the literary and media worlds, linguists explain what really distinguishes human and machine writing, while novelists including Jennifer Egan and Jeanette Winterson reflect on the future of fiction in an age of ChatGPT