Reward System by Jem Calder review – slaves to the algorithm
Six interlinked stories from a superb new writer about young Londoners and their smartphone addictions
The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup
Appliance by JO Morgan; Book of Night by Holly Black; The Pharmacist by Rachelle Atalla; Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima; Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Meg Mason: ‘Jane Austen taught me there really is such a thing as reading for pleasure’
The author on being inspired by Nina Stibbe and taking comfort in the works of Nancy Mitford
Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso review – chilly legacy of abuse
This unnerving debut novel about emotional scars being inflicted down the generations reads like witness testimony
Debut novelist wins £20,000 Dylan Thomas prize for No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood follows acclaimed memoir Priestdaddy with book focusing on a life lived on social media
The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan review – an atmospheric tableau
This tale of a Soviet mathematician working in rural 50s Ireland is bogged down by a lack of narrative impetus
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry review – Thomas Hardy in mourning
A remarkable portrait of the remorse that followed a difficult marriage, and gave birth to great poetry
The Schoolhouse by Sophie Ward review – uneasy history of a betrayed childhood
Ward follows her inventive debut with a wayward blend of adolescent trauma and police procedural
Once more with feeling: why time loop stories keep coming back
From Groundhog Day to Russian Doll, fiction in which characters replay their lives have great appeal – especially now, when a slew of time-travel novels are set to be released
In brief: The Schoolhouse; Look Here; Taking a Long Look – review
A gripping mystery novel by Sophie Ward, Ana Kinsella’s love letter to London and a collection of Vivian Gornick’s insightful essays on culture
You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead review – flawed lives fluently explored
The novelist shows her expertise in the briefer format in tales of sexual power, self-delusion and flawed personality
The Opposite of a Person by Lieke Marsman review – climate and Copernicus meet in the Italian Alps
The impact of blowing up a hydroelectric dam, the limits of identity politics and the Renaissance polymath feature in the Dutch writer’s funny and clever first novel
Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz review – an overblown afterlife comedy
A lax approach to plot and character makes this near-future fantasy about a murdered man and his wife only fitfully funny
Sara Cox: ‘There were some tears, some “I can’t do this”’
The DJ and writer on coming to terms with being a novelist, the appeal of middle-aged men and the book that broke her heart
‘I yearned for a deeper, slower, more useful existence’: dispatches from the Great Resignation
From the ad executive turned charcoal burner to the woman who built a new life in the woods, a new genre of books about radical reinventions is proving a runaway success