Top 10 novels about toxic friendships
Complex attachments mixing intimacy and deception can decide whole lives, and have inspired novelists from William Thackeray to Elena Ferrante
The Voids by Ryan O’Connor review – Irn-Bru and benders
This luminous debut novel, set in a squalid, hyper-hedonistic Glasgow, is a wild and gratifying literary ride
In the Margins by Elena Ferrante review – a portrait of the artist
The closest Ferrante has come to an articulation of why and how she writes
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda review – millennial vampire tale with bite
This debut novel is a surefooted, art-filled and wholly 21st-century take on bloodsucking
Deep Water review – erotic thriller loves Ben Affleck’s slack-jawed look
Hollow-faced Affleck becomes murderously obsessed with wife Ana de Armas’s infidelities in baffling return from Fatal Attraction’s Adrian Lyne
Sell Us the Rope by Stephen May review – before Stalin had blood on his hands
The young Marxist has yet to turn into a monster in this intriguing tale of sexual slights and political squabbles set in London in 1907
In brief: Stewkey Blues; Birds and Us; Lives of Houses – reviews
Witty short stories rooted in Norfolk, a look at our long history with birds, and a collection of essays on the meaning of our homes
Mischief Acts by Zoe Gilbert – a very British strain of the weird and wild
A shape-shifting 14th-century huntsman rides again in these shadowy, extraordinary stories that blend prose and poetry, the present and the past
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson review – scenes from a marriage
The author’s very funny fifth novel, about two artists and their toxic relationship, deserves its place on the Women’s prize longlist
Percival Everett: ‘I’d love to write a novel everyone hated’
The American novelist on his stereotyping of white characters, the breadth of the black experience in modern literature, and why he always returns to The Way of All Flesh
The road well travelled: 100 years of Jack Kerouac
Nature-loving mystic or proto-dudebro? Untameable free spirit or reclusive mama’s boy? On the centenary of his birth, it is time to look past the icon at the ‘bleeding ball of contradictions’ behind it
‘I couldn’t face the resentment and rage’: can artistic couples have successful relationships?
From Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to Philip Roth and Claire Bloom – novelist Charlotte Mendelson on the seething envy within famous partnerships
Paradais by Fernanda Melchor review – snakes in Eden
A Mexican gated community offers no protection in this chilling novel by the author of Hurricane Season
The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda; Lambda by David Musgrave; Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick; The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi; and The Way of the Worm by Ramsey Campbell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck audiobook review – California dreaming
The desperate tale of the Joad family during the Great Depression is expertly narrated by actor Richard Armitage