A Previous Life by Edmund White review – salacious confessions

A couple share their sexual histories in this elegantly filthy report from the frontiers of desire

Top 10 cooks in fiction

From PG Wodehouse’s ‘peerless’ Anatole to John Lanchester’s merciless Tarquin Winot, a novelist chooses her favourite kitchen creations

New Zealand author who won the Booker prize in 1985 for her novel the bone people, and also wrote poetry and short stories

The Argentinian provocateur turns her misanthropic gaze on the literary world in her third novel – with mixed results

Editorial: Literature can be surprisingly accurate in predicting what lies ahead

An Irish-American family’s secrets laid bare; a personal exploration of climate change; and a vivid debut about brotherly love

A semi-autobiographical novel of trauma and addiction offers hope for narrator, author and reader

Espionage, witchcraft, gore and spellbinding language propel an exciting historical adventure

A married woman’s fling with a young 1960s rabble-rouser is the centrepiece of this elegant, shrewd and complex novel

A new biography of VC Andrews reveals how her disability left her under the control of her difficult mother

The literary form is enjoying a renaissance, with the pandemic allowing people more time to consume and produce it

A funeral in Germany provides the setting for our winning story in this year’s Cape/Observer/Comica award for emerging cartoonists

My mother considered it a dirty text, but this profoundly democratic book has liberated female Irish authors

A monster trying to order pizza, a Nigerian girls’ boarding-school story, a YA Indian fantasy about scheming siblings – and much more

A deft version of the Costa prize winner about rural, middle-aged twins whose sheltered lives are shattered by their mother’s death