Sally Rooney on the hell of fame: ‘It doesn’t seem to work in any real way for anyone’

At 30, the Normal People author is already the most talked-about novelist of her generation. As she readies her third novel, she’s bracing for more (unwanted) attention

Madeline Miller on The Song of Achilles: ‘It helped people come out to their parents’

The American novelist describes how she overcame her fears of a classical backlash to write a gay love story about Achilles and Patroclus

More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman review – a true tale of survival

From Tito’s gulags to a kibbutz … this is a powerful retelling of a Jewish woman’s extraordinary life, and of a family’s emotional trauma, from the author of A Horse Walks into a Bar

Writers notes: the record label remixing novels into music

Fiction has been adapted into popular films and TV for years – but now there is growing interest in bespoke scores for novels

A new start after 60: ‘I always dreamed of being a writer – and published my first novel at 70’

In her thirties, Anne Youngson wrote a book in her lunch breaks at work. It stayed in a drawer. Then she retired, wrote her debut and was shortlisted for a major award

The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach – a homage to 18th-century fiction

Jas Treadwell’s picaresque adventure is a virtuoso performance that resonates with our own strange times

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s next work won’t be read by anyone until 2114

The Zimbabwean writer joins authors including including Margaret Atwood and Ocean Vuong who have agreed to lock away new writing in the Future Library

‘You think wrong!’: top 10 rants in literature

Some distrust kvetching in print, but writers from Shakespeare to Valerie Solanas show there’s nothing wrong with constructive – and even destructive – criticism

What You Can See from Here by Mariana Leky review – a tonic in troubled times

Worldly woes come to a small village in this German bestseller sprinkled with fairytale magic

More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman review – the personal is political

An Israeli family’s journey to Croatia throws up secrets that illuminate their pain in a beautiful exploration of the lingering power of history

In brief: Vuelta Skelter; Anxious People; What Strange Paradise – review

Tim Moore completes his trilogy of cycling’s grand tours, a Swedish hostage drama proves funny and insightful, and a Syrian child refugee finds a friend

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt review – a quietly heroic family drama

In her seventh novel, Susie Boyt sharply picks out the relationship between a grandmother, mother and daughter

A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray by Dominique Barbéris review – discreet charms of the bourgeoisie

This slim novel about sisters meeting in the Parisian suburbs elegantly conjures up an alternative world of possibilities

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker review – a Troy story for the sisterhood

Moving from Homer to Virgil, Pat Barker’s second feminist reboot of the classics is a stirring adventure set amid a misogynist dystopia

On my radar: Paula Hawkins’s cultural highlights

The author of The Girl on the Train on discovering Alison Bechdel, identifying with Physical, and her favourite new crime novel