Prime Minister’s Literary awards 2025: Michelle de Kretser wins $80,000 for Theory & Practice

The author used her acceptance speech to call out the Australian government’s response to the war in Gaza, in a ceremony marked by political commentary

Half Light by Mahesh Rao review – a tale of forbidden love in India

A love affair between two men in Darjeeling comes to a violent end in this unfocused tale of heartbreak, secrecy – and the separate lives they return to in Mumbai

Amity by Nathan Harris review – perceptive portrait of slavery’s aftermath

This follow-up to the Booker-listed The Sweetness of Water charts the perilous journeys of a brother and sister in the Reconstruction era, from the deep south to Mexico

A friend’s advice to cut my tortured prose unlocked my career as a novelist

What he said was simple, but it achieved a kind of sorcery. For the first time, my dream of becoming a writer seemed possible, says novelist Andrew Martin

The Guardian view on the 2025 Booker prize: bringing posh bingo to the BookTok generation

Editorial: With this year’s shortlist announced live to the public, Britain’s most prestigious literary award is finding ways to engage new audiences

‘A cottage of one’s own’: Newly unearthed Virginia Woolf stories to be published

A chance discovery at a country house revealed the three funny – sometimes surreal – interlinked tales, written almost a decade before Woolf’s first book was published

Cannon by Lee Lai review – a meditative graphic novel laced with horror and humour

The author of Stone Fruit returns with the story of a young queer Chinese woman struggling to express her emotions and be heard

My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende audiobook review – portrait of a fiercely independent young woman

Sent from San Francisco to report on the war in late-19th century Chile, a young writer embarks on a journey of self-discovery in this tale of love, loss and liberation

The Lodger review – ingenious penny dreadful take on Hitchcock’s foggy mystery

Puppetry and silent cinema techniques are used to retell Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel and its film version in a show played for laughs rather than thrills

Venetian Vespers by John Banville review – a haunting honeymoon

This brooding tale of an Englishman’s downfall in fin-de-siècle Venice is memorably eerie – but it’s hard to care about such a pompous protagonist

What’s With Baum? by Woody Allen review – the film-maker’s late-life first novel

Good gags abound in this tale of a bespectacled Jewish writer caught up in a #MeToo takedown – just don’t expect any surprises

‘Brilliantly human’: Kiran Desai and David Szalay make Booker prize shortlist

No debut novels are among the six finalists, with established authors including Ben Markovits and previously shortlisted Andrew Miller in the running

As a Booker prize judge I helped whittle 153 books down to a shortlist of six. Here’s why you should read them

Ben Markovits, David Szalay, Kiran Desai, Andrew Miller, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura’s books will all take you on enthralling journeys

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood review – long Covid from the inside

The cult author’s autofictional follow-up to No One Is Talking About This is the story of a breakdown

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite review – a family doomed in love

This intense follow-up to My Sister, the Serial Killer is a haunting story of heartbreak, grief and intergenerational trauma