In brief: Uncommon Ground; The Pretender; All That Glitters – reviews

Patrick Galbraith debunks the cliches of country life; Jo Harkin’s auspicious debut brings the wars of the roses to life; and Orlando Whitfield’s impressive memoir illuminates his friendship with a fraudster

Kaliane Bradley: ‘I dreaded the book going to people I know’

The author of bestseller The Ministry of Time on how lockdown telly, Terry Pratchett and her Cambodian heritage shaped her Arctic time travel tale

Name by Constance Debré review – a demolition of bourgeois life

The French author takes aim at marriage, childhood and her illustrious family name in the finale of a landmark autofictional trilogy

‘You must read my diaries’: unlocking the private life of Edna O’Brien

Towards the end of her life, the groundbreaking Irish novelist granted film-maker Sinéad O’Shea access to her most personal writing. What she revealed was shocking and inspiring

The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup

Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway; Some Body Like Me by Lucy Lapinska; City of All Seasons by Oliver K Langmead & Aliya Whiteley; Rose/House by Arkady Martine; The Cat Bride by Charlotte Tierney

Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford review – wild trouble in a child’s world

An unsettlingly funny debut explores memories of a perilous birthday party, with dark echoes of Grimms’ fairytales and gothic fiction

Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan review – hilarious, beautiful and very violent

A hapless young idealist sets sail for utopia, in this wild epic of colonial chaos in the late 18th-century Americas

Thomas Pynchon announces Shadow Ticket, his first novel in more than a decade

The elusive 87-year-old author’s new book is a noir caper set during the big band era following a detective in search of a cheese heiress

The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal review – the power of kindness

Love and loss combine in this tender tale of how a mourning Caribbean mother cares for others

‘Mind-expanding books’: International Booker prize shortlist announced

From Muslim Indian women’s lives to a Danish time looper, all six contenders for the £50,000 prize are from independent presses, as translator Sophie Hughes earns an unprecedented third nomination

‘Flying is an act of surrender’: a new novel about a woman who wants to be ravished by an Airbus

Kate Folk on Sky Daddy, a book about sex, death and plane crashes that’s taking off in these turbulent times

Alex Wheatle obituary

Author of the Crongton novels whose stories of inner-city life give a realistic portrait of growing up in contemporary Britain

The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal review – a warm story of second starts

A bereaved woman forms new relationships in the author’s first novel in seven years, a tender and funny tale of forgiveness

In brief: Bad Nature; Bad Friend; The Flitting – review

An impelling US road-trip for our times; an enlightening cultural history of female friendships; and a bond forged over butterflies for a son and his dying father

Novelist Oisín Fagan: ‘I was at the altar of literature and had its fire in me’

The Irish author on his new ‘violent seafaring epic’, his appetite for body horror and living his entire life book-first