The Silver Book by Olivia Laing review – a thin line of beauty

The world of 1970s Italian cinema is the glossy backdrop for an elegantly wrought but shallow novel

King Sorrow by Joe Hill review – dragon-fired horror epic is a tour de force

This sprawling tale of college kids who summon evil with lifelong consequences is a fantastic read

Hilary Mantel story imagining Margaret Thatcher’s assassination to be staged in Liverpool

Short story set in 1983, and published a year after the former prime minister’s death, considers ‘what happens when people feel they don’t have a voice’ says director John Young

Should I care what Sarah Jessica Parker thinks about books?

She swept all before her at the Booker prize ceremony, but I’m running out of patience with celebrity influence in publishing, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes

Loren Ipsum by Andrew Gallix review – chronically funny satire of the literary scene

Full of word games, in-jokes and grisly murders, this debut pours gleeful scorn on the pretensions of contemporary literary life

‘It’s notoriously hard to write about sex’: David Szalay on Flesh, his astounding Booker prize-winner

The novel’s protagonist is violent, libidinous and so inarticulate he says ‘OK’ some 500 times. So how did the author turn his story into a tragic masterpiece?

Vaim by Jon Fosse review – the Nobel laureate performs a strange miracle

In the Norwegian master’s latest example of ‘mystical realism’, one man makes a dreamlike, hypnotic voyage through life

David Szalay wins 2025 Booker prize for ‘dark’ Flesh

The judges ‘had never read anything quite like it’, says panel chair Roddy Doyle, announcing the Hungarian-British author’s novel as the winner of the £50,000 award

The risky strategy of Booker winner Flesh pays off

The protagonist’s inner life is hidden from the reader in this highly original novel

Andrew Miller is bookies’ favourite to win 2025 Booker prize

The Land in Winter has shortest odds of victory, ahead of Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Love The Traitors and Only Murders in the Building? Visit The Mousetrap, says bold new director of West End perennial

Ola Ince, who has refreshed Agatha Christie’s record-breaking mystery, suggests ‘we all fancy ourselves as detectives’

Readers reply: Who is the most evil villain in fiction?

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

‘I had a year to write it from scratch’: the 2025 Booker finalists on the stories behind their novels

A newspaper report about a missing girl, the memory of a midwinter emergency … Susan Choi, Andrew Miller, David Szalay and others on what inspired their shortlisted books

In Love With Love by Ella Risbridger review – a sexy celebration of romantic fiction

From Pride and Prejudice to Fifty Shades, a writer’s paean to the literature of desire

The Transformations by Andrew Pippos review – a tender study of an ordinary man doing his best

Pippos brings a quieter drama to his second novel, about a subeditor who has a midlife shakeup in the dying world of print journalism