The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown review – weapons-grade nonsense from beginning to end

Code-breaking hero Robert Langdon is back for another conspiracy thriller, featuring underground laboratories and new thoughts on the nature of consciousness

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai review – a dazzling epic

Longlisted for the Booker, this capacious story of love, work and family set between India and the US is both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature

‘Looks so sizzling they could fry an egg!’ How the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice adaptation changed my life

The 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic, starring Colin Firth, has its own fan group, has inspired university courses and was even featured in the Barbie movie. What’s behind its enduring appeal?

Bunny author Mona Awad: ‘I’m a dark-minded soul’

The author’s surreal, satirical breakout novel won her awards and tattooed superfans. As she releases a follow-up, she talks about growing up as an outsider – and the best advice she received from Margaret Atwood

Slow Horses author Mick Herron: ‘I love doing things that are against the rules’

As the hit thriller returns to our screens, its creator talks about false starts, surprise inspirations – and why he never looks inside Jackson Lamb’s head

Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan review – coming-of-age tale has the makings of a classic

A 12-year-old girl from a family of gamblers and greyhound racers grapples with adulthood as her home life disintegrates in this sharp and empathetic novel set in 1970s Brisbane

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan review – behind the American dream

This luminous and tender 20th-century saga of wounded souls and small-town secrets has a deep melancholy

Kathleen Folbigg’s memoir, an ode to condiments and ‘a work of art’: the best Australian books out in September

Each month Guardian Australia editors and critics pick the upcoming titles they have devoured – or can’t wait to get their hands on

Shamiso by Brian Chikwava review – a globe-trotting coming-of-age story

Though audaciously told, this portrait of a young woman’s twisty journey from Zimbabwe to Brighton doesn’t quite hang together

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr review – lost story of a gay art duo

The lives of Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who found love and fame and lost it all, are vividly reimagined

The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith review – a terrific, tightly plotted romp

With four murder inquiries in play, JK Rowling’s eighth Cormoran Strike novel avoids the page-padding longueurs of previous volumes – but will he finally tell Robin how he feels about her?

Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen review – a portrait of catastrophic mental illness

Originally published a year before her death, the Danish author’s final novel is an autofictional suicide note

‘They had everything, then nothing’: the prodigies the art world forgot

Robert Colquhoun and Bobby MacBryde were once the golden boys of London’s art scene – photographed in Vogue, filmed by Ken Russell and lauded by Francis Bacon. So why did they vanish into obscurity?

‘I have no interest in the white gaze any more’: Randa Abdel-Fattah on Gaza, boycotts and her new novel

Discipline follows a journalist and an academic navigating censorship in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza – an issue the author is no stranger to herself

Rebecca F Kuang: ‘A Tale of Two Cities is deeply silly camp – I love it!’

The US writer on being switched on to romance by Sally Rooney, the magic of David Mitchell and the joy of Jean-Paul Sartre