Deborah Levy: ‘A writer’s career is choppy – I was 50 when I found success’

Her ‘living autobiographies’ and novels have earned her legions of fans, but that success was hard won. Deborah Levy talks about stamina, boldness, and finding delight in the details

Gliff by Ali Smith review – reading the signs of crisis

Two children decode a dystopia, in a chilling and wistful novel that speaks to our times

The new folk horror: nature is coming to kill you!

In The Loney and Starve Acre, the novelist has tapped into a rich seam of rural menace. As his new collection Barrowbeck is published, he considers how today’s fictions are haunted by climate anxiety

The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade review – comic novel or conceptual art project?

The author’s alter ego is on a quest to uncover the life and work of his playwright idol in this whimsical debut

The Hotel by Daisy Johnson review – chilling tales for Halloween

There are shades of The Shining and Shirley Jackson in these atmospheric short stories set around a haunted hotel in the Fens

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer review – a thrilling coda to an otherworldly trilogy

This follow-up to the Southern Reach series again explores the mysteries of Area X

Crime and thrillers of the month – review

Agatha Christie meets Saw in rural Essex, dark secrets of the wellbeing industry uncovered and a gripping tale of revenge on the privileged

Novelist and poet Paul Bailey dies at 87

The twice Booker prize-shortlisted author was best known for his novels, which included At the Jerusalem and Gabriel’s Lament

The Hotel by Daisy Johnson review – eerie and elegant gothic tales

This striking short story collection, set in a spooky hotel in the Fens, offers a fierce interrogation of women’s roles in the folk horror world

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz review – witty, tightly plotted follow-up

The sequel to bestselling thriller The Plot takes the wife of the first novel’s protagonist and throws her into a satisfyingly twisty, literary satire

In brief: Jeremy Catto; Haunted Tales; A Ballet of Lepers – review

An affectionate biography of an old-school Oxford don; an atmospheric collection of spooky stories; and a darkly humorous reminder of Leonard Cohen’s early literary gifts

Eliza Clark: ‘I don’t think we respect female writers’

The British novelist on including content warnings in her first short story collection, why she struggles at book signings and the ‘flagrant sexism’ female authors are subjected to

‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump

Enthusiasm can be a productive force for good, but our culture has rapidly become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in

Novelist Jonathan Coe: ‘Liz Truss was very unimpressed to meet me’

His new novel is set during the former PM’s brief premiership, so what happened when they had dinner? The author on politics, cosy crime and bingeing Friends

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk review – hallucinogenic horrors

The Nobel laureate’s riff on The Magic Mountain takes on a darkly surreal life of its own in this tale of a young man’s visit to a health resort