Laura Battle and Andrew Dickson select their best mid-year reads
Ángel Gurría-Quintana selects his best mid-year reads
Alex Clark selects her best mid-year listens
James Lovegrove selects his best mid-year reads
Adam LeBor selects his best mid-year reads
Trouble at the border; dark humour in gothic tale Brat; the radical history of suburban gardening; what the Capetians and Plantagenets did for us; a new novel from Joseph O’Neill; the heroine of the Underground Railroad; social unrest in Chile; a pilgrim in search of Dostoyevsky’s soul — plus the best new environment titles
Leonid Tsypkin’s newly reissued novel fuses Soviet-inflected nostalgia with a biography of the great Russian writer
A weird and raucous novel about living and dying
A quest to find a brilliant and elusive African soccer player forms the backdrop to O’Neill’s globetrotting novel
Social ills and unrest in modern-day Chile play out in a tense and tragic story of a put-upon domestic worker
Designer diamonds, luxury yachts and hallucinogenic toads all feature in Kevin Kwan’s latest novel
’Pemi Aguda’s short stories evoke the chaos, smells, corruption and supernatural influences in Nigeria’s biggest city
An intriguing and provocative apocalyptic tale loosely inspired by ‘King Lear’
Four stories about authorship and identity within the visual arts are interspersed with observations from a shape-shifting narrator
Haunted landscapes figure prominently in recent releases, while a key voice on American dystopia receives welcome reissues
100 years after the writer’s death, what do his uncensored diaries, and a raft of new studies, reveal about what made him and his relevance in our digital age?
The ‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’ author’s second novel shows women facing the aftermath of addiction and bereavement
The 85-year-old writer’s subversive novel wades into the horror show of a 19th-century asylum ruled over by a brutal gynaecologist
A powerful story of brotherhood, friendship and extraordinary courage during the Biafran conflict
By bucking the fixation with youth and fitness, the Greek-Australian writer has delivered his most heartfelt novel yet
Based on the author’s own family history, this continent-hopping novel chronicles the relentless march of time and the people swept up by it
Author Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann on beating the bookies for ‘Kairos’, the first German novel to win the prize
Lai Wen’s novel is deeply humane account of an act of state violence that Chinese authorities have tried to erase from history
A story of passion, art and politics in the GDR is the first German novel to win the prize
The novelist’s bold writing and merciless eye make her feel like a writer for today
International Edition
