Fiction

Murder Before Evensong by Richard Coles (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99)The first in a projected series from the pop star turned vicar and memoirist,...

“Was this how it was going to be for ever?” wonders Joyce Savigear, facing another afternoon of drudgery at EH Lacey’s department store...

Terrible jobs are a staple of literature. But it is a somewhat loaded term inviting images of scrubbing toilets, cleaning vomit, etc, when,...

“I have read some really fantastic fiction about queer women, but I have quite often felt that it leans towards the slightly gloomier...

How to describe Talk to My Back, a classic collection of graphic stories by alt-manga’s feminist star, Yamada Murasaki? These tales of thwarted-ness...

Rebecca WaitRiverrun, £16.99, pp400Sisters Alice and Hanna have spent their lives negotiating the mercurial tendencies of their manipulative mother. Hanna has escaped abroad,...

Nell Stevens’s two works of nonfiction, Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me, are about her attempts to write, respectively, a novel and...

The first thing the Japanese American author Ruth Ozeki did the morning after winning the Women’s prize for fiction was meditate. “A very...

A man keeps waking up on the same morning, over and over again. Is he going mad? Is he suffering a pesky case...

Long before Dante found himself lost in a dark wood, forests have been put to metaphorical use by storytellers. They are perhaps the...