Best science fiction and fantasy books of 2019

Dystopian islands made of tech trash, a climate emergency zombie plague and the end of the internet: Adam Roberts on the most brilliant SF and fantasy of the year

Today’s science fiction, the cliche runs, is tomorrow’s science fact. Considering how SF tends towards the pessimistic, from cyberpunk’s urban cynicism in the 80s to today’s glut of post-apocalyptic dystopias, that’s a worrying thought. Still, we can’t ignore geopolitics, or the planet’s climate emergency. SF is the literature most attuned to contemporaneity’s harsh music and so remains the best predictor of our collective future.

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Best books of 2019

Need help with what to read or gift this Christmas? Our critics pick the best novels, poetry, sports, memoirs and children’s books of the year

• Bernardine Evaristo, Lee Child and more pick their favourites
• Save up to 30% on the books of the year at guardianbookshop.com

It has been a year of doubles: two Nobel laureates, two Booker winners, even two Ian McEwan books. Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan on the celebrated and overlooked books of the year, including some exceptional US novels, extraordinary translations and great short stories.

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Anonymous official’s book replaces Trump Jr’s ‘fake No 1’ on bestseller list

A Warning knocks Triggered from atop the New York Times nonfiction list amid reports Republicans attempted to boost sales

Donald Trump Jr has not seen every event on his book tour go smoothly but he has had the eager support of the Republican party in driving sales of Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

He has however lost top spot on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list to A Warning, the book by an anonymous Trump official which presents Trump Jr’s father, the president, as a menace to the republic itself.

Related: Donald Trump Jr walks out of Triggered book launch after heckling – from supporters

Related: Trump proposed sending migrants to Guantánamo, claims book by anonymous author

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DC drops Batman image after claims it supports Hong Kong unrest

Picture trailing new Frank Miller comic showed Batwoman throwing a molotov cocktail against the legend: ‘The future is young’

DC Comics has pulled an image advertising its new Batman comic on social media following an angry backlash in China, where some believed it implied support of the ongoing protests in Hong Kong.

The since-deleted image showed Batwoman throwing a molotov cocktail against a backdrop of pink lettering reading: “The future is young.” Intended to promote Frank Miller and Rafael Grampá’s forthcoming Batman title Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child, it was shared on DC’s social media earlier this week.

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Oddest book title prize: Dirt Hole Variations beats War on Artisan Cheese

Guide by the late Charles L Dobbins, known as the father of modern trapping, sees off polemical defence of traditional dairies

The Dirt Hole and Its Variations might be a serious guide to hunting and trapping foxes, coyotes, bobcats and raccoons, but the double entendre has helped it land the Diagram prize for the oddest book title of the year.

The late Charles L Dobbins’s self-published guide blew away its competition, landing 40% of the public vote to put it ahead of the second-placed Ending the War on Artisan Cheese. The award for the year’s oddest book title is given out by the Bookseller magazine, whose fictional diarist Horace Bent said it had been a standout year. Also shortlisted were How to Drink Without Drinking, Viking Encounters: Proceedings of the 18th Viking Congress, Noah Gets Naked and Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich.

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Waterstones chooses books of the year 'for a better, kinder world'

Greta Thunberg’s speeches and surprise hit The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse have together defined 2019, say booksellers

With the UK in the throes of a divisive election campaign and scientists warning that we are in a “planetary emergency”, Waterstones has chosen two titles that “call for a better and kinder world” as its books of the year.

After nominations from staff, a panel at the country’s largest book chain picked Charlie Mackesy’s illustrated call for love, friendship and kindness, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, as book of the year, and Greta Thunberg, author of No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, as author of the year. Both choices, said bookseller Kate McHale, are “testament to the extraordinary power of books to move and shape us”.

Related: A boy, a mole, a fox and a horse: the recipe for a Christmas bestseller

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'99 problems but my ABCs ain’t one': Jay-Z sues Australian woman over lyrics in children’s books

US rapper accuses Jessica Chiha and her online retailer The Little Homie of knowingly infringing on his trademarks

An Australian woman says she’ll fight US rapper Jay-Z’s copyright lawsuit because she thinks she should be able to use the Grammy winner’s name and lyrics to sell children’s books.

Jessica Chiha and her business The Little Homie are being sued in the federal court by the US billionaire, legally named Shawn Carter, who accuses them of knowingly infringing on his trademarks and misleading conduct.

Related: Poetic justice: how Jay-Z became a civil rights champion

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Clive James: 'A wisecracking literary phenomenon who was on fire with life itself'

He could put Rambo and Rimbaud in the same sentence, virtually invented TV criticism – and, from his epic poems to his chat show quips, shot an Aussie rocket into the English language. Robert McCrum pays tribute to his great friend

The death of Clive James breaks as its own kind of “fake news”, a moment so long anticipated and imagined – not least by its irrepressible protagonist, merrily riffing on Mark Twain and the rumours of his death being “exaggerated” – that now Clive is no longer with us, it’s hard to take in, to comprehend or quite believe.

For his readers and fans, his audience, this is a moment of infinite sorrow at the passing of a beloved Australian, a supreme entertainer, and a polyvalent literary wizard who, in “the home stretch” (as he called it) managed to be courageous, witty, stoical, inspiring, provocative and sublime, often simultaneously.

Related: Clive James obituary

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Research overturns consensus that Molière did not write his own plays

Analysis by French academics finds scant evidence to support accepted view that the classic plays were written by a better educated man

For at least a century, scholars have argued that the supposed lack of education of Molière, the French playwright responsible for seminal masterpieces including Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope, means he could not have written them. Now academics say they have resolved the controversy once and for all, using an algorithm to find that Molière – born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622– was the author of all his plays.

Molière’s father was one of the appointed furnishers of the royal household, but his son rejected this career for a life on the stage, touring, acting and writing the searing comic plays that would change the face of French theatre. In 1919, French writer Pierre Louÿs claimed that the poet Pierre Corneille had ghostwritten Molière’s most famous works. Since then, questions about Molière’s level of education, his busy schedule and the rarity of surviving manuscripts have kept the debate going.

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Clive James, writer, broadcaster and TV critic, dies aged 80

James died at his home in Cambridge on Sunday almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis

Clive James, the broadcaster, poet and television critic, has died aged 80 after a long illness.

His agent confirmed the Australian passed away at his home in Cambridge on Sunday, while a private funeral attended by family and close friends took place in the chapel at Pembroke College, Cambridge, on Wednesday afternoon.

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Bad sex award: shortlist announced for 'Britain's most dreaded literary prize'

Dubious honour lines up contenders for the year’s most ‘outstandingly awful’ sexual scene, with Elizabeth Gilbert and Didier Decoin among the nominees

Describing itself as “Britain’s most dreaded literary prize”, the Literary Review’s Bad sex in fiction award has unveiled this year’s shortlist, which ranges from Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author of Eat Pray Love, to the acclaimed French novelist Didier Decoin.

Dreamed up in 1993 by its editor Auberon Waugh and critic Rhoda Koenig, the award is for “the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel”. It is intended to draw attention to “the poorly written, redundant, or downright cringeworthy passages of sexual description in modern fiction”.

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Corbyn: I guarantee libraries will be protected under Labour

Party leader says that cuts-hit service gave him ‘a fantastic start in life and I want that for everybody’

Jeremy Corbyn has said that he can guarantee he will protect public libraries if Labour gets into power.

Speaking at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London on Sunday, the Labour leader attacked the Conservatives’ policy on libraries, saying that the party knows “the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

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Irish novelist Edna O'Brien wins lifetime achievement award

Country Girls author receives £40,000 David Cohen prize seen as Nobel precursor

Edna O’Brien has been awarded a £40,000 lifetime achievement prize regarded as a precursor to the Nobel, for having “moved mountains both politically and lyrically through her writing” in a career spanning almost 60 years.

The Irish author was presented with the £40,000 David Cohen prize at a ceremony in London on Tuesday night.

Related: Edna O’Brien: ‘I want to go out as someone who spoke the truth’

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Debut author of Queenie caps success with Costa prize shortlisting

Candice Carty-Williams, who began writing to improve representation of black British characters in fiction, joins 19 other authors contending for prestigious book of the year honour

Candice Carty-Williams never planned on being an author, but applied to join a writing retreat in 2016 because she felt that black British authors needed more representation in the white world of publishing. Three years down the line, sales of her debut novel Queenie are booming, a Channel 4 adaptation is in the works, and she’s just been shortlisted for the Costa book awards.

The story of a young black Londoner negotiating her love life, career and family, Queenie is, according to the judges for the Costas’ first novel category, “eminently readable, funny and thought-provoking”. It’s up for the £5,000 debut prize along with Brian Bilston’s Diary of a Somebody, about a man who decides to write a poem every day for a year; Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton, a historical fiction about a maid’s trial for the murder of her master and mistress; and Joanna Glen’s story of a girl who doesn’t fit in, The Other Half of Augusta Hope.

Related: Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams review – timely and important

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AI 'reveals Shakespeare and Fletcher’s different roles in Henry VIII'

Czech academic Petr Plechac has run tiny pieces of text through a new algorithm that he says identifies their distinct contributions

When the scholar James Spedding analysed the authorship of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in 1850, he pored over the details of the text and eventually attributed the play not only to the Bard, but to his successor at the King’s Men theatre company, John Fletcher. Now 169 years later, an academic has used artificial intelligence to back up Spedding’s theory and pin down exactly who wrote what.

Petr Plechac from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague trained an algorithm on scenes from Shakespeare’s later plays Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, and on Fletcher’s Valentinian, Monsieur Thomas, The Woman’s Prize and Bonduca. He also ran a selection of scenes from works by Philip Massinger, Fletcher’s successor at the King’s Men and another possible candidate for authorship of Henry VIII, through the algorithm.

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Republicans bulk bought Donald Trump Jr's Triggered book

Reports claim title hit No 1 in bestseller list thanks in part to $94,800 advance purchase

The mystery over whether Donald Trump Jr’s new book deserved its place at No 1 in the New York Times bestseller list deepened as it emerged that the Republican National Committee (RNC) spent $94,800 (£74,000) on a bulk order of the book a week before it was released.

Triggered, billed as the book the “left doesn’t want you to read”, was published on 5 November, and heavily promoted by the RNC, which emailed supporters offering signed copies for sale. It went on to top the prestigious hardcover nonfiction list.

Related: Donald Trump Jr's Triggered: a litany of trolling and insults worthy of his father

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George Eliot translation of Spinoza sheds new light on her fiction

Novelist’s work on the philosopher’s landmark Ethics helped develop her astute grasp of human emotion

Having languished in obscurity for more than a century, a new edition of George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics will be published next year, shedding new light on the creator of Middlemarch.

The author, born Mary Ann Evans, completed her translation of this central text of western philosophy in 1856, before she had taken on her pen name and while she was living in Berlin with George Lewes. If a publisher had taken it up, it would have been the first translation of the Ethics into English. But Lewes fell out with publisher Henry Bohn over £25, and the work fell by the wayside while Evans moved on to fiction and her nom de plume with the publication of Scenes from Clerical Life in 1857 and Adam Bede in 1859.

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The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson review – stunning conclusion

Stories of alien invasion are rarely told from the perspective of the formerly colonised – this series set in a future Nigeria expands the SF genre

The Rosewater Redemption is the third volume in the Wormwood trilogy by Nigerian-British author Tade Thompson. It concludes a major new work of science fiction, one that mixes and matches familiar tropes with an unfamiliar setting, and in so doing changes their significance.

The first volume, Rosewater, won the Arthur C Clarke award earlier this year and is set in a mid-2060s Nigeria. Fifty years earlier, a gigantic alien lifeform dubbed Wormwood crashed into London and sank into the ground. Moving through the Earth’s crust, Wormwood re-emerged in Nigeria, where it unleashed alien animals and bacteria, but also began healing illness and injury. The city that sprang up around this healing spring called itself Rosewater.

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Barbara Taylor Bradford writing prequel to A Woman of Substance

Novelist says she returned to the story that made her name 40 years ago as she struggled to cope after her husband’s death

Barbara Taylor Bradford’s husband, Robert Bradford, always told her: “Keep writing if anything happens to me, it’s your solace as well as your career.” So when he died of a stroke this summer, it was natural for her to pick up her pen. But after 55 years of marriage, Bradford was surprised to find herself returning to the blockbuster novel that made her name in 1979: A Woman of Substance.

A prequel, Blackie and Emma, is due to be published next year, taking readers back before the start of her rags-to-riches bestseller with the story of Blackie O’Neill, the closest friend of Bradford’s most famous heroine, Emma Harte.

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Home of one of first Bibles printed in Welsh saved from flood risk

Hydropower scheme at William Morgan’s 16th-century house to keep humidity levels in check

One of the most important sites in the history of the Welsh language is being protected from the threat of flooding and heavy rainfall by harnessing the element that is putting it at risk.

The upland farmhouse Tŷ Mawr Wybrnant in Snowdonia, north Wales, is the birthplace of Bishop William Morgan, whose translation of the Bible in the 16th century was a key moment for the Welsh language.

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Marieke Hardy steps down as Melbourne Writers Festival artistic director

Festival spokeswoman says organisation’s financial position had nothing to do with Hardy’s departure

Marieke Hardy has quit her post as artistic director of the Melbourne Writers Festival two years into a three-year contract as the organisation grapples with a cost blowout and historic deficit.

Hardy announced at a donor event on Thursday night that she was stepping down.

Related: Broadside 2019: how a feminist festival took on feminism – and forced us to think harder

Related: 'Setting us up to fail': funding uncertainty brings arts companies to a crisis point

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Oxford Dictionaries declares 'climate emergency' the word of 2019

Usage of the term increased 100-fold in the space of 12 months, dictionary says

Oxford Dictionaries has declared “climate emergency” the word of the year for 2019, following a hundred-fold increase in usage that it says demonstrated a “greater immediacy” in the way we talk about the climate.

Defined as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it”, Oxford said the words soared from “relative obscurity” to “one of the most prominent – and prominently debated – terms of 2019.”

Related: The climate science is clear: it's now or never to avert catastrophe | Bill McKibben

The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. Instead of “climate change”, the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”.

Related: Global heating supercharging Indian Ocean climate system

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National Book Awards: Susan Choi wins fiction award for Trust Exercise

Queer writer Edmund White was also honored with a medal for distinguished contribution to American letters

Susan Choi has won the fiction prize at the National Book Awards in New York on Wednesday night. The celebrated author won for her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, about teens attending an elite drama school in the south during the ’80s which was praised for its bold experimentations with narrative and form.

Trust Exercise beat out Sabrina & Corina: Stories by Kali Fajarado-Anstine; Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James; The Other Americans by Laila Lalami; and Disappearing Earth by Julie Phillips for the top prize.

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Marco Polo parchment sheds light on last year of his life in Venice

Document supports theory that Polo had close ties to friars who may have helped edit travel book

Researchers in Venice have discovered a document that strengthens the theory that a group of friars played a hand in the revision of Marco Polo’s book about his travels.

The legendary merchant and explorer set off from Venice in 1271 at the age of 17 and spent more than two decades travelling through Asia. He returned to Venice in 1295 and was imprisoned in Genoa three years later after becoming embroiled in a naval conflict between the two cities.

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Former Baltimore mayor faces fraud and tax evasion charges

Federal indictment accuses Catherine Pugh of using her Healthy Holly children’s books to promote her career and fund mayoral run

The disgraced former mayor of Baltimore has been charged with fraud and tax evasion involving sales of her self-published children’s books.

An 11-count federal indictment unsealed Wednesday accuses Catherine Pugh of using her Healthy Holly children’s books to enrich herself, promote her political career and fund her run for mayor.

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Author hits back after West Virginia library removes LGBT picture book from shelves

‘Gay adults grew up reading straight romances,’ says writer Daniel Haack after US library withdraws Prince & Knight from shelves

The author of a rhyming picture book removed from the shelves of a West Virginia library has hit back at protesters, suggesting that anyone concerned the book could “turn someone gay” should remember “all the gay adults who grew up only reading about straight romances”.

Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack was pulled from West Virginia’s Upshur County public library earlier this week, according to local press reports, after a local church minister called it “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children, especially boys, into the LGBTQA lifestyle”. The book tells the story of a prince and a knight who fall in love, ending on the lines: “And on the two men’s wedding day, the air filled with cheer and laughter, / for the prince and his shining knight would live happily ever after”. Pastor Josh Layfield told parents that putting the book on library shelves was “an intentional leading of children into sin”.

Prince & Knight is meant to be a fun little adventure story to reflect the reality of millions of families not seen in other children’s stories

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World's first printed Christmas card goes on display at Dickens museum

Printed in 1843, the hand-coloured card originally sold for one shilling and shaped the popular tradition

The world’s first printed Christmas card, an artwork created in 1843 that went on to spawn a global industry, has gone on show at the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

Designed by Henry Cole and illustrated by John Callcott Horsley, in the same year that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published, the hand-coloured card shows a family gathered around a table enjoying a glass of wine with a message: “A merry Christmas and a happy new year to you.”

Related: How the Ikea Christmas ad brought grime to the masses | Jeffrey Boakye

The exhibition, Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas, runs at the novelist’s former London home, now a museum, until 19 April 2020.

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Baillie Gifford prize won by Jack the Ripper study ‘reclaiming victims' voices’

Hallie Rubenhold lands £50,000 award for The Five, a history that challenges assumption that the women were all sex workers

• Interview with Hallie Rubenhold: ‘Jack the Ripper’s victims have just become corpses. Can’t we do better?’

Social historian Hallie Rubenhold has won the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction for The Five, a book about the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper described by the judges as “a great moral act”.

Related: The Five by Hallie Rubenhold review – the untold lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims

Related: Why have we forgotten Jack the Ripper's victims? – books podcast

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Ever heard of Blade Runner: A Movie? No, not that one

There’s Ridley Scott’s film. There’s the Philip K Dick’s book it was based on. And then there is William Burroughs’ forgotten screenplay-turned-novella

Have you read the book Blade Runner: A Movie? It’s not the book of the movie Blade Runner – the book of that movie is called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade Runner: A Movie isn’t even a movie. Though it was meant to be. The movie of a book called The Bladerunner. Another book, written by someone else entirely, unconnected to Blade Runner, the movie, or Blade Runner: A Movie, the book.

Phew. Shall I start again?

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Ever heard of Blade Runner: A Movie? No, not that one

There’s Ridley Scott’s film. There’s the Philip K Dick’s book it was based on. And then there is William Burroughs’ forgotten screenplay-turned-novella

Have you read the book Blade Runner: A Movie? It’s not the book of the movie Blade Runner – the book of that movie is called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade Runner: A Movie isn’t even a movie. Though it was meant to be. The movie of a book called The Bladerunner. Another book, written by someone else entirely, unconnected to Blade Runner, the movie, or Blade Runner: A Movie, the book.

Phew. Shall I start again?

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Brontë Society secures last of Charlotte's minute teenage books

Charity raises £512,000 to buy tiny handwritten work and bring it pack for public display in the Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire

After years of chasing an “incredibly rare” little book by the teenage Charlotte Brontë, the Brontë Society has succeeded in acquiring it at auction, after fears that it would disappear into private hands again.

At a Paris auction on Monday, the charity paid €600,000 (£512,000) plus auction costs to acquire the book, which measures just 35mm x 61mm. Written in 1830, when Charlotte was 14, it is part of a series of six produced by the author in her teens. Only five are known to have survived, with one missing since around 1930.

Related: Judi Dench appeals for public help to bring rare Brontë book to UK as auction looms

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Brontë's miniature manuscript and a defiant protest: Monday's best photos

The Guardian’s picture editors select highlights from around the world

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China threatens Sweden after Gui Minhai wins free speech award

Embassy hits out at judges and warns of ‘consequences’ after the Tucholsky prize goes to jailed Hong Kong publisher

Sweden’s prime minister has rejected threats from China that Sweden will “suffer the consequences” for awarding a freedom of speech prize to the detained Chinese-born Swedish publisher Gui Minhai.

Gui was one of the five Hong Kong-based publishers and booksellers who disappeared in 2015 having printed books critical of the Chinese government. He reappeared in 2016 in custody, saying on Chinese state television that he had surrendered after fleeing a fatal drink-driving incident 11 years before. Released in 2017 but prevented from leaving China, Gui was seized by plainclothes police while travelling to Beijing with two Swedish diplomats in January 2018. Since being filmed making what supporters believe was a confession under duress, he has been imprisoned.

Related: 'A very scary movie': how China snatched Gui Minhai on the 11.10 train to Beijing

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Margaret Atwood: Booker prize-winning author to tour Australia next year

Acclaimed Canadian writer will speak in Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart and Perth from 16 February

Margaret Atwood will embark on a speaking tour of Australia next year to celebrate publication of The Testaments, the Booker prize-winning sequel to her seminal 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Canadian author will tour major capital cities in February and March, less than 12 months after her one-night-only show at the Sydney Opera House this year.

Related: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo share Booker prize 2019

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War of words breaks out after YA novelist’s fans go after critical reader

Twitterstorm unleashed after Sarah Dessen reveals hurt feelings about graduate’s wish to see her dropped from university curriculum

A bestselling author’s decision to respond to a recent graduate who criticised her books in a local newspaper has seen the graduate bombarded with online abuse and her university apologise for her comments.

YA author Sarah Dessen retweeted a story from South Dakota’s Aberdeen News to her 268,700 Twitter followers in which the graduate, Brooke Nelson, spoke about joining a committee at Northern State University to help choose a book that new students would be required to read on its Common Read course. Nelson said she had joined specifically to speak out against Dessen’s novels being included.

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Triggered, Donald Trump Jr's #1 bestseller, under fire for inflating sales

New polemic against ‘leftwing hate’ has topped US book chart, but there are indications its success was fed by bulk purchases

More than 30 years ago, Donald Trump is reported to have ordered key staff to buy thousands of copies of The Art of the Deal to make it seem more popular than it was. Now his eldest son Donald Trump Junior has been accused of doing the same thing for his diatribe Triggered, after the New York Times bestseller list revealed its sales had been boosted by bulk purchases.

Published on 5 November and dedicated by Trump Jr to “the deplorables”, Triggered topped the NYT’s non-fiction chart this week. But the newspaper has added a dagger beside the book to indicate that “some retailers report receiving bulk orders”.

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Baudelaire’s unknown extra verse to erotic poem revealed

New lines to The Jewels, inscribed in a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal, has been unveiled as the volume comes up for auction

More than 150 years ago, Charles Baudelaire scrawled an extra verse of his erotic poem The Jewels into a copy of his landmark collection Les Fleurs du Mal. The stanza has never been made public, with the book’s previous owner wanting to keep it private, but ahead of its auction next week, the lines have been revealed to the world.

The Jewels was one of six Baudelaire poems banned by a French court in 1857, less than two months after Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) was published, and the poet and his publisher prosecuted for offence to public decency. The court ruled that the erotic verses – beginning “La très chère était nue”, or “My darling was naked” – would “necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses by a crude realism offensive to public decency”. The conviction was only overturned in 1949.

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Rushdie and Atwood join calls to restore citizenship to critic of Modi

More than 250 authors urge India’s prime minister to reinstate overseas citizenship of British journalist Aatish Taseer

Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk and Margaret Atwood are among more than 250 authors calling on India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to review the decision to strip British Indian writer Aatish Taseer of his Indian citizenship, saying that the move “flies in the face of India’s traditions of free and open debate”.

Taseer, who was born in the UK but grew up in India, is a novelist, memoirist and journalist. In May, he wrote a cover story for Time magazine under the headline “India’s divider in chief”, which was highly critical of Modi’s government. Last week, Taseer was stripped of his overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status, meaning he may be blacklisted and thus never able to return to the country, according to the free-speech organisation PEN.

The boy who once sold tea at a railway station has become the most influential Indian leader in generations, winning a landslide in the 2019 elections. Or so goes the story that has become the core of Narendra Modi’s extraordinary appeal.

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The Supernova Era by Cixin Liu review – a world without adults

Only the young survive in this fascinating thought experiment by the author of The Three-Body Problem

The jacket for Cixin Liu’s new novel carries a blurb from none other than Barack Obama: “Wildly imaginative, really interesting … The scope of it was immense.” What the publishers rather disingenuously neglect to specify is that this and the other glowing review snippets are not for the present book at all, but for the multi-award-winning, global phenomenon that was his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, beginning with The Three-Body Problem (first published in English in 2014). Those novels are indeed a monumental and wondrous achievement: a mind-bending hard-sci fi epic peopled by vivid and lovable characters, in which the story just happens to explain why we have the laws of physics we observe.

Admirers of that sensational triptych will find something rather different in The Supernova Era, which Liu actually wrote in 2003, before the first Chinese edition of The Three-Body Problem in 2007. Though it is adorned with the colourful nebulae of space-opera art, it is primarily a work of speculative sociology.

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Trump proposed sending undocumented migrants to Guantánamo, anonymous book claims

Plan to designate unlawful migrants as ‘enemy combatants’ provoked astonishment and mortification, says author of A Warning

Donald Trump proposed designating all migrants entering the US without permission as “enemy combatants” and shipping them to Guantánamo Bay to be detained alongside hardened terrorism suspects, according to a new book written by an anonymous author described as “a senior official in the Trump administration”.

Related: Trump cared more about investigating Biden than Ukraine, key witness reveals

Are you fucking kidding me? This is completely batshit

A crass and blunt public speaker, an immoral man who frequently sued his opponents

Related: 'Fascinating. He's being pinned down': voters on Trump impeachment drama

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Eight sentences over 1,000 pages: Lucy Ellmann 'masterpiece' wins Goldsmiths prize

Ducks, Newburyport wins £10,000 prize for fiction that ‘breaks the mould’ of the novel, a month after missing out on the Booker

Lucy Ellmann’s 1,000-page novel Ducks, Newburyport has won the £10,000 Goldsmiths prize for “fiction at its most novel”, praised by judges as a “masterpiece”.

Ducks, Newburyport is the stream-of-consciousness internal monologue of a mother in Ohio as she bakes pies in her kitchen. Made up of just eight sentences, with no paragraph breaks, its ambitious form led to it being turned down by Ellman’s previous publisher, Bloomsbury. It later found a home at independent press Galley Beggar and was shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize.

Related: 'I want world domination!' Lucy Ellmann on her Booker behemoth Ducks, Newburyport – books podcast

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Judi Dench appeals for public help to bring rare Brontë book to UK as auction looms

A miniature book by the teenage Charlotte Brontë could fetch at least £650,000 in Paris next week, and Haworth’s Parsonage museum hopes to buy it with crowdfunding

Judi Dench, Jacqueline Wilson and Tracy Chevalier are among several names throwing their weight behind the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s bid to keep one of Charlotte Brontë’s tiny manuscripts from being “shut away in a private collection”, with public donations topping £50,000 with just a week to go before the miniature book is auctioned.

Written in 1830 when Brontë was 14, the manuscript measures just 35mm x 61mm and features three hand-written stories, one of which describes a murderer who is driven to madness when he is haunted by his victims. In private ownership since the death of Charlotte in 1855, the last of the famous literary sisters to die, it is one of six tiny booklets produced by the writer at the Parsonage in Haworth. Only five are known to have survived, and the museum owns the remaining four of the “little books”.

Related: Charlotte Brontë's hair found in ring on Antiques Roadshow, say experts

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Zadie Smith's first play to reimagine Chaucer in borough of Brent

The Wife of Willesden to be staged for London borough of culture celebrations next year

Zadie Smith is to reimagine Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale for a new production billed as a gift to her home borough of Brent.

Smith’s first play, titled The Wife of Willesden, was announced on Tuesday as a highlight of the programme next year when Brent in north-west London becomes the capital’s second borough of culture.

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John Bercow announces 'candid' memoir, Unspeakable

Two weeks after stepping down, the former Speaker and MP is set to reveal his thoughts on David Cameron and Boris Johnson in his book, released in February 2020

Two weeks after stepping down as Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow has announced that he will publish his memoirs in February next year.

Titled Unspeakable, the book was acquired by Weidenfeld & Nicolson after significant interest from publishers, with one insider telling the Guardian that the deal was “comfortably” into six figures.

Related: John Bercow: ‘I may be pompous and an irritant. But I am completely authentic’

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Melissa Lucashenko wins top prize at Queensland Premier's Literary Awards with 'risky' novel

The $25,000 award for Too Much Lip follows her Miles Franklin win earlier this year

Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Too Much Lip has scooped up the top prize at this year’s Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.

The Goorie author can now add the $25,000 Queensland Premier’s award for a work of state significance to her accolades, following her Miles Franklin win in June this year.

Related: Miles Franklin 2019 winner Melissa Lucashenko: 'We need a revolution'

Related: Archie Roach's Took the Children Away: the story behind the stolen generations lament

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'Extraordinary' letters between Ian Fleming and wife to be sold

More than 160 letters written over 20 years shine light on James Bond author’s life

An extraordinary stash of letters that shine a light on the tangled relationship between James Bond creator Ian Fleming and his wife Ann, from their intense and secret affair to the bitter end of their marriage, are to appear at auction.

Sotheby’s is selling more than 160 letters between the couple, written over 20 years. Gabriel Heaton, a specialist in books and manuscripts at the auction house, said the letters in their scope and scale provided what “must surely be an unmatchable record of the life of the author as his fortunes changed”.

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Donald Trump Jr walks out of Triggered book launch – video

Donald Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, were forced to cut short a launch event for his book, Triggered: How The Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, at the University of California, in Los Angeles, because of loud booing from the audience.

The audience was angry that Trump Jr and Guilfoyle would not take questions.

Trump Jr tried to argue that taking questions risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would distort

• Donald Trump Jr walks out of Triggered book launch after heckling – from supporters

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Ian Rankin relaunches the novel he once hoped to bury

The author now sees his ‘lost’ book Westwind as pacey and prescient

It is an unusual promotional gambit before a book launch. Ian Rankin has revealed that he once disowned his novel, Westwind, and hoped it would “never … see the light of day again”.

When he first produced the manuscript, 30 years ago, he was told to change it so many times that he started “to lose belief in my abilities” and began “doubting my future as a publishable writer”, he has said. Only 1,000 hardbacks were printed when it was first published in 1990.

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Elena Ferrante’s mysteries come home to narrow Naples streets where people bury their past

We visit the hilltop district whose charms and complexity inspired the author’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults

Elena Ferrante’s new novel dominates the window display of Raffaello, a bookshop in the Naples neighbourhood of Rione Alto, and stacks of copies fill its tiny interior.

The presence of a bookshop is among the first notable distinctions between Rione Alto, the main location for La Vita Bugiarda Degli Adulti (The Lying Life of Adults), and Rione Luzzatti, the neglected, rundown area where Ferrante’s phenomenally successful quartet of books that began with My Brilliant Friend are believed to have been set.

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A boy, a mole, a fox and a horse: the recipe for a Christmas bestseller

Charlie Mackesy’s drawing of a boy and a horse was a sensation online – now the book that image inspired is topping the charts

When he sat down to draw a boy talking to a horse, the illustrator Charlie Mackesy was working out his own feelings. But his drawing of a horse confessing the bravest thing he’s ever said was “Help” became an online sensation. The book that image inspired is now topping charts on both sides of the Atlantic, with Mackesy’s publisher printing hundreds of thousands of copies to meet demand.

Mackesy, who has been a cartoonist for the Spectator and a book illustrator for Oxford University Press, says the straightforward, heartfelt conversations between the characters in The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse were drawn from “conversations I’ve had with my friends about what life really means, what’s important; it was a way for me to think aloud on paper with words and drawings.”

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The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz; The Complete Short Stories of Mike Carey; The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North; Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood; and Rise by Kim Lakin-Smith

Annalee Newitz combines time travel, multi-alternative realities and feminist politics in the fast-paced, complex and mind-bending The Future of Another Timeline (Orbit, £8.99), a follow-up to her well-received 2017 debut Autonomous. Time travel has always existed through the agency of the Machines, five mysterious devices situated at various points around the world since the Cambrian era, which allow travellers to make small changes to history that will affect the future. The novel follows Tess in her fight against a misogynist cabal known as the Comstockers, named after the 19th-century US anti-vice moralist Anthony Comstock. The Comstockers are using the Machines to edit history and will stop at nothing to eradicate women of influence, as well as gay and transgender people, in order to build a male-dominated future. There are echoes of Joanna Russ as Newitz deploys her extensive knowledge of feminism, gender politics and history in a compulsively readable novel of controlled anger that, despite the horror, offers hope.

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Else Fitzgerald wins 2019 Richell prize for short stories that 'feel like a revelation'

Judges hail collection on the challenge of climate change, Nearly Curtains, as ‘a firework show of bursting ideas’

• Read an extract from the award-winning collection here

When writer Else Fitzgerald was a kid, drought sent her family bankrupt.

They owned a nursery in regional Victoria. “We lived our lives by the weather,” Fitzgerald said. “So I have this fascination with how people deal with the challenges of climate change.”

Related: Being a crime writer doesn’t mean I condone murder. Do I even have to say it? | Garry Disher

Related: Australian literature in universities is under threat, but cultural cringe isn’t the reason why | Julieanne Lamond

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Anonymous tell-all book likens Trump to '12-year-old in air traffic control tower' – report

Book by figure described as administration official says colleagues considered mass resignations to raise alarm, according to Washington Post

The anonymous author of a widely anticipated book on the Trump White House has described the US president as spiraling from crisis to crisis “like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower”, according to scathing extracts published by the Washington Post on Thursday.

The unnamed author, identified only as “a senior official in the Trump administration”, also says that colleagues considered resigning en masse in order to raise alarm about the president’s conduct, but ultimately decided against it, according to the Post.

Related: Biden, Clinton, investigations: the three words Trump wanted to hear on Ukraine

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University of Western Australia's decision to close publishing house sparks outrage

Decision to shut UWA Publishing, which published works by multiple Miles Franklin winners, came ‘out of the blue’

The University of Western Australia’s surprise decision to shut down its publishing house has prompted outrage and protest from the Australian literary community.

The fate of the 84-year-old publishing house, UWA Publishing, was communicated via a “proposal for change” circulated by the university’s senior management on Tuesday, blindsiding staff.

Related: Australian literature in universities is under threat, but cultural cringe isn’t the reason why | Julieanne Lamond

As a long-time fan of @terriannwhite and the work of others at @uwapublishing I am shocked and saddened to hear of this decision. Another blow to Australian literature at a time when it's already under attack on multiple fronts.

Very sad news for Australian readers, writers and thinkers, given the important work published by @uwapublishing and @terriannwhite. https://t.co/2PfK1tNhE7

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Women's writing began much earlier than supposed, finds academic

The first female English authors were thought to have begun writing in the later middle ages, but a new book claims the tradition dates back to the eighth century

The eighth-century abbess who wrote the first surviving example of poetry known to have been authored by an Englishwoman. Or her contemporary, a nun who wrote the first full-length prose text known to be English. A new history of women’s writing argues that there was a thriving female literature far earlier than previously believed, and that earlier histories have deliberately excluded or marginalised the contributions of early medieval women.

The first English women’s writing is usually dated to the later middle ages, to the likes of the 12th-century courtly writer Marie de France and 14th-century visionaries Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.

Hugeburc's authorship was only discovered in the 20th century, when her name was found to be encrypted in the manuscript

Related: Archive shows medieval nun faked her own death to escape convent

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‘Climate strike’ named 2019 word of the year by Collins Dictionary

Reflecting increasingly politicised language, this year’s contenders also included ‘rewilding’ and ‘hopepunk’

In a year when global protests over the climate crisis were staged from Afghanistan to Vietnam, Extinction Rebellion demonstrations stopped traffic in major cities and Greta Thunberg called for young people to skip school to fight political inaction, “climate strike” has been named Collins Dictionary’s 2019 word of the year.

Each year, the dictionary’s lexicographers monitor a 9.5bn word corpus and make a list of 10 new and notable terms. One of these is crowned the word of the year. Climate strike’s definition is “a form of protest in which people absent themselves from education or work in order to join demonstrations demanding action to counter climate change.”

climate strike (noun): a form of protest in which people absent themselves from education or work in order to join demonstrations demanding action to counter climate change.

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Ferrante fever grows as fans gather across Italy for new book launch

Reading vigils held for release of author’s first novel in four years, set in 1990s Naples

Reading vigils are being held across Italy as fans of Elena Ferrante gather for the release of the author’s new book, her first novel in four years.

Ferrante’s Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O, was careful not to give too much away, issuing only a short extract in early September indicating the story takes place in Naples, the same setting for her phenomenally successful quartet of books that began with My Brilliant Friend.

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Jailed Turkish author Ahmet Altan freed after three years

The 69-year-old, whose prison memoir I Will Never See the World Again was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, has been released after retrial

The jailed Turkish author Ahmet Altan, whose detention was condemned by 38 Nobel laureates, has been released from prison after more than three years behind bars.

The 69-year-old was arrested in 2016 with his brother, the economist and journalist Mehmet Altan, on allegations of spreading “subliminal messages announcing a military coup” on television. Alongside journalist Nazlı Ilıcak, the Altan brothers were charged with attempting to overthrow constitutional order, interfering with the work of the national assembly and the government.

A moment of #freedom for #AhmetAltan, who gets to see the world again. Priceless. Big appreciation to @englishpen @pen_int @P24Punto24 @GrantaBooks @SRausingTrust @Elif_Safak @YaseminCongar_ and the many others in Turkey and around the world who persisted. pic.twitter.com/B7ed5us4yA

Related: Jailed Turkish writer Ahmet Altan: My words cannot be imprisoned

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Ernest J Gaines, author of A Lesson Before Dying, dies aged 86

The acclaimed, award-winning novelist was known for his stories of the African American experience in the south

The novelist Ernest J Gaines, whose poor childhood in a small Louisiana plantation town germinated the stories of black struggles that grew into universal stories of grace and beauty, has died. He was 86.

The Louisiana governor’s office on Tuesday released word of his death.

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Discworld dishes Moby-Dick: BBC unveils 100 ‘novels that shaped our world’

Panel of experts charged with listing the fiction that has affected them most goes for bestsellers as well as literary classics

There’s no Wuthering Heights, no Moby-Dick, no Ulysses, but there is Half of a Yellow Sun, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Discworld: so announced the panel of experts assembled by the BBC to draw up a list of 100 novels that shaped their world.

The choices were made by Stig Abell, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Syima Aslam, founder of the Bradford literature festival, authors Juno Dawson, Kit de Waal and Alexander McCall Smith and journalist Mariella Frostrup. The list is intended to mark the 200th anniversary of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, widely seen as the progenitor of the English-language novel.

Related: The 100 best books of the 21st century

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Richard Ford’s literary honour questioned by peers after history of aggressive behaviour

The Paris Review’s decision to give Ford the Hadada prize has been criticised in light of conduct that has included spitting on Colson Whitehead

The Paris Review’s decision to award its august lifetime achievement prize to Richard Ford has been criticised, with readers pointing to the American novelist’s history of poor conduct, such as when he spat in the face of fellow writer Colson Whitehead.

Ford will be presented with the Hadada prize in April by Bruce Springsteen, who once described Ford’s work as “poignant and hilarious”. Ford follows in the footsteps of previous winners including Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion, with the magazine saying that his “writing has been commended for its ‘linguistic mastery … rivalled by few, if any’ and for the ‘terse poetry’ he brings to his prose”.

Related: Richard Ford should swallow his pride over Colson Whitehead's bad review

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Book clinic: which fantasy novelists can I turn to now that Terry Pratchett is gone?

Author Eoin Colfer, who wrote the final book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, advises a bereft reader

Q: I am reeling from the still painful demise of Sir Terry Pratchett. Which fantasy novels can I lose myself in now while also giggling at the satire and musing at the pathos?
Ben Sturgeon, 49, Humbie, Scotland, veterinary director for a working animal charity

Eoin Colfer, author of children’s fantasy novels including the acclaimed Artemis Fowl series, writes:

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500 years after the expulsion of Spain’s Jews, medieval Bible comes home

Priceless volume that survived centuries after exile of its persecuted owners finally returns to Galicia

On a summer’s day in 1476 a scribe called Moses Ibn Zabarah put the finishing touches to an enormous and magnificently illustrated Hebrew Bible commissioned by the son of a wealthy Jewish family from Galicia, north-western Spain.

“The blessed Lord grant that he study it, he and his children and his children’s children throughout all generations,” he wrote.

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