Roald Dahl's BFG becomes Guid and Freendly in Scots translation

Marking the much loved author’s centenary, new version reconstructs the classic children’s character, ‘fower times as lang as the langest human’

He eats “foosty feechcumbers” rather than snozzcumbers and drinks fuzzleglog rather than frobscottle, but he is still just as big and friendly as ever: meet the Scottish version of one of Roald Dahl’s best-loved characters, who has made his appearance as part of the celebrations of the late author’s centenary.

Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant becomes, in Scots, the Guid Freendly Giant; the book’s title, The BFG, thus becomes The GFG. Publisher Black and White Publishing, which is releasing the new translation this week, said it was intended to celebrate the centenary of Dahl’s birth on 13 September, and predicted the book would be hugely popular, particularly with Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of the children’s novel also out this summer.

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'In stressed times, we can take comfort in wildlife': why nature-writing is 'exploding'

The shortlist for the Wainwright nature-writing prize’s third year is announced as bookshops report dramatic rise in the genre’s sales

Now in its third year, the Wainwright nature-writing prize has announced its shortlist, spotlighting what one judge called an “exploding” field, as more and more writers and readers are turning to this genre as a balm for the woes of modern life.

The contenders range from James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life, a firsthand account of a way of life that has endured in the Lake District for centuries, to Amy Liptrot’s acclaimed memoir about her return to the wilds of Orkney, The Outrun. Dame Fiona Reynolds, who has been chair of judges for the Wainwright prize since 2014, said that “what is coming out [in the genre] is remarkable new writing”, as the titles join a busy corner of the books market, where recent hits have include Helen Macdonald’s memoir of grief and falconry, H is for Hawk and last year’s Wainwright prize winner, John Lewis-Stempel’s Meadowland.

Related: Country files: nature writers on the books that inspired them

Related: Helen Macdonald: ‘I was feral, I identified with the hawk, took on her character’

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Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, dies aged 87

Toffler was one of the world’s most famous futurists who foresaw how digital technology would transform the world

Alvin Toffler, a guru of the post-industrial age whose books, including Future Shock, anticipated the transformation brought about by the rise of digital technology, has died. He was 87.

Toffler died in his sleep at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, on Monday, said Yvonne Merkel, a spokeswoman for his Virginia-based consulting firm Toffler Associates.

With heavy hearts we share that Alvin Toffler, our firm’s founder, has died at age 87. #RememberingAlvinToffler https://t.co/PjzIZvRBD7

Related: Is there too much stress on stress?

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Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, dies aged 87

Toffler was one of the world’s most famous futurists who foresaw how digital technology would transform the world

Alvin Toffler, a guru of the post-industrial age whose books, including Future Shock, anticipated the transformation brought about by the rise of digital technology, has died. He was 87.

Toffler died in his sleep at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, on Monday, said Yvonne Merkel, a spokeswoman for his Virginia-based consulting firm Toffler Associates.

With heavy hearts we share that Alvin Toffler, our firm’s founder, has died at age 87. #RememberingAlvinToffler https://t.co/PjzIZvRBD7

Related: Is there too much stress on stress?

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Angola court orders conditional release of jailed activist book club

17 young activists to be released three months after they were arrested during a book club meeting discussing non-violent resistance to repressive regimes

An Angolan court has ordered the conditional release of 17 young activists, including a well-known rapper, three months after they were jailed for rebellion against long-serving president Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

Most of the group were arrested during a book club meeting in June last year, where one of the works under discussion was a book about non-violent resistance to repressive regimes by the US political philosopher Gene Sharp.

Related: Reading the revolution: the book club that terrified the Angolan regime

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The Swordfish and the Star by Gavin Knight review – Cornwall’s dark, dangerous side

Hair-raising stories from the fishing ports of Cadgwith and Newlyn reveal a Cornwall very different from that known to tourists and second-home owners

Gavin Knight’s previous book, Hood Rat, was a vivid, if impressionistic, evocation of gang crime in some of Britain’s grimmest postcodes. Knight not only embedded himself in police crews working the frontline of this unofficial war, but spent hours winning the trust of gang members, and those affected by their crimes. Instead of then producing an impartial, journalistic account, he wrote something drawing on fiction techniques to speak in the voices of those he had interviewed. So where a reader might have looked for hard facts and statistics, they heard instead of a drug dealer’s concerns for managing his business, the marital crisis endured by a copper and the innermost thoughts – in the form of a monologue, in effect – of a young hitman.

The aim, clearly, was immediacy and authenticity, but some reviewers were upset by the conflict between this approach and the way the book was marketed as true crime. For his next, Knight might seem to have taken a far cosier option, immersing himself in the fishing communities of west Cornwall.

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What we Cannot Know by Marcus du Sautoy review – the seven edges of knowledge

Among the frontiers identified are time, the cosmos, consciousness and God, but aren’t swaths of knowledge concerned with meaning rather than scientific fact?

Scientists like to see themselves as modern counterparts of the great explorers, sailing off into the unknown and coming back with marvellous tales of adventure and discovery. But the heroic age of exploration lasted no more than 500 years: after the so-called conquest of the poles there was not much terra incognita left to conquer. Does a similar fate await the sciences? Will nature yield up its last secret one day? Will our questions all be answered? Will scientists abandon their laboratories and take up poetry, painting or tap dancing instead?

These are the questions raised by an engaging new book in which Marcus du Sautoy promises to lead us to “the edges of knowledge”. He begins by recalling a speech given by the physicist Lord Kelvin at the end of the 19th century. “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” Kelvin said, “all that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Albert Einstein soon proved him wrong, but scientists carried on dreaming of the day when they could declare mission accomplished. In September 1930, for instance, the distinguished mathematician David Hilbert addressed a meeting in his honour in Königsberg. Nothing could hold out against the progress of science, he said: “We must know – and we shall.” Unluckily for him, a young logician called Kurt Gödel had demonstrated the exact opposite in a paper delivered in the same city on the previous day. Every conceivable system of mathematics, Gödel showed, must contain statements that cannot be proved, so the idea of scientific closure was a quixotic fantasy.

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Game of Thrones: how will Winds of Winter regain the suspense stolen by the show?

For those reading George RR Martin’s fantasy series, HBO’s dramatisation has been thrilling – but now it’s ahead of the books, it will be work hard to surprise us

Spoiler alert: this blog assumes you’ve seen episode ten of Game of Thrones season six. Do not read on unless you have

Another year, another season of Game of Thrones on television. If only the books arrived at such a steady pace. The first book in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, came out 20 years ago this September. The succeeding volumes have each taken five years or so to produce, to the ire of fans. “People yell at you and say: ‘We want the next book right away.’ They’re like babies,” Stephen King said to Martin in a public interview last week. I don’t mind settling for a new instalment every five years – they’re meaty, good to reread, and frankly, too damn time-consuming to pick up every 12 months.

But I must admit I was less happy when Martin announced in January that he had missed the deadline of 31 December 2015, which would have allowed book six, The Winds of Winter, to come out before the TV show embarked on storylines not yet reached in the books. The HBO series thus became a weird mishmash of new and old news, with the vast majority of events coming from book five, A Dance With Dragons, but with some sudden leaps into the unknown, possibly from The Winds of Winter – or even book seven, A Dream of Spring. In the books, Jon is still lying stabbed on the floor in the Black Keep, Cersei hasn’t gone all Godfather on King’s Landing yet, and Arya is still training with the Faceless Men – all of which is in the distant past now for the TV characters.

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Andrew Miller: 'I was trying to leap out of my habitual mind'

After six novels, the author explains, fiction had begun to seem like a rather hollow formula. For his seventh, The Crossing, he wanted to find something new

When a book is finished it’s surface seals over. This can be a relief, a kind of freeing up, but it makes the day-to-day experience of writing the book hard to hold on to.

The Crossing is my seventh novel (the difficult seventh?). When I had finished the sixth, Pure, my intention was to “look up” and spend some time reflecting on what it was I was doing or trying to do. I was 50-and-a-bit, and had been writing fiction since I was 17. Did I want to go on? I had signed no contract in blood to say that I would write until I dropped, and though it was not obvious to me what else I might do – gardener? short-order chef? – I wanted there to be a reason for going on that was more and better than simply doing what I was used to doing, what was expected. What did writing mean to me now? What, specifically, did it mean to write fiction?

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Enid Blyton book illustrations through the ages – in pictures

Illustrator Alex T Smith takes us on a fascinating tour of Enid Blyton book cover art from the 1940s to the present day

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Harry Mount’s Odyssey review – in the wake of Homer’s hero

This re-creation of Odysseus’s convoluted route home from Troy is a study in self-deprecation that wears its learning lightly

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. Harry Mount was a member of the Bullingdon club, writes for the Daily Mail and the Spectator, and a cynic could say that he might have achieved at least some of his success due to, in its oldest and most literal sense, patronage (his father is the excellent Ferdinand Mount). He is not too distantly related to David Cameron. In this book he quotes the controversial Spectator columnist Taki without censure. And – this is the most damning thing – he edited the book The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson. That alone should have been enough for me to consign Harry Mount’s Odyssey to the cleansing fire; but I couldn’t because this is a thoroughly charming and interesting, if at times a little exasperating, book.

In it, Mount more or less – we don’t know for certain, and the scholarly consensus shifts constantly – follows Odysseus’s convoluted route back from Troy to Ithaca. Mount does not have any special or “authentic” way of doing this: previous literary travellers have sailed round the Mediterranean in a replica of a bronze-age ship or on a raft, but Mount does so on the MV Corinthian, a cruise liner (or “floating gin palace”, as he puts it), with his parents. NB: Mount is in his 40s and is fully aware of the bathos of this, even going so far as to cite Ronnie Corbett’s sitcom Sorry!, about a middle-aged man still living with his mother.

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The books that honour the bloodiest of battles

On the centenary of the Somme, these are the titles that best bring the horror show to life

I was still a teenager when I first struggled through Somme by the great Lyn MacDonald, a book that I both could not put down, and dreaded picking up. At school, we’d “done” the war poets, of course, to which I had responded by duly adding a desperately naive form of pacifism to my burgeoning portfolio of hormonal opinions. But this, a history based on many first-hand accounts, was different. There was no beauty in it – and so, for the first time, the full horror show flashed before my eyes.

Related: Scenes from the Somme: surreal, sickening spectacle

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I’m Not With the Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music by Sylvia Patterson – review

The music journalist’s account of her life and encounters with the stars is both angry and hilarious

Before the myth-making, chin-stroking male became the prototype for the Music Writer (hello, Lester Bangs, Nick Kent and Greil Marcus), guess what? There were women.

Back in March, Kate Mossman’s brilliant Radio 4 documentary, The Women Who Wrote Rock, took us back to Rave’s Dawn James and the NME’s Nancy Lewis, who described the stars of their day in everyday detail, without reverence or deference. After them came Julie Burchill, Lucy O’Brien, Miranda Sawyer, Alex Kadis, Amy Raphael, Lynsey Hanley, Barbara Ellen, the world-straddling Caitlin Moran, Kitty Empire, Laura Barton, Laura Snapes… I could go on. Female music journalists aren’t particularly rare. Look around. We’re here.

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Has Ann Patchett picked the best 75 books of the past 75 years?

She and her bookshop’s staff have assembled a great, inclusive list. As with all lists, there are annoying omissions – but I’m not sure I could have done better

• The Guardian’s 100 best novels written in English

I love Ann Patchett, both because of the brilliance of State of Wonder and because she has an independent bookshop. And I love lists of books, both because they give me new reading ideas and because they awaken my competitiveness over how many I’ve read. So a list of books compiled by Patchett and her team of booksellers? Just the thing to cheer me up a little.

There are parameters, of course – Patchett et al have chosen 75 books from the last 75 years, to celebrate Parade magazine’s 75th anniversary, and only those written in English, “because if we opened it up to the world we would miss plenty of gems out of sheer ignorance and wind up with a lot more than 75 books”.

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Poets on tour: foreboding at the Welsh border

Cast down by unease after the referendum result, we are kept afloat by a warm audience at Oswestry, a great guest and the beauty of poetry and music

Friday: Imtiaz Dharker

I wake in the same bed, expelled to another country overnight. The television is still on, shark faces swimming up to the screen to eye the shipwreck. Even those of us who never eat breakfast come down to huddle together and feed on each other’s fury and sorrow. Our children send us disbelieving text messages. Clouds slump on the horizon and as we leave Wales, the rain begins. On the bus today there are no games, no playing with language. No-one is singing.

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Emma Stone and Alicia Vikander set for rival Agatha Christie biopics

Paramount is believed to be courting the Amazing Spider-Man actor, while Sony has reportedly sounded out the Danish Girl star

The Danish Girl star Alicia Vikander and The Amazing Spider-Man’s Emma Stone have both been lined up to play a young Agatha Christie in biopics being developed at rival Hollywood studios.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Vikander has been approached by Sony to play the celebrated crime author in her formative years as a “proto-feminist” unhappy with traditional wife-and-mother expectations. Stone, on the other hand, has been pencilled in for Paramount’s take on Christie’s “missing” 11 days in 1926 – a subject already covered in Michael Apted’s 1979 film Agatha, which starred Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman.

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Locus awards go to Ann Leckie, Naomi Novik and other stars

Prestigious science fiction and fantasy prizes also honour work by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and George RR Martin

Ann Leckie and Naomi Novik won the top two prizes at this weekend’s Locus awards, with George RR Martin, Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett also honoured at the Seattle ceremony.

Leckie took the Locus award for best science fiction novel for Ancillary Mercy, the conclusion of her story about Breq, a soldier who carries within her the intelligence systems of a now-destroyed starship. The trilogy’s first part, Ancillary Justice, won Leckie the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C Clarke awards, and was hailed for the distinctive voice in which it was told – Breq refers to all characters as “she”, regardless of their gender.

Related: Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman review – ridiculous and sublime

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Locus awards go to Ann Leckie, Naomi Novik and other stars

Prestigious science fiction and fantasy prizes also honour work by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and George RR Martin

Ann Leckie and Naomi Novik won the top two prizes at this weekend’s Locus awards, with George RR Martin, Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett also honoured at the Seattle ceremony.

Leckie took the Locus award for best science fiction novel for Ancillary Mercy, the conclusion of her story about Breq, a soldier who carries within her the intelligence systems of a now-destroyed starship. The trilogy’s first part, Ancillary Justice, won Leckie the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C Clarke awards, and was hailed for the distinctive voice in which it was told – Breq refers to all characters as “she”, regardless of their gender.

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Locus awards go to Ann Leckie, Naomi Novik and other stars

Prestigious science fiction and fantasy prizes also honour work by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and George RR Martin

Ann Leckie and Naomi Novik won the top two prizes at this weekend’s Locus awards, with George RR Martin, Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett also honoured at the Seattle ceremony.

Leckie took the Locus award for best science fiction novel for Ancillary Mercy, the conclusion of her story about Breq, a soldier who carries within her the intelligence systems of a now-destroyed starship. The trilogy’s first part, Ancillary Justice, won Leckie the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C Clarke awards, and was hailed for the distinctive voice in which it was told – Breq refers to all characters as “she”, regardless of their gender.

Related: Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman review – ridiculous and sublime

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Dystopian Ukraine novel, written on Facebook during protests, gets English translation

Kaharlyk by Oleh Shynkarenko, a novel that began as Facebook posts to evade censors, tells story of man whose brain is controlled by Russian army

A book that the Ukrainian writer Oleh Shynkarenko published in chunks on Facebook during the Maidan square protests in order to avoid censorship has been translated into English for the first time.

The journalist and author began writing his vision of an alternate reality in which Russia has conquered Ukraine while protests were ongoing in Kiev. Index on Censorship, which publishes an extract from the first English translation in its latest magazine, said that the story grew out of a blog in 2010. In it, he joked about hoping there were radicals prepared to kill the then-president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Shynkarenko was subsequently interrogated by security services and found entries on his blog deleted, he believes by the security services. He later turned to Facebook to tell his story of a post-apocalyptic future, echoing the violence of the “Euromaidan” protests in 2013 and 2014 in 100-word snippets.

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Dystopian Ukraine novel, written on Facebook during protests, gets English translation

Kaharlyk by Oleh Shynkarenko, a novel that began as Facebook posts to evade censors, tells story of man whose brain is controlled by Russian army

A book that the Ukrainian writer Oleh Shynkarenko published in chunks on Facebook during the Maidan square protests in order to avoid censorship has been translated into English for the first time.

The journalist and author began writing his vision of an alternate reality in which Russia has conquered Ukraine while protests were ongoing in Kiev. Index on Censorship, which publishes an extract from the first English translation in its latest magazine, said that the story grew out of a blog in 2010. In it, he joked about hoping there were radicals prepared to kill the then-president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Shynkarenko was subsequently interrogated by security services and found entries on his blog deleted, he believes by the security services. He later turned to Facebook to tell his story of a post-apocalyptic future, echoing the violence of the “Euromaidan” protests in 2013 and 2014 in 100-word snippets.

Related: Maidan, Portraits from the Black Square review – moving images of the Kiev protesters

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Michael Herr, author of Dispatches, dies aged 76

Author whose memoir of Vietnam was deemed by many to be one of the best accounts of life in wartime ever written, has died in New York

Michael Herr, the American writer and war correspondent famous for writing Dispatches, described as “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time” by John le Carré, has died aged 76.

Born in 1940, Herr was one of the most respected writers of New Journalism, the novelistic reportage pioneered by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, where the journalist is as much part of the story as their subject. He practised this most famously in his book Dispatches, about his time working as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine in Vietnam between 1967 to 1969.

He was a sweet, kind, funny, generous friend - this news is very sad indeed

Related: The 100 best nonfiction books: No 9 – Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)

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Tristimania by Jay Griffiths; Mad Girl by Bryony Gordon – review

Two depression memoirs aimed at different readerships both offer optimism and enlightenment

When the novelist William Styron wrote a piece for Vanity Fair in 1989 describing his battle with depression, he could hardly have known that he was pioneering a new genre. He expanded the essay into a book, Darkness Visible, the first modern example of a now burgeoning literary form, the depression memoir. Styron’s candour helped to break down some of the stigma around the condition, and in the 25 years since it was published, such personal memoirs have become almost commonplace, particularly among writers and journalists (myself included). The fact that so many personal accounts continue to be published is testament to the way these stories have made it easier to discuss an illness that is still too often regarded as shameful or somehow less than valid.

Jay Griffiths is an impossible writer to categorise; her books are part cultural histories, part travelogues, exploring such abstract concepts as time, wildness and childhood. Her remarkable 2007 book, Wild, begins with a description of how drinking ayahuasca with a Peruvian shaman drew her out of a persistent bout of depression.

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The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell review – heartwarmingly eccentric

How a young British teacher rescued a tar-soaked penguin and charmed a boys’ school in Isabel Perón’s Argentina

Tom Michell is a self-described callow youth when he arrives in Argentina in the 1970s to teach in a boys’ boarding school, “a country boy from the gentle Downs of rural Sussex” who is unprepared for life under Isabel Perón’s government, and the threat of a military coup. But The Penguin Lessons isn’t a history book, or a travelogue, either, although it does touch on politics and on Michell’s explorations: it’s the story of how, on one of his journeys, he found an oil-drenched penguin on the beach in Punta del Este in Uruguay, and smuggled it back to his school.

Michell sees just one penguin alive amid a scene of devastation, hundreds of birds lying dead in the sand “from the high water mark to the sea and stretching far away along the shore to the north”. He decides he has to save this one bird, and manages to transport it back to the flat where he’s staying. “I couldn’t dream up a more unsuitable place for cleaning a tar-sodden penguin,” he writes, before carefully immobilising it and setting to work with various products, “ butter and margarine, olive oil and cooking oil, soap, shampoo and detergent”.

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Meanwhile, Trees by Mark Waldron review – bizarre and invigorating

Mark Waldron is like a magpie picking super-sophisticated mixtures of gold and dross from an immense linguistic landfill

All My Poems Are Advertisements for Me, declares one of Mark Waldron’s snappy titles, neatly connecting the writer’s day job, advertising, and the vocation, poetry. It’s something readers might often have suspected about poems, but never dared say. The poem itself turns out to be, oddly, a Wordsworthian and even Heaneyish nostalgia for childhood immediacy of sensation (“the thump and the tug of it”) but finally comes back to the case against art, concluding: “…Death is not what you think it is./ It’s actually what I think it is.” The poem encircles its own poetry with a crocodile grin of hard but pleasing irony.

Death’s conventional link with leaf-fall gets a new twist. In the title poem, the Parisian “city streets are wet/ with an old-fangled rain that feels, rubbed between/ contempo fingers, entirely démodé.” He goes on to explain that “It’s winter and the trees/ have done avec their leaves”: in fact, they’ve choked them, changing them from green to “a purplish black”. Autumnal decline has never looked so villainous.

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Jessie Burton: ‘Success can be as fracturing to your self as failure’

After her debut novel, The Miniaturist, became a bestseller, the author experienced extreme anxiety – a struggle reflected in her new book, The Muse

Here she is, Jessie Burton, at the door of what she describes as her “burrow” in Forest Hill, south-east London. First glimpse of her flat: colourful, perky, tidy. “Come in,” she says. She shows me what she calls her “she shed” – a literary wendy house at the end of the garden – built on the proceeds of her first novel The Miniaturist and in which she has finished her second, The Muse, which is out this week. Jessie matches these upbeat surroundings. Dark, vivid and forthcoming, she wears a skirt that is just asking to be twirled and has a musical, ever-so-slightly panicky laugh. She looks Spanish but is not – she grew up in Wimbledon. If you did not know otherwise (as I already do), you would say this was someone who would never let anything get out of hand. But life has a way of testing even the most flourishing individuals and, in Jessie’s case, the challenge came wrapped up in success.

The Miniaturist, set in 17th-century Amsterdam and inspired by Petronella Oortman’s doll’s house in the Rijksmuseum, was a bestseller published in 34 countries – nothing miniature about its success. To promote the book, Jessie did “over 200 events” (she has had reason to count them) in 18 months. She wrote: “It was the fullest, most confusing and amazing time of my life. Over a million people bought my first novel, the TV rights were optioned, Martin Scorsese put it on to his Kindle, a Spice Girl tweeted about loving it, Vogue asked me to pose for a portrait.” She was delighted, naturally – but what no one, including Jessie herself, could have predicted was that, at 31, and during this period when she was expected to feel exultantly invincible, she would break down. She knows full well that daring to confess that success was an ordeal is unlikely to secure her many sympathy votes but she has none the less written about this period in a brave and fascinating blogpost .

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Climbing Days by Dan Richards – review

Dorothy Pilley’s memoirs set her great-great-nephew on a beguiling quest to follow in her footsteps – up a mountain

Quoting Dr Seuss, Dan Richards writes: “It is fun to have fun / But you have to know how”. Climbing Days is the most enormous fun.

Richards first came to my notice with Holloway, the bestseller that he co-wrote, indeed made, with the writer Robert Macfarlane and Radiohead cover artist Stanley Donwood (one early version of Holloway was a leather-bound, hand-printed, boxed and sealed edition of 13 books – one of which I am lucky enough to own, although I have never quite dared to break the red wax seal). Last year saw the publication of The Beechwood Airship Interviews, and now here is the beguiling Climbing Days.

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Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging – review

Sebastian Junger’s lament on the failings of modern western communities suffers from a surfeit of nostalgia and disregard for historical fact

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging is a strange book. It is written by Sebastian Junger, a prize-winning author, war journalist, and maker of two outstanding documentaries on the conflict in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, then, in his new book, Junger is particularly insightful when he is discussing combat soldiers and the difficulties they experience when returning from war zones.

Junger is nostalgic for a world that never existed – at least not for most people

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Stand up for the arts in schools, say children’s laureates

Observer cartoonist explains the need for action by writers and illustrators for children

Children’s fiction sections of bookshelves are stalked by imaginary giants and superheroes. But these books have also given Britain a succession of real-life literary giants, from Lewis Carroll to Roald Dahl.

Now a group of leading modern-day titans of the field, the eight former children’s laureates, have joined forces with the current holder of the post, Chris Riddell, to create one formidable force.

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Abiola Oni announced as winner of the BAME Short Story prize

Nigerian-born author from London wins £1,000 award for warm and clinical vision of dystopia

Reading the entries to the Guardian and 4th Estate BAME Short Story prize confirms what I knew all along: that there are some very talented writers of colour out there. And for whatever reason, they’re not finding representation, getting publishing deals or winning prizes. Which is why an award like this is so necessary.

Like the other judges – BuzzFeed’s Bim Adewunmi; Waterstones’ head of books, Melissa Cox; writer Bernardine Evaristo; 4th Estate editor Anna Kelly; and Guardian women’s editor Nosheen Iqbal, I was looking for one thing: new, fresh and exciting voices. And boy, did we find them.

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In Parenthesis: in praise of the Somme's forgotten poet

David Jones’s first world war poem was hailed by TS Eliot as a work of genius. So why has its author been largely forgotten?

On 10 July 1916, the 15th battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers attacked Mametz Wood in northern France. Their assault was part of the recently launched Somme offensive, and followed the now familiar method of British attacks over this period. Walking in four lines across a no man’s land of thistles, wild flowers, self-sown mustard and wheat, the men of the 15th slowly advanced into sweeping machine gun fire and artillery. As conscripted soldiers, the strategy behind their offensive was no more sophisticated than that they outnumbered their professional German counterparts three to one. By the time they reached the wood that advantage had already been reduced by a third.

Related: Soldier, poet, painter: how David Jones became Britain’s visionary outsider

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Deborah Moggach: 'I try not to look at property porn, but the flesh is weak’

The author on being distracted by emails and phone calls, and why real people make the worst characters

Everyone has their rituals and I have to start the day with a roll-up and a cup of coffee. It gets my brain fizzing – it loosens the connections – and if I’m interrupted, I’m lost. If someone even says “I’ll phone you some time in the morning” it threatens my concentration, which is a feeble organ at the best of times. With screenplays it’s not so bad because it’s a more public process anyway – so many other people are involved – but if I’m writing a novel, I need to shut myself off into my private world. I don’t mind people in the house, as long as they’re not quarrelling and they don’t come in, but I can’t bear music.

After that I chew gum for the rest of the morning, trying to ignore the infuriating Adobe upgrades that ping on to my laptop, and my daily missive from the ever-faithful Sarah Raven, with her tempting flower-seed offers. I try not to look at other emails, especially if they’re about property porn, but the flesh is weak.

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‘I’ll be watching The Mighty Walzer with my head in my hands’

The author on staging his deeply personal Manchester novel in the city to which it belongs

Next month the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester stages a dramatisation of my novel The Mighty Walzer, by Simon Bent, so in an important sense it’s his not mine. But I can’t pretend I don’t feel possessive of it still. And I’m fighting against feeling sentimental about the staging of it, too. Manchester – where it belongs! It’s like a long-awaited homecoming, because The Mighty Walzer, though it is steeped in the Manchester of the 1950s, was written much later than that and far from it – the first chapters at a little folding table in campsites in western Australia, the rest on an exploding laptop in Melbourne Public Library.

That was in 1998 – a difficult year for me for many reasons, not least the breakdown of a marriage. A sad confusion hung about me. I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I’ve never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again. As it turned out, these were the perfect circumstances in which to write a novel about the past, love and loss, not belonging, homesickness, failure and the lingering ignominies of adolescence.

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The best new children’s books – reviews roundup

Can a dog save the day? Can a cat teach a bird to fly? Plus a book-munching monster and a race across the hills – new picture books and novels

There’s a books-within-books theme to the picture books this month, kicking off with The Detective Dog (Macmillan) by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie. This is a glorious collaboration by a master of the art and a rising star. Detective Dog Nell has a keen sense of smell and a passion for books picked up from listening to children read in a school one day a week. But when she turns up to find the children distraught because the books are gone, can she save the day and track down the thief? Donaldson sets out the rhyming story with characteristic panache, perfectly complemented by Ogilvie’s bright and busy artwork – the spread celebrating the wonder of the public library (“You can join if you want to – there isn’t a fee / And then you can take lots of books out for free”) is a particular joy.

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Hisham Matar: 'I don't remember a time when words were not dangerous'

As a schoolboy in Tripoli, the author was captivated by Arabic. But when his family was forced to leave, it was in English that he came to speak, think and write

Before everything, there was Libya. The boys and I would gather on our street in Tripoli during the aimless afternoon hours. The sun would still be strong, its power seeming to increase as it descended. You feared losing it, as though it were ever possible for the sun to never rise again. One such afternoon, one of the boys suggested I draw something. He had asked me this because I had just found, in one of the empty building lots on our street, a good stick. It was long and thin and strong, producing, when I struck the air with it, a beautiful whistle. “Go on, anything,” he said. Feeling the attention of the others, I quickly drew into the sand the map of our country: a square with the wiggly line of the north coast. The boys said it wasn’t right. I had missed the step where, in the south-east, Sudan cuts in a corner, and I hadn’t got the snaking curve of our Mediterranean, where the sea sticks its tongue into Brega, quite right either. This was two years before I left Libya and would not see Tripoli and our street for another 33 years.

I was seven that year. The two things I excelled at were strange and, if anything, inspired the puzzlement rather than the admiration of my peers. I could swim further out into the sea than anyone dared, so far out, in fact, that the water became a different territory, icy, its surface the rough grain of stone and the depths, when I opened my eyes underwater, the black-blue of a bruise. I still recall the curious mixture of fear and accomplishment I felt when I would look back and see that the land had disappeared. No matter how tall I would paddle myself up out of the water, I could not see the shore or my friends, who had been swimming behind me at first but after yelling, “Hisham, you’re crazy”, one by one had fallen back and turned to swim towards the beach. I would remain there alone and let the sea’s conversation, rising and falling in gentle waves, carry me with it. Even though my heart would be pounding by now and there was no one to see me, I would dare myself even further: I would close my eyes and spin around myself until I lost direction. I would make a guess and begin swimming back where I thought the shore might be. Somehow, I never got it wrong. Not once.

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Philip Pullman on the 1,000 causes of Brexit

The dog-whistle call of Nigel Farage’s racism and the lies of Boris Johnson are the final act of a tragedy that began 70 years ago

This catastrophe has had a thousand causes. Here are some.

There is our country’s post-imperial reluctance to let go of the idea that we are a great nation, combined with our post-second-world-war delusion that we were still a great power. That was why we refused the chance to join the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, and our infatuation with our own greatness was sufficiently undamaged by Suez in 1956 to make us refuse to join the EEC when that got going with the Treaty of Rome in 1958. If we’d committed ourselves to Europe early, with everyone else, we’d now have a much deeper understanding of our real relationship to the continent, namely that we belong there.

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The Muse by Jessie Burton review – a solid follow-up to The Miniaturist

A double portrait of hidden creativity set in swinging 60s London and civil war Spain from a writer who cannot be faulted for ambition

The imaginative boldness that distinguished Jessie Burton’s 2014 debut novel, The Miniaturist, earned her critical raves and an international bestseller: her fans will be eager to know if she can reprise the trick with her follow-up. Having recreated the stiff-necked puritan society of 17th-century Amsterdam in her first book, in The Muse Burton has once again done the hard yards of research to reimagine not one but two distinct eras of the 20th century, and fused them to an intricate story of imposture. This is not a writer who can be faulted for ambition.

In the summer of 1967 a young woman named Odelle Bastien applies for a job at the Skelton Institute, a discreetly upmarket gallery in St James’s. Odelle, having arrived in London from Trinidad five years earlier, has put her dreams of being a writer on hold while she finds her feet and tends to other people’s, selling shoes at Dolcis. The Skelton’s eccentric co-director, Marjorie Quick, spots the young woman’s potential and offers her £10 a week as a typist – riches! Too bad about the gallery’s snitty receptionist Pamela: “She knew no other blacks, she told me on the Thursday of that first week. When I said that I hadn’t known any either by that name till I came here, she looked completely blank.” At her friend Cynth’s wedding reception, Odelle meets Lawrie, who has recently inherited a painting of a lion he thinks might be worth something. At the Skelton they’re very interested, though on glimpsing the picture Miss Quick looks as though she’s seen a ghost.

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Flash Friday: 3 Stories of God by Joy Williams

In our last instalment of Flash Friday, we offer Joy Williams’s excellent tryptich from her 99 Stories of God – where titles come at the end. It’s been a fun ride with the excellent Tin House. Until next time!

The child wanted to name the rabbit Actually, and could not be dissuaded from this.

It was the first time one of our pets was named after an adverb.
It made us uncomfortable. We thought it to be bad luck.
But no ill befell any of us nor did any ill befall the people who visited our home.
Everything proceeded beautifully, in fact, until Actually died.

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Migration: Ali Smith, David Herd and Wolfgang Bauer listen for the true story – books podcast

As the UK adjusts to life outside the European Union, we ask if literature can get to the heart of an issue that dominated the referendum campaign

Anxiety about immigration may have driven the vote for Brexit – but in or out of the EU, the global forces driving migration remain. This week’s podcast asks if literature can pierce the myths surrounding this difficult subject, to reveal the human tragedy at its core.

As Comma Press publishes Refugee Tales, a collection inspired by Chaucer that tells the stories of people caught up in the UK immigration system, the novelist Ali Smith and the poet David Herd join us in the studio to examine if the voices of migrants can be heard over the waves of rhetoric. The playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak reads from his latest play, Love, Bombs and Apples, and explains how humour helps to build bridges between people. And journalist Wolfgang Bauer tells us why he gave up the protection of his German passport to go undercover on the dangerous sea crossing from Egypt to Italy.

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Michael Herr, author of Dispatches, dies aged 76

Author whose memoir of Vietnam was deemed by many to be one of the best accounts of life in wartime ever written, has died in New York

Michael Herr, the American writer and war correspondent famous for writing Dispatches, described as “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time” by John le Carré, has died aged 76.

Born in 1940, Herr was one of the most respected writers of New Journalism, the novelistic reportage pioneered by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, where the journalist is as much part of the story as their subject. He practised this most famously in his book Dispatches, about his time working as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine in Vietnam between 1967 to 1969.

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Systems fiction: a novel way to think about the present

Seen in literary fiction as well as SF, this genre weaves together complex debates in a way that can offer a clearer view of the future – think Atwood, DeLillo and Asimov

Weirdly enough, science fiction is not the best lens through which to examine science fiction. In the 80s, critic Tom LeClair came up with an alternative category for all the weird literary novels that veered into speculative territory: the systems novel. These books pick apart how the systems that keep society chugging along work: politics, economics, sex and gender dynamics, science, ideologies – all can be explored through fiction, especially experimental fiction. LeClair applied this tag specifically to Don DeLillo, but it can be expanded more widely: think Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan and Umberto Eco, among others.

That may seem like an eclectic bunch to unite under one banner, but the systems novel is ultimately a space for ambitious thinkers, the ones who want to weave complex thoughts into a tastier parcel than some impenetrable academic tome. The dramatic kick in a systems novel is usually found in the points where the different systems overlap: tackling climate change isn’t all about physics, it also about unpicking the economics of a carbon-driven economy, for example.

Related: Science fiction: the realism of the 21st century

Related: When AI rules the world: what SF novels tell us about our future overlords

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Systems fiction: a novel way to think about the present

Seen in literary fiction as well as SF, this genre weaves together complex debates in a way that can offer a clearer view of the future – think Atwood, DeLillo and Asimov

Weirdly enough, science fiction is not the best lens through which to examine science fiction. In the 80s, critic Tom LeClair came up with an alternative category for all the weird literary novels that veered into speculative territory: the systems novel. These books pick apart how the systems that keep society chugging along work: politics, economics, sex and gender dynamics, science, ideologies – all can be explored through fiction, especially experimental fiction. LeClair applied this tag specifically to Don DeLillo, but it can be expanded more widely: think Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan and Umberto Eco, among others.

That may seem like an eclectic bunch to unite under one banner, but the systems novel is ultimately a space for ambitious thinkers, the ones who want to weave complex thoughts into a tastier parcel than some impenetrable academic tome. The dramatic kick in a systems novel is usually found in the points where the different systems overlap: tackling climate change isn’t all about physics, it also about unpicking the economics of a carbon-driven economy, for example.

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Paul Beatty: ‘Slam poetry, TED talks: they’re for short attention spans’

The award-winning author on race, satire and watching samurai films with his mother

Paul Beatty is breakfasting in a Dunkin’ Donuts on New York’s Lower East Side and mulling over his upbringing in Los Angeles, where he was born in 1962. “My mother grew up in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. She wasn’t the happiest kid in the world and found some eastern religion bookstore. From then on she spent every day there or in the library. She’s got insane knowledge about all that stuff.” After she moved to Los Angeles she found a cinema “that had been showing old Japanese movies forever,” he says. “She would take us all to the Kurosawa and samurai films from when we were really little – six or seven. She was really immersed. She went to karate club for a long time. Breaking bricks. Industrial bricks!” Beatty later travelled with his mother to Tokyo to watch sumo wrestling. “She was in her mid-to-late 40s and very small. We’d spar in the living room. She was into everything eastern – every religion, Thai kickboxing. We had to bow before entering and leaving the house. It was a little too much.”

It’s tempting to speculate that Beatty’s idiosyncratic home life informed his ambivalent, leave-me-out relationship to some of the pieties of modern American literature. Especially modern black American literature. (He prefers the descriptor “black” to “African American”.)

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Jonathan Coe wins 'bittersweet' honour from France as UK turns back on Europe

Author describes mixed feelings after being declared Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, in a week when the UK voted to leave the EU

The Rotters’ Club author Jonathan Coe has been declared France’s “favourite British author”, in a prestigious honour from the French government previously bestowed on authors such as TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney. Coe was made an Officer in France’s Order of Arts and Letters, an accolade he described as bittersweet in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the EU.

The honour, one of France’s highest, was established in 1957 “to recognise eminent artists and writers, as well as people who have contributed significantly to furthering the arts in France and throughout the world”.

Related: Jonathan Coe: ‘Where do I write? On the train, in the pub, Heathrow Terminal 5...'

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Quentin Blake's unpublished illustrations of The BFG - in pictures

Quentin Blake guides us through the remarkable story of his collaboration with Roald Dahl to make The BFG

Originals of all the illustrations in this gallery, and many more, can be seen at The BFG in pictures exhibition at London’s House of Illustration until October 2016

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My life before writing: Emma Cline on being a child actor

Being a child actor seemed like a vision of what the world could be – free of sharp edges

• David Mitchell on his dreams of being a lighthouse keeper
• Margo Jefferson on musical theatre
• Nina Stibbe on her ambitions to work in a sawmill

I tried, for a while, to be in movies. Or rather, my mother and I tried, because that’s the nature of child actors – they require adult sponsorship, the parental momentum taking over when the child’s interest falters. I missed days of school to attend auditions in various low-ceilinged rooms in Burbank, toting my headshots in a fake leather portfolio like a grim little businessman. I ate bowl after bowl of ice-cream for an ice-cream commercial, did a catalogue shoot on a soundstage where bright, fake leaves blew in front of industrial fans. I was not a happy child: this all seemed like a vision of what the world could be. A world free of sharp edges.

I read for the parts of girls who spoke in full sentences and played soccer, girls who wore capri pants and collared shirts in Liberty prints and kept up sexless crushes on boy neighbours. These were girls unlike any girls I knew, but that was part of the pact, the lie we were all creating together: the characters weren’t realistic, but they offered the chance to participate in a world in which daughters would ask mothers to buy them their first bra, where daughters would confess the benign secrets of their hearts. The characters were sometimes embarrassed or ashamed, but in neat, normal ways, ways that were easily assuaged by a mother sharing her own experiences on the drive to soccer practice. I did not recognise this world but I wished I did, and for a while, believed that these precise falsehoods were vastly preferable to the indignities and messes of real life.

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Poets on tour: 'the UK has been torn in two like a bad poem'

Journeying through idyllic country to meet another great crowd in Crickhowell is the joyous prelude to a dark night watching the polls

Referendum Day. We poets have sensed the drifting presence of the malevolent genie uncorked from its bottle by the foolhardy chancer David Cameron as we journey further northwards. A front garden outside Gloucester is entirely fortressed by three huge boards repeating the wish: Give Us Our Country Back.

On Thursday afternoon, we drive on to Crickhowell, but there’s time to wander the pleasant streets of Monmouth first. Proprietor of Boutique says Leave. Taxi driver: Leave. Waiters in curry house: Leave. Gig organiser Helen Taylor and I picnic on the river by the Monnow Bridge, the only surviving medieval bridge in Britain, and chat about our families. One of Helen’s daughters, on her way to vote, texts: “See you on the other side.”

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The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter – a final farewell to the Long Earth

‘Stepping’ from one Earth to the next, meeting strange creatures and reflecting on life, love and quantum theory: a gentle collaborative journey through the multiverse comes to an end

And so here it is, the last new work we’ll ever have from Terry Pratchett, barring a box of undiscovered treasure somewhere. The Long Cosmos is the conclusion of his collaborative series with Stephen Baxter, about the Long Earth, a universe in which a possibly infinite number of parallel worlds exist and you can simply “step” from one to another.

The arc of the series had long been mapped out, after the pair decided at a dinner party in 2010 to work on an abandoned SF storyline of Pratchett’s. Baxter notes in the introduction that, short on time, Pratchett worked on what material he could (including devising a marvellous floating wood), and that Baxter finished the series as they’d both planned it.

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Kazuo Ishiguro: my turning point? Reading Proust on my sickbed

It may be set in Japan around the second world war, but An Artist of the Floating World was influenced by the author’s experience of living in Sydenham in the 80s

I began An Artist of the Floating World in September 1981, in a basement flat in Shepherd’s Bush, London. I was 26 years old. My first novel, A Pale View of Hills, was being prepared for publication, but at that point I had no sensible reason to believe I had before me a life as a full‑time novelist.

Lorna and I had returned to London that summer (we’d been living in Cardiff), having secured new jobs in the capital, but no accommodation. A few years earlier, we’d both been part of a loose network of young, left-leaning, alternative types who lived in short-life housing around Ladbroke Grove and Hammersmith, and worked for charitable projects or campaign groups. It seems odd now to recall the carefree way we just turned up in the city that summer confident we’d be able to stay in one shared house or another until we found a suitable place of our own. As it turned out, nothing came along to challenge our complacency, and before long we’d found a small basement to rent just off the bustling Goldhawk Road.

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The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter – a final farewell to the Long Earth

‘Stepping’ from one Earth to the next, meeting strange creatures and reflecting on life, love and quantum theory: a gentle collaborative journey through the multiverse comes to an end

And so here it is, the last new work we’ll ever have from Terry Pratchett, barring a box of undiscovered treasure somewhere. The Long Cosmos is the conclusion of his collaborative series with Stephen Baxter, about the Long Earth, a universe in which a possibly infinite number of parallel worlds exist and you can simply “step” from one to another.

The arc of the series had long been mapped out, after the pair decided at a dinner party in 2010 to work on an abandoned SF storyline of Pratchett’s. Baxter notes in the introduction that, short on time, Pratchett worked on what material he could (including devising a marvellous floating wood), and that Baxter finished the series as they’d both planned it.

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String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis review – the best writer on the game ever

In pieces that range from his own success as a junior player to the sport-changing ability of Roger Federer, Foster Wallace combined a nerd’s outlook with a novelist’s gift for exposition

David Foster Wallace was, in his own estimation, “a near great junior tennis player”. Between the ages of 12 and 15, he competed in tournaments all over the Midwest, at one point achieving a regional ranking of 17. He wrote about the experience in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”, the first – and most challenging – of the five essays in this volume. “Derivative Sport” is unlike any other sporting memoir you’ll encounter: it combines a (somewhat sketchy) account of life on the junior circuit with voluminous divagations into climate, topography and geometry. Wallace’s aim appears to be to demonstrate that his success on the tennis court was largely accidental – less a reward for talent and perseverance than the unforeseeable outcome of freakish circumstance.

Because of where he grew up – the Illinois Corn Belt – Wallace felt at home “inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids”. A certain “weird proclivity for intuitive math” meant, moreover, that he found the “geometric thinking” required by tennis (all those rapid trigonometric calculations) straightforward. And most crucially, unlike practically every other player on the planet, he relished playing in the wind. (This, too, he links to his mathematical prowess: “I could … admit the differential complication of wind into my calculations.”) Being at ease with the wind gave Wallace a tremendous advantage, since he grew up in a pocket of Illinois known as Tornado Alley. The wind, he writes, “informed and deformed” life in his hometown, and did “massive damage to many central Illinois junior players”. Yet Wallace was able to cultivate a “robotic detachment” from his environment, and so spent his youth “beating up on” more naturally gifted players. Facing him – especially in a howling gale – must have been a nightmare.

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Poets' tour, part four: in and out with lettuce and lardy bread

As our road trip moves through changing landscapes and political sympathies, our mood is shifting between hilarity and tears

And so we leave the grand, sorrowful house of Chipping Norton, back down the long two-mile driveway, once owned by the Brass family; today the property of a man who also owns Alexandra Palace and three golf courses. (He has never had time to play a game of golf, our taxi driver tells us.) We pass the Quiet Woman antiques shop and it seems today is going to be a day when we ooh and aah going through places, but don’t have time to stop. Then just as we are about to drive out of Chipping Norton, the very unquiet women in the back of the bus spot a market and shout: “Stop!”

Everyone scatters around the market – local lardy bread for Carol Ann Duffy, and for me artichoke hearts and feta marinaded in dill. Ali has a kind face, slicing the feta slab almost lovingly. He’s from Afghanistan via Turkey. When I ask him if he’ll vote in or out – he says out. He’s been told it will be better for his children and knows nothing about politics. I tell him In will be better for them.

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Food in books: gravlax on rye from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Kate Young muses on the joys of morning markets and makes a Swedish favourite from Stieg Larsson’s popular crime novel

By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network

Then he made himself lunch, which consisted of coffee and open sandwiches, and sat in the garden, where he was typing up the notes of his conversation with Pastor Falk. When that was done, he raised his eyes to the church.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

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The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay review – a clever, time-hopping debut

From 2003 Las Vegas to 1958 California to 1592 Venice, examples of deceit and concealment constantly echo each other in an exceptionally intelligent work

Though flashbacks are currently a fashionable novelistic tactic, this bold American debut makes unusual historical jumps. Starting 13 years ago in the Las Vegas of 2003, it then reverses to California in 1958 and Venice in 1592, subsequently alternating sections from these eras.

While the publishers have understandably cited the epoch-crossing novels of David Mitchell as a comparison point, the characters and narratives in the three time zones of The Mirror Thief are more formally linked than the sections of a Mitchell book such as Cloud Atlas. In the most recent portions of the story, on the eve of the second Gulf war, a retired veteran of the first attack on Saddam Hussein is on some sort of civilian mission around the Vegas gaming tables. Curtis is searching for Stanley Glass, a super-gambler who has fleeced casinos using a system of probability calculation. Glass claims to have derived this from The Mirror Thief, a poetry collection by Adrian Welles, a fictional Los Angeles Beat poet who became friendly with Ezra Pound when the fascist-sympathising writer was confined in an asylum. The sections set in the 50s show the young Glass coming under the influence of Welles, whose cult book tells the story of Crivano, who became involved in a Venetian scandal over the making of mirrors. Turning the page to a subsection date-stamped ‘“1592’”, the reader expects to get the historical background to the Welles poems, and is not disappointed.

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Stephen King and George RR Martin talk gun control

Interviewed by Game of Thrones novelist, the horror star says automatic and semi-automatic weapons ‘are weapons of mass destruction’

George RR Martin has released a video of him interviewing Stephen King, who issues a fierce demand for greater gun control. At the public event in Albuquerque last week, King suggested that if the man who killed 49 people in the Orlando terror attack “had gone in there with a knife, he would have been overpowered before he’d stabbed more than four people”.

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Stephen King and George RR Martin talk gun control

Interviewed by Game of Thrones novelist, the horror star says automatic and semi-automatic weapons ‘are weapons of mass destruction’

George RR Martin has released a video of him interviewing Stephen King, who issues a fierce demand for greater gun control. At the public event in Albuquerque last week, King suggested that if the man who killed 49 people in the Orlando terror attack “had gone in there with a knife, he would have been overpowered before he’d stabbed more than four people”.

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007 questions: how well do you know the James Bond books? – quiz

On this day 50 years ago, Ian Fleming’s 14th and final Bond book, Octopussy and the Living Daylights, was published. How much do you know about Ian Fleming in print?

In the first James Bond book, Casino Royale (1953), Bond orders a martini. How does he famously take it?

"Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel."

"Three measures of Bombay, one of vodka, half a measure of vermouth. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add an olive."

"Three measures of vodka, one of gin, half a measure of vermouth. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of orange peel."

"Three measures of Beefeater, one of vodka, half a measure of Pimms. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large chunk of onion."

According to the obituary Fleming wrote for Bond in You Only Live Twice, what nationalities were Bond’s parents?

Scottish and English

English and French

Scottish and French

Scottish and Swiss

How many people does Bond kill across all of the books?

183

279

352

469

Which of these names is not the name of a Bond girl?

Gala Bland

Viv Michel

Domino Vitali

Mary Goodnight

In the Bond story Octopussy, who or what is Octopussy?

An enchanting femme fatale

An octopus, named Pussy

A ship

A particularly odd curse word

In one Bond book, Fleming ends on a scene that could be construed as Bond dying, leaving the author a way out if he decided against writing more. Which book almost saw the end of Bond?

Diamonds are Forever - Fleming's fourth Bond book

From Russia, With Love - Fleming's fifth Bond book

Dr No - Fleming's sixth Bond book

Thunderball - Fleming's ninth Bond book

In which of the following stories does Bond's nemesis Blofeld NOT appear?

Thunderball

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

You Only Live Twice

Quantum of Solace

Only one Bond story is told from the point of view of a woman. Which story is it?

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

You Only Live Twice

The Hildebrand Rarity

The Spy Who Loved Me

Q never appears in the novels. What is the name of MI6 armourer in Fleming's stories?

Boothroyd

Bigby

Blanche

B

In a profile read by M in one of the stories, which Bond villain is believed to be a latent homosexual because he cannot whistle?

Ernst Stavro Blofeld

Francisco Scaramanga

Le Chiffre

Sir Hugo Drax

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Kick-Ass to return as a black woman, announces Mark Millar

The comics star says reinvented protagonist ‘opens up story possibilities that haven’t been tried in almost 80 years of superhero fiction’

Citing his belief that comics are “not short of white males aged around 30”, the writer Mark Millar is relaunching his popular superhero Kick-Ass as a black woman.

Originally a geeky white teenager called Dave Lizewski, whose love of comic books leads him to become a real-life superhero, Kick-Ass’s mantle will now be donned by a black woman, creator Millar told the Hollywood Reporter, who will have “a completely different take on Kick-Ass”. The upcoming story, drawn by co-creator John Romita Jr, will also be set in a new city, with a new supporting cast, according to the author.

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Kick-Ass to return as a black woman, announces Mark Millar

The comics star says reinvented protagonist ‘opens up story possibilities that haven’t been tried in almost 80 years of superhero fiction’

Citing his belief that comics are “not short of white males aged around 30”, the writer Mark Millar is relaunching his popular superhero Kick-Ass as a black woman.

Originally a geeky white teenager called Dave Lizewski, whose love of comic books leads him to become a real-life superhero, Kick-Ass’s mantle will now be donned by a black woman, creator Millar told the Hollywood Reporter, who will have “a completely different take on Kick-Ass”. The upcoming story, drawn by co-creator John Romita Jr, will also be set in a new city, with a new supporting cast, according to the author.

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Condensed, or just dense? The apps that turn books into 15-minute reads

Many readers will recoil from these radically boiled-down versions of titles like A Brief History of Time. Me too, until I started reading them

Is this reading or “reading”? An app called Joosr, which aims to help users read a book in 20 minutes, has just been launched in the UK. Initially, this horrified me. I ranted that we had lost our ability to concentrate, that authors’ words are sacred. But then I looked at what the app was actually doing and realised it could be a good idea.

The app has more than 100 nonfiction books in a radically condensed format available on a subscription. Think self-help bestsellers like Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning and dense science texts like A Brief History of Time (sorry Dr Hawking, I did try). With the first type of book, readers can pick out useful tips without wading through pages of case studies; with the latter, a briefer version might be the only way to get information to stick.

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Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann review – a world of consumers

This history of consumption is fascinating and broad in scope, from Ming-era China to the pleasures of online shopping. But it is riven by a contradiction

This book addresses one of the most basic questions. To survey the vast terrain, Frank Trentmann, a professor at Birkbeck and formerly the head of a £5m research project on Cultures of Consumption, has delivered a monumental study, sweeping from Renaissance Europe to the burgeoning middle class of modern-day India, by way of 19th-century London, Berlin, Paris, Shanghai and pre- and postcolonial Africa.

Trentmann’s message is subtle and comes in different shades across many chapters. But fundamentally, his aim is to undercut conventional political and cultural critiques of consumer society. Consumption, Trentmann tells us, isn’t merely an empty exercise in social climbing, corrosive of the human spirit. Nor is it reducible to the homogenising anglobalisation of giant mass-producing corporations that JK Galbraith and Herbert Marcuse warned us against. Holding both crude sociology and simplistic economics at arm’s length, Trentmann paints a rich picture of the variegated human impulses that have impelled the history of consumption: the search for “domestic comfort, fashion and novelty”, the pleasures of shopping, the exotic taste for articles from “faraway lands”, “the cult of domestic possessions and hobbies”, and the mediatised inducements of the printed word, radio, cinema, TV, video and the digital age.

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Fluke: The Maths and Myths of Coincidences by Joseph Mazur – review

Unforeseen meetings, improbable outcomes and a strange story of plum puddings … a deep dive into the mathematics of chance

A sunny day in Paris, 1929. The novelist Anne Parrish leaves her husband in a left bank cafe to browse books at a stall by the Seine. One in particular grabs her attention. It’s an old favourite – Jack Frost and Other Stories, in English. She parts with one franc for it, before excitedly returning to the cafe to share her find. Charles, her husband, takes it from her to have a look. After a moment, he passes it back, open at a page inscribed with the words “Anne Parrish, 209 North Weber Street, Colorado Springs, Colorado”. It was her very own childhood copy.

We expect marvellous coincidences like this to occur once in a lifetime. But most of us have experienced more than one event that, on the face of it, seemed highly unlikely. The friend who called at the moment you picked up the phone to ring her. The neighbour you bumped into thousands of miles from home. At these moments, life suddenly seems less random, the world less indifferent. It can be comforting, feeling like you are the centre of the universe, or unsettling: if we really are caught in a web of destiny, who is weaving it?

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Lisa McInerney's 'astounding' debut novel wins Desmond Elliott prize

A fortnight after bagging the Baileys prize for women’s fiction, The Glorious Heresies takes £10,000 honour

Two weeks after Lisa McInerney won the Baileys prize for women’s fiction, the Irish writer has won the £10,000 Desmond Elliott prize for her debut novel The Glorious Heresies, which judges said had “electricity running through [its] prose”.

Related: The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney review – the Sweary Lady is on bellicose form

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Lisa McInerney's 'astounding' debut novel wins Desmond Elliott prize

A fortnight after bagging the Baileys prize for women’s fiction, The Glorious Heresies takes £10,000 honour

Two weeks after Lisa McInerney won the Baileys prize for women’s fiction, the Irish writer has won the £10,000 Desmond Elliott prize for her debut novel The Glorious Heresies, which judges said had “electricity running through [its] prose”.

Related: The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney review – the Sweary Lady is on bellicose form

Related: Lisa McInerney: ‘The phone has to be in another room. And even then I’ll play Minesweeper'

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Poets on tour, part three: silence in Oxford, shouting in Chipping Norton

Today, the road trip reaches the heart of Oxfordshire, where tense political times provide the spark for hijinks and tomfoolery

Midsummer Bath is gold in early sun and rain, as we climb aboard the minibus for the drive to Oxford. Edward Thomas insists that I say through Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, but it is, of course, the other way round on this road, with flowers, flowers all the way – dog roses, campion, buttercups, mallow, cowparsley and Jack-by-the-Hedge, blood-splashes of poppies.

Two down, 14 to go. This will, indeed, be the longest day. We relish each other’s company in anxious political times, but all took heart from Wales’s 3-0 win in France. Minibus games yesterday grew loud and raucous. Today we compared poetry and prose, the fine line with the elegant sentence, talked of how a line of prose can have a “tune”. I supplied “a short while ago in New York”, from Radio 4’s financial news. “A dance to the music of time”, “A Portrait of Dorian Grey”, “The Ballad of Bobby MacGee”, my fellow poets add, after minutes of silent thought.

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Four times African writers rewrote a western classic and nailed it

Ainehi Edoro looks at books by African writers that are based on western classics – sometimes giving the original a complete makeover

By Ainehi Edoro for Brittle Paper, part of the Guardian Books Network

Heart of Darkness tells the story of a British sailor who travels the river Congo in search of a lost explorer. The language is evocative and beautiful but the book has been criticised as racist, partly because it represents Africans as caricatures. Ama Ata Aidoo flips Conrad’s classic in a spunky purse-size novella titled Our Sister Killjoy, replacing the British sailor of Conrad’s adventure with Sissie, a Ghanaian student set adrift on a European quest. Sissie travels through Germany and Belgium, driven by wonder and frustration just like Conrad’s Marlowe. While Conrad populates his novel with stock African characters drawn from hundreds of years of racist colonial archive, Aidoo expertly fashions her European characters as one-dimensional figures, reducing them to stereotypical body types, names and even accents. Like Marlowe, Sissie obsesses over Europeans, but her observations about Europeans are more refined as she remains slightly more clinically detached. Aidoo comes for Conrad in a tit-for-tat literary fist-fight to show him just what is wrong with his representation of Africa.

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Everyone Is Watching review – a panoramic portrait of New York

Whitman, Mapplethorpe and Edmund White star in Megan Bradbury’s beautifully written debut about what defines America’s most famous city

The American writer Lydia Davis has compared her mini-stories to buildings, because like skyscrapers they are surrounded by an imposing blank space.

It’s a pretty analogy that didn’t mean much to me until I read Everyone Is Watching. Megan Bradbury’s debut novel also develops from blocks of text surrounded by white space. Her chapters are short, her paragraphs all of similar length and her sentence structures as repetitive as a course of bricks; sometimes three or four in a row start with the same word. The effect is enervating at first – it feels like an early reader for intellectuals. Yet gradually these blocks of text build to something more complex. The layering of experience, the repeated allusions to light, mirrors and shifting perspectives, do indeed call to mind the shimmering high rises among which her novel is set. Her subject is New York and her material the stories of four famous New Yorkers: photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, writers Walt Whitman and Edmund White, and city planner Robert Moses.

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Unesco lists Exeter Book among 'world's principal cultural artefacts'

Collection of poems and riddles from the 10th century, regarded as ‘foundation volume of English literature’, added to Memory of the World register

The Exeter Book, an Anglo-Saxon poetry anthology dating back more than 1,000 years, which has inspired writers from WH Auden to JRR Tolkien, has been granted Unesco status as “the foundation volume of English literature”.

Housed in Exeter Cathedral since it was given to the institution by its first bishop, Leofric, in the 11th century, the Exeter Book was written around 970. It contains some 40 poems and 96 riddles, a number of which are found nowhere else. On Tuesday, it was placed on Unesco’s Memory of the World register, where it will sit alongside works such as the Magna Carta, the Bayeux Tapestry, the Book of Kells and the Diary of Anne Frank.

Related: Oldest handwritten documents in UK unearthed in London dig

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Free Speech by Timothy Garton Ash review – coping with the internet as ‘history’s largest sewer’

This is a thought-provoking manifesto for a ‘connected world’, a suggested agreement on how we disagree. But is freedom of expression what Garton Ash says it is?

In the 1980s, Timothy Garton Ash made his name as a brilliant reporter on central and eastern European politics. He was spied on by the Stasi (who code named him “Romeo”), made friends with dissident writers, politicians and journalists, and experienced first hand what it was like to live in a world of totalitarianism, censorship, secret police and samizdat publishing.

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Quidditch leaves Harry Potter behind as (real) World Cup fever grows

From Uganda to Pakistan, quidditch teams from all around the world are gearing up for the international competition of JK Rowling’s fictional sport in Germany next month. But if you can’t fly a broomstick - why would you play?

“To be honest, I was never a huge Harry Potter fan,” says UK quidditch coach Ashley Cooper, who has just graduated in medicine from Oxford. “If anything I’m more a Lord of the Rings fan.”

Team UK captain Ben Morton agrees. “I’d never read the books when I started playing … It’s more the sport that I picked up.”

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The Natural Way of Things review – a masterpiece of feminist horror

Ten women are abducted and held prisoner in the Australian outback in Charlotte Wood’s powerful modern-day parable

At the beginning of The Natural Way of Things, 10 young women wake from a drugged sleep to find they’ve been abducted and taken to a derelict sheep-shearing station somewhere in the Australian outback. There are no telephones, no computers, no neighbours. The compound is surrounded by a 30ft fence so powerfully electrified that a single touch leaves crippling burns. The area inside is several miles across; large enough to contain an entire ecosystem, including not only cockatoos and poisonous snakes but troops of kangaroos. The women are put to hard labour, and their two male guards treat them impersonally, sometimes brutally. Any request for explanations is met with beatings.

Gradually they realise what they have in common: all have been involved in sex scandals with powerful men. “Isobel Askell the airline girl, then Hetty the cardinal’s girl … Maitlynd the school principal’s ‘head girl’… that morose gamer girl Rhiannon, the one called Codebabe and the wanking mascot for every nasty little gamer creep in the country. Then poor cruise-ship Lydia, then Leandra from the army, then … the girl the whole country could despise: little Asian Joy, from last season’s PerforMAXX.” Finally, there are the two point-of-view characters: Verla the politician’s mistress, and Yolanda, who should have known better than to go into that room alone with those footballers. We never get the full stories of these scandals, but then, we know them without being told. They are – and this is the point –all too familiar.

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Top 10 books about the Beatles

Paul McCartney’s biographer picks out the best work in a field that has often been marked by ‘leaden paragraphs overstuffed with show-offy facts’

Writing about the Beatles has saddled me with two heavy burdens. The first is that almost everyone considers themselves an expert on what the band’s publicist Derek Taylor called “the 20th century’s greatest romance”. I’ve noticed that many of these self-appointed sages hate to hear something about the subject that they don’t already know. My new biography of Paul McCartney was full of revelations about his life, in and after the Beatles, yet from many quarters still brought that resentful chorus of “nothing new here”.

The second, long-term burden is becoming classified as a “rock biographer”. In Britain, writing about rock music still isn’t really taken seriously – and, by and large, doesn’t deserve to be. In the US, by contrast, it’s taken far too seriously, with the earnest, plodding pair Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick vying for supremacy in the field. To me, their combined surnames suggests a new verb, “to greilnick” – ie churn out leaden paragraphs overstuffed with show-offy facts, yet be unable to create a compelling narrative or convey character or atmosphere.

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The Sex Lives of English Women review – turkish delight fantasies and great ‘organisms’

Being ravished on Question Time, enjoying bondage in the pub, a nun who wants a threesome … Wendy Jones has given women the space to talk, but could have done much more

What do women really want? Many have wondered, and now, finally, thanks to Wendy Jones’s collection of “intimate interviews” we have some answers. One wants to swim in a pool with no edges filled with molten chocolate; another wants to re-enact a porno version of a 1970s Fry’s turkish delight advert; another to have a sexual encounter while participating in Question Time. Some women want to have sex every day; some don’t want to have it at all. Some like whipping, others like vampires. The shocking news seems to be that women are individuals, with desires and fantasies peculiar to themselves.

If there are any more general conclusions to be drawn from what was originally half a million words of material, Jones isn’t telling, which makes one wonder what the point of her project was. “When I began, I had no agenda,” she writes in her introduction. “I wanted to listen to women, to give women space to speak.” She found her subjects seemingly at random, through sitting next to them on the train, through friends, or on social media. “Every woman has a unique sexuality and a unique story to tell about her sexuality,” she writes – and yet she also seems to want these individuals to tell us a bigger story. Each of the 24 interviewees is given her own chapter with a bossy, generalising label – “Muslim”, “Mother”, “Lesbian”, “Nun”, “Feminist”, and so on – as though each woman were not simply herself but representative of a whole demographic. Sometimes the interviewee obligingly conforms to expectations (“Muslim” tells us that “society is too sexualised” and that the main thing is to ask “how do I please the Lord?”, while “Mother” describes sex as her “marital duty”), and other times she comically doesn’t (“Nun” wants a threesome). Either way, what Jones’s subjects say is coloured by her one-word characterisation.

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Are you anxious, asks a picture book, then helps me face my answer| Rebecca Slater

Generalised anxiety is paralysing to live with and nearly impossible to explain but a new book on it proves pictures can indeed be worth a thousand words

I first came across Catherine LePage’s illustrated book browsing the aisles of my local bookstore. I do this most days, as a way to get myself out of bed, out of the house. After months of holding down temporary and contract jobs, I’d recently landed a full-time job, quit after a week in a fit of panic, and now found myself unemployed, unsure and more anxious than I’d been in my entire life.

I found it propped up in the small self-help section, tucked away in the back corner of the store. On approach, a young woman, flicking through a book on self-esteem, averted her gaze: a sign of mutual respect, sympathy or occasionally fear that I’d become accustomed to in frequenting this section over the past months.

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Sarah Polley adapting Margaret Atwood crime novel for Netflix series

The Canadian actor turned writer and director will adapt Atwood’s 1996 book, Alias Grace, into a miniseries, with American Psycho’s Mary Harron directing

Netflix has teamed with Sarah Polley (director of Away From Her) and Mary Harron (American Psycho) for a new true-crime series, based on a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, about convicted murderer Grace Marks. Polley, who last directed the acclaimed documentary Stories We Tell, will write and produce the six-hour miniseries, with Harron on board as director.

Alias Grace, bearing the same title as Atwood’s 1996 book, will tell the story of Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant and domestic servant in upper Canada, who along with stable hand James McDermott, was convicted of the brutal murders of their employer and his housekeeper. Marks was eventually exonerated after 30 years, while McDermott was hanged for the crimes.

Related: Don't ask for the truth

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Translation Tuesday: Next, a poem by Jing Xianghai

Still largely unknown to western readers, Jing Xianghai is the best-selling Taiwanese poet of his generation, combining comedy with heroic pathos

By Jing Xianghai and Lee Yew Leong for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

Jing Xianghai, a psychiatrist by day, is the best-selling Taiwanese poet of his generation. The following poem is taken from his collection Nobita (pronounced Da Xiong in Chinese).

*****

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David Baddiel wins funniest book for middle grade children

Funny books are celebrated as the winners of the inaugural Laugh Out Loud book awards (The Lollies) are announced by Michael Rosen

The winners of the inaugural Laugh Out Loud Awards (nicknamed “The Lollies”), a new prize to celebrate the funniest children’s books, have just been announced!

Related: Search for the funniest children's books of the year – the Lollies shortlist

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Poets' tour hits Bath: strawberry moon in a honey-dipped city

The Shore to Shore diary makes a second stop, where we are treated to warm enthusiasm and opinionated bookselling – and find more reasons to write

Day two of the Shore to Shore tour: summer solstice, 17 hours of daylight and the promise of a strawberry moon if we are lucky. Poets and poetry, baggage, books, trumpet, garklein flute, horn and crumhorn are slotted into the minibus, and we launch ourselves into a dreich morning – “out of the swing of the sea” – on our way to Bath.

Related: Five poets go on tour: Carol Ann Duffy's travel diary begins

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Covers story: why are there so many new publishing imprints?

From Colm Tóibín’s Tuskar Rock to Fleet, One and Tinder Press, there seem to be more and more publisher subdivisions. Claire Armitstead finds out why

Towards the end of the noughties, Colm Tóibín bounced into the office of a London publisher clutching a fat Australian novel and insisting that he had to bring it to the UK. His enthusiasm for what he would later acclaim as a book “of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don DeLillo’s Underworld” caused some surprise at Atlantic Books, which was among the 80-odd publishers that had already rejected Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap.

But Tóibín persevered - and the novel, which had already been out for two years in Australia – became the literary talking point of 2010: loved and reviled with equal passion, this yarn about a falling-out over an unruly child at a suburban barbecue was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and went on to be made into two TV mini-series.

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Henning Mankell play about colonialism in Africa published in English for first time

Extract from The Antelopes by Wallander author – who spent years in Mozambique – published in Index on Censorship

A play by Henning Mankell about a Swedish couple struggling to understand the Africa where they have lived for more than a decade is being published in English for the first time this week.

Best known for his crime novels about Inspector Wallander, Mankell was also a dramatist, with more than 30 plays to his name. An extract from The Antelopes, which the author called “a battle between irreconcilable presences, between falsehood and truth”, has just been translated into English for the first time by Ann Henning Jocelyn, and is published in the new issue of Index on Censorship’s quarterly magazine.

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Henning Mankell play about colonialism in Africa published in English for first time

Extract from The Antelopes by Wallander author – who spent years in Mozambique – published in Index on Censorship

A play by Henning Mankell about a Swedish couple struggling to understand the Africa where they have lived for more than a decade is being published in English for the first time this week.

Best known for his crime novels about Inspector Wallander, Mankell was also a dramatist, with more than 30 plays to his name. An extract from The Antelopes, which the author called “a battle between irreconcilable presences, between falsehood and truth”, has just been translated into English for the first time by Ann Henning Jocelyn, and is published in the new issue of Index on Censorship’s quarterly magazine.

Related: Henning Mankell’s final farewell

Related: Henning Mankell's ability to write anything anywhere saw him to the end

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From bedroom wall to auction hall: rare Thor comic art goes on sale

Cover artwork for 1968 Marvel cover featuring Norse ‘superhero’ goes to auction after decades adorning domestic interior

A rare early image of the superhero incarnation of the Norse god Thor, which has hung on a bedroom wall for decades, is set to be auctioned later this week.

The illustration, the original artwork for the cover of the December 1968 issue of The Mighty Thor, was designed by Jack Kirby, the creator known as the “King” of comics for helping to invent characters from Captain America to the Fantastic Four, as well as Thor. It shows the Norse god and son of Odin in his winged helmet battling a giant, and will go up for auction on 24 June for an estimated price of £5,000 to £8,000.

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From bedroom wall to auction hall: rare Thor comic art goes on sale

Cover artwork for 1968 Marvel cover featuring Norse ‘superhero’ goes to auction after decades adorning domestic interior

A rare early image of the superhero incarnation of the Norse god Thor, which has hung on a bedroom wall for decades, is set to be auctioned later this week.

The illustration, the original artwork for the cover of the December 1968 issue of The Mighty Thor, was designed by Jack Kirby, the creator known as the “King” of comics for helping to invent characters from Captain America to the Fantastic Four, as well as Thor. It shows the Norse god and son of Odin in his winged helmet battling a giant, and will go up for auction on 24 June for an estimated price of £5,000 to £8,000.

Related: Original Tintin comic artwork sells for more than €1m

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Louise O'Neill: 'Readers tell me my book showed them that being raped wasn't their fault'

The author of Asking for It explains how she drew on many people’s experience of sexual violence for her novel, including her own

Writing Asking for It was a fraught process. The day before I sat down at my desk to begin working on it, I decided that I had to tell my parents and my sister about my own experience of sexual assault – because I knew the subject was likely to come up in interviews once the book was published. My mother was sobbing; my sister remained silent, her face a mask of horror; my father hugged me and told me that he loved me. I went to bed that night and had nightmares about being raped by a faceless man, my mouth sewn shut so I couldn’t scream for help. I woke at 4am, gasping, my face damp with tears.

That was only the beginning.

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