Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last monthSimon Mason is an author new to me but I saw his novel Missing Person: Alice in a bookshop and noticed that both Mick Herron and David Peace had praised it. That was good enough for me. It is a short, elegant novel about an enigmatic investigator and his search...

In The Loney and Starve Acre, the novelist has tapped into a rich seam of rural menace. As his new collection Barrowbeck is published, he considers how today’s fictions are haunted by climate anxietyFrom the earliest pagan offerings to the metaphysical peaks of the Romantic poets, the natural world has always been a repository for our dreams and nightmares....

The author’s alter ego is on a quest to uncover the life and work of his playwright idol in this whimsical debutThe Unfinished Harauld Hughes is something like a South Bank Show House of Leaves: it’s the narrative of the making of a documentary that never gets made, about a movie that also never got made. Its protagonist-narrator is Richard Ayoade,...

A superb history of Christianity’s 2,000-year relationship with our animal instinctsJesus never mentioned homosexuals, masturbation or the role of women in social, let alone sacred, life. Yet that hasn’t stopped millennia of godly scholars and lay Christians acting as if he had. According to these finger-waggers, extrapolating from biblical apocrypha,...

There are shades of The Shining and Shirley Jackson in these atmospheric short stories set around a haunted hotel in the FensFrom the tricksy, unstable terrain of Fen, her debut collection, through the Booker-shortlisted Everything Under, to the darkly gothic drama of her 2020 novel Sisters, Daisy Johnson’s fiction has long bumped up against the edges...

As the Erotic Review is joined by dating app Feeld’s literary magazine and Gillian Anderson’s anthology of women’s fantasies, there seems to be a fresh appetite for writing about desire‘Sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believe we are expected to want”, writes Gillian Anderson...