The Chinese American author of The Book of Goose pays tribute to the late writer, reflecting on the rich rewards of revisiting her stories over many yearsA life in quotes: Alice MunroFive of the best Alice Munro short storiesTwo days after Alice Munro died, I went to an event in New York, and found myself among strangers. A woman asked me if I’d heard...

Writer and peer Daniel Finkelstein narrates his family’s extraordinary story with a mixture of horror and wonderIn this remarkable family memoir, the political journalist and Conservative peer Daniel Finkelstein documents the lives of his parents and grandparents under Hitler and Stalin, and “how the great forces of history crashed down in a terrible...

Hunted by Abir Mukherjee; Bonehead by Mo Hayder; When We Were Silent by Fiona McPhillips; The Mystery of the Crooked Man by Tom SpencerHunted by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill Secker, £14.99) For his first standalone novel, Mukherjee, author of a crime series set in 1920s India, has turned his attention to contemporary America. During the last week of a toxic...

The British novelist on rereading the classics, his teenage love of outsiders, and discovering the brilliance of Anita BrooknerMy earliest reading memory I remember reading Roald Dahl and Diana Wynne Jones and, in particular, I remember my parents leaving all the volumes of CS Lewis’s Narnia series on my bed. But what came before that? I must have had...

Blue Sisters, the novelist’s follow-up to her debut Cleopatra and Frankenstein, focuses on death and addiction. She explains how she found her way to a more optimistic story‘Certain themes really choose writers,” says author Coco Mellors from her home in New York, where she lives with her husband and son. “Addiction is a theme I never really chose to...

A compelling debut digs into the conflicting emotions at the heart of an aristocratic family in 2010s EnglandThe cast of Allen Bratton’s debut may sound familiar. Hal, the young heir to the house of Lancaster, wastes his hours in the Boar’s Head pub with his friends Poins and Falstaff. His father, Henry, tries to curtail his son’s bad behaviour, while...