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How has your idea of home changed over the years? Author Manav Kaul (Kunal Patil/ Hindustan Times) The memory of home is so interesting. I live in a fictional world because I write fiction. I am more excited by memories of home and its people than the physical place itself. When I visit the places where I grew up or the places from where I started a career in theatre, I am often disappointed because the memory of those places is so much bigger. In that sense, I carry my home with me. Hindustan Times - your…

One day, Liz Jensen’s son, Raphaël, meets death in the garden. It’s a bird: a great tit that he picks up and brings inside. ‘‘I found a sleeping bird,’’ he says to his mother, who explains that this particular bird will not be waking up. They dig a hole for it and hold a funeral. “Not a bird any more, we tell him. Underground, it will rot and magic into something else. But this makes no sense to him. He puts snail shells on the little grave and howls.”At the age of 25, Raphaël meets death again. He is on a training run in…

Mary Jean Chan, Caleb Azumah Nelson and AK Blakemore are among the shortlistees for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.The award, worth £20,000, celebrates poetry, novels, short stories and drama by writers aged 39 and under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Catherine Lacey and Joshua Jones also made the shortlist. Jones was the only debut author selected, with his short story collection Local Fires, inspired by real events and people in his home town of…

Buchi Emecheta’s journey – from orphaned child, through marital oppression, single motherhood and societal prejudice, to fulfilment as an internationally acclaimed writer – though often described in terms of a rags-to-riches tale is better characterised as one woman’s dogged pursuit of a seemingly impossible dream. Recurrent themes in her novels – motherhood, female independence and freedom through education – are all the more powerful since they are never far from her own real-life experiences. Although it is easy to…

It’s sometimes said that all war movies, whatever their stance, end up being propaganda for war. In The Kellerby Code, a version of the argument is made about PG Wodehouse. “Propaganda for poshos,” one character says briskly when she sees the protagonist reading The Code of the Woosters. “Every book set in an English country house is an advert for a system that fucks everyone apart from the chinny cunts who live in them.”Jonny Sweet’s debut novel, then, is very conscious of the tradition in which it stands. It’s a lurid…

In Vienna, every second building looks like it was built for a king, the waiters who serve your coffee wear tuxedos, and public transport is not just efficient and cheap, the council pays musicians to play Mozart in the carriages. But in the stories of Serbian author Barbi Marković, set in the Austrian city and its surroundings, there’s something not quite right about the place.In Minihorror, the 44-year-old’s very strange and very addictive short story collection, horrifying things lurk behind splendid baroque facades. A…

The champion of Arabia never got to write the book, but gave Roland Phillips a title for his, a valuable but flawed study of a man whose actions and fate continue to ripple through British-Irish relations more than a century after his execution in 1916.Casement gazes from a cover that splices two portraits into a discomfiting whole, preparing the reader for immersion in a life that crossed sexual, geographic and ideological boundaries, and a journey that made him a martyr for some, a traitor for others.Just as Casement…

The Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s astonishing 2018 debut novel, There There, offered a kaleido­scopic portrait of urban Native American identity. Composed of an all-Native cast, it ruminated on power, storytelling, dispossession, erasure and historical memory. The novel’s off-the-wall structure placed its central event – a mass shooting at an Oakland powwow – at the book’s end, leaving its aftermath largely unattended.Now comes an emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel, Wandering…

The latest Sally Rooney-endorsed Irish writer makes a book-length debut with a short story collection that captures the experience of being a young woman today with a clear eye and a listless sigh. Crap jobs and a desire not to go to them, crap men and the desire still to go to them, and worse-than-crap housing are common themes in these airless stories of aimless women.The title isn’t just cute: it’s no surprise when Rebecca Ivory thanks her therapists in her acknowledgment. She is excellent at revealing how our…

In an early scene from Saltburn, Oxford scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) goes on the defensive when his classmate Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) criticises his essay for the overuse of the adverb “thus.” Oliver counters that it is lazy to pick apart the style instead of the substance of his writing. Farleigh hits back, “It’s not what you argue but how” — which could be read as a pre-emptive notice from writer-director Emerald Fennell to detractors who may pan her new film for being heavy on style and light on…