7 The Professor (written 1846; published 1857) by Charlotte Brontë This was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of a... Read more »
As I write this, Iranians around the world are holding their breath for the end of the murderous Islamic Republic. More than three years after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement began, amid renewed... Read more »
The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan (Head of Zeus, £20) Better known as a film-maker, Jordan has never stopped writing novels. His latest opens in 2084 in rural Ireland, where... Read more »
Asako Yuzuki’s international bestseller Butter was a taste sensation based on the true story of a Japanese female serial killer and gourmet chef who scammed and poisoned male victims with her culinary... Read more »
John Lanchester has distinguished between his nonfiction and his novels as the line between “things happening in the world” and “the things that won’t leave you alone”. Over the last decade and... Read more »
Katie Kitamura, Susan Choi, Kit de Waal and Lily King are among the authors longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. Awarded annually and now in its 31st year, the prize... Read more »
The Danish author Helle Helle’s They, published in the UK in a pin-sharp translation by Martin Aitken, charts the subtle and shifting bond between a teenage daughter and an ailing mother in prose... Read more »
Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then,... Read more »
It would be hard to find a more courageous and perverse, iconic yet controversial figure in European literary history than George Sand. One of the great romantics, she helped transform culture, and... Read more »