China Miéville, author

I was sideswiped by Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child. A brilliant, strange book that challenged me in the most exhilarating way, with its fractured language and dream-cinema visions, the sense it bestowed of walking through a corridor full of echoes. Echoes of a less elliptical but no-less political kind haunt Jordy Rosenberg’s astounding Night Night Fawn. I guess you could call it a family novel? But it’s at least as much about fascism as it is about the family – as well as about unsettling linkages between the two. And for horrors and rage in a nonfiction register, Jonas Marvin’s The Breaking of the English Working Class is an indispensable – and beautifully written – essay on decades of structural, economic and psychic violence. The feeling it provoked in me brought to mind John Berger’s phrase “undefeated despair”.

The Rouse by China Miéville is published by Picador (£35). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Linda, Guardian reader

I was totally immersed in Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor, a beautifully written story describing a short time in the life of a young woman and her fishing community on an island off the coast of Wales in the 1930s. The simplicity of this tale is underpinned with intriguing moral issues when two anthropologists visit the island to study the lives and history of the islanders. The book is the most poetic I’ve read in a while.

Derek Owusu, author

I’ve enjoyed so many books recently. Two I now claim as favourites of all time. The first is Beloved by Toni Morrison. Incredibly late to the party because I was resistant to reading her again having had such a hard time with Sula. But Beloved, in my opinion, is the perfect novel. The second is Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, one of the founding texts of the Latin American tradition of magical realism. It was hard work but so enjoyable, a reminder that challenging can be fun and that it’s possible to tell a story in a variety of ways. Last, I want to mention The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. I’ve only just finished it, so coherent feelings are still working themselves out, but in the mix I know there is admiration, pleasure, something life affirming and something ineffable sparked by the religious elements of the novel. I’m almost certain it’s going to join the others as one of my favourites. I’m having a great run.

The Recovery House by Derek Owusu is published by Merky Books (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Fiona, Guardian reader

In the day, Mario Vargas Llosa by Gerald Martin, a giant ship of a book which, at nearly a thousand pages, will probably steer me through the remains of 2026. In the night, when I cannot sleep, I do as I always do around the date of my birthday: a re-read of all of Jean Rhys. With her, I am on the moonlit deck of the ship and we watch the darkness of a deep sea rush by. For sanity, The Practice of Not Thinking by Ryunosuke Koike: the antidote to botched CBT therapy. For inspiration, For Now by Eileen Myles, concerning the loss of part of their archive and the struggle to hold on to a rent controlled apartment of 40 years. And My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem. Of course.

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Sebastian Barry, author

If anyone is in a mood to have their psyches calmed and their reading synapses restored, then The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope is the cat’s pyjamas. I was nodding my head recently when Marlon James was saying somewhere that he rated Trollope above Dickens. Not that D is any slouch. I am rereading a book I read for work, and now again just because it’s so excellently done, Army Life in a Black Regiment, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Emerson said it was a masterpiece by a writer not known for writing masterpieces(!) The Penguin Classics reissue in the late 1990s also has his correspondence with Emily Dickinson and an account of his one meeting with her, revelatory on many levels. She spoke as she wrote. I was also very admiring of a little book of poems by Kayleigh Jayshree called Mango and Starblush, which Miss Dickinson might have called true poems.

The Newer World by Sebastian Barry is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Irvine Welsh, author

I’ve been enjoying Contrapposto by Dave Eggers. The premise that love and art are the only things that make life worthwhile pulses beautifully through this novel and its two protagonists, spanning decades of their obsession with both, and each other. The tragedy is they are not sufficient alone for a relationship to survive to the exclusion of everything else (namely capitalism, which always has a place at the table), but they remain essential and enduring. Nowhere is this better evoked than here. Think John Williams’s Stoner but with art instead of literature and stuffed with more memorable characters.

In Raveheart, Graeme Armstrong confronts the twin promises of utopia and madness in a time before the internet’s colonisation of the mind, when people still dared to dream and lived to party. This book made me want to call some heads, rent a farmhouse, get a sound system and neck several pills. In fact, I might just do that.

Finally, another one for creatures of the night in all their disparate glory. Overnight by Dan Richards is more than a tribute to the people (and other critters) who operate in the hours of darkness to ensure we have everything we need – it’s a discourse on the very nature of night-time itself, and its essential relationship to our humanity. This is a beautifully written work of startling brilliance, astonishing the reader page after page.

Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Jean, Guardian reader

I am reading The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson. My only regret is not saving this book until my late summer beach vacation, because this book is best read with sand betwixt your toes. The story follows a group of lifelong friends in their thirties in their Massachusetts home town as they navigate marriage, parenthood, and careers. A newcomer from New York City arrives to work on what she hopes will be her big break as a writer and becomes irrevocably interwoven in the group’s complicated dynamics. It’s funny, sharp, and has me wondering as a child-free woman if many parents are self-medicating with weed on a regular basis to get through the day.

Janice Hallett, author

I’ve been diving deep into true crime lately. London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe is a book that examines so much more than its central crime story: that of a young man whose big dreams and relentless drive took him in a deadly direction. Keefe elevates the tragedy by placing it in the context of our capital’s criminal history. I’ve also revisited Carol Ann Lee’s exceptionally researched and presented The Murders at White House Farm.

For someone fascinated by criminal psychology and the legal system, this book is without a doubt a core text on the Jeremy Bamber case. Meanwhile, I was hooked for a whole weekend on Dead Fashion Girl by Fred Vermorel. Described as “a situationist detective story” it starts with the 1954 murder of a young fashion designer in Ruislip, not far from where I live, and splays outwards and downwards into London’s postwar criminal underbelly.

The Silent Appeal by Janice Hallett is published by Profile (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Barbara, Guardian reader

You wouldn’t think that an account of a ten-month long legal process would be a page-turner, but that is exactly what Emmanuel Carrère has achieved in V13, the book based on his weekly magazine columns covering the trial of the surviving perpetrators of the terror attacks in Paris on Friday (ie Vendredi) 13, 2015. He delves into the lives of the victims, the perpetrators, the lawyers, and produces an all-round picture of the human beings involved in this horrific event. It is written with compassion, empathy, and a genuine curiosity about motivation.

Light-years away (or perhaps not) is the deceptively simple tale told by Iain Crichton Smith in Consider the Lilies, a short novel about an elderly woman’s treatment at the hands of the Duke of Sutherland as he evicted tenants during the Highland Clearances – one woman, representing the fates of 150,000. A note at the front of the book tells me that I bought it on North Uist more than half-a-century ago, and now that I’m older I find it possibly even more moving than it was then.

Move over bird of the year: voting is now open in the Guardian’s poll to find Australia’s best children’s picture book of all time.

In December, more than 3,000 Guardian readers shared their favourite Australian picture books, which shaped the top 50 shortlist.

Spanning picture books published between 1973 and 2022, among the 50 books are familiar classics – Possum Magic, Who Sank the Boat?, Animalia, Mr McGee, The Rainbow Serpent, the mysterious and prolific Grug – as well as more recent hits like The Very Cranky Bear, Pig the Pug and Mr Chicken Goes to Paris.

Starting on Tuesday, much like bird of the year, readers can vote once a day for their favourite picture book. The five books with the least votes will be eliminated each day, with tallies resetting at 9.30am AEDT. Readers should remember to vote every day in order to keep their favourite book in the running.

The final round of voting for the remaining 10 books will start at 9.30am AEDT on Wednesday 4 February, after which vote tallies will no longer be visible. The book with the most votes when the poll closes at 9.30am on Thursday 5 February will be crowned champion – and revealed at 6am on Friday 6 February.

Get voting!

The title characters of Megha Majumdar’s second novel are a young man referred to only by a nickname, Boomba, and a woman known as Ma. Each regards themselves as a guardian, and the other as a thief. The reader is not asked to take sides, but instead to observe how the world makes thieves of guardians, and vice versa.

A Guardian and a Thief takes place over what is meant to be the last week of Ma living in Kolkata. She, her father and her two-year-old daughter are about to join Ma’s husband in the United States, as the recipients of prized “climate visas”. Floods and extreme heat have turned Kolkata into a city of persistent food shortages. Black marketeers hoard eggs, fruit and vegetables, while fish, previously the cornerstone of Bengali cooking, has vanished altogether. The terrifying word famine is disinterred. This is one of the many ways in which climate change has sent Kolkata forward into the past. While Majumdar’s acclaimed debut, A Burning, laid out the appalling consequences of a young woman’s Facebook post, in A Guardian and a Thief the city appears to be almost entirely smartphone-free.

For years, Ma, who sincerely believes herself to be an honest and altruistic person, has got away with stealing food from the homeless shelter that she manages. She has, after all, an old father and an infant daughter to take care of – if she is a thief, it is only because she is a guardian. But then, just as she is about to leave Kolkata behind, a new shelter resident who has observed her theft breaks into her house. Boomba takes not only the stolen food, but her purse, which contains her family’s passports and the climate visas that will open the gates of America.

Majumdar writes what Martin Amis dubbed “vow-of-poverty prose”, although in her case it might more accurately be called vow-of-efficiency. This means the eradication of semicolons, run-on-sentences, wordplay and digression; a faultlessly clear third-person voice that dispenses with free indirect style; and a truly minimal degree of social and historical context. All these things are sacrificed for narrative focus.

There are costs to taking efficiency to this ascetic extent. A Guardian and a Thief has the pace of a thriller, but it derives its drama from the ratcheting up of moral stakes, rather than suspense. By abjuring so many of the novel’s traditional tools, Majumdar can make her choice of form seem arbitrary, raising the question of why this is a novel at all, and not a play or film. Although concerned with moral ambiguity, it seeks at all times to be narratively unambiguous, and to signpost and repeat its ideas for the inattentive reader, just as TV writers are now encouraged to do.

But plenty is gained, too. By offering as little cultural and historical exposition as possible, Majumdar evades the narrative clunkiness that inevitably attends attempts to explain India to the west. This frees her up not only to tell a story of universal moral interest, but also to deliver a perceptive account of specifically Indian anxieties. She brilliantly renders the helplessness that even privileged Indians feel in the face of western consular officials; the extent to which Indians divided by class simply cannot understand each other; and, above all, how the Indian rich use the claims of family as a justification for riding roughshod over everyone else.

If the novel works best as (Indian) moral critique, it is less successful as climate fiction. By structuring the plot around the accidental theft of the family’s passports, Majumdar, at two crucial moments, is compelled to stretch plausibility too far. In both cases, for narrative reasons a character displays a degree of unworldliness that is inconsistent with everything else we know about them, and with what we might reasonably expect of someone in their position.

First, Boomba – a young man who has worked for years in the big city – is ignorant of the very existence of passports. When he finds them, he fans himself with one “to see if it served a cooling purpose”. Later, Ma goes to a forger in an attempt to substitute fake passports for the ones that Boomba has stolen. This could, perhaps, be explained by desperation. Boomba’s moment of unworldliness, however, cannot be satisfactorily accounted for.

At a pinch, a reader might accept or at any rate pass over these moments. What is harder to accept is the idea that the US, in a world in which large parts of Earth are uninhabitable, might hand out “climate visas” at all. The book pits “some Americans” who are outraged by climate immigration against “other Americans” who welcome it; the implication is that climate visas will be handed out by some presidents and not others. A Guardian and a Thief dramatises, to superb effect, the Indian elite’s great fear: a world in which they are forced to share. The west’s fear of uncontrolled climate immigration, by contrast, is not only not dramatised but trivialised as the concerns of “some”. Those “other Americans” will find here a novel to engage their sympathies, but not trouble their sleep.

Tomasz, Guardian reader

Ever since my father presented me with a copy of The Unicorn, beautifully translated into my mother tongue, I have been an ardent admirer of Iris Murdoch’s. I went on to read all of her novels, plays and poetry with great enthusiasm. Before Christmas, I returned to her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, having remembered very little of it. Yet from the very first page, I was reminded why I have always loved her work so deeply: the prose is rich, precise, disciplined and meticulously detailed; the many characters are so vividly rendered that none appears two-dimensional; each experiences and processes reality in a way that feels distinct and unmistakably individual; and the pacing of events feels perfectly judged. Although the novel is threaded with philosophical reflections on goodness and love, these never feel laboured or artificially imposed. Rather, they emerge naturally as an integral part of the novel’s dense and intricate tapestry.

Alan Hollinghurst, author

I’ve spent a month reading two poets whose work has been part of my life for more than 50 years. John Fuller’s Marston Meadows opens with the immaculate corona of sonnets that inspired Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know, but these give only a foretaste of a collection that ranges, with amazing wit, agility and deep feeling, through the changing perspectives of old age (Fuller is 89). To my mind, the most moving and luminous of all his books. The Poems of Seamus Heaney, superbly edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis, contains surprises too: poems that were previously uncollected, some never seen before, and most of them fit to stand beside the literary landmarks of their time. It’s been as magical to find these new things as to reread the countless other poems known almost by heart.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is published by Pan Macmillan. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Kelly, Guardian reader

I read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan with my Sauna Book Club (yes it’s a book club in a sauna – no, we don’t read in the sauna). I had enjoyed this title the first time I read it back in 2023, but this time I fell deep in to the story, maybe because of the time of year: this story is set at Christmastime in Dublin during the 1980s, with the eerie and unsettling backdrop of the local convent. I think it also touched a nerve because I have a daughter the same age as the girl that the protagonist Bill Furlong is trying to help. Bill is someone everyone deserves to know, someone who won’t look away – he makes the reader question their ethics and fills their hearts with hope. Keegan’s writing is so delicate, it amazes me how much she can say in one sentence. The book club enjoyed the book and we gave it a resounding 10/10.

Samantha Harvey, author

I read Choice by Neel Mukherjee a couple of months ago and it’s still echoing in me. It’s a novel of three stories – or perhaps one, in which the other two are embedded, so that we’re summoned into a labyrinth of moral uncertainty and offered no easy escape. It’s irresistible writing, elegant and shattering.

I’m about halfway through The Spare Room by Helen Garner, which is the first of her books I’ve read. She describes a kookaburra with a butter hangover, then with a few quick strokes conjures the radiance of a child and the spectre of death. I see why people rave about her, I will now too.

Iris Murdoch’s newly published Poems from an Attic span her life; they’re often written for a specific other, and I almost felt bad – voyeuristic – reading them. But obviously I did read them, fascinated and uplifted by their unerring soul, their frankness and care. The final poem, Macaw in the Snow, is a bolt of light. It made me cry on the train.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey is published by Vintage. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Stuart, Guardian reader

I’ve spent the majority of December reading Ice by Jacek Dukaj, translated by Ursula Phillips. This is a remarkable novel about an alien invasion and an alternative history of Russia, set in 1924. The protagonist Benedykt Gieroslawski is sent to frozen Siberia to track down his father who is believed to be in cahoots with the invading Gleissen aliens who are slowly freezing the entirety of Europe. An incredible novel weighing in at nearly 1,200 pages. The world building and depth of character development are really something else.

A large part of the novel takes place on the Trans-Siberian express, which only adds to the story and character development. It’s a heavy read – not one for trying when the TV is on in the background, but definitely one for sitting down quietly with and immersing oneself in.

I still can’t get over Sinners. It’s what the cinema was made for. It looked amazing; its sound was so rich and textured; and the juke joint dance sequence was a genuine WTF surprise that could have been grim but was utter genius. And if you haven’t seen it, please stay for the scene that comes mid-credits: it has to be my favourite five minutes of film all year. Michael, Manchester

Pillion blew me away – no pun intended. I’d expected it to be sexy and subversive but it’s a much bigger film than that. We saw it in a pretty full cinema and it felt like all of us were realising that fact together – the first laughs sounded surprised, mine included – but as the film revealed itself, it was clear we were all firmly on side. I left with a massive grin on my face and won’t shut up about it to anyone who so much as mentions a motorbike. Izzy, London

I’ve seen 156 films at the cinema this year, 114 of them new. My favourite, rather surprisingly to me, was Blue Moon. It’s just fabulously well done. The premise – lyricist Lorenz Hart trying to come to terms with the end of his professional partnership with composer on the opening night of Rodgers’s and Oscar Hammerstein’s first smash hit musical Oklahoma – is inspired. The script is sharp and witty and the acting superb, especially from Ethan Hawke as Hart, Andrew Scott as Rodgers and Margaret Qualley as Gary’s would-be love interest Elizabeth Weiland. I expect all of them to get Oscar and Bafta nominations, as well as the film itself getting nods for best picture and best original screenplay. Martin McDonald, 60, Manchester

Every aspect of the film gripped the audience in terrifying, magnetic ways, up until the climactic final scene. Never leaving Rose Byrne’s captivating performance and never panning to the daughter until the very end, the film captured a side to parenthood that we do not often see represented in media: the particularly devastating toll it takes on one’s capacity to see and deal with the world around oneself, as parent or child. Jonny Lawrence, Ithaca, New York

Nickel Boys is a wonderfully evocative, Malick-style film that effortlessly gets at a depiction of interiority that is so rarely achieved; a literary adaptation that is completely cinematic. A truly unique experience, emotional and thoughtful without descending into the sort of brutality that often punctuates this kind of story. A triumph. Sean, 33, London

There have been some superb films this year but The Ballad of Wallis Island takes it for me. Absolutely gorgeous, great soundtrack – and who knew Tim Key could act so well? Seán Gorman, 43, Galway, Ireland

The end of the yellow brick road, this film did not disappoint in concluding the emotional rollercoaster that the first film started last year. The more Q&As, interviews, podcast episodes I hear and conversations I participate in, the more I am impressed with every single element of this film. No detail, no motivation, no frame was taken for granted, leaving us with a powerful and incredible experience that changed me for good. M, California, USA

One Battle After Another is a stunning film with a host of compelling themes about modern America and indeed the world running through it. It’s funny, surreal and frightening. A real treat. Gary Ingrey, 66, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire

It’s difficult to choose, but I really enjoyed F1 the movie. As a keen motorsports enthusiast, I found it was light yet captured elements of the tactical side of racing that are often overlooked. The “experienced” veteran v newbie “dismisser” story also gave me a laugh. Raymond, 58, Kildare, Ireland

With its hazy colouring, late-60s setting and fairytale inspiration, The Ice Tower is steeped in a world of nostalgia, making for an easy favourite. Jumping off from The Snow Queen, the film also recalls the temporal uncertainty of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the visions of A Matter of Life and Death. Much as The Snow Queen left me as a child, The Ice Tower bound me in chilling wonder. Lauren, 28, London

Oslo Stories Trilogy

My favourite this year was the Oslo Stories Trilogy from writer turned director Dag Johan Haugerud; three films that present a long, meandering meditation on love in its different forms. Beautifully written dialogues and soulful understated acting; just really moving slices of life without the usual bombast. I loved the visual themes too; the stairs in Dreams, rooftops in Sex and river-quay vistas in Love. Some of the characters appear in all three films, and as a whole the Stories reminded me of Kieslowski’s Three Colours. From the 100 films or so I saw this year, this trilogy really stood out. Ariela Flusser, London

Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro is the best film of 2025. I think he did a spectacular job of showing the creature’s empathy towards others and his anguish at being a “monster”, and Jacob Elordi gave a masterly performance. The cinematography was gorgeous, as were the costume design (Kate Hawley is a genius!) and set designs. Alexandre Desplat composed a fitting original score that added childlike whimsy to what could have been considered gruesome scenes, which put me into Victor Frankenstein’s mental state as he was crafting his creation and helped me see his process through his eyes. Oscar Isaac was well cast as the tormented creator and Mia Goth was perfect as the loving and benevolent Elizabeth. This was truly the Frankenstein film I’ve waited for my whole life. Sylvia Rowe, 58, Tennessee, USA

Train Dreams is a beautifully made meditation on life. It’s told with excellent performances throughout, with Joel Edgerton delivering a career best. Patrick, Ireland

A House of Dynamite is very well written, directed and edited. Excellent cast. A gripping thriller that emphasises the hard truth about the dangers of nuclear weapons in our time. Fictional, but factually accurate. Richard Western, 86, Oregon, USA

Black Bag is an interesting story that felt almost like a whodunnit. I enjoyed the atmosphere, the scenery and the wonderful cast. Jane, South East

Tornado is a revenge western set in an imagined 18th- t0 19th-century Scotland, with a Japanese hero whose father is a samurai, and who may or may not be a samurai herself. It’s made on film, 90 minutes long. What’s not to like? Tim Bradshaw, Devon

The true crime genre has morphed into a standardised, boiler-plate format, forgoing nuance and empathy for schlock and sensationalism. But Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbour bucks this trend through the meta lens of a true found-footage film. Such a cinematic choice risked being contrived, but it gives the film a profound and disturbing power. Despite exclusively using bodycam and CCTV footage, the film’s POV is almost a character in its own right – lingering on scenes and tableaux that resonate. The image of an empty chair in a police interview room, with a handwritten note resting by its leg, will haunt me for a long time. Matt, medical writer, Macclesfield

My favourite film this year is Nouvelle Vague by Richard Linklater. The movie narrates the pre-production and filming of Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard. I went to see it thinking it would be another biographical film filled with cliches and nostalgia about the golden age of French cinema. Instead, it was incredibly witty, funny and heartwarming, with great performances by unknown actors and a really creative and interesting approach to the story that mixes reality with fiction. It was the surprise of the year! Victoria, 22, Athens

The Kingdom shows a very little-known aspect of Corsica outside France. I’m from Brittany so I totally understand the pride Corsicans feel about their territory and culture. This film was made by Julien Colonna, the son of the head of the Corsican nationalist movement, Yvan Colonna, who murdered Claude Érignac, prefect of Corsica. This film centers around the raw and intense relationship between the head of a clan and his rebellious teenage daughter. They go on the run when their hiding place is discovered. It can only end badly because it’s a story of endless feuds, violence and revenge. It reminded me of As Bestas (The Beasts), another movie about culture clashes. The French government is largely unable to control the situation, and autonomy for the region may be the only solution for this fiercely independent territory. Catherine Laz, 63, London

This movie is a throwback not only to its sweating hotdog of a 1998 New York setting, but also to the kind of film it is. A film where a flawed character gets in an unimaginably horrible situation through no fault of their own and just makes everything worse at every opportunity. I love these kind of movies, the evil Alice in Wonderland story where characters descend into the veins of a living city underworld with a hero ill equipped to overcome any of it (Austin Butler loses a kidney in the first 12 minutes). The film shines in its set pieces, balancing its farcical elements with action. It is, above all, incredible fun. It will join the pantheon of films I put on when I get home from the pub. Tom Crozier, Melbourne, Australia

Geoff Dyer, author

I finally got round to Thoreau’s Journal. It is determinedly down-to-earth and soaring, lyrical and belligerent, humane and cantankerous. Walt Whitman thought Thoreau suffered from “a very aggravated case of superciliousness”, but as Walt also said (of himself) the Journal of this brooding, solitary figure is great; it “contains multitudes.”

I’ve also been reading Xiaolou Guo’s My Battle of Hastings. Having moved to Britain and switched to writing in English, the Chinese writer and film-maker makes an impulsive decision to buy a flat by the sea in Hastings. Very funny, as she always is, but also a serious look at Britain and Brexit. It might even be a study of how the historical roots of that decision extend back to 1066.

And Meghan Daum’s The Catastrophe Hour: all credit to UK-based Notting Hill Editions for publishing this latest instalment of pieces by one of American’s finest, wittiest and most scathing essayists.

• Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Sarah, Guardian reader

I absolutely devoured Lily King’s new novel Heart the Lover. It’s a classic girl-meets-boy love story but feels totally fresh and the story is told in an engrossing way. It is smart, romantic and literary – three things that are hard to do well at the same time, but King totally succeeds and this is up there with my top reads of the year.

My enjoyment of Heart the Lover sent me off in search of more literary campus-set coming of age novels in which romance is central to the plot, so I also read (and loved) My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin, a story centred on an affair between a final-year student and a married professor at a New England college in the late 90s.

My final recommendation from this genre is The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I’m still reading this one but it’s excellent: clever, deftly drawn characters and witty dialogue. I’m convinced Eugenides can do no wrong, as his novel Middlesex is one of my all-time favourites as well.

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Marcia Hutchinson, author

Act Normal is not so much a memoir as the butterfly musings of the genius Peter Kalu. Chronology be damned, Peter writes as if possessed by the ghosts of his past. The reader will encounter an almost Dickensian roll call of characters for whom the word “eccentric” barely scratches the surface.

The Best of Everything is Kit de Waal’s exquisite third novel about found rather than inherited family. I practically queued up to buy this one on publication day as I adored her debut, My Name Is Leon. In The Best of Everything, love comes from an unexpected direction for middle-aged hospital worker Paulette: an unsung hero and the kind of stolid Windrush woman who has been all but forgotten.

Jamaica Road is a wonderful debut novel by Lisa Smith. Daphne, the only Black girl in her class in south London is content enough trying to blend in when new classmate Connie Small arrives “fresh off the boat” from Jamaica. His refusal to bow to the ascendancy of the white kids awakens something in her and eventually upends both their lives. The racism of the 1980s and in particular the Deptford fire form a poignant backdrop which is only too familiar now.

It’s a long time since I finished a book in one sitting, but Kate Griffin’s dark and twisted gothic tale Fyneshade, about a governess gone bad, really got to me. A gripping page-turner, ideal for cold winter evenings.

• The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson is published by Cassava Republic. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Jim, Guardian reader

I’ve been reading The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter. A young woman of Algerian descent tries to piece together the history of her family. As she conjures up the memory of her grandfather Ali and her father Hamid, she traces the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence.

It is a story told simply and elegantly and with great humanity, as it unpicks the struggles and the compromises that people have to make in order to survive. At the same time it is unsparing in its critique of colonialism and racism. The writing is hypnotic and I find myself rationing the chapters to prolong the pleasure.

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I have noticed that many of the books I have loved have a recurring theme: how to survive in a changing world and find your own place simply to be. Maybe it’s something to do with my own background as a gay man, originally from Northern Ireland, who grew up at the height of the Troubles.

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Andrew Michael Hurley, author

Ideal for winter evenings is After Midnight, a new Virago anthology of Daphne du Maurier’s short fiction. Another “after hours” book I’ve enjoyed recently is Bora Chung’s Midnight Timetable: a novel formed of various stories connected with the strange and sinister Institute – a maze-like place in which cursed objects are kept for research. South Korean folklore, urban horror stories and surrealism are fused into something truly nightmarish.

An older novel that I often return to is John McGahern’s The Leavetaking, in which a Catholic schoolteacher reflects on his life after being sacked for marrying a divorcee. Here, the past is half-remembered, half-imagined – as the past always is – and McGahern’s exquisite sentences capture every nuance of elegy, regret, yearning and hope.

And finally, Helm, by Sarah Hall, tells the story of our relationship with the elements and the elementals. Narrated by the titular Pennine wind, the novel moves along humanity’s timeline, documenting all our wonder, creativity, ignorance and folly. It’s a joy to read something so profound and playful. In every line, there is a new insight or a wonderful surprise.

• Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

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Tim, Guardian reader

This month I read three very different books that somehow spoke to each other: Lost Horizon by James Hilton, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, and Feeding the Machine by James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant.

Lost Horizon is getting on for a century old yet it feels startlingly fresh – a perfectly paced novel that balances adventure and quiet philosophy. Hilton’s prose is lean but luminous, and his idea of Shangri-La still feels like a metaphor for the human wish to withdraw from chaos without fully escaping it.

Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 offered the opposite experience: a dizzying, paranoid web of symbols and coincidences that mirrors our own algorithmic age. It’s absurd, funny, and somehow comforting in its refusal to make sense.

And Feeding the Machine grounded both worlds – a sharp, lucid analysis of how digital labour and AI infrastructures shape our daily lives. Reading it after Hilton and Pynchon felt like closing the loop between the dream of utopia, the breakdown of meaning, and the real machinery behind both.

The CIA smuggled the Guardian Weekly to eastern bloc countries during the cold war, a new book reveals. Copies of this newspaper were sent as part of a broader secret programme that got literature by authors including George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn behind the Iron Curtain.

In the early 70s, Guardian Weekly was sent to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, said Charlie English, former head of international news at the Guardian and author of The CIA Book Club.

Under the “CIA book program”, the US intelligence agency sent approximately 10m books east over the three decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The programme aimed to “combat the stultification that Stalinism imposed on the eastern bloc”, where censorship was rife, and show those living there that “the west hadn’t forgotten about them”, said English.

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Books were transported by truck, yacht, balloon, and in travellers’ luggage, among other methods. Miniature books and magazines were packed in tampon boxes and sugar packets, while in one instance Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a plane to Warsaw in a baby’s nappy.

The CIA Book Club details the significant role of the late Jerzy Giedroyc, a relative of the former Great British Bake Off television presenter Mel Giedroyc, in the CIA’s operations. He was “perhaps the most important person in the west helping the CIA ship books into Poland” and considered a “hero of the Polish independence movement”, said the author.

While the book programme is given “almost no credit” for bringing about the end of the cold war, dissidents say literature was vital to the anti-communist movement in Poland, and former CIA officers believe it played a significant role in ending the war. “I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight”, Adam Michnik, a leading figure of the Polish Solidarity movement who was jailed by the regime in the 60s and 80s, told English.

“There was a whole generation of Solidarity-era dissidents who’d been raised on these uncensored publications”, added English. Mirosław Chojecki, who was encouraged to seek out dissident literature by one of his school teachers and who went on to become a mastermind of book smuggling operations, said that the clandestine volumes “showed you there was somewhere out there in the world where culture is free”.

As well as sending books, the CIA funded underground publications in the eastern bloc, and Agency assets based in western Europe smuggled printing equipment to them. When Solidarity “was almost destroyed” by the regime in the early 80s, “it was the underground publishing movement and literature that kept it alive”, said English.

Mazovia Weekly, supported by Giedroyc and the CIA, “exerted a profound influence on Polish politics”, leading the way in arguing for negotiations with the regime, which took place in early 1989 and resulted in the first partially free elections in the country since the war. Michnik said that while he was imprisoned, the publication had been “a source of strength, a source of hope, a source of faith that there would be a free Poland”.

Within the CIA, it was Operation Cyclone, which financed the Afghan mujahideen, that “took the plaudits for bringing about the end of the cold war”, wrote English. This may have been because Cyclone cost $700m a year, while the book programme’s latterday budget was $2 to $4m annually. Given the “tremendous outlay, it was politically expedient to give the Afghan action all the credit”.

Operation Cyclone may also have been credited because, according to US historian Benjamin Fischer, it “suited the image US intelligence leaders liked to project of the CIA, of an organisation packed with spooks and paramilitaries who fought in war zones, in sharp contrast to the more intellectual pursuit of sponsoring books and publishing”, wrote English.

Capitalism, artificial intelligence, Renaissance history and motherhood are among the topics explored in the books on the inaugural Women’s prize for nonfiction longlist.

Sixteen women – including Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein, Observer art critic Laura Cumming and historian Tiya Miles – are now in the running for the £30,000 prize, launched last year to redress the relatively low numbers of women recognised in nonfiction prizes.

The “groundbreaking” longlisted titles are “about redressing wrongs – so whether that’s exposing truth, or revealing hypocrisy or uncovering hidden stories – there’s a dedication to truth”, said chair of judges and historian Suzannah Lipscomb.

Klein was longlisted for Doppelganger, in which she writes about being mistaken for the feminist writer turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. Prize judge and biographer Anne Sebba said that Doppelganger was “such a clever book” because Klein “takes what, on the face of it, is a simple idea of having a double, someone who is frequently thought of as her, but then expands this to construct a dark comedy of a rather terrifying mirror image world”.

Miles made the longlist for All That She Carried, a story of slavery centred on a sack that an enslaved woman passes on to her daughter. The book “finds a way to give voice to the wordless by using a mundane, domestic object – a cloth sack and its contents – to thread an extraordinary tale through the generations”, wrote Colin Grant in his Guardian review.

Quick Guide

Women’s prize for nonfiction 2024

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The Britannias by Alice Albinia (Allen Lane) 

Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley (Bloomsbury) 

Eve by Cat Bohannon (Hutchinson
Heinemann)

Intervals by Marianne Brooker (Fitzcarraldo)  

Shadows at Noon by Joya Chatterji (Bodley Head)  

Thunderclap by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus)

Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista (Grove Press)

Wifedom by Anna Funder  

Matrescence by Lucy Jones (Allen Lane)

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (Allen Lane) 

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Hamish Hamilton) 

All That She Carried by Tiya Miles (Profile) 

Code-Dependent by Madhumita Murgia (Picador) 

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus)  

Young Queens by Leah Redmond Chang (Bloomsbury)

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair (4th Estate)

The 16 titles will be narrowed down to a shortlist of six, to be announced on 27 March. The winner will be announced alongside the fiction prize on 13 June. Along with the cash prize, the winning author will receive an artwork, known as The Charlotte, created by sculptor Ann Christopher.

Cummings was selected for Thunderclap, about the early deaths of Dutch painter Carel Fabritius and Cumming’s father. “I love this book because of the way she intertwines a subtle and tender love of her father with a deep understanding of Dutch art,” said Sebba.

Lipscomb noted that many, though not all of the longlisted books feature a “personal voice”, weaving academic research with personal reflections. “There’s a sense of owning one’s subjectivity as an author that comes out of these, and I think that might be a zeitgeisty thing – it might be that if we’d launched this prize 10 years ago, that wouldn’t be the case. But that’s an interesting phenomenon.”

Other memoiristic titles chosen include Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, about growing up Rastafari, and Intervals by Marianne Brooker, about her mother’s illness and death.

The launch of the nonfiction prize came in the wake of research commissioned by the Women’s prize that found that only 35% of books awarded a nonfiction prize over the past 10 years were written by women, across seven UK nonfiction prizes.

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While the longlist was made up of “brilliant” books across “economics and technology and science and history and investigative journalism”, said Lipscomb, “there were fewer books submitted in some of these areas than one might have hoped, and perhaps fewer books submitted in adjacent areas, like philosophy, literary criticism, geopolitics, mathematics, sports”. Lipscomb hopes that the prize will encourage publishers to “invest in female writers writing in these fields”.

Also on the longlist are The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie, The Britannias by Alice Albinia, Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley, Eve by Cat Bohannon, Shadows at Noon by Joya Chatterji, Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista, Wifedom by Anna Funder, Matrescence by Lucy Jones, Flat Place by Noreen Masud, Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia and Young Queens by Leah Redmond Chang.

This year’s prize was open to books published in the UK between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024. Alongside Lipscomb and Sebba on the judging panel are fair fashion campaigner Venetia La Manna, author Nicola Rollock, and winner of the 2018 Women’s prize for fiction Kamila Shamsie.