With its gods, monsters and dizzying scale, Homer’s the Odyssey is deemed by many to be unfilmable, though it hasn’t stopped directors from having a go, including Christopher Nolan, whose blockbuster adaptation comes to cinemas next week. An audiobook would seem a smart choice, allowing listeners to deploy their imaginations to conjure dark sorcery, supernatural beasts and epic storms rather than leaning on CGI.

This classic recording, first published in 2006, is based on Ian Johnston’s much-admired translation. It is narrated by the Game of Thrones actor Anton Lesser, who brings gravitas and texture to this tale of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his efforts to get home after the 10-year Trojan War. Odysseus’s journey is fraught as he encounters the wrath of the sea god Poseidon in the form of a man-eating monster and a whirlpool that swallows ships. Then comes Calypso, the beautiful goddess-nymph and daughter of Atlas who keeps him on an island for seven years in the hope that he will stay as her husband.

Back in Ithaca, Odysseus’s wife Penelope – who doesn’t know if her husband is dead or alive – is being besieged by suitors, while their adult son Telemachus, who hasn’t seen his father since he was an infant, struggles to maintain order and embarks on various sojourns to track down him down. Then we’re with the gods on Olympus as they sit around arguing about which mortals they will aid and on which they will rain down hell and damnation. Will Odysseus make it home and, if he does, will he be welcome?

Available via Naxos, 12hr 45min

Further listening

Music as Medicine
Daniel Levitin, Penguin, 12hr 17min
A paean to the healing properties of music, Levitin’s book investigates the connections between music and the human body and brain and tests the argument for the use of music as medicine. Read by the author.

Butcher
Joyce Carol Oates, 4th Estate, 13hr 11min
A cast including Edoardo Ballerini, Cassandra Campbell and Amy Shiels star in this chilling fictional biography of a doctor who experiments on the female patients of a New Jersey lunatic asylum and becomes a leading light in gyno-psychiatry.

Just as I am about to interview this year’s Women’s prize winner, debut American novelist Virginia Evans, at the party on a drizzly evening in a leafy London square, we are interrupted because someone wants to congratulate her. The fan is Richard Curtis.

A warm-hearted weepy with a sprinkling of gentle humour, Evans’s prize-winning novel The Correspondent is prime Curtis material. In fact, he is too late. “I think he just wants to be my friend,” Evans jokes modestly – Notting Hill is her favourite movie of all time. A film of The Correspondent is already in the pipeline with Jane Fonda playing 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, the crotchety correspondent of the title. Evans will be one of the producers and will have a cameo appearance, “walking a dog or something”.

It is a far cry from when Evans wrote the novel in a closet (she removed her husband’s clothes) over nine months in a rented house in North Carolina, during the pandemic in 2020. She never expected her story, written entirely in letters, of a former legal attorney, to be published, let alone become a word-of-mouth hit, which spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

But the author, who turned 40 earlier this month, is no overnight success. She has been writing for two hours a day, between 5am and 7am, since she was 19, completing seven unpublished novels before The Correspondent. “It is my debut,” she says. “But it doesn’t feel like the first baby, it feels like the eighth baby. It feels as if I’ve always done this.”

Over the years she has received “thousands of rejections” and sent letters to every literary agency in Manhattan “at least once”, she says, before trying those in London and finally finding Canadian agent Hilary McMahon, who recognised that she “had what it takes”. But still The Correspondent wasn’t an easy sell. “It took months, and there was a lot of silence and a lot of ‘nos’,” she says. “It just felt like rejection and ultimately failure was my thing. And it was for a long time – until it wasn’t.”

During this time she did a number of “paycheck jobs” – including working for a lawyer and a surgeon and as a barista – while bringing up her two children, Jack, 13, and Mae, 10, without any childcare. At the point when she moved her desk into the closet, she was contemplating starting law school. But somehow she never gave up. With each rejection, “I felt, ‘OK, I can do better and I have to do better,’” she says. “If you’re a writer, you just can’t not write.”

The novel’s form was inspired by Helene Hanff’s 1970 epistolary memoir 84 Charing Cross Road, which Evans read in a single day during lockdown. She found it so comforting she wished it had lasted longer. So she set about writing a novel in letters that would take in a whole life. John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner also served as a template of how to turn a seemingly unremarkable life into quietly heartbreaking fiction.

Ornery and outspoken, Sybil, a long-divorced mother of three, is an unlikely heroine in the mould of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (it is surely no accident that the new paperback cover bears striking resemblances to those of Strout’s). Past tragedy, late romance, betrayal, revenge and gardening club rivalry are all documented in her correspondence: letters to her childhood friend Rosalie, her brother Felix, a troubled teenager, a Syrian refugee, as well as real-life figures including Ann Patchett, Joan Didion and George Lucas.

“I love any book that plays with the format on the page,” Evans says of her decision to tell Sybil’s story in letters. “I think it’s very generous to your reader to give the eye a break. There’s something about letters that feels like a trick. You fly through because the visuals are easier, but the content is not less.”

Despite its warmth and light touch, Evans describes The Correspondent as a book about grief and disappointment. Early in the novel we discover that Sybil’s son Gilbert died many years ago in an accident. While she was writing, the six-year-old son of some very close friends died. Suddenly she felt what it would feel like to lose a child “as closely as I could without it being my own”. When she returned to the book “the echo of his life and the echo of the manner of his death and what it does to a family,” resonated in every passage. She asked her friends’ permission to include Wade in the acknowledgments. “They read it and they said that they would be honoured,” she says. “When the book came out, it wasn’t a big thing. But now it’s all over the world. His mom frequently reaches out to me and says, ‘every time I see the book somewhere, I just think that these people also now know of his existence.’ So that is really one of the best things about this success.”

Maggie O’Farrell has said that she delayed writing her former Women’s prize winner and now Oscar-winning film Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare’s only son from the plague, until her own son was safely past the age at which he died. Evans took the opposite approach – and made Gilbert eight, the same age as her own son Jack at the time she was writing. She listened to an interview with Zadie Smith in which the novelist said of the maxim that you should write what you know, that you should also write what you fear, because they are equally vivid in your mind. “I realised that it’s so true,” she says. “I could only write that grief accurately by trying to get as close to the thing as I could.”

One of three siblings, Evans grew up in Maryland. It wasn’t a particularly bookish household. But, like Sybil, she has always written letters, especially to authors she admires. Ann Patchett became a pen pal and is now a friend and supporter of the novel. Evans had a little uneasiness about the imaginary letters from Didion and Larry McMurty included in the novel. Both authors replied to fanmail and she was careful to make sure they were based on things they had written. “I love to receive a letter,” she says. “It’s like an artefact. I have some letters that are real treasures.” Now she is inundated with letters and has to have help to reply to them all.

For all its sadness, she wanted the novel to have an “uplift”, she says gesturing with her hands. “A lot of books, you get to the end and you feel, ‘Oh dear, this is very, very bleak.’” She thinks this hopefulness may account for why the novel has struck such a chord, especially today. Redemption is unfashionable in fiction, she admits, which she worried might count against The Correspondent. “It says something really beautiful to me that so many people were willing to entertain my book. A book about hope and a book about forgiveness and a book about grief and disappointment. That those things are so valued makes me feel quite optimistic.”

Its success means she can finally write full-time, although she sticks to two or three-hour stretches once the children have gone to school. And she has come out of the closet: she now has a room of her own – “a little porch”. She is well into a new novel, about making a movie. But she still can’t quite believe in her own triumph. Recently she asked her agent: “’Do you think this thing will sell?’ She laughed at me, said, ‘Yeah, now it will sell. Everything will sell.’”

‘To stay out late, to remain awake and mobile from dusk till dawn, to walk the streets all night as Charles Dickens did during a bout of insomnia in 1860, is to enter an unfamiliar state of being and seeing,” notes Dan Richards in Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark. An immersive blend of memoir and investigative journalism, the book finds the author unearthing the stories of shift workers and those who do essential labour while the rest of us sleep.

Richards, who reveals he is naturally more owl than lark, meets dock workers in Southampton; outreach workers at St Mungo’s providing support for the homeless; a search and rescue team in Lincolnshire; and night ferry operatives transporting sleeping passengers from Aberdeen to Lerwick in Shetland. In the early hours, he visits The Dusty Knuckle in Dalston, London, a bakery that trains young people with troubled backgrounds in the art of bread making. He also talks to the mothers of newborn babies negotiating night feeds through a fog of hormones and exhaustion.

Richards is our narrator, and his reading, like his book, is atmospheric and illuminating. His voice crackles with emotion as he recounts his behind-the-scenes experience of the nocturnal life of a hospital. In this instance, the author was not a dispassionate observer but a patient, admitted to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary with Covid in the early months of the pandemic. Richards’ eight-day hospitalisation was passed in a “semi-delirious trance”, frightened for himself and his loved ones and concentrating on “my one job: to breathe, to live”.

Available via WF Howes, 9hr 3min

Further listening

Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury, 5hr 55min
The Dutch historian’s latest is an optimistic call for life’s achievers to put their talents to a higher calling: to make the world a better place, whether tackling the climate crisis or helping to avert the next pandemic. Narrated by Boris Hiestand.

Notes on a Drowning
Anna Sharpe, Orion, 9hr 40min
Hanako Footman reads this tense and fast-moving thriller in which a legal aid lawyer and a Home Office adviser investigate the death of a young women who drowned in the Thames in suspicious circumstances.

‘May I say that I’m very glad to meet you,”  Woody Brown taps on his word board. Brown is formal, funny and strikingly eloquent. He has a formidable ability to tell stories that reach into the mind of his characters and express what they are thinking, and what they think others are thinking about them. Brown is also autistic and non-speaking.

His first novel, Upward Bound, tells the story of everyday life at the eponymous adult day care centre in southern California. The title is ironic – the young adults, referred to as clients, are anything but upward bound. By and large, they are stifled, patronised, unheard and unseen. Despite their shortcomings, the staff are portrayed with a surprising tenderness.

The story is told from multiple perspectives – Walter, loosely based on Brown, is only understood by his mother; Hollywood-handsome Tom desperately tries to show the neurotypical world that he understands, by blinking; student Ann, who is doing voluntary work to boost her CV, fancies Tom but is blind to the charms of the other clients; Dave, the care centre’s director, really wanted to be an actor, and treats Upward Bound’s annual show like a Broadway production. Brown has created a wonderful portrait of the lives of people destined to be misunderstood by virtually all of us because, as he says, their brain and body are not on speaking terms (pun intended).

Brown, 28, is at home with his mother, Mary, in Los Angeles when we chat. Mary holds up the letter board on which he taps out his answers. She then speaks them back to me. Brown is not totally without speech. Sometimes, he comes out with a word or phrase, often delivered in a high pitch and repeated. This is known as echolalia.

Brown and his mother are incredibly close. She hugs him tight as a blanket when he is stressed, waits patiently for his answers and seems to understand him almost as well as he does himself. “She has been at my side for every moment of my journey,” Brown taps. “Without her there is no me.”

Nobody really knows what makes Brown and other non-speaking autistic people the way they are. But what his family knows for sure is that as a young child he was written off by specialists. His parents were told that he was a lost cause; that there was nothing going on inside. They sensed otherwise. When he was a toddler Mary watched Soma Mukhopadhyay, whose son Tito is autistic and non-speaking, on the TV show 60 Minutes. Mukhopadhyay had taught Tito to type, and now he could communicate with the world. She thought it would be amazing if Woody could learn a fraction of what Tito had. Mary took him to see Mukhopadhyay, who wrote letters on slips of paper and jumbled them up. “I’ve been told he’s mentally retarded, and she says ‘Woody spell cat’. And he pulls down the C and the A and the T. He’s three at that point!”

But it made little difference. When he went to school, teachers dismissed him as a no-hoper, and thought it wasn’t even worth trying to educate him. He was put in the lowest class and left to his own devices. At the age of eight, Mary tells me, the kids in his class were asked if they knew another word for sad. “When it gets to his turn he spells out ‘melancholy’ and he spells it correctly.”

And still it made no difference. The more Brown was misunderstood, the worse his behaviour became. He was bored, angry and disruptive. He threw chairs in class. “I was in the pit of despair,” Brown taps. How did he climb out? “It was a gradual ascent, starting when I was 12 and finally allowed to join the remedial class for lessons,” he taps.

You weren’t even in the remedial class? “I was meant to be in the lowest special ed class, which was so demoralising. At least in the remedial room they tried to teach some basic academics.”

“Sorry boss! Sorry boss!” he shouts in a high-pitched cartoon voice. It’s a shock when you first hear Brown speak.

Is he happy now? “I am very happy now that I have real purpose and productivity. I want this for all autistic people. One of the reasons I wanted to be a great writer was that I wanted neurotypical people to read my book, not out of pity but because it was a good book. That way I can reach the hordes who underestimate and infantilise us, and show them how vivid and magnificent we are.”

Brown is wearing a lovely T-shirt, featuring Japanese trains. I ask him what it means. “I love trains and Murakami. Hence Japanese trains. Murakami’s my favourite author. I’ve read so many of his books. We read every day, and I can’t get enough!” Mary reads aloud to him because he has visuospatial issues that make it difficult to focus on the words on the page.

You have a similar simple, limpid style to Murakami, I say. He smiles. “He’s also not very social like me!” he taps.

Mary asks him a question: “Woody, when you refer to the pit of despair what does that metaphor of the pit mean to you?”

“Murakami always talks about a well, which stands in his books as a metaphor for depression and loneliness,” he taps. “There’s a well in every Murakami book. I think of Murakami’s wells as a visual manifestation of my isolation.”

As he taps, I notice he’s looking away from me. At first I assume he doesn’t like to make eye contact. But then I realise sometimes he looks straight at me, and that he seems to be engaged in an activity when he looks away. I ask what he’s doing.

“May I say I think better when I have my screens going?” Brown says.

Now it’s Mary’s turn to smile. “Should we show Simon?” she asks.

“Yes!!!” he bellows.

There are three computer screens on a mobile cart, and he’s playing or watching each one as we chat – one shows his favourite cartoon, Thomas the Tank Engine, on the second he plays Angry Birds and on the third there are videos of old-school steam locomotives.

I ask him if he’s occupying himself with all the screens because he finds me boring. “No,” he taps. “May I say I have many screens running through my brain at all times. My brain is so busy that I have to occupy more than one channel at a time. If I only looked at you the top of my head might blow right off! It’s exhausting to narrow my vista to one window.”

We have agreed to do the interview in 30-minute bursts because any longer is exhausting for Brown.

“Hey mom, sorry you just don’t understand. You just don’t understand,” he says in the high-pitched voice.

“Do you want a break?” she asks. “Yes,” he says in a deep voice that I assume would be his natural tone.

See you later, I say.

Brown is already walking away with his cart of screens.

“Byyyyyyee. Goodbye Molly,” he says, reverting to the cartoon voice. Mary explains that Molly is a character in Toy Story 3.

---

Half an hour later we reconvene. Brown is newly energised. I ask in what way Upward Bound’s Walter is like him. “Walter is my alter ego. We share aspects of disability and personality.” In what way? “Many aspects of non-speaking autism are shared, particularly the frustration of being misunderstood by most people. I wanted to show how Walter was perceived by the other characters to get a glimpse of how inaccurately others see him. Only his mom is able to translate his verbal nonsense and Walter is lucky to have that one small corner of understanding.”

At one point Walter’s mother invites fellow autistic parent friends over to the house to watch a film about Temple Grandin. Walter hovers in the background watching the film. The portrayal of the autistic animal science professor infuriates him because “this lovely, lithe actress” [Claire Danes] plays her, whereas in real life Grandin is “big and awkward and ugly, in the way that Eleanor Roosevelt was ugly, magnificently ugly”. Walter has an autistic meltdown and puts his hand through a window. “May I say the Temple Grandin chapter is autobiographical.” He shows me his scar.

Your mum seems more fun than Walter’s mum, I say. “She used to be more stressed out,” he taps. “Her behaviour improved as mine did.” Mary is laughing. “Also we have both been working on our anxiety which helps us be nice.” Is anxiety at the core of people with autism? “Anxiety is a constant companion, but I can manage it better now. Meditation has helped greatly.”

Upward Bound’s Tom, for all his beauty, is understood by nobody. “I remember a boy like Tom from childhood, and I have always been concerned about him,” Brown taps. “I worry that no one ever heard him, and that he languishes somewhere alone.” Does he think many autistic people languish unheard? “Oh yes! People put their own ideas on to a blank page that they can’t otherwise read,” he taps.

“Us! Us!” he shouts.

When was the last time you saw him? “Maybe when I was 10.” Was he also Hollywood handsome? “Oh yes! He was gorgeous!”

The person least capable of understanding the clients at Upward Bound is Dave, the director. “Dave is a symbol of well-intended but ultimately self-centred carers who find their way into the land of disability by accident.” Did he have any carers like Dave? “Oh yes!” he taps. “Their voices are louder than the true believers.” What does he mean? “People who get it tend to be more quiet and introspective. They listen more than they need to be heard.”

One person who does get it is Carlos, a carer with a troubled background. “I love Carlos. He is the hero of the story,” he taps.

“Us!” he shouts.

“We’re starting to lose him,” Mary says. We agree to continue tomorrow at 10am.

“I’ve got more to say, but I’m all done now,” Brown taps.

“Wowowoowo! Goodbye James, see you tomorrow,” he says. James is a locomotive in Thomas the Tank Engine.

---

The next day they are five minutes late, and Brown seems a little stressed about it.

“In trouble,” he says repeatedly.

You’re not in trouble with me, I say.

“Sorry boss, sorry boss!” he shouts in the high-pitched cartoon voice.

Mary gives him a deep hug, which settles him.

In 2022, Brown became the first non-speaking autistic graduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received the English department’s top writing honours. He completed his master’s at Columbia University in 2024. Mary attended both courses alongside him. He also took his cart and three screens to his studies. Multitasking was the only way he could focus on lectures and seminars. In his bedroom at home, he has far more screens all going at the same time.

Mary is also an English graduate, and worked for 20 years as a story analyst in the film industry with the likes of Steven Spielberg. Brown’s father Drew is head of production at Paramount TV. Mary anticipates there will be sceptics who suggest that she has helped Brown with his work, but she says she has had nothing to do with the creative process. Sure, she translates Brown’s sentences off the letterboard and then types them up, but apart from checking whether a comma or full stop is needed, and occasionally reminding him he’s used the same word twice in a paragraph, she insists she had no influence over the book.

When you’re with the two of them, this soon becomes apparent. Mary is super smart and good with words. But Brown is super-super smart and brilliant with words. Sometimes she will ask him to explain something because she can’t find the right language. Take trains, for example. Not only is Brown obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine in a childlike way, he also explains the workings of his mind via trains with a concept that could be the basis of a metaphysics PhD. “My mind feels like there are thousands of train lines all running at once, and there are trains on all of them. But they’re not on flat ground, they’re all in 3D. In the universe above me there are all these trains on their tracks just floating around and I’m on all the trains all the time.”

Why do so many autistic people love trains? “Parallel lines and soothing progress,” he taps. But, of course, when there are infinite trains floating in the universe and he’s on every one it’s not so soothing. The trailer to a documentary that has been made about Brown plays out against a horrible shunting and whistling of the railway station from hell.

Is that what you always hear in your head? “My head is so loud that it’s like Grand Central at rush hour. When alone in my room I turn everything, all my screens, to top volume. I drive my parents nuts with the noise. Cacophony is the only word to describe it.” Does that give you relative peace? “Strangely, yes. Mom loves quiet, I love chaos.” Does he really love the chaos or does it enable him to find a relative serenity? “Chaos outside neutralises the chaos inside,” he taps.

You are one complicated dude Woody Brown, I say.

“Sir Topham Hatt!” he shouts in a high pitch.

I ask Brown about the various romances in Upward Bound – all of them unrequited. Walter loves Emma, who is also autistic and non-speaking. He believes, or hopes, he can hear her return his love in her thrumming. “Emma is a real person. My friend since childhood,” he taps. “And I do feel love for her. I know we communicate via autistic energy fields. Our senses are disordered which makes us less attuned to some input and hyper-attuned to others. My childish wish is to find someone who will make a life with me in spite of my shortcomings.”

Why is that childish? “Fabulistic may be a better word. It’s hard for people who are so dependent to have a relationship in real life.”

Could you see yourself living away from your parents? “Yes. They are old, and I will probably survive them. My sister Annie and her husband, Matt, want to share their lives with me when Mom and Dad can’t take care of me any more. They like me. Go figure!”

Well, there’s lots to like about you, I say.

“Locomotives!” he shouts.

Mary talks to me about Brown’s echolalia. She says for so long she thought the words were random. Eventually, she discovered they were a form of shorthand. “Should I tell Simon the story of straight?” she asks him. He nods. “Woody used to watch videos with a blue dog. He still does. I can’t say the name because it stresses him. He’d have a meltdown and he’d say ‘straight’ all the time. How old were you when this was happening?”

“About six,” Woody taps.

“Then I watched him watching the video and the character in the video was trying to hang up a picture, and it was crooked, and he couldn’t get it straight and he was just so frustrated, and when I realised ‘straight’ meant frustration I was like ‘Oh my gosh’. I’d been dismissing these words as nonsense.”

“I use phrases that I can access with my mouth to compensate for all the words my mouth can’t say,” Brown taps.

Autism is currently being demonised by some on the political right in the United States. Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr have referred to the condition as a “disease” and said there is an “epidemic”. How does he feel about that? “May I say that they both distress me terribly. Their words and actions are dangerous.”

In Upward Bound, the carer Ann talks about the clients who can speak but do so constantly and repetitively, concluding that speech is not their superpower, it’s their kryptonite. I ask Brown if he regards his inability to talk as a superpower or kryptonite. Neither, he taps. “My disorder is just that. A disability that says nothing about who I really am. Some people have more strikes against them than others, but we all have things to overcome. Is being non-speaking worse than a child’s fate in Gaza or an immigrant’s destiny on the streets of Minneapolis? How dare I complain from my comfortable home? Perspective is everything.”

Brown is now working on his second novel, Alfie. “It’s a bildungsroman about my search for camaraderie,” he taps. Mary apologises, and says she’s not sure how to pronounce bildungsroman.

“Alfie is a boy in Arkansas who excels at baseball,” Brown taps. Is he autistic? “No, although he hides his anxiety behind his catcher’s mask.”

We’ve been chatting for an hour today. As I say my farewells, I tell Brown how much I love the title Upward Bound. He smiles. “Irony is my middle name,” he taps.

Well Woody Irony Brown, it’s been great talking to you, I say.

“Thank you,” he says. “Byeeeee! Say goodbye Molly.”

It is coming up to 12 years since the publication of H Is for Hawk, about the historian, writer and naturalist Helen Macdonald’s time spent training a Eurasian goshawk after an intense period of grief. Showered with awards, the book was a runaway hit and sparked a literary trend for shared transformative encounters with animals including cats, dogs, magpies and hares.

This month, H Is for Hawk comes to the big screen in a new adaptation starring Claire Foy. But there is still time to get to know the source material, which tells of the sudden death of the author’s father and how Macdonald, an experienced falconer who had previously trained kestrels and peregrines, took delivery of a temperamental young goshawk named Mabel with the aim of taming her and teaching her to hunt. Macdonald, who is non-binary, is the audiobook’s narrator. Their reading is characterised by introspection, curiosity and flashes of humour as they observe this “spooky, pale-eyed psychopath” who, as well as feeding and flying, likes to play ball with scrunched-up bits of paper.

H Is for Hawk intersperses the author’s adventures with their companion with biographical excerpts on writer TH White whose book, The Goshawk, chronicled his own attempts to train a bird in the 1930s using ancient and cruel methods. Unsurprisingly, Macdonald does a better job and their account of their relationship with the goshawk, which helps to alleviate a grief that feels close to insanity, is deeply affecting. Though the sections on White are diverting, it’s when conjuring the life and character of this extraordinary bird of prey that Macdonald’s prose truly soars.

Further listening

The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About
Mel Robbins, Audible Studios, 10hr 38min
Robbins, a writer, podcaster and motivational speaker, reads her bestselling self-help book advocating confidence, serenity and letting go of the desire to influence other people and their opinions.

A History of England in 25 Poems
Catherine Clarke, Penguin Audio, 12hr 48min
An eclectic series of poems connecting the English to their past, from the jingoist Agincourt Carol (1415) to John of Gaunt’s This England speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II to Adlestrop, Edward Thomas’s wartime paean to the countryside, as viewed from a train.

The opening sentence of this remarkable novel announces that the reader is in for an intriguing experience. “On the fourteenth day of July 1924, when the tchinovniks of the Ministry of Winter came for me, on the evening of that day, on the eve of my Siberian Odyssey, only then did I begin to suspect that I did not exist.” It may hint at Kafka in the ominous arrival of officials, or Borges in its metaphysical conundrum, but stranger things are afoot. In 1924 there was no tsar, let alone his bureaucrats, the tchinovniks. The date is significant, but I don’t mind admitting I had to find out why online. The time, as Hamlet says, is out of joint.

The rudely awakened sleeper is Benedykt Gierosławski, a Polish philosopher, logician, mathematician and gambler whose debts will be erased if he undertakes a special mission for the Ministry. He is to travel to Siberia, “the wild east”, and find his father, Filip, who was exiled there for anti-government activities. This is not clemency. Filip is now known as Father Frost, and as a geologist, radical and mystic, he might have a connection with what has occurred. The reader is drip-fed the details. A comet fell into Tunguska in Siberia in 1908, as it did in our universe. But here the event has caused the emergence of an inexplicable, expanding, possibly sentient coldness called the “gleiss”. Ice, which won the European Union prize for literature, came out in Poland in 2007, well before the Game of Thrones TV adaptation made “winter is coming” a meme; but in this novel, it certainly is.

The “black physics” caused by the comet’s impact has created new materials and technologies: superconducting “coldiron”, “frostoglaze” and “blackwickes” that emit “unlicht”. More than that, it has created an entirely new geopolitical situation. Neither the Russian Revolution nor the first world war has taken place. It is not just history that has been reconfigured: ideology has also been transformed. The great fissure is between the Ottepyelniks, who advocate Thaw, and the Lyednyaks, who wish to preserve the gleiss. This is not a simple transposition of the idea of a “cold war”. Some Siberian entrepreneurs rely on the gleiss for their technological advantage, while others see in its absolute frozen stasis a kind of religious transcendence. The tsar seems to favour its elimination, with Russia becoming part of a European “Summer” cluster of powers. The gleiss sharpens dichotomies: Slavophiles and westernisers, imperial tsarists against Polish and Siberian nationalists, anarchists against autarchs, materialists against spiritualists.

Benedykt, as a gambler and scientist, is intrigued by how chance operates under the gleiss. Basically, randomness and probabilities are certainties; quantum fuzziness becomes crystal clear. He is not alone in his fascination: a fellow passenger on his journey is none other than Nikola Tesla. And Tesla is not alone as a real person in the fiction: we meet Aleister Crowley, Trotsky and Rasputin, among others. The novel has three acts; firstly, Benedykt on the Trans-Siberian express train (there are plots, deaths, spies, double agents), then his time in the political hotbeds and laboratories of Irkutsk, then finally his journey into the wastes along the mysterious “Ways of the Mammoth”.

The publishers should be commended for giving the translator, Ursula Phillips, an appendix in which to discuss her translation. Her choices, compromises and ingenuity are made clear, especially since the style reflects Gierosławski’s opening, where Benedykt thinks he might not exist. The first person, the “I”, is therefore dropped: “Stand facing … release air from the lungs …” Phillips argues against accusations of “untranslatability”, though the cultural references are problematic to convey. But her decisions provide an anchor for the reader amid an almost obligatory obliquity. A novel about the world’s complexity needs to be complicated; the truth is sometimes slant. It is telling that Dukaj recommended Phillips read Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon during her work.

Ice is not just a cerebral romp. There are moments of hilarity and horror; chapters full of pathos, a moment unfurling a life of regrets. It is a gloomy, sharp, dazzling work. If things had been different, Dukaj asks, would they just turn out the same?

Ice by Jacek Dukaj, translated by Ursula Phillips, is published by Head of Zeus (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The Maltese-born Joe Sacco is the rare cartoonist with a journalism degree (and, maybe just as rare, a cartoonist with masterful journalistic chops). Sacco’s latest book, “The Once and Future Riot,” coming out this month from Metropolitan Books, focusses on the aftermath of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. The book uses the cartoonist’s tools—visual details, captions, balloons, maps, sequential narratives—to tell the story of Sacco’s own reporting: his conversations with victims, village leaders, witnesses, and officials.

Sacco’s style, forged years ago in the tradition of independent comics, favors an autobiographical mode, and he continued to operate in that mode even as his work began to take a journalistic turn. “I began to appreciate what my drawn character signalled,” he told us, that journalism “is shaped by the journalist’s cultural biases and subjectivities, crafted by a fallible person trying—with different degrees of success—to understand what is going on.” His work places the journey of a reporter directly in front of the reader, capturing its intimacies, what Sacco calls “the rich interactions with other humans that come when a person makes oneself a guest in an unfamiliar world.”

When Sacco set out to investigate the riot, in 2014, he was drawn to the tension between people’s memories of the experience, their rationalizations, and the coherence of each of the conflicting accounts. While researching, he became interested in violence wielded to interfere in democratic processes—a theme that resonates across the globe. “Most people just want to live their lives, and they get caught up in shocking events not of their own making,” Sacco said. “Civilization, order, waking up every morning to find the world the way you left it the night before—I no longer take those things for granted.” In this astonishing work, Sacco unearths intimate human stories at the root of sectarian violence. In the excerpt below, he sets the scene in rural northern India as he’s being driven to meet some of the interview subjects.

—By Françoise Mouly & Genevieve Bormes

When Han Kang published her International Booker-winning The Vegetarian (2015), translated by Deborah Smith, about a South Korean housewife who gives up meat and wants to become a tree, the novel slotted into a wave of English-language fiction about female appetites and male control. But the books that came next were harder to pin down. After Human Acts, about the 1980 massacre of student protesters in Han’s native Gwangju, came The White Book, in which a Han-like novelist reflects on the death of her baby sister while musing on wartime Warsaw. Then came 2023’s Greek Lessons, riddling to the point of opacity, about a divorced poet’s inability to communicate.

We Do Not Part, Han’s first novel to be translated since winning the Nobel prize for literature last year, has elements of all these books. Stark as well as ethereal, chronologically discontinuous, full of nested narratives – often structured as remembered conversations about remembered conversations – it exhumes historical horror but also swerves into hallucinatory magic realism without breaking the plausibly autofictional frame with which it begins.

Our narrator is the Seoul-based author Kyungha, whose life has gone off the rails after publishing a novel that sounds a lot like Human Acts (it’s about “a massacre at G–”). Even watching passersby is traumatic, reminding her of life’s fragility (“The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease – so easily, and by a single decision”). She can’t shake the memory of the survivors she wrote about, putting herself in the place of mothers who sheltered from gunfire with their children in a well. “In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?”

This is all happening at an unspecified point in the recent near-present. Kyungha, having previously held down a job to support her family, now doesn’t have to – not only because her daughter’s no longer a child, but also because of some coyly hinted-at domestic rift in the wake of her breakdown. She’s struggling to think of anyone she can name in her will – a symbol of her predicament – when out of the blue comes a text from Inseon, an old colleague from her journalism days. A visual artist living alone on Jeju Island, about 300 miles away, she’s now in hospital in Seoul after an accident at her studio, and she needs Kyungha to go and take care of her abandoned pet bird – a request Kyungha accepts, despite the hazardous snowbound trek it entails.

Thus does the novel’s musing give way to a quixotic rescue mission (“Inseon had told me that to save her I had to get her water within the day. But when does the day end for a bird?”), shifting in tone yet further once Kyungha arrives only to find Inseon – or a vision of her – already there, and ready this time to elaborate on the horror that their previous conversations only circled: the state’s mass murder of civilians in Jeju during anti-communist violence in the late 1940s, prior to the Korean war, a bloody history that scarred Inseon’s family, not least her late mother, whom she nursed through dementia.

The harrowing testimonies she presents Kyungha ultimately constitute We Do Not Part’s main business. In contrast to Human Acts, the stories of violence don’t come to us via narratorial recreation, exactly; they instead emerge solely from quotation in the form of interviews with the eyewitnesses and relatives whose accounts Kyungha hears from Inseon and then passes to us – a storytelling technique that, while no less a performance on Han’s part, gives the impression of being less presumptuous, more ethically scrupulous.

When Han won the Nobel, she said she couldn’t celebrate amid war in Gaza and Ukraine. John Banville puckishly responded by saying the committee should take back the award, but it would be hard to read We Do Not Part and not think her words heartfelt. Even at its most seemingly inessential – witness the repeated lingering descriptions of snowflakes – the book insists quietly on the necessity to pay attention, to never turn away, to look, to see. As a message, it risks appearing somewhat frictionless, even self-serving, offering reward without cost, but it’s worth remembering how this strange and unsettling novel begins: with the nightmare-haunted protagonist, alone.

Renowned music producer Joe Boyd was the first production manager to plug Bob Dylan into an electric guitar, at the Newport folk festival in 1965. He remembers Pete Seeger walking away in disgust. When I interviewed Boyd half a century later, he said, to my surprise, that he had come to understand Seeger’s response. Boyd’s record collection was a clue as to why: expansively arranged in alphabetical order by country, far and wide. India, Indonesia, Iran…

Having produced Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake etc, Boyd had turned his attention to music from over the horizon, derived from the rites and roots of those who make it. The culmination of Boyd’s lifelong journey in pursuit of such music is this vast volume, every paragraph packed with information and inspiration – but written with a refreshingly light touch.

Inasmuch as music is an expression of the human world – our aspirations, tribulations and celebrations – this is a history of that world, told through music. And although music may derive from heritage, it is by definition “sans frontières”, and the book explores “how rhythms, scales, and melodies flowed across the globe, constantly altering what the world danced and listened to”. Especially across the Atlantic Middle Passage: a binding thread explains how much great music was created in defiance of the brutal horrors of colonialism and slavery.

After Cuba became the fulcrum of the colonised Americas, “Afro-Cuban” music reverberated in all directions. The zaraband and chaconne, “branded as lascivious ‘Negro imports’ when first heard in Seville”, were “turned into polite templates suitable for Bach and Handel”. Later, in New Orleans, “multiple forces were coming together… to create the soundtrack to the first half of the western hemisphere’s 20th century”. European innovations based on harmonic experiment were confronted by polyrhythms new to them, but centuries old in Africa. What Europe called syncopation had forever been an African “way of perceiving time”. Boyd’s description of Dizzy Gillespie crossing that “rhythm chasm” is electrifying.

An inventory of musical instruments in Brazil is “almost as long” as that of the 134 responses to a census of 1976 asking people to define their skin colour. When the tradition of Carnival (carne vale – farewell meat, for Lent) began in the 1890s, “Brazilian authorities tried to keep a lid on Africans joining in too exuberantly”. Likewise the generals, when it came to Tropicália music after the coup of 1964: Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were imprisoned, then fled to hang out in Notting Hill.

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There are “scales, melodies, rhythms, instruments and folk tales all swirling round in that mid-Atlantic gyre,” writes Boyd. He cites Nigerian wonder-drummer Tony Allen, after he heard bebop: “We should have been playing… like that in Nigeria. After all, it originally came from here. They took it, went to the Americas, polished it, and sent it back to us in Africa.” “The dialogue,” Boyd adds, “was almost entirely between Africans and their long-lost cousins, whose ancestors had been taken in chains from these same lands. Their descendants had propelled and provoked the ‘developed’ world into musical modernity; now it was Africa’s turn.”

Ravi Shankar’s music mastered Indian modal scales in which “the sequence of notes used while ascending always differs from those on the way down” and which are “not limited to what western music calls whole or semitones”. When they reached New York, John Coltrane inflected My Favorite Things with Indian modes and his epic India was “based on a Rajasthani folk melody”. Shankar captivated the west, met with George Harrison and Yehudi Menuhin, changing the lives of both, and music far beyond them.

A chapter exploring Russian and eastern European music finds Boyd at the Koprivshtitsa festival in Bulgaria: “a stunning spectacle: as far as I could see, there were woods and meadows filled with crowds in wildly colourful traditional garb. Eight stages were scattered across the plateau, each representing a different district.” But on Boyd’s return to Koprivshtitsa after the fall of communism, “wedding bands played a hybrid of simplified Serbian and Thracian beats at a deafening volume”.

The disappointment cues an important theme in Boyd’s thinking, post-Newport. Throughout the book, he is part of its story. And as writer and producer, he insists that music should be performed and heard with minimum technological conveyance. When producing the Bulgarian band Balkana, he convinces singers to gather around a single microphone, because “harmonies blend much better in the air than in a mixing board’s transistors”. During the book’s conclusion, meditating on how music informs memory, Boyd protests that “a computer-generated rhythm feels completely different from one created in real time by humans”.

Music in Boyd’s book is often a means of seduction, and at times sexual liberation from puritanism, mostly Protestant or Muslim. But carnal music, and music from the earth, also reach for the sublime: Boyd finds music expressing syncretism between religious beliefs – Afro-Cubans, Bahia Brazilians and slaves in the American south “finding convenient parallels between Christian Saints and their own Gods”, with effortless spirituality, but musical complexity.

Above all, this book is about music as deliverance from oppression. In South Africa, “with all attempts to ameliorate the harshness of white rule thwarted, music became the expression of African anger, hope, misery and joy… singing became the weapon of choice”. Boyd cites Hugh Masekela: “The government despised our joy.” Conversely, the USSR needed to destroy deep folk music precisely because it constituted peasant identity: “wood nymphs morphed into tractors… The Soviet solution was to drain every ounce of life out of musical forms they couldn’t comprehend.”

One of Veloso’s jailers told him “he considered the Tropicálistas’ deconstructions a far greater threat than any leftwing agitation”. “Exhibit A,” writes Boyd, “in the case for humanity’s resilience in the face of unimaginable horror, for its ability to create beauty in defiance of monstrosity, is the extraordinary sounds created by Congolese musicians even as their land was being plundered.”

Boyd’s book is, accordingly, the Proust of music history – à la recherche of much music lost, here regained and affirmed in our present.

It was the end of the 1990s, and I was in my 20s working as a legal academic at King’s College London, but I wasn’t in love with the law. I needed a change. During a sabbatical, I saw a newspaper advert for a foundation course at the Slade School of Fine Art. In a moment of madness I applied.

I arrived at the entrance interview, my hands swinging. Apparently, it was customary to offer a portfolio for scrutiny. Unfazed, I said I didn’t have one. Nor did I mention that Mrs Ali, my high school art teacher, expressly forbade me from pursuing the subject, citing a basic lack of talent. But she was 4,000 miles away in Trinidad, unable to stop me now. I told the interviewers I was enthusiastic. Would that be enough? I still don’t understand why, but they took a chance on me. I started a week later.

It was a baptism by fire, with long life-drawing sessions followed by group critiques. Every lunchtime I cried into my sandwich. My sketches were stick figures compared with the brilliantly rendered drawings my classmates produced. Mrs Ali was right: I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body. But I’d already paid a couple of thousand in fees, so contracted with myself daily to show up just one more time. The days became weeks that morphed into months. Eventually, I was hooked.

I emerged from those intense months of immersion in art and its history convinced that this was my calling. That crazy decision made me quit my job. It took me back to university, only I was now a Goldsmiths College art undergrad. This was followed by a masters in fine art at Central Saint Martins in London. Oh, and somewhere along the line we had twin baby boys.

Safely ensconced in institutions of higher education, I acquired bits of art teaching and occasionally exhibited work. This mix of teaching, art practice and parenting felt brilliant. I wore black, dyed my hair rainbow colours and believed I was one of the cool kids. One look at my hubris and the universe doubled over laughing. Before I could turn around twice, the twins’ father decided city life was too confining. We had ties to Barbados, and with a heavy heart, I packed our life into boxes while grieving for the London art scene I was leaving behind.

This was the mid-2000s; Barbados’s art landscape has since been radically transformed, but when I arrived I didn’t find an obvious tribe. Artists were mainly producing large, colourful narrative paintings. I’m a conceptual artist with zero painting skills. Most of my time is spent on the idea. Typical of my work is a piece inspired by the capture of a sniper who plagued Washington DC. After the suspect was caught, the police spokesperson said: “We were looking for a white man in a white van. We found a black man in a blue car.” I programmed each sentence into a separate ticker tape. As they scrolled, the colours changed, so that you might see “We were looking for a white man in a black van” alongside “We found a blue man in a white car”. I never did collect that piece from the small gallery where it was exhibited.

My new island home was also tiny, a mere 14 by 21 miles. I was desperate to make work but didn’t know how. At a petrol station, I politely inquired if the manager would consider having me as an artist in residence. I would create art out of interactions with employees as well as the endless stream of customers. He watched me cut eye and muttered something about how he had never heard anything so stupid. I should pay for my gas and move on, please. I was holding up the line.

I had more success at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society, which gave me an unpaid month-long residency. I was ecstatic. It meant I could roam the museum freely, interact with staff, archives and exhibits and then produce work out of my reflections. Again, things have since improved there, but back then it struck me as a fossilised space. Displays appeared untouched for decades. Actual bookworms had munched through various archives, rendering them barely legible. Decay was everywhere.

I took a deep breath and did the only thing all my years of art school training suggested. I set to work sweeping the floors, careful to store the dust collected from each room in separate glass jars. I then cleaned cabinets, storing and labelling the detritus. Since the bookworms had bitten through the archives, I knew I had to bite back. I etched the patterns left behind by the worms on to prepared metal plates, which were then dipped in an acid bath. The acid “bites” into the metal plate, etching the drawing into it. The plate is then loaded with ink and the pattern pressed on to paper.

My residency exhibition consisted of a makeshift apothecary, filled with the jars of collected dust, framed etchings of bookworm drawings, an installation of fabricated archives and a sound piece listing donations made to the museum over the years. A good 50 friends and museum well-wishers showed up. I was not asked back.

A little disheartened, I dug deep for other art strategies. There was the time I set out on what the French theorist Guy Debord called a dérive, an unplanned walk through an urban landscape where one observes the everyday anew. The island’s lack of pavements means that no one walks. So I got in my car, chose a random vehicle, and drove behind it for a couple of hours. The day ended when the driver pulled over, got out of the car and glared at me menacingly.

Then I followed up a series of classified ads, making work out of the things offered. I bought oils with names like Boss Fix, Court Case and Jezebel Spiritual, repurposed them with my own written spells and offered magic potions for sale. I didn’t get any takers.

Gradually, I found my best interrogation of this new home was not from making objects but through words. For a couple of years I produced a weekly blog, Notes from a Small Rock. Published every Friday at 10am, it had quite a following on the island of 270,000. One day, after a meal out with friends, I started a short story inspired by a dessert on the menu called Death by Chocolate. I could feel the play of art and the discipline of law finally combining. A voice that had been lurking somewhere inside poured on to the page. I submitted it to some competitions and won two awards.

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Then I moved on to a novel, and that got published after a seven-way auction. It was the beginning of a journey to full-time writing. But I continue to be inspired by art and probably spend most of my free time in galleries, rarely leaving without a yearning to make work. I still keep a tiny sketchbook and pencils in my backpack. At the Hay festival recently I got an idea inspired by the variety of bookish tote bags everywhere.

But hard choices must be made, and the manuscript of my next novel begs for attention. I open my laptop and begin reading the draft, knowing I’m in a space where what I do feeds my intellect and nourishes my soul. I’m finally home.