Bear with me, because there is some backstory to get through before we can talk about the book I am actually here to review. Back in 1984, Stephen King and Peter Straub collaborated on the fantasy novel The Talisman. Like all the best King stories, it follows a young boy: in this case Jack Sawyer, 12, whose mother, Lily, is dying. Jack learns that a magical object called the Talisman might save her – if he can find it in a parallel world known as the Territories. Straub and King followed this up in 2001 with Black House, in which an adult Jack investigates a series of child murders that turn out to have disturbing links to the Territories.

The books are very different: one a coming-of-age cross-country quest, in which Jack flips back and forth between two versions of the US; the other a fantastical and horror-inflected murder mystery. Both are brilliant and enduring classics which will always have a place on my bookshelves – I reread both of them, all 1,800-odd pages, to prepare for Other Worlds Than These and was as swept away and delighted as the first time round.

So: in 2013 Straub had an idea for a final volume in the Talisman trilogy, drawing as Black House does from a real-life series of murders, and returning Jack (previously left on a bit of a cliffhanger) to the fray. King didn’t pick up on it back then, and Straub died in 2022. Now King is 79, and, as he writes in a somewhat valedictory afterword, “it’s time to think about tidying up, as much as such things are possible for a writer whose mind is still crammed with cool ideas”. So he went back to that old idea – the original email lost, but the concept of a “series of motiveless, brutal crimes” in the Far West of the Territories, as Straub put it, at the story’s heart.

Jack, “his tide … going out”, is now 57. An aimless, lonely émigré to the Territories, he is sent on a mission by the two-bit despot he now depressingly reports to. He’s to travel through the toxic Blasted Lands to gather information on the Great Gorge, a mysterious area of “growing danger” that Governor Youngblood wants to know more about. Flipping back and forth between “America-side” and the Territories, Jack learns that an old policeman friend has gone missing on the trail of a pair of “murderin’ kids” who have been leaving a swathe of bodies in their wake in Nebraska. These kids are, he’s told, “infested” by demons – and the infestation is spreading to the children of the Territories.

For the true King fan (the “Constant Reader”, as he puts it), there are moments of shivering joy in Other Worlds Than These – not least in the title, which draws from a key scene in King’s The Gunslinger. I could never not find pleasure in a billy-bumbler (a dog-like creature), or in memories of Wolf, a wonderful creation from The Talisman, or in references to chief gunslinger Roland Deschain from the Dark Tower series. As befits King, there are moments of true horror too, and good ones, as the teenage infection spreads across the Territories.

But I cannot recommend that anyone who is not a Constant Reader embark on this 800-plus-page tome. For one, it would be pointless to read it without previously having read The Talisman and Black House (and if I’m honest, probably the seven-volume Dark Tower sequence too). And even for the Constant Reader, this is really not vintage King. I would have said that I’d follow Jack Sawyer anywhere, but as Ole Travellin’ Jack crisscrossed his way across the dry desert land of the Territories, his journey started to feel endless, and endlessly repetitive. As Jack’s crew are gearing up to cross yet another rickety bridge over yet another gaping chasm, one character even makes this point when they spot it. “Oh God … talk about repetition.” I hear you, fella! Jack himself does it: “Another echo. They’re becoming tiresome,” he says, in a rather too on-the-nose comment about the eerie (not so eerie the nth time they’re mentioned) similarities between the US and the Territories.

Is this deliberate? Yes, undoubtedly: “ka [destiny] is a wheel”, as we’ve been told (more than once); Jack, as Roland did before him, is treading the path laid out for him in an endless cycle. But this time round, it all gets a little portentous, self-referential and self-indulgent – and, dare I say it, boring.

I still think Stephen King is a genius. I still think The Talisman is the perfect coming-of-age dark fantasy novel. So thank you for the endless hours of reading pleasure, Mr King. But unlike its predecessors, Other Worlds Than These will not be going on my reread shelf.

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A winter of discontent is anticipated by the embattled characters in Game of Thrones, but the Royal Shakespeare Company is banking on a glorious summer with its world premiere of a prequel to the hit TV series based on George RR Martin’s fantasy novels.

The new play, The Mad King, arrives 30 years to the month after the original publication of A Game of Thrones, the first novel in Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire. It has a gala performance in Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday evening in a reconfigured Royal Shakespeare theatre with a capacity of 870. Tickets for the entire run, priced from £10 to £95, have already sold out.

The RSC’s co-artistic directors, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, have said that the epic play – which lasts 225 minutes including an interval – “thrillingly imagines events teased in the books” and they trumpet it as the “first-ever stage production arising from the canon of George RR Martin”. The Mad King bookmarks, handy for all those doorstop novels, are on sale in the RSC gift shop – although scripts for the play are not currently purchasable, leading to heated discussions on message boards about its plot, which involves familiar characters from the houses of Targaryen, Stark, Lannister, Baratheon and Martell. To “protect the magic” of the play, theatregoers with cameraphones are asked to cover them with stickers labelled “sworn shield”, a reference to a dutiful oath in Game of Thrones.

The play is adapted by Duncan Macmillan, who has worked on it for almost a decade. In the programme, Macmillan writes that its focus is a jousting tournament at Harrenhal – “a major event in Game of Thrones lore that has never been depicted on the page or on screen”. Macmillan added that he and director Dominic Cooke wanted to make a play “for fans and novices alike, a piece of theatre that sits inside the wider history but is also complete in its own right”. Macmillan and Cooke were first announced in 2021 as collaborating on a Game of Thrones project for an unspecified venue.

The Mad King – which unfolds on a cross-shaped stage with the audience all around and has a cast of three dozen – weathered a challenging period of previews. Five early performances were cancelled, with an announcement that “the actors, creative and technical teams [were taking] the additional time necessary to progress and refine the work in real time, owing to the ambitious and epic nature of the production and, as a knock-on effect of unforeseen delays to the fit-up process”. (A spokesperson for the RSC said that affected audiences were contacted to arrange refunds or to rebook their tickets.)

The demand for tickets, alongside a sold out run of The Cherry Orchard (starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh) in its Swan theatre, will help fill the company’s coffers after what Evans described last year as a “perilous situation”. A recent restructure has enabled the company to reduce its cost base by £2.8m a year. The RSC said the process was “not solely based on reducing our financial overheads” but also to help it “work as effectively and efficiently as possible and to position us to generate additional income to invest in the creation of theatre and learning through theatre, which is our founding purpose”.

By transforming its stage into the world of Westeros for The Mad King, the RSC hopes to welcome audiences who are new to either its Stratford venue or to theatre more generally. In recent years, it has drawn upon existing IP with considerable success, including an adaptation of the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbour Totoro, also powered by imaginative puppetry like The Mad King. My Neighbour Totoro opened at the Barbican in London in 2022 and transferred to the West End, where it will end its run in January.

Among the audience at the Royal Shakespeare theatre on Friday night was Game of Thrones fan Edward, 29, from Dudley, who said he had visited Birmingham Hippodrome and Wolverhampton Grand but it was his first time at the RSC. “I just can’t stop smiling – it’s so fun,” he said of the production, despite initially being “shocked when I saw the run time”. Another newcomer to the building was Aisha, 28, who had travelled from London. A fan of the franchise, Aisha said the play “compares very well to the books and films – they’ve done an amazing job”.

Rachel, 51, comes to the RSC a couple of times a year, most recently for an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, and said that mixing Shakespeare with such adaptations provides “a good variety”. Diane, 66, was there to see The Cherry Orchard and expressed frustration that the company’s two main stages had no Shakespeare this summer (a trimmed version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made with the Unicorn children’s theatre, is on at its third venue, The Other Place.) “For me personally it’s disappointing. I know that sounds snobby, I don’t mean it to, but the name’s the Royal Shakespeare Company … The balance is off. It’s a little bit of a betrayal of their name and raison d’etre but I’m well aware they have financial difficulties.” Diane acknowledged: “I’m probably the only one on earth who hasn’t watched [the TV series] … I know there’s a following that’s very loyal.”

On the fan forum Theatreboard, people who had seen The Mad King variously praised its “full Shakespearean tragic resonance” and “Shakespearean-ish cadence”, with one saying that it was “on a par in theatrical terms with the London 2012 opening ceremony”.

Steven and Bethany, both 30, recently moved to Stratford and saw the RSC’s Henry V earlier this year. Bethany arrived “hoping for a dragon tonight!” and Steven said that they hadn’t expected the RSC to stage such a production. “It brings in more people who wouldn’t usually come to the theatre,” said Bethany. “They might enjoy the experience and see what else is on offer as well. With it being in Stratford, rather than London, you’re bringing in different crowds.”

“You’d expect to see it on the West End rather than Stratford,” agreed Steven. The RSC’s Hamlet Hail to the Thief, another bid to draw new audiences by accompanying the tragedy with a Radiohead album, opens in London this winter. The Mad King is widely tipped to follow hot on its heels.

A collection of Stephen King novellas that inspired classic films including Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption has been banned from Utah public schools.

Published in 1982, the collection, titled Different Seasons, contains four novellas: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal, Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption, The Body: Fall from Innocence, and The Breathing Method: A Winter’s Tale.

But earlier this month, the Davis, Jordan, Tooele and Washington school districts decided to remove the collection from their libraries, triggering a statewide ban by the Utah state board of education on 6 July. The book had previously been available to students in grades seven through 12, according to the board.

A book is removed from all public schools in the state if at least three school districts – or at least two school districts and five charter schools – determine that a book contains “objective sensitive material” defined under Utah code, according to Utah law.

Utah code defines “objective sensitive material” as “instructional material that constitutes pornographic or indecent” content. The statute further states that “sensitive material” includes content that is “harmful to minors”, pornographic, or that “includes certain fondling or other erotic touching”.

The Utah state board of education maintains a list of books currently banned under this code. As of 15 July, the list includes 35 titles, including The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

The removal of King’s Different Seasons comes as in January, the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah filed a lawsuit against state officials on behalf of the estate of Kurt Vonnegut and several bestselling authors, arguing that the book bans are “unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments”.

In a news release announcing the lawsuit, the ACLU accused Utah of “trampling on the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment”.

In one illustration, painted on vellum and decorated with gold leaf, the sorcerer Merlin is depicted as a powerful shape-shifter who has transformed into a talking stag. In another, the Knights of the Round Table are shown returning, victorious, from battle.

The illustrations appear in one of the earliest manuscripts to tell the tale of King Arthur and the search for the holy grail – a richly illuminated medieval tome which, for more than 700 years, has been in private hands.

Now, institutions will have an opportunity to buy the work, which has never been publicly exhibited or comprehensively studied, when it is offered for sale at auction by Christie’s for an estimated £1.5m to £2m in July.

Dating from c1290 to 1310, the manuscript contains texts from the Old French Lancelot-Grail cycle – the foundational myths of King Arthur, Merlin and the holy grail – and 126 miniature illustrations, including a rare depiction of Merlin as a stag.

Only three such manuscripts are known to be held in private collections, said Dr Eugenio Donadoni, director of medieval and renaissance manuscripts at Christie’s, which is selling the work in its valuable books and manuscripts sale on 8 July: “Ours is the earliest of the three and the most profusely illustrated. Its text is unique.”

Known as the Lebaudy manuscript, after it was collected by the French industrialist Jean Lebaudy in the 20th century, it is thought to be the earliest copy of the Lancelot-Grail cycle ever to appear at auction.

“Many of the miniatures are in burnished gold, [created] using gold leaf, which was polished very aggressively to make it shine,” said Donadoni.

The manuscript is thought to have been produced at the end of the 13th century by the Master of the Liège Apocalypse, an anonymous but distinctive artist and illuminator named after the apocalyptic religious manuscript he was best known for. “He evidently was very sought after because the manuscripts he produced were very rich and would have cost a lot of money to make,” said Donadoni. “He’s got a very characteristic style and does these square-jawed male faces and lovely red dots on the cheeks of his characters.”

Previous owners of the manuscript have included a 15th-century knight, a jouster who died young, and the obsessive medievalist and bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps, while Lebaudy fought in two world wars and twice won the croix de guerre. “You can see how, throughout history, this manuscript might have appealed to these people,” Donadoni said.

Dr Irene Fabry-Tehranchi, who specialises in French texts at Cambridge University Library, said it was “amazing” to think that the Labaudy manuscript was being sold and could enter public ownership for the first time. “It’s really exciting. This private ownership of a key medieval manuscript is a real challenge for scholars. It prevents further research, unfortunately.”

Scholars have been unable to study the entire manuscript and its illustrations in depth, she said, because it has, perhaps understandably, been an object of desire for the super-rich. “It’s a beautifully illuminated manuscript, which contains wonderful Arthurian stories depicted in exquisite miniatures. Originally, it was made for aristocratic patrons, possibly women who were very fond of Arthurian stories.”

Now, she said, the manuscript is part of “our world heritage” and she is keeping her fingers crossed that, seven centuries later, the pattern of ownership can be broken. “I hope that … it will finally become available in a public collection. The problem is, of course, that nowadays libraries and heritage institutions don’t have very much money. [But] these institutions are there to preserve these texts and to make them publicly available.”

After examining scans of the manuscript, she said the ending of a classic story, known as the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, has been abridged and rewritten so that it presents a “special version” of the text.

“[At the end of] the standard version of the story, you have the development of knightly adventures and romance, and also a shift in focus from King Arthur to his nephew, the knight Gawain, and his adventures,” she said. “In the reworked version, I believe, of the Lebaudy manuscript – although we need to look at it more closely – we have more of a focus on the battles of Arthur and questions of kingship.”

This “different” ending better reflects the opening of the tale, where the king seeks to affirm his legitimacy while facing rebel British barons and fighting Saxon invaders.

“In some cases, scribes thought they could rewrite the story and make it more appealing to what either their patrons wanted or in a way that felt better [to them] – that was a standard medieval writing practice. It was probably someone’s initiative to do this rewriting, because they thought it was best,” she said. “It shows the scribe’s own take on the story.”

Acclaimed US novelists Susan Choi and Lily King are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, in a lineup dominated by debut authors and independent publishers.

The six titles contending for the £30,000 award range from a US campus love story to a coming of age tale set in 1960s Bradford, but are connected by their consideration of “the complexity and beauty of the female experience”, said the former prime minister of Australia and judging chair Julia Gillard.

Choi is on the list for her sixth novel Flashlight, which was also shortlisted for last year’s Booker prize. A historical family saga, spanning from small town Indiana to North Korea, it reckons with a father’s disappearance, and was described in a Guardian review as “all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger.”

King is recognised for Heart the Lover, also her sixth work of fiction, in which a 1980s campus love triangle reignites in mid-life. “This story of first love between college kids is vivid, moving and witty,” wrote Rebecca Wait in her Guardian review.

More than half of the titles in contention are debuts, with four first-time novelists – Addie E Citchens, Virginia Evans, Marcia Hutchinson, and Rozie Kelly – featured alongside the two more established names.

US writer Citchens was selected for Dominion, which follows the experiences of two female protagonists in a Black church community of the American south.

Evans made the shortlist for The Correspondent, an epistolary novel in which an elderly woman deals with ageing and her past by writing letters to loved ones and strangers.

British author Hutchinson is up for The Mercy Step, following the coming of age of a young Black girl in 1960s Bradford, whose family are Windrush generation immigrants.

Completing the shortlist is Kingfisher by British writer Rozie Kelly, about a young creative writing academic who develops an infatuation with his older female colleague.

Four of the titles were published by independent presses: Canongate (Heart the Lover), Europa Editions UK (Dominion), Cassava Republic Press (The Mercy Step), and Saraband (Kingfisher).

Despite being among the most prominent names on the longlist, Katie Kitamura and Kit de Waal failed to make the shortlist; Kitamura with her fifth novel Audition, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker prize, and De Waal, who was the chair of the fiction prize’s judging panel last year, for The Best of Everything.

Other titles longlisted for this year’s prize were Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps, Moderation by Elaine Castillo, The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine, The Others by Sheena Kalayil, A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, and A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang.

Gillard whittled down the 16-strong longlist alongside the poet and novelist Mona Arshi, the author and broadcaster Salma El-Wardany, the writer and comedian Cariad Lloyd, and DJ and author Annie Macmanus.

The prize was open to titles written in the English language and published in the UK between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026.

The winner will be announced on 11 June at a ceremony in London, alongside the winner of its sister award, the Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Founded in 1996, the Woman’s prize for fiction was created in response to the Booker prize’s failure to shortlist any women writers in 1991. Past winners include Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Maggie O’Farrell and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Last year’s prize went to Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep, a postwar romantic and family saga set in the Netherlands, which judges praised for its “masterful blend of history, suspense and historical authenticity”.

• To browse all books in the 2026 Women’s prize for fiction shortlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

A prominent Canadian-American author, who has long claimed Indigenous ancestry and whose work exposed “the hard truths of the injustices of the Indigenous peoples of North America”, has learned from a genealogist that he has no Cherokee ancestry.

In an essay titled “A most inconvenient Indian” published on Monday for Canada’s Globe and Mail, Thomas King said he had learned of rumours circulating in recent years within both the arts and Indigenous communities that questioned his Cherokee heritage.

In mid-November, he met with members of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (Taaf), a group based in the state of North Carolina that exposes perpetrators of Indigenous identity fraud. King says this group was the main source of the rumours.

The genealogist working with Taaf told King she found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry on either side of his family lineage. King says he accepts the findings.

“It’s been a couple of weeks since that video call, and I’m still reeling. At 82, I feel as though I’ve been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story,” he wrote. “Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.”

King, a California-born academic, writer and activist, has lived in Canada since 1980, when he took a job in Alberta teaching Indigenous studies at the University of Lethbridge. He rose to prominence with work that Canada’s governor general said displayed “formidable wit to explore the social, economic and political dimensions of the modern Aboriginal experience”.

King has long said he grew up hearing a story that his father, Robert King, was not his biological father. Instead, Thomas King’s grandfather was Elvin Hunt, a man believed to have Cherokee ancestry. But the genealogist working with Taaf found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry on either side of King’s family lineage.

King won the 2014 RBC Taylor prize for non-fiction for his book The Inconvenient Indian and in 2020 won the Stephen Leacock memorial medal for humour for his work Indians on Vacation. That same year, he was promoted to companion of the Order of Canada, commended for his “prolific and groundbreaking work [which] continues to enrich our country’s culture, and has changed our perception of Canadian history”.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail published on Monday, King said he intended to return the National Aboriginal Achievement award, which he received in 2003. “The rest of my awards are based on my writing, not my ethnicity,” he said.

King is the latest prominent figure whose claims to Indigenous ancestry have been disproven. Recently, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation claimed folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie was born in Massachusetts to white parents, not to Cree parents as she had long claimed.

King says he never intentionally misled people, instead genuinely believing he had Cherokee ancestry.

“Taaf suggested that I might want to offer up an apology for my life, but an apology assumes a crime, an offence, a misdeed,” he wrote in his essay. “And I don’t think that’s appropriate. Throughout my career – activist, academic, administrator, writer – I’ve conducted myself in the belief that I was mixed-blood Cherokee.”

But he wrote that after seeing the evidence, if he chose to withhold that information “then an accusation of fraud would have merit”.

The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone’s university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.

So my heart initially sank at Heart the Lover’s cover promise that our main character would soon be “swept into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games” – good grief, save me from the raucous card games! But obviously the caveat here is what it always is: a good writer will make it matter. I had faith, therefore, that everything would be all right, since Lily King is an exceptionally good writer. Indeed, she could probably write a book-length account of her most recent dream and I would still rush to read it.

King is a well-established name in the US, and it’s about time she reached a wider audience over here. In her hands, this story of first love between college kids is vivid, moving and witty. It unspools into a searching exploration of loss, mortality and the inexorability of time. “It’s just this long tender farewell to youth,” the narrator says early on, referring to a short story she has read. King’s novel got me straight in the heart. It hurt.

The narrator is not named until the end, although if you’ve read King’s brilliant previous novel Writers & Lovers you’ll know her name already. Heart the Lover is a companion of sorts to that book, both a prequel and a sequel, while also capable of standing on its own. There is just one slightly perplexing reveal – which I won’t spoil – that may feel like a rewriting of history to fans of Writers & Lovers, though I think most readers will be in a forgiving mood.

We begin as the narrator meets Sam, and then his best friend Yash, in her senior year of college (let the academic fervour, quick-fire banter and raucous card games commence: the book’s title is a reference to one of these card games). It looks set to be a classic love triangle, but this is not the angle King is most interested in, and what we get instead is a two-hander, a more focused love story. Despite this, the book has a rich cast of background characters, each of whom King presents with precision and care. At the midway point comes a time jump, and the second half of the story presents middle age butting up against the echoes of youthful intensity, with the shifting of relationships and character over time. Characteristically, King pays attention not just to what we lose, but to what we gain.

The novel is awash with literary references, and yes, I may have balked at the aforementioned “academic fervour”, but actually it’s a delight: this is a book in love with the experience of reading, precise about the way certain stories and ideas powerfully affect us at particular stages in our lives. “You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books?” the narrator says. “A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it.” King maintains a lovely balancing act: she is an unapologetic English major (a type as much as a biographical feature), but her books, tightly plotted and compulsively readable, are for everyone.

The first half might be seen as a “young” book, excellent on the intensity and desire and energy of youth. It then becomes a grown-up novel: wearier, more poignant, and yet still – and this is not a decision every writer would have made – hopeful. The arc of the story suggests bleakness, but the delivery resists it. To say farewell to youth, according to King, is not to say farewell to love, or to hope. “Isn’t love a form of hope?” the narrator asks at one point. We may be left feeling melancholy at the end of Heart the Lover, but, crucially, we are not disheartened.

Havoc by Rebecca Wait is published by Riverrun. Heart the Lover by Lily King is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The cover of Lily King’s new novel, Heart the Lover, features an abstracted face sobbing white tears on a tangerine background. It is an appropriate image, given that so many early readers – from BookTokkers to fellow authors – have reported weeping uncontrollably during the book’s final third.

For King, the reaction was unexpected. “I certainly felt a lot of emotion while I was writing. Not sobbing, more a deeper grief,” she says. But she describes the writing of her sixth novel, which begins with a 1980s college love story then revisits the same characters in middle age, as a joyful experience. “It was really great to just go back to the 1980s and college. It was a relief.”

King’s latest novel shares a “connective thread” with Writers & Lovers, her bestselling 2020 tale of a 31-year-old woman waitressing while striving to establish herself as an author, which counts Curtis Sittenfeld, Elizabeth Strout and Madeline Miller among its fans. Like that book, and 2014’s Euphoria, inspired by the life of 1930s anthropologist Margaret Mead, Heart the Lover features a love triangle (actually, in Euphoria the triangle is more of a square). This dynamic feels true to life, King says, at least in her experience: “You go through droughts with relationships and then it just pours.”

Yet King did not intend to write a love story this time. She was working on a “political murder mystery” titled Mercury Island during the pandemic. “I had about 90 pages, and I had run out of steam. I had a dead body on the first page, and I didn’t care how he died,” she laughs. Then her friend Ann Patchett sent her the manuscript of Tom Lake. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, she’s having so much fun. And I am having so much fun reading this.’” So she flipped to the back of her notebook and started writing Heart the Lover’s first scene.

King’s writing is warm and big-hearted – even when characters behave badly they are presented with sympathy – and she comes across the same way, speaking from the house she shares with her husband in Portland, Maine. She is curious, chatty, has a cascade of long, curly blond hair and exudes a sense of hearty outdoorsiness – she hikes and, as she tells me with a wince, “Dare I say, I have gotten really into pickleball.”

For all her buoyancy, she is devastated by the political situation in the US; her voice cracks when she talks about her fears for voting rights, and about the tech companies who strike her as “intent on pushing us away from each other – actively, deliberately – with seemingly no conscience or sense of responsibility. It just breaks my heart.”

Given the darkness of this moment, she admits that in the run-up to publication she sometimes wished she had written that political murder mystery, and not a love story, after all. At times she worried that the book’s title – taken from a card game the characters play – was too “schmaltzy”. One of her two grownup daughters even told her: “‘You use that title, you will ruin your career.’ That really haunted me!”

In the end, though, she decided to “go all in”. “Falling in love produces all of these great feelings and chemicals and hormones,” she says. “The extraordinary thing is that you can read a novel and feel those same things.” She is well aware that love stories are sometimes discussed “in a belittling way. I really want to push back against that, because I don’t know what else we have if we don’t have love?”

King knew she wanted to be a writer from her first high school creative writing class. But the road, she says, was “very, very, slow”. She studied English as an undergraduate, and a master of fine arts in creative writing at Syracuse University, then, similarly to her Writers & Lovers protagonist, Casey, paid the rent waiting tables. Her first novel was published when she was 36.

She says she developed writerly, watchful instincts during her “chaotic” Massachusetts childhood, which encompassed periods at home alone with her unhappily married parents while her two older siblings were at boarding school, and then the acquisition of 14 step-siblings after her parents divorced when she was 11, remarrying three times between them. Her father “was a really serious alcoholic. I don’t know how he got all these wives to marry him!” she says. Each family setup was so different. “There were four different cultures. I became very adept at watching for signs of how that culture operated, how I would survive best and how to protect myself.”

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She also read a lot as a child, and it was Judy Blume’s novels about teenage girls navigating complex social dynamics that inspired her to write. She and Blume are now friends, having met during an online event during the pandemic. That “has been an incredible honour. She gave me everything. I feel like I would not have this career if I hadn’t read her books.”

These days, she is a diverse reader. “I always keep a copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse on my desk, as well as The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard,” she says. She is a longterm devotee of Tessa Hadley, Strout and Colm Tóibín, and cites My Friends by Hisham Matar, about three Libyan exiles living in London, as a recent favourite. At the moment it is “useful to read dissident literature about countries in authoritarian crises. I’ve read a lot of those books all my life – now it’s with a totally different perspective. We Americans have always had an exceptionalist point of view, as though that would never come here. And so I think those stories are so important – but we also need to balance our reading so we don’t get terrified into numbness and inertia.”

That, in the end, is why she decided to embrace her accidentally written love story. Fiction “allows us to see things from so many perspectives. That is such an important part of living communally,” she says. When we connect with others through fiction, it reminds us “that the huge majority of people on this Earth are genuinely good and have love in their hearts”.

A new report on book bans in US schools finds Stephen King as the author most likely to be censored and the country divided between states actively restricting works and those attempting to limit or eliminate bans.

PEN America’s Banned in the USA, released on Wednesday, tracks more than 6,800 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago, when PEN didn’t even see the need to compile a report.

Some 80% of those bans originated in just three states that have enacted or attempted to enact laws calling for removal of books deemed objectionable: Florida, Texas and Tennessee. Meanwhile, PEN found little or no instances of removals in several other states, with Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey among those with laws that limit the authority of school and public libraries to pull books.

“It is increasingly a story of two countries,” says Kasey Meehan, director of PEN’s Freedom to Read program and an author of Wednesday’s report. “And it’s not just a story of red states and blue states. In Florida, not all of the school districts responded to the calls for banning books. You can find differences from county to county.”

King’s books were censored 206 times, according to PEN, with Carrie and The Stand among the 87 works of his affected. The most banned work of any author was Anthony Burgess’s dystopian classic from the 1960s, A Clockwork Orange, for which PEN found 23 removals. Other books and authors facing extensive restrictions included Patricia McCormick’s Sold, Judy Blume’s Forever and Jennifer Niven’s Breathless, and numerous works by Sarah J Maas and Jodi Picoult.

Reasons often cited for pulling a book include LGBTQ+ themes, depictions of race, and passages with violence and sexual violence. An ongoing trend that PEN finds has only intensified: thousands of books were taken off shelves in anticipation of community, political or legal pressure rather than in response to a direct threat.

“This functions as a form of ‘obeying in advance’,” the report reads, “rooted in fear or simply a desire to avoid topics that might be deemed controversial.”

The PEN report comes amid ongoing censorship efforts not just from states and conservative activists, but from the federal government. The Department of Education ended an initiative by the Biden administration to investigate the legality of bans and has called the whole issue a “hoax”. PEN’s numbers include the Department of Defense’s removal of hundreds of books from K-12 school libraries for military families as part of an overall campaign against DEI initiatives and “un-American” thinking.

In Florida, where more than 2,000 books were banned or restricted, a handful of counties were responsible for many of the King removals: dozens were pulled last year as a part of a review of whether they were in compliance with state laws.

“His books are often removed from shelves when ‘adult’ titles or books with ‘sex content’ are targeted for removal – these prohibitions overwhelmingly ban LGBTQ+ content and books on race, racism and people of color – but also affect titles like Stephen King’s books,” Meehan says. “Some districts – in being overly cautious or fearful of punishment – will sweep so wide they end up removing Stephen King from access, too.”

PEN’s methodology differs from that of the American Library Association (ALA), which also issues annual reports on bans and challenges. PEN’s numbers are much higher in part because the free-expression organization counts any books removed or restricted for any length of time, while the ALA only counts permanent removals or restrictions.

Both organizations have acknowledged that because they largely rely on media reports and information that they receive directly, their numbers are far from comprehensive. Stephana Ferrell, director of research and insight at the Florida Freedom to Read Project, wrote in an email this week that total bans are “likely much higher” than in PEN’s snapshot analysis, based on the project’s ongoing public records requests.

The PEN report includes no banning data from Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other red states because researchers could not find adequate documentation. Meehan adds that PEN also doesn’t know the full impact of statewide laws.

“It’s become harder and harder to quantify the scope of the book banning crisis,” Meehan says. “In a state where a banning law is passed, we don’t have the data to know whether every school in that state had the books affected. Our data is a snapshot. It’s what we were able to collect through what’s publicly reported or on websites or what journalists have uncovered.”