Helen Garner has praised Dua Lipa as a “serious and sensitive” interviewer after the British superstar added Garner’s nonfiction book This House of Grief to her monthly book club.

Garner’s 2014 courtroom drama will be the first Australian inclusion on the popular list, taking the Melbourne author’s work to the singer’s growing global audience.

Lipa said Garner’s book offered a “sharp and forensic analysis of the human condition,” announcing the selection in an Instagram post.

“Although Helen has been writing for almost 50 years, her work is new to me and it’s a thrilling discovery,” Lipa wrote.

“She’s one of the most fascinating writers I have come across in recent years, and I’m sure that, like me, you’ll find yourself diving into her back catalogue.”

Garner will join 23 high-profile authors championed by Lipa after the August publication of the interview, which the author described as “fruitful”.

“I found her an impressive person, serious and sensitive and deeply interested in the difficult questions that the book raises,” Garner said.

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Lipa foreshadowed Garner’s addition ahead of her interview series’ move to streaming on Spotify in June.

“It wouldn’t be my book pile without at least one harrowing story,” Lipa said at the time.

Garner won international acclaim for This House of Grief, a retelling of the trial of Victorian man Robert Farquharson over the murder of his three sons. Farquharson drove his three children into a dam in south-western Victoria in 2005.

The book received special mention in Garner’s 2016 win of the US$150,000 (A$207,633) Windham Campbell literary prize. The author first thought the award was hoax after an email in her junk folder from someone at Yale University who had “good news” and wanted her phone number, she said at the time.

Garner, 82, came to local prominence after the 1977 publication of Monkey Grip but has enjoyed soaring popularity outside Australia in the last decade.

New editions of several of Garner’s books, including This House of Grief, were republished in the UK and US in 2023 and 2024.

Lipa shared a preview of her analysis announcing This House of Grief’s selection on Instagram.

“[Garner’s] not looking for monsters – her interest lies with ordinary people who seem to have been pushed beyond their emotional limits,” Lipa wrote.

“As the trial progresses, I found myself questioning my own reactions, asking myself less, Did he do it? and instead, Is it possible to have empathy for this man, even if he did the worst thing imaginable?”

The 29-year-old singer has attracted more than 450,000 Instagram followers and nearly 100,000 YouTube subscriptions to her Service95 platform, which launched monthly book club picks in 2023.

Authors of each of Lipa’s monthly book picks have sat for extended interviews with the singer, analysing their work and sharing music recommendations. The lone exception is Gabriel García Márquez, author of 1967’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, who died in 2014.

Garner’s is the 24th book to be included and the first by an Australian author, in a list dominated by American books but spanning Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing to Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born.

Lipa has previously singled out Albanian author Ismail Kadare as a personal inspiration, saying the novelist’s work encouraged her connection with her Kosovan-Albanian heritage in a keynote speech for the Booker prize 2022 ceremony.

“I often wonder if authors realise just how many gifts they give us,” she said.

• This House of Grief by Helen Garner (Orion Publishing Co, £9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Nick Cave fans have descended on a charity bookshop in Hove, in southern England, after the musician donated 2,000 books from his personal collection.

The Australian singer made the donation to Hove’s Oxfam Bookshop on Blatchington Road. The books were once part of his personal library, which was recreated for an art installation that went to Denmark and Canada.

A bookshop worker named only as Richard told the Argus: “It’s a very interesting donation. The types of books are very wide ranging – there’s philosophy, art, religion, even old fiction paperbacks. It’s an incredibly varied donation. He clearly held on to his books, some of them are quite old.”

Books from Cave’s collection on sale included books by Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan, a first edition of Johnny Cash’s novel Man In White, and “a recipe book about aphrodisiacs”, the Times reported.

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The Times reported that “a crowd of people” were going through Cave’s books in the shop by Friday, with treasures including Cave’s boarding pass for a flight to Amsterdam, a map of the US, an empty packet of cigarettes and an “old envelope with the words ‘Lukes tooth’ written in Cave’s distinctive handwriting.” His son Luke is 34 years old.

On Saturday, a queue formed at the shop as word spread.

Cave and his family moved to Brighton in the 2000s. One of his sons, Arthur, died in 2015 after falling from a cliff in Ovingdean Gap in Brighton. The family left for Los Angeles, then London; in 2023, they sold the Brighton home for £2.9m. Cave wrote: “Brighton had just become too sad … we did, however, return once we realised that, regardless of where we lived, we just took our sadness with us.”

Richard told the Argus that many of Cave’s books will just look like regular books on the shelves, unless fans go searching: “A couple have plane tickets used as bookmarks but apart from that. It’s not like he was one of these people who had a book plate or wrote his name in.”

However, some customers reported finding books with sentences underlined or passages noted in Cave’s handwriting. Some were also once gifts, including a copy of The Lieutenant of Inishmore inscribed by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.

A spokesperson for Cave said he wouldn’t comment on the donation, saying: “He thinks the discoveries will remain intriguing mysteries for those who find them.”

Actors Channing Tatum and Pedro Pascal have written poems for a new anthology curated by Canadian musician and poet Mustafa that also includes contributions by the writers George Saunders, Max Porter and Hanif Abdurraqib.

The book, titled Nour, explores themes of ceremony, loss and worship. “You told me God wasn’t real/ as we sat in the water in the dark that night/ I couldn’t see your eyes but I could feel the anger/ in the water”, opens Tatum’s poem, extracted below along with Pascal’s.

Mustafa’s debut album, Dunya, was released last September; long before that, he’d begun collecting songwriting credits for the likes of Camila Cabello’s She Loves Control, The Weeknd’s Attention, and Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes’ Monster.

His work has often focused on the impact of gang violence and the deaths of friends, drawing on his experiences growing up in the Regent Park neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada’s first social housing project. He has not returned to Regent Park since his brother was killed in 2023, he told an audience at a launch event for Nour with actor Daniel Kaluuya on Thursday evening.

“In my mind I want to talk about my brother,” he told George Saunders in a discussion with the author, a transcript of which is included in Nour. “But is that my responsibility? But he was killed, I want to reimagine his memory. I want to write beauty where there wasn’t. But then I also don’t want to misconstrue the reality of the harshness of what it was”.

Mustafa told Saunders that he finds himself reading pages of the writer’s Booker prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo to “kids in the hood … because you’ve developed your own language, and your own universe, it’s like it’s a universe that we all have access to and we all have equal right to enter.”

Nour “is the most important thing I’ve ever been a part of”, Mustafa told attenders at the launch event. The book also features work by the poet Noor Hindi and the musicians Daniel Caesar and Dev Hynes among others.

“With art, we all have to surrender, especially when it comes to poetry”, said Mustafa. “You can’t just put different literary devices together and hope for beauty. There is this invisible thread that ties great work together”.

Worshipping Surrender by Channing Tatum

You told me God wasn’t real
as we sat in the water in the dark that night
I couldn’t see your eyes but I could feel the anger
in the water. You said if there was and that god
could let a child be violated it was not a god
worth worship. Many other things were said
on many nights in that angry water
Mostly talk of power soaked in booze and fear

So it’s safe to say I’ve never known religion
I still hear your voice say “Worshipping anything
is for fools” over the dull sound of the football on TV
I always imagine clowns on bikes with baskets on the front
Honking and riding in circles

But my great secret is that I have always felt you
Felt angels. Felt love.
Felt the magic of so deeply caring for another
I never knew what exactly to call it.
Now as I write this maybe that’s what worship has been for me

I’ve heard it said, god is love. Maybe my way to worship
is to love. Every person I meet. As reckless or stupid
as that can be. But I also worship
my bedsheets, my favorite pillow. I worship the feeling
right before I drink coffee, the smell of breakfast

I have loved so much as I have drifted through this life.
Loved so hard I almost loved myself
right out of this world because it was all too much
But now I surrender at the feet of each day
that I get to experience beauty, the warmth of love
Sun on my skin

I have never known religion but I’ve always
known you. My love. Love. Love.
I will always worship love. I surrender
my love always. I surrender my love forever.

Untitled by Pedro Pascal

I see you
late bloomer
smoking just after sunrise for the first time.
Wearing pants and buying pillows
dropping cash
then leaving them lonely in a stranger’s closet.
Mushroom lamp says “What the fuck? Lemme outta here.”
I explain to her that first I have to go back
and back and back again
until I understand that I will always be in love with those footprints.
“Fine.”
People smoke here
because they like me. See me sitting near the bird shit, making things up that never happened.
But they’re cool with it.
Someone tells me she was kidnapped by a man who held a knife to her neck
because her sister always picks the wrong men.
I tell her I was a very late bed wetter.
All the other talk happens alone,
never into a mirror and never to you.
But to objects caught off guard by my hostility,
by the shape of this grief.
Eleven months and only this:
I am struck by the lightning of your presence
now that you are gone.