China Miéville, author

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

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

Linda, Guardian reader

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

Derek Owusu, author

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

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

Fiona, Guardian reader

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

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Sebastian Barry, author

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

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

“What’s in your head?” Dolores O’Riordan’s raw, plaintive refrain loops through the Cranberries’ 1994 hit Zombie. A protest song about the Troubles could, on paper, hardly seem further removed from Derek Owusu’s third novel, about a young writer recovering from a mental health crisis. But in an author’s note before The Recovery House begins, Owusu instructs the reader to listen to the song “at least two to four times before going beyond this page”. Gradually it becomes clear that the song’s central question is one Owusu’s protagonist asks in various forms throughout the novel.

Can we ever fully understand what is going on in our own heads? We meet Jamal, a young novelist who has woken up in a recovery house – a residential alternative to hospital admission – after a breakdown. It transpires that he has overdosed, is an alcoholic, and has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. He is in a frazzled, frantic state, initially less interested in getting better than in piecing together how he got there.

The house itself is hardly a sanctuary in the conventional sense: Jamal finds a single bed with protruding springs, dead cockroaches in the nightstand and restless corridors in which people in various states of distress move around one another. Jamal’s nurses watch him; he watches them back. Owusu knows the world he is writing about – he spent a summer in a recovery house himself after a mental health crisis, and there is an intimacy to the way he renders this suspended, in-between place.

Writing is both Jamal’s vocation and his illness. Like Owusu, he has published two books and won an award for his first; the expectations surrounding the third have become unbearable, and he eventually remembers that it was the attempt to write it that precipitated his breakdown. He comes to the frightening realisation that “the thing that inspired me is the thing that’s trying to kill me”. His frustration with the world of publishing is also evident: “why does everyone in this industry want something from you even though we’re all very aware that things usually take time.”

A woman staying in the room below Jamal sings Zombie’s chorus in the night, over and over, until he finds himself singing it too, flooding his mind in interstitial moments. The singer, Joy, eventually slips a pen and paper beneath his door, something the nurses have refused him for fear of what writing will provoke. From there, they develop a tender, almost soulmate-like friendship, which becomes inflected with religion when the pair begin a weekly Bible study session together. Faith, as rendered by Owusu, is not cruel or exacting. There is something almost prelapsarian in Jamal and Joy’s relationship with God, as there is about their friendship – an innocent, platonic love. Between them, “What’s in your head?” transforms from a fear into an invitation: tell me.

The recovery house gradually becomes a strange, fragile ecosystem for Jamal’s convalescence. He shares cigarettes with its motley crew of residents, observes their dramas and begins to emerge from himself. It offers something a hospital cannot: a temporary, disparate community of people who understand that we are perhaps all closer to the precipice of collapse than we like to imagine. “Who was well in the world anyway?” one of the patients asks, concluding: “there was only the sick and those who didn’t realise it yet”.

At just 160 pages, The Recovery House is a very small book about some very large questions: what separates illness from inspiration? When does that inspiration become compulsion, when does self-examination slip into self-destruction? Owusu is interested in the porous boundaries between these states, and his prose mimics them. Written in long, free-flowing sentences, with sparse punctuation and no conventional chapter markings, the novel has the rhythm of a poem, one thought spilling into the next before it can be contained.

Owusu’s novel is slight enough to cradle in your hands, and it feels as though it must be handled in this way: with care, liable to shatter if held too tightly. It is a uniquely honest and affecting meditation on art, religion and mental health, told with a preternatural tenderness. At times it is almost painfully raw, reading like an excavation of the soul of a writer wondering whether, in turning his life into art, he has also been exploiting it.

Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Harriet Armstrong, Colwill Brown, Sasha Debevec-McKenney and Suzannah V Evans also made the shortlist for the £20,000 award, which celebrates fiction in any form – including novels, short stories, poetry and drama – by writers aged 39 or under, in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

Comprising four novels and two poetry collections, the books on the “galvanising” shortlist “have profound things to say about the ways we live and what it means to be human”, said author and judging panel chair, Irenosen Okojie.

Two of the six shortlisted authors have previously been nominated for the award. British-Irish poet and memoirist Hewitt, nominated in 2025 for his poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, has been chosen again for his debut novel, Open, Heaven – a portrait of gay first love, described in the Guardian by Sarah Perry as a “tender, skilled and epiphanic work”.

Owusu, a 2023 prize nominee, is shortlisted for Borderline Fiction, which follows a young black man navigating a series of relationships and coming to terms with mental health difficulties. Praised in the Guardian as “disarmingly poignant”, it is his third novel.

Armstrong, the youngest shortlisted author at just 25, is in the running with To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, a darkly comic campus novel grappling with gen Z gender relations and mental health, in which Armstrong “expertly adumbrates the emotional intensity and vulnerability of first love”, according to Guardian reviewer Jude Cook.

Brown, too, is recognised for her debut novel, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, about three working-class girls growing up in Doncaster, set between the late 90s and 2015. Brown’s novel “feels essential … you will probably read nothing else like it this year”, wrote Catherine Taylor in the Guardian.

Both poetry collections on the shortlist come from debut authors: American poet Debevec-McKenney, whose Joy is My Middle Name engages with themes of sex, race, addiction and pop culture; and Bristol-based Evans, whose Under the Blue offers a meditation on the lived realities of care.

The six-strong shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 12, which also featured Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi, What Remains After a Fire by Kanza Javed, The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, Absence by Issa Quincy, Gunk by Saba Sams and Make a Home of Me by Vanessa Santos.

Joining Okojie on the judging panel are the writers Joe Dunthorne, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Prajwal Parajuly and Eley Williams.

Last year’s prize was awarded to Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher for her novel The Coin, and previous winners include Caleb Azumah Nelson, Arinze Ifeakandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Fiona McFarlane and Kayo Chingonyi.

The winner will be announced on 14 May at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

My earliest reading memory
When I was about four or five, I think. I was living in Long Melford, Suffolk, with my foster parents, and my foster dad was trying to teach me how to read using those Biff and Chip books.

My favourite book growing up
I never read a book until the age of 24, so there wasn’t a favourite until I was about 25, and they usually changed with every new book I read. It started with St Mawr by DH Lawrence, then EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Time Machine by HG Wells, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and then it was F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for a very long time. But that lost its place last year when I finally read The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov.

The book that changed me
The book that changed me as a young man was The Will to Change by bell hooks. Until I read that I didn’t really know what being perceived as a man was all about. I kind of just drifted through life never having thought about it. Or if I did, it was so surface-level that it essentially meant nothing.

The writer who changed my mind
Benjamin Zephaniah. I emailed him out of the blue once and we started a correspondence that built into a friendship. He and my partner at the time convinced me to do a master’s in creative writing. I was hesitant, because I’ve always considered myself not very clever. But he said I could do it. And I did.

The book that made me want to be a writer
There are three: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, and The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward. Ellison gave me access to the strings behind a novel, showed me the pieces it was made from. And Rankine and Daley-Ward gave me permission to write a novel however I wanted to, to shape it in any way I felt necessary.

The author I came back to
Henry James. I tried him almost a decade ago – I think it was Washington Square – and it seemed so dry and impenetrable that I decided I wouldn’t bother again. But I did try again, as I always do, earlier this year. I picked up The Aspern Papers and suddenly James’s writing opened up to me, the voice on the page so strong, the sentences so satisfyingly unique and complex, that I ended up reading five novels in a row. My next is The Bostonians.

The book I reread
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I can’t remember how I discovered it but I read it whenever my self-esteem drops to dangerous levels.

The book I could never read again
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. At first I remember thinking how beautiful the prose was. That changed very quickly and it all became really cloying. Once I got to all the descriptions of jewels and beautiful things from around the world I called it quits. That was the first time I had ever got that far into a novel and stopped. Even thinking about it annoys me.

The book I discovered later in life
A Good School by Richard Yates. I think it’s his best novel. A friend from work had told me her favourite novel was Revolutionary Road so I made a note to read it. Years later I picked it up and decided to read everything Yates had written. It wasn’t until I got to A Good School that I was truly taken by that feeling of just loving something instantly and intensely.

The book I am currently reading
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes.

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My comfort read
The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. For anyone who experiences depersonalisation, this book will pull you out of it and remind you the external world is in fact real.