Cloudstreet, Tim Winton’s sprawling Australian family epic, has been voted Australia’s favourite book in a poll run by ABC Radio National.

The broadcaster announced over the weekend the results of a nationwide poll to determine a list of readers’ top 100 Australian books.

Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel The Book Thief took second place, while Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe came in third.

First published in 1991, Cloudstreet follows two working-class Australian families, the Lambs and the Pickles, over their 20 years living together in an old rambling house called Cloudstreet, in postwar Perth.

The story – Winton’s fifth novel and ninth book – won a swathe of awards upon publication, including the Miles Franklin in 1992, and has been a staple of Australian English literature classes for decades. It’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Australia alone.

Cloudstreet has topped previous polls on Australian books, including one by the Australian Society of Authors surveying writers on their favourites in 2003, and a subsequent poll run by the ABC the same year, surveying the public. Winton’s novel appeared in a 2019 BBC list of “100 novels that shaped our world”.

The final top 100 in this year’s ABC Radio National poll included adult fiction, nonfiction, young adult fiction, children’s picture books, history and cookbooks.

The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book made it into the top 50 (at No 22), while Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion came in at number 56. RecipeTin Eats: Dinner by Nagi Maehashi made the cut at 96.

Authors Helen Garner, Melissa Lucashenko, Geraldine Brooks, Anna Funder, Peter Carey and Hannah Kent all had multiple books in Sunday’s top 100. Books by children’s authors Alison Lester, Paul Jennings, Mem Fox, Jeannie Baker and Ruth Park appeared in the final 100.

The earliest published work was For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke from 1874 (No 80). The most recent were Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel and Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, both published in 2025.

Kate Evans, the host of ABC Radio National’s literary show The Bookshelf, said the list included “audacious literary fiction to historical accounts of who we’ve been and how we might understand all that complicated past, to joyful children’s books, Indigenous stories of both pain and humour, and many, many family stories”.

“This list defies any glib conclusions about how we read – and surely that’s the point,” Evans said.

The shortlist for the 10th year of the 4thWrite prize – the short story competition for unpublished writers of colour run by the publisher 4th Estate in association with the Guardian – has been revealed.

The six shortlisted stories were “affecting in new and surprising ways”, said judge Gurnaik Johal, who was shortlisted for the prize in 2018.

Clementine Wolodarsky was shortlisted for I Only Mug Girls, which judge and author Sanam Mahloudji described as “a fun and absurd ride of a story about an unlikely friendship between a lying misfit who works at the corporate office of Gail’s and the lonely divorcee she meets on the train”.

Darren Chan made the shortlist for Love Bite, described as “a really impressive and affecting story … sharp and funny and shot through with darkness” by judge and novelist Kamila Shamsie.

Ope Adedeji was selected for Omugwo, which tells the story of a woman convinced her newborn granddaughter is the reincarnation of her sister. The story is a “moving exploration of grief and mother-daughter relationships”, said judge and Guardian books commissioning editor Ella Creamer.

Meher Iqbal appears on the list for Darkroom, which Mahloudji praised as “a sensitive and sensorially rich coming-of-age story about a young teenage friendship” that “captures the isolation and regret of jealousy with beauty and depth”.

Diya Nair was chosen for Minty Fresh, which “depicts an office relationship in such a compelling and life-like way”, said Mahloudji. The story has “a subtle humour and details that feel true to life in their complexities and contradictions”.

Completing this year’s list is Svetlana Chigozie Onye with London 2060, which follows a water rationing officer in a drought-ravaged future London as he navigates a secret relationship and personal tragedy.

“The 4thWrite shortlist is a reminder of what short fiction can do: give us a whole world in a few pages and leave us thinking long after the ending,” said judge Chanté Joseph. “It was a joy to read such distinct voices and discuss them with the other judges.”

The winner of the prize will receive £1,000, a one-day publishing workshop at 4th Estate and publication of their story on the Guardian website.

This is the 10th year of the prize, which is open to writers aged 18 and over living in the UK or Ireland. Last year’s winner was Piyumi Kapugeekiyana for The Original Is Not Here. Other past winners include Yan F Zhang for Fleeting Marrow in 2024 and Tian Yi for The Good Son in 2023.

A number of previous longlisted and shortlisted writers have gone on to publish books: Bolu Babalola, author of Love in Colour and Honey & Spice; Guy Gunaratne, author of Mister, Mister and In Our Mad and Furious City; Kasim Ali, author of Good Intentions and Who Will Remain; Gurnaik Johal, author of We Move and Saraswati; and Kit Fan, author of Diamond Hill and Goodbye Chinatown.

Along with Mahloudji, Joseph, Shamsie, Johal and Creamer, this year’s judging panel includes agent Emma Paterson of Aitken Alexander Associates and 4th Estate publishing director Kishani Widyaratna.

From Homer’s Odyssey to Agatha Christie’s crime fiction, humans have produced plenty of tales to grace the bookshelf. But research suggests artificial intelligence may now be providing some competition.

In a study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, 1,682 adults were asked to read one of six short stories, three of which were written by humans and three by ChatGPT. Each AI story had a similar theme to one of the human-authored works.

The team told participants whether their story was written by a human or AI, but this information was not always correct. The researchers then asked participants to rate how absorbing and engaging they found the story, and its quality.

Participants who read an AI-generated story rated it as more absorbing and of higher quality than those who read a story written by a human. However, participants gave higher ratings to stories they had been told were written by people.

Dr Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a senior author of the research from Villanova University in Pennsylvania, said: “AI systems can already generate short stories that are seen as being at least as good as – if not better than – human-written stories. We should update our views of AI’s abilities accordingly.”

However, Weisberg, who is herself a creative writer, said that did not mean writing should be left to AI, noting that novels produced by tech were probably going to be different from those written by humans.

“We may need to make room for AI-generated novels, and for AI/human co-written novels, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no longer space for us to appreciate the process of human creativity,” she said.

“Humans write as a form of creative self-expression or to challenge ourselves, or to make sense of our experiences. The fact that AI can generate human-like stories doesn’t change any of that.”

The results also suggest attitudes to AI matter: participants with more positive attitudes toward AI gave higher ratings to stories they were told were produced by ChatGPT than those with a less positive outlook.

The researchers carried out two further experiments in which 905 adults were given two of the six short stories – both on the same theme and only one of which was penned by a person. They were then asked to guess which was written by a human and which by AI.

In one experiment, about 40% guessed correctly, a result that is worse than chance, while in the other experiment 52% guessed correctly.

“There is no general evidence that participants were able to distinguish human-written from AI-generated stories,” the authors write.

The researchers found that while participants’ self-reported expertise with fiction was not linked to how accurately they guessed, greater expertise with AI systems was.

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“AI writing has a particular style that we can learn to recognise with practice – just as we can learn to recognise different human authors’ unique styles,” Weisberg said.

Weisberg suggested that the preference for stories labelled as being written by humans was linked to a desire for authenticity, but that people actually preferred AI-generated stories because they were easier to read and digest.

However, Luke Kennard, a professor of film and creative writing at the University of Birmingham, who was not involved in the work, emphasised that AI was highly contentious.

“Because we’re human, we tend to personify AI and imagine it as some kind of glowing robot with a benign and neutral face, when it’s really just predictive code based on a massive stolen database of actual writing, physically based in vast, expensive and destructive datacentres with catastrophic repercussions for the surrounding communities,” he said.

Kennard also stressed that AI was not a “tool” similar to spellcheck or a thesaurus, but an existential threat.

“Of course it’s capable of spitting out a coherent and even enjoyable poem with the right prompting and finessing. Given that it’s been trained on thousands of years of human work, it would be embarrassing if it wasn’t,” he said. “I suppose the question we should be asking is: is it worth it? And the answer is absolutely, categorically, it is not.”

Gromit, the canine star of the Wallace and Gromit animations, is “breaking his silence” and writing a memoir.

After “bottling everything up for a long time”, the moment has come for him to “spill the beans”, according to publisher Ebury.

Grand: The Autobiography of Gromit will unveil his “never-before-told” life story, including such details as “what it’s like to wear Techno Trousers, his true feelings about gnomes, and what the moon tastes like”.

The book is scheduled to be published in October and will mark the first time audiences have heard from Gromit himself, who has no dialogue in the beloved Aardman animations.

“I’m very excited to announce that Wallace’s faithful, and rather more intelligent, pooch Gromit, has decided to break silence, put pen to paper, paw to keyboard and share with the world some of his innermost thoughts and feelings,” said creator Nick Park. “He tells of their life and loves, their affections and afflictions, their pet hates and fur-vent passions, and his book promises to be a deep dish of doggy nuggets and wisdom to chew on.”

The publisher’s author biography describes Gromit as a talented knitter, baker, and gardener. “He has twice received awards for his marrows in competition. Although he is well-read, this is his first book. He would like you to know that he is a good dog.”

In early May, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners for its influential Short Story Prize, which recognizes unpublished short fiction. One of the awardees, a Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir, was accused of A.I.-assisted cheating by a broad array of social-media users who seized upon his story’s synthetic tics, glitchy metaphors, and general unreadability. (“They called her Zoongie,” one passage from the story goes. “Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.”) In a statement, Razmi Farook, the director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, said that contestants had confirmed to the Foundation that they had not used A.I., and that the authors of the short-listed stories had made this attestation twice. The next day, on a call with the Times, Farook allowed that the moment had perhaps come to “look at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.”

Shortly after Nazir’s story, “The Serpent in the Grove,” appeared online, in the British magazine Granta, Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, ran it through the A.I.-detection platform Pangram, which flagged one hundred per cent of the text as likely to have been A.I.-generated. Two of the other winning entries, by the Maltese author John Edward DeMicoli and the Indian author Sharon Aruparayil, were similarly implicated. (Aruparayil denied using A.I. to write her story “Mehendi Nights,” calling the allegations “an entertaining witch-hunt.”) In an interview with the Observer responding to the scandal, Nazir said that his writing process consists largely of speech-to-text dictation on an Android phone. (He cited chronic-health conditions that make sustained typing impossible, and he’s published at least one poem about neuropathy to his Facebook page.) The publisher of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, put out a statement noting that the team had asked the A.I. program Claude about the provenance of “The Serpent in the Grove” but couldn’t say for sure whether “the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of A.I. plagiarism—we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”

Epistemically, there is something a bit wobbly about using chatbots to determine whether a piece of prose was written by chatbots. A Stanford study found, in 2023, that A.I.-detecting algorithms tend to be biased against non-native English speakers. Still, as Mollick put it on Bluesky, “Come on, if you know you know.” According to internet lore, A.I.-generated writing can be recognized by a handful of tells, memorably enumerated by Sam Kriss in the Times magazine in 2025. These include anaphora, when words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, and epistrophe, when words repeat at the end of successive clauses. Nazir’s piece features both. “No fan, no bulb, no hum,” one line begins. “Bush kept it, snakes liked it,” another starts. And: “Water took her and would not return her.”

Then there is zeugma, when a verb takes two objects, one literal and one figurative. Throughout the story, air is “sweet with cane and forgetting” and the mouth of a well is “boarded with ply and chance,” as if a magnet is pulling the sentence away from material reality. Finally, negative parallelism, the “not x but y” construction, which is much reviled by human L.L.M. detectors for its ubiquity in A.I.-generated prose, is all over “The Serpent in the Grove”: laughter is said to “cut a hush, not cure it,” and Nazir writes that “bush took him in—not like a mother, like a judge.” These rhetorical devices exploit our learned associations between certain types of repetition in prose and heightened meaning; they also create a pulse we feel in our bodies. If they recur in automated text, it’s because they recur in human writing, but in the fake stuff they’re decoupled from content.

There is a particular kind of British cruelty that thrives on politeness. The 2018 Windrush scandal exposed this in full: rather than chaos or spectacle, it revealed a machinery of clinical decisions that stripped Black and brown people of their belonging with bureaucratic precision. It is now part of our national story, often spoken of in the abstract or invoked as a cautionary tale. But what can be obscured, in this telling, is the texture of the harm, the way complicated lives were reduced to paperwork.

Smallie, Eden McKenzie-Goddard’s tender debut, insists on restoring the humanity of those Windrush-generation immigrants who were erased by official language. The story begins decades before, in 1961, when 19-year-old Lucinda Brown leaves Barbados for England, in search of Clarence Braithwaite, the jazz musician who fathered her child (who stays in the care of her family) and then disappeared into the promises of Britain. On the boat crossing she meets Raldo, a magnetic Trinidadian – “the type of man women slap each other to point out” – whose easy charm hints at a freer life.

When she arrives in London, though, rather than romance, she finds disillusionment. The England she has been promised is cold and indifferent – on her first day, she is beaten by the police, her body absorbing the force of a system she does not yet understand. She shares a cramped room in Hackney with three other recent Caribbean arrivals, and works long hours as a cleaner. The dream of Clarence, too, quickly calcifies into a jarring reality. Reshaped by the harsh reality of immigrant Britain, he is brittle, volatile and increasingly unfaithful. “This is not my Clarence,” Lucinda realises. “This is not the land I was promised.”

Running alongside is the present-day storyline, when Lucinda receives a terse letter from the Home Office informing her that she is an illegal immigrant, due for removal. “They have given me six weeks to prepare to leave a life of more than 50 years.” Her children – particularly Patrick, a recovering alcoholic barely holding himself together – must reconstruct her life in documented form, proving her right to remain by filling in the gaps of a past that was never recorded properly in the first place. Their search leads back to Raldo, the man who might hold the missing piece of evidence, and the ghost of an alternative life.

This dual structure allows McKenzie-Goddard to juxtapose the granular, intimate details of Lucinda’s life with the cold, abstract logic of the state. A woman who has spent decades working, raising children, building a home, can be reduced in an instant to an unwanted administrative error. “A grandmother. Seventy-five. A cage,” her son Mark says, referring to the removal van Lucinda is forced into. “Where is the justice?”

There are contemporary political echoes threaded throughout: one of Lucinda’s sons, Chris, is a Conservative MP with hardline views on immigration, a figure whose trajectory echoes several real-life politicians. McKenzie-Goddard pushes this to its logical, ironic extreme: what does it mean to participate in a system that could, quite literally, deport your own mother?

Later, a judge will describe Lucinda as having lived a life “so small she was invisible to records”. Lucinda did not change the world, or distinguish herself in ways that make for easy sympathy. She is not a model immigrant, nor always an especially “good” person. But Smallie insists that dignity should not depend on moral clarity or exceptional virtue.

Despite the heaviness of its subject matter, Smallie moves with a propulsive energy, structured around cliffhangers and withheld revelations. McKenzie-Goddard’s prose is lyrical without becoming overwrought, and strikingly assured for a debut. There are many moments of brilliance: on the night Lucinda goes dancing for the first time in Barbados, McKenzie-Goddard writes: “This is what freedom sounds like … the Bible got it wrong … at the end of days, when it is time to return to God, the angels will play the saxophone.” Much of the speech is rendered in Caribbean dialect, its cadences and prosody giving the novel a lived-in warmth. At just under 300 pages, Smallie is densely packed. Some relationships – Lucinda and Raldo, Patrick and his son, Jevan – feel slightly truncated, and could have benefited from a little more space. It does an enormous amount for a relatively slim novel, but at times one can’t help but wish it had allowed itself to do more.

As perhaps one of the first novels to grapple directly with the Windrush scandal, Smallie captures something that reportage alone cannot. In its mosaic of Caribbean immigrant life in London, it echoes the emotional reach of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, but reframed with the hindsight of just how fragile belonging is, and how easily it can be withdrawn. It feels like a novel that will come to sit among the defining literary accounts of this shameful period of British history.

The stories in Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell’s fourth collection are often devoted to family life, or a professional life in the arts: or both. They’re almost always about memory and how to manage it. They offer a certain continuity with her earlier collections, Multitudes, Intimacies and Openings, though it’s subtle and organic rather than directly narrative.

In All Grown Up, Luke returns to his childhood home, only to be steadily reabsorbed by it. He applies himself to clearing the house, putting it on the market; he thinks about all the possibilities he’ll have once he’s sold up. But the longer he stays the less impulse there is to leave, and the more he remembers, not just about his life here, but his life generally. Meanwhile he’s a 40-year-old divorcee with a bad back, incipient alcoholism and a child at boarding school, attempting to come to terms with divorce, the death of his mother and his sense of entrapment. A one-night stand with his ex-wife’s sister doesn’t help. As you read, that title cycles between bleak irony and an equally bleak optimism.

Hamlet, a Love Story is a title full of traps, too. In a New York dive bar after the run of a new play called Choose Your Own Hamlet is finished, Sonya the playwright somehow ends up with Callum, who isn’t even her type. She is willing to bet she isn’t his either. She has decided that the flaw in her play – in which Hamlet loops and replays the original text, desperately seeking “a way out of all that lies ahead” – is that Choose Your Own Ending texts don’t just encourage choice, they reward action. “Inaction was punished. Your only hope was to … seize the narrative.”

The Lady of the House seems like a classic ghost story, with a castle gatehouse, old books featuring “grey blooms of mould on the inner covers”, and a curse dating from 1660. Two sisters – one of them, the text will only ever address as “you”; the other is called “Lou” – seek commonalities when one visits the other’s partly renovated heritage home in Scotland. Ghosts of memory rise to match the ghost the unnamed sister encounters on her first night in the gatehouse guestroom. Lou, tired out and dully exasperated by childcare after seven years of IVF, miscarriages and financial hardships, admits that “the most random things have been surfacing lately – things you’d not even call proper memories … just stuff”. She’s not sure “what you’re supposed to do with it, with any of it”. The reader suspects she’ll manage it by moving resolutely forward. What the ghost wants is clearer, with some promise and more menace.

Caldwell’s characters display a quiet resilience. At the same time they are breakable. She depicts their lives at moments of spiritual and emotional loneliness, supported and simultaneously defeated by the anxious sense they have that life is important even when it can never be solved. Though overwhelmed by circumstance, they have the deeply bedded feeling that they are failing in a duty. In Little Lands the duty is to your own future: a shot-by-shot replay of the dance scene in The Sound of Music is paired with and critiqued by the real lives of Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews, who, we’re told, fell in love during the filming of the dance and regretted never doing anything about it. While for the professional violinist of Harmony Hill, travelling alone by air with an instrument “older than the United States of America”, duty is what she owes to her talent and – especially – her teachers: obsession as stewardship. Duty to locality, and to memory and origins, reach their climax in All Grown Up when Luke recognises that if he’s not careful – if he doesn’t choose his own ending – his future can only be the past.

These stories are full of transformational delight in life and the spirit one moment, emotional and psychological threat the next. They’re considered enough to be savoured, one at a time, with an attention that responds to the intention of the author. We are each of us God, the harried, devoted mother of A Family Christmas thinks, “right out on the cutting edge, the universe seeking to know itself. We are an aperture, a point of light, through and by which things can be known.” Caldwell is surely speaking of the devotions of the writer here, of herself, and, especially, these kinds of stories.

One of the most attractive features of Devotions is its realism, explicit in the panoramic lists of objects in a scene, the sharpness of Caldwell’s eye, her capture of the moment. She talks of sleeping in “the taut stretched acres of an American hotel double, with rolling news on low for company”, and you’re instantly there. “A few scraps of sky,” she tells us elsewhere, “sheared themselves off and fell as snowflakes.” The tiny events like this, the places, the people, the relations between them, the things they say and the way they say them, all seem utterly observed. There isn’t another way to put it. It’s stimulating, frightening, quietly passionate and somehow comforting too. Never wrenched or overwrought, always an oblique yet perfectly human mix. If you want a window to look at the world through, it’s here.

M John Harrison’s The End of Everything is published by Serpent’s Tail in June. Devotions by Lucy Caldwell is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The title of Colm Tóibín’s new story collection seems to promise, at first glance, a return to familiar territory: a tour, perhaps, of old stomping grounds; a reconnection with earlier work. But as the pages turn, that suggestion of affinity is revealed to be a subtle bait and switch. The stories in this collection, it turns out, have to do with displacement, not familiarity; their news is not from Dublin, but from the places where Dublin’s news might land. They interrogate what it means, and how it feels, to live at one remove: from home, from loved ones, from the past.

That sense of dislocation is established in the opening story, The Journey to Galway, set during the first world war, in which once again the interaction between title and content proves delicately wrongfooting. This “journey”, we discover, is not about attaining a longed-for destination, nor even really about forward motion; rather, it’s a moment of suspension, between one reality and the next. An unnamed woman remembers the morning on which she received a telegram telling her that her son, a pilot in the British airforce, had been killed in action over Italy. On hearing the news, she knows she must take the train to Galway, to inform her son’s wife, Margaret. “In Margaret’s mind,” the woman realises, as she stares out of the train window, “Robert was still alive. Maybe that meant something; it gave Robert some strange extra time …” And it is this liminal time, untethered and provisional, that is the “journey” of the title – a Schrödinger’s-cat caesura, in which the terrible event both has and hasn’t taken place. “Until she appeared in the doorway of that house, there would not be death,” the woman thinks. “But once she appeared, death would live in that house.”

If this seems an oddly abstract reflection for a newly bereaved mother, that’s no accident: abstraction is the essential quality of Tóibín’s collection. Again and again, he takes devastating raw materials – a father on the cusp of indefinite separation from his daughter; a man struggling to save a brother who is slowly dying – and presents them lightly, obliquely, allowing his readers to absorb the breadth of their implications before becoming overwhelmed. Grief, betrayal and moral complication are rendered in calm, frictionless paragraphs; Tóibín lulls the reader into a kind of complicit attentiveness, so that the full force of what has happened only lands after the sentence, or the story, has finished. In place, time, and perspective, the collection jumps about wildly – the action moves from Spain to San Francisco, to Enniscorthy in County Wexford, to Argentina; from male to female and from first person to third; from the early 20th century to the 50s to the present day. But the lambent prose, the tone of cool reflection: these are what bind these stories, transforming them from separate moments into a coherent whole.

Those qualities are front and centre in the collection’s final two stories, A Free Man and The Catalan Girls. Here, Tóibín takes off the brakes, allowing them to swell and expand so that, collectively, they’re longer than the rest of the stories put together. The Catalan Girls, which is closer in length to a novella, tells the tale of three sisters, uprooted from Catalonia to Argentina in their early teens. Patiently, probingly, Tóibín considers the different ways in which they adopt and adapt to their new home, and the range of their responses when, half a century later, they discover that an aunt whom they haven’t seen since childhood has left them her house in Catalonia in her will. The story’s length permits nuances of allegiance, language and loss to emerge, so that when the final, quiet conclusion is reached, it lands like a blow.

But it is A Free Man that is the collection’s standout piece. If there’s a flaw in the other stories, it’s that the sense of abstraction can tip over into a lack of feeling; the characters at times read as dispassionate observers of their lives and circumstances, rather than flesh-and-blood participants. But in A Free Man, the question of the extent to which our passions define us is the point. The story follows the path of Joe, a man in late middle age, newly released from prison in Ireland and disowned by his family. The nature of Joe’s crimes, and the breadth of his guilt, are unveiled slowly, alongside other details from his life that may – or may not – contextualise them. These gradual revelations are interspersed with cheerless scenes from his current existence: a bruising encounter with a banking clerk; a stuffy hotel room, where he “woke and slept and woke again” and arose feeling “drained” and “desperate”. As past and present unfold in tandem, our empathy builds even as our unease mounts – and Tóibín’s decision to leave us poised between the two, without resolution, sits as a comment on the ambiguity at the heart of the tale. In A Free Man, form and content come together to enhance one another, and the result is a story of profound, disquieting power.

The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Kiran Desai

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

When we emptied my father’s flat after his death, a crowd descended. They rushed away the cupboards and chairs, his shirts and socks. Ragpickers took the rusted appliances. A young woman, the guitar. I remember my father practising Greensleeves over and over. Or did I make that up? It was raining, but my eyes stayed dry. No time for tears – that’s how fast an empire is dismantled. Another landscape gone.

I was already writing about loneliness, about Sonia and Sunny, who meet on the night train to their respective grandparents’ homes, journeying into their past – the past being a kind of home to us all. I was already sensing the restorative depth of their bond, as well as its fragility.

Sonia and Sunny’s relationship unfolds over years and continents – across the United States, Italy, Mexico, India. As they meet and part, negotiating a world without a centre, I wrote about the rifts between nations, between races, genders, religions, all as a kind of loneliness. I wrote about the spaces where news stories disconcertingly changed form, where people made unknowable creatures of themselves. And about shadowlands occupied by phantoms and nightmares that anticipated that a dark undercurrent of history might at any moment explode into renewed violence. I wrote about longing for the vanishing natural world, the magical creatures that forests and oceans once concealed. But I was also interested in loneliness shifting shape into a quiet that is peace after the war is over. A sought-out solitude during a time of transformation. An exquisite artistic loneliness. A discovery of the dignity and privacy of one’s individual being.

Everything I experienced during the years of writing was swept into the river of this book – diaries, newspaper articles – and, at one point, my book lay in pieces and I struggled to hold it together. Wherever I went, my ungainly tome came along, weighing down my luggage. I lugged it in market bags, to be mailed from various locations to my home in New York City, which was filling up with paper.

Then a wondrous coincidence happened (in my experience life always gives you what you need to write your book). The Italian artist, Francesco Clemente, who has worked in India for decades, asked me to write an introduction to an exhibition of his paintings, a meditative and mystical series that powerfully conjured India. His watercolours were in constant flux, suspended between wakefulness and dream. As a gift, he sent me one of his paintings, a demon god without a face. It might have come out of a primeval forest. In this faceless, eyeless deity that I kept beside my writing table, I found the visual symbol I needed to unite the many stories, to think of them in terms of who is in whose purview, who is captured and controlled by whose gaze – when it comes to the power divides I mentioned, when it comes to journalism, when it comes to art, when it comes to love. The unseen world, the shadow world, together with the plot of Sonia and Sunny’s long unresolved romance, together became The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

Ben Markovits

The Rest of Our Lives

It started with the opening lines, about a man whose wife had an affair when the kids were small. I was working on something else at the time, but I wrote the first few pages one afternoon and then put them aside. Maybe a year later, I had another look. My own kids were getting older and I wanted to write about a certain period of family life coming to an end. Those opening pages seemed like a way in: a guy drops his daughter at university and instead of going home afterward, keeps driving.

There were other things about the idea that interested me. The fact that it wasn’t the man who had the affair; also, his feeling that, I haven’t done anything wrong, and yet here I am. The last sentence I’d written said something like: even when things smoothed over, the best I could claim was a C- marriage, which makes it hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life. This seems reasonable enough but also clearly the wrong way of thinking about it, and I thought that tension might make a good basis for a novel.

Meanwhile, odd medical stuff had started happening to me: sudden exhaustion while jogging, random head rushes, a swollen face in the morning. My GP couldn’t find anything, but I put these symptoms in the book as another symbol of middle age, the gradual decline that you can’t quite understand. By the time I finished the first draft, both Tom, my narrator, and I knew what we had, and I was going through chemo. Obviously this shaped the book – not just the plot but how I felt about the story. My original idea was to leave Tom completely abandoned at the end, but the more I wrote, and the sicker I got, the less that made sense. Being sick focuses a lot of attention on you; it also changes how people feel about you, if only temporarily.

One of the problems of road trip novels is that your hero is usually running away from the source of the story: in this case, an unhappy marriage. But it occurred to me that I often find it easier to talk to other people in my head when they’re not around – you keep the conversation going, sometimes more honestly and lovingly than you can in their presence. In other words, even though Tom was driving away from his wife, this could still be a novel about reconciling themselves, if not to each other then to the next stage of their lives, which in one way or another they both have to face.

Susan Choi

Flashlight

I recently saw Eleanor Catton ask Sarah Moss, of her latest work: “What is the earliest ancestor of this book?” I thought this was such a great question because it gets at how the genesis of a book can sometimes take place long before any actual writing, or even recognition that there might one day be writing, takes place. The earliest, prehistoric, fish-that-still-hasn’t-grown-legs ancestor of this book is a childhood trip I took to Japan with my parents in the late 1970s. I had never been out of the US, and Japan at that time was hardly westernised as it is now, so the culture shock was profound. I never forgot that trip, and a long time later when I’d started writing I wished I could write about it, but although the trip had been life-changing for me, nothing had happened that would seize the interest of a reader.

Jump forward two decades, and I’m leaning against the kitchen counter in my first New York City apartment, reading my housemate’s New York Times. “Defector’s tale reminds Japan of a lost girl” catches my eye. I still haven’t published my first book, let alone learned any writerly habits such as paying attention to possible ideas or even making note of them. The article kept my attention from start to finish. It was about a Japanese schoolgirl who had vanished into thin air while walking home from badminton practice. Her disappearance had taken place the year before my family’s time in Japan, and she’d been just a handful of years older than me. These weren’t particularly remarkable coincidences, but they kept her in my mind.

Jump forward another two decades plus, and I’m sitting on my back deck gazing into the unusually clear spring sky, reading Dickens, which seems very fitting somehow for the terrifying pandemic that has upended life around the globe, and trying to work out whether my idea – to write about that dreamily recalled Japan of my childhood, but from the point of view of a very different child, one subjected to catastrophe – could possibly work. Whether out of perversity or as a sort of warding-off of misfortune, I often find myself imagining something familiar – like my own childhood journey – fed through a fantasy machine of worst-case scenarios, so that the old familiar material comes out the other side warped beyond recognition. Could I hurl thunderbolts of the extraordinary on to a childhood landscape of the ordinary? The actual thunderbolt I was considering seemed almost too thunderous for fiction, and I got stuck again. “This is too outlandish,” I discouraged myself. I decided to cheat, and write about my young protagonist post-thunderbolt, without owning up to what the thunderbolt had been. (This is a great hack for when you’re stuck while writing fiction: skip ahead.) The resulting short story, Flashlight, came out in late 2020. After that, I was committed – I really had no choice but to go through with the thunderbolt, the result being Flashlight the book.

Andrew Miller

The Land in Winter

The origins of a novel are quickly covered over. Rule of thumb says it started months or even years before you think it did. The new idea, prodded, looks a lot like an older idea you liked but didn’t know what to do with. Perhaps it was weather that came first, something visual, a landscape blurred by snowfall. Then, around that image, or rising out of it, a time and place: 1962, a village outside Bristol, the village never named but reconstructed from my memories of where I spent the first years of my life. And somewhere inside this welling up of images and possibilities, inhabiting them as a kind of armature, an anecdote of my mother’s, a very bare story about the day she and my doctor father ran across the field to an emergency at the farmhouse on the other side.

Pretty much from the off, I had a good feeling about the book, about the writing. The previous novel had been an anxious struggle. Now, with The Land in Winter, I felt suddenly liberated. I didn’t worry much about themes. As long as there was a good forward energy, I was happy just to follow it. One of my guiding intentions – a central one – was to let my four main characters have the freedom to see out their parts in whatever way was right for them. No one was going to be shoved around by plot. As ever, there were moments of doubt – a book without a crisis is one I’d start to worry about – but the writing was often joyful and there are no bite marks in the manuscript (there are in some).

In the summer of 2023 I sent it off. I thought I was finished, more or less, but my editor, with a cooler eye, could see there was still much to be done. Things I’d believed were present in the manuscript had not been visible to him at all. So began a year of intensive rewrites. Not to tidy up – I wanted the book to keep a certain wildness, even a certain oddness – but to make it a little more shapely, and perhaps just to understand it better, its preoccupation with how big our lives might be, and what a bigger life might mean, the consequences of that. Handing it over a second time, I had the snow-blindness most writers experience at the end of a long project. It’s hard to know any more what you’ve made. The affirmations of this spring and summer have been deeply reassuring because they tell me that what I felt about the work – that freedom and that joy – was not delusional. You cannot write if you do not trust your intuition.

Katie Kitamura

Audition

Audition has a simple premise. The narrator is an actress in rehearsal for a difficult new play. She is successful, happily married, and settled in her life. Then, a young man approaches her and tells her that he believes he is her son. From that point, two narratives unfurl – two versions of events, two distinct realities. In one, the young man is a stranger. In the other, he is in fact her son.

I can pinpoint the origins of the novel quite precisely. Some years ago, I came upon a headline, reading: “A stranger told me he was my son.” I immediately knew this was material I wanted to work with in some way. I was careful not to click on the link and read the article, in part because I wanted to sit with the strangeness of the headline. On the one hand, I was fascinated by the idea that a single encounter could change everything you understand about yourself and your place in the world.

But I was also interested in the illogical nature of the headline. The two terms, “a stranger” and “my son”, seemed diametrically opposed, even mutually exclusive. I didn’t want the mystery of that opposition to be resolved. The article would, I felt sure, contain a perfectly plausible explanation for the mysterious headline. Perhaps the author of the article had placed a child into adoption. Or perhaps the stranger in question had a mental health disorder.

Neither of those options felt particularly satisfying to me as a novelist. In them, all the wonderful mystery of the headline seemed to drain away. Some time later, I went for a walk with a friend and I told her about the headline – about how beguiling I found it, and how I wasn’t entirely sure how to enter into the world that I could sense hovering just behind the headline. She asked me to repeat the sentence, and then she said: “But that’s just parenting. Every time my son comes home from college, it’s like a stranger has walked into the apartment.”

After that conversation with my friend, I had a sense of what I wanted to try to do in the novel. I wanted to write about how many universal experiences – of love, of motherhood – can feel like two mutually exclusive things at the time. I never clicked on that headline, but now I wonder if the story behind it was not a story about adoption, or about delusion, or about a hoax of some kind – all ideas that I had pondered and played around with. I wonder if instead it told a very human and very simple story about the long process through which a child must necessarily grow up to become a stranger to their own parents – about both the satisfactions and the devastations of that experience.

David Szalay

Flesh

Flesh was conceived in the shadow of failure. In the autumn of 2020 I abandoned a novel I had been working on for nearly four years. This was obviously not an easy decision. It represented the writing-off of a huge investment of time, hope, energy and emotion. A lot of work had been done. I had written over 100,000 words. But by that autumn I had long had the sense that the thing wasn’t working. The struggle to make it work was becoming anguished. It was with a feeling of exhausted relief, more than anything else, that I finally just binned it, resolving to have a good night’s sleep, and start again the next morning with a blank sheet of paper, or at least a new Word document.

At that point I was about a year away from the date by which my publishers and I had agreed that I would deliver a new book. I had, in other words, one year or slightly less in which to write a novel from scratch. The pressure of that did get to me. After a few weeks of staring at a blank screen, at a blinking cursor, it was obvious that I would need to ask for more time, and I did.

It wasn’t a problem.

Still, I was dogged by self-doubt. Dogged by the feeling that while it might be sort of OK to abandon one half-finished novel, it would be disastrous – for me, psychologically – to abandon two in succession. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was becoming depressed. The greatest difficulty, in a way, was just deciding what to write about. What specific story to tell. Where to start. In a way, I wished that someone would tell me what to do, what to write about. There was no one to do that, though. I was on my own, in what felt quite a lot like an anxiety dream.

I made myself start with a few simple ideas. (One of the main problems with my previous effort was that it had been too intricate, too fiddly.) I decided that I would write something that was partly English and partly Hungarian. And that the story would somehow express the feeling I had that our existence is a physical experience before it is anything else, that all of its other aspects proceed from that physicality, and of course finally return to it too when we ourselves return to being what Auden memorably called “irresponsible matter”.

Those two ideas, if they can even be called that, were the fixed points with which I started the new work. They were the seed from which it grew.

Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
I read this years ago and it’s a story that’s truly haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons from New York, who rent the same off-grid country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What do the locals know? Every time I read Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.
Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman
In this short story a couple travel to an ordinary seaside town where bells ring the whole time, a constant chiming that is annoying and inexplicable. The first very scary scene happens at night, when they decide to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and salt, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and worse. It’s just insanely sinister and every time I go to a beach at night I think about this story that ruined the sea at night for me – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, he’s not – go back to the hotel and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving meditation on desire and decay, two bodies aging together as a couple, the attachment and violence and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but probably one of the best short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in Argentina in 2011, La aparición, edited by Matías Serra Bradford and translated by Agustín Pico Estrada and Laura Wittner.
Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell, is published by Granta.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
I read Zombie by a pool in France in 2020. Despite the sunshine I felt cold creep through me. I also felt the electricity of excitement. I was writing my third novel, The Last House on Needless Street, and I had hit a wall. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave who would never leave him and made many grisly attempts to do so.

The acts the novel describes are horrific, but equally frightening is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s terrible, fragmented world is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is sunk deep, trapped in his consciousness, forced to witness thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his mind is like a physical shock – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into Zombie is less like reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward will be published by Viper in February 2026.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
When I was a child, I sleepwalked and later started having night terrors. Once, the terror involved a dream in which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I found that I had torn off the slat from the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the story of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I was. It is a novel about a haunted, noisy, emotional house and a girl who eats chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book so much and returned again and again to it, always finding something new.
The Hotel by Daisy Johnson is published by Vintage.

Ned Beauman

Incarnations of Burned Children by David Foster Wallace
If you were ever swapping scary stories around a campfire, and everyone else was talking about ghosts and ghouls and hitchers with hooks for hands, but when your turn came you adjusted your spectacles and said, “Actually, I think nothing is scarier than the thought of a parent accidentally harming their child” – well, you probably wouldn’t get invited camping again. Which is why I was reluctant to select this David Foster Wallace story about a baby getting burned by boiling water. It is not appropriate for Halloween; it will not give you anything resembling a delicious shiver down your spine. But the fact is, no other piece of fiction I have ever read, supernatural or otherwise, has haunted me like this one has, so it would be dishonest to pick anything else.

And that’s despite my not being a parent – which, indeed, Wallace wasn’t, either. So, who knows, maybe this is just a bachelor’s idea of what hurting your child might be like, particularly since it first appeared in Esquire magazine, between an ad for hair-loss cream and another for Marlboro Lights. But for me, this story isn’t only about parenting, it’s about the possibility that out of sheer random chance you might become culpable for something that ruins someone else’s life as well as your own. In that sense, it may not look like horror fiction but it certainly functions as horror fiction.

Also, Wallace was a Stephen King fan and put his novels on the syllabus when he taught college English, so as you read this scene of a mother and father tending helplessly to their maimed little son, it’s reasonable to wonder if Wallace had Pet Sematary at the back of his mind.
The Captive by Ned Beauman, writing as Kit Burgoyne, is published by Titan.

Stephen Graham Jones

The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum
Humans are the worst monsters. You never know what’s going on in your neighbour’s basement. But sometimes you do, and sometimes you’re part of it … It’s summer for some kids in 1950s suburban America, but instead of having a mystery to solve, a monster to put down, they have to face the darkness in themselves, and then live with that new awareness.

You come out the other side of reading this book a different person, never mind if you liked it or not. This isn’t a novel you’re really supposed to like, yet it has a moral centre all the same. The question is: do you think that way too? Even for a glimmer of a moment, do you identify with someone here? The best art is dangerous and doesn’t flinch. This is that.
The Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is published by Titan.

Hollie Starling

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
A century after humanity’s extermination, five people remain on Earth, kept alive and tortured for the sadistic pleasure of an omniscient supercomputer. Don’t be put off if you’re not a sci-fi reader; neither am I. Let me put you off another way. I first read the story in the waiting room at Doncaster station where my train home from university was often cancelled, meaning the two purgatories are sensorily wedded, like a madeleine made of melted eyeballs. I felt my tender brain plasticise around Ellison’s descriptions, sick and gleeful at being made to actually consider “the smell of sulphur, of rancid butter … of human scalps”. I hated it then for what I couldn’t un-know. I hate it now because Ellison wrote it in one sitting without edits. His exquisite vision of synthetic hell is a first draft.

Reading it back, I find the camp excess very funny, but the famously nihilist ending is still the most frightening thing I’ve known. The horror of forces beyond our control – whether savage god, hostile landscape or distorted ideology – jangle my nerves more than any flimsy old ghost and was chief in my mind while putting together Bog People, a new collection of folk horror. My own contribution, Yellowbelly, also intersects with tech incrementalism but – I have no trouble admitting – pulls back from the brink. More dark parable, less dark night of the soul. A rail replacement bus to Scunthorpe is horror enough.
Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror, edited by Hollie Starling, is published by Chatto & Windus.

Eric LaRocca

The Auctioneer by Joan Samson
Samson wrote only one novel in her lifetime. In a sharp, corrosive story that predates Stephen King’s masterpiece Needful Things or Shirley Jackson’s seminal The Lottery, The Auctioneer is a chilling descent into the hell of small-town madness as a result of greed and paranoia.

Set against the bucolic backdrop of a small community in the hills of New Hampshire, the story centres on a charismatic figure named Perly Dunsmore who arrives in the town of Harlowe and charms the unsuspecting townspeople into donating personal items for a community auction. As his grip on the community intensifies, Perly’s demands of the residents become more and more disconcerting. It is a wonderfully chilling meditation on the erosion of a close-knit community by an outsider with malevolent intentions.

I think what continues to disturb me about this novel is how so much of the horror is grounded in reality. There are no obvious supernatural elements at play. Instead, it’s centred around human cruelty and suffering.
We Are Always Tender With Our Dead by Eric LaRocca is published by Titan.

Intan Paramaditha

Urban legend
When I was a child in Indonesia, I heard an urban legend that terrified me: if you didn’t rinse and properly wrap your menstrual pad, a ghost would come for you. The story went that a girl once left her pad unwashed in a toilet. When she returned to fetch a forgotten ring, she found the door ajar. Inside squatted a woman with long black hair, her back to her. Slowly, she turned. A pale face, lips slick red – and in her hands, the girl’s unwashed pad. The ghost licked it clean.

That vision haunted me, but years later I understood it was more than a ghost story. It was also a lesson in shame, a way of disciplining girls’ bodies, teaching us that blood was dirty, dangerous, in need of secrecy.

It inspired me to write Blood, published in my collection Apple and Knife. In the story, the narrator must confront the same cautionary tale told by her Qur’an teacher. As an adult copywriter in Jakarta, she is tasked with selling sanitary pads by casting menstruation as monstrous. Memories of becoming a woman and the relentless policing of her body collide with a vision of the ghost who appears in the office toilet, licking menstrual blood.

Horror, for me, exposes how society treats women’s bodies as abject, shameful. Writing Blood was a way of reclaiming what had once made me afraid. The ghost still lingers, but now she walks beside me, her mouth red, her hunger reminding me of demonised, unruly, disobedient women.
Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J Epstein, is published by Vintage Classics.

Paul Tremblay

Tiptoe by Laird Barron

Randall Vance is a photographer who grew up in the 1960s, the youngest of two children in an upper-middle class family. His enigmatic father, an engineer for IBM, liked to play a game called “tiptoe”. He would sneak up on his sons and pinch them. Sounds harmless enough, right? But his father never lost, never got caught, and the game represented his rather Darwinian philosophy that hinted at a secret ocean of menace. Maybe.

First appearing in the Shirley Jackson tribute anthology When Things Get Dark, Tiptoe works, on one level, as a clever homage tinged with the wicked wit and everyday weirdness of a Jackson tale. There’s fraught family dynamics that are quaint and deeply dysfunctional. There’s class anxiety mixed within the ugly spectre of American history. There’s even an eccentric aunt who makes believable claims to being psychic. While there is nothing expressly supernatural in the story and no scenes of explicit violence on the page, I’ve never had a story get under my skin in the way Tiptoe does. It picks at one of our oldest, hardwired fears, that of being the unwitting prey to a predator that we are not equipped to avoid.

Barron got my nervous leg twitching on the second page with “What I do know, is he was the kind of guy nobody saw coming.” It’s a chilling tone-setter to a story that becomes more ominous with every page. That line and all the unspoken hints and secrets are there, queuing up behind you, somewhere over your shoulder, there to see plainly if you only dare look. And in the last two breathtaking pages, Laird makes you look.
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay is published by Titan.

CJ Tudor

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
I spent most of my childhood being scared. I was scared of the dark, monsters, ghosts. I was scared of the derelict playground up the street, the house opposite where someone killed themselves. The list was long, random and inexhaustible.

Despite this, I was also attracted to creepy stuff. I would watch horror films at my friend Kirsty’s house and read any scary books I could get my hands on.

When I was trying to think of a book that scared me, I considered Stephen King – The Shining and Pet Sematary. But then I realised that those were books that had scared me as a kid. They didn’t hit so hard as an adult. Because your fears change.

That’s what brought me to Doctor Sleep. The sequel to The Shining was published in 2013, the same year I had my daughter. And as a parent your greatest fear is something happening to your child.

In Doctor Sleep the monsters of the book are the True Knot, a quasi-immortal group that hunts and kills children with the “shining”. Psychic vampires, they feed on the life force of their young victims. One of those victims is a young boy called Bradley Trevor who is abducted by the True Knot.

King never describes in detail what they do to Bradley, but one line always haunted me: “The boy lasted a long time. He screamed until his vocal cords ruptured and his cries became husky barks.”

I thought about that. A lot. My mind kept going back to it. Gnawing over it.
The Gathering by CJ Tudor is published by Penguin.

Alma Katsu

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
This is hands down the most realistic dystopian novel ever written. The unrelenting despair and undeniable reality of the world Cormac McCarthy has depicted will drive an icy spike of terror into your heart with every page. This will be us, your inner voice tells you, if the world doesn’t change.

Adding to the verisimilitude, I was on a road trip with my husband when we listened to the audiobook. I’d had a rough idea of what the novel was about but not the specifics. With every mile, as the story got bleaker, I waited for my husband to tell me “enough”. He’s not much for fiction, let alone anything as dark as this, but we listened to every word.

McCarthy does not tell us why civilisation ended, though – because the main characters are heading south to escape the killing winters, it’s been attributed to climate change. Does it really matter? A clever touch of the author’s is that the only characters you encounter are “have-nots”. There might be “haves” hunkered down on private islands stocked for survival, a truth for the modern day, but we don’t see them. The author knew, I think, that when the world has been laid to waste, through either stupidity or malice, you will only be a “have” for a matter of time. Time runs out for everyone, too late to see that we’re all in this together.
Fiend by Alma Katsu is published by Titan.