Books

‘I’m so vegetarian, even as a novelist’

The writer on sacrificial lambs, her new retelling of Medea, and the importance of reading aloud

Ágota Kristóf’s language of loss

After fleeing Soviet oppression, the Hungarian writer’s stories would be plagued by dislocation and longing

The long shadow of the Marques disaster

More than 40 years after catastrophe struck the Tall Ships Race, the mother of one of the lost crew is still looking for answers

Simon Armitage makes peace with the dead

In New Cemetery, the poet laureate draws on the wonder of moths and the death of his father to produce a haunting sequence of poems

The lies that fathers tell

The late poet and novelist John Burnside was the son of a serial fantasist. His haunting memoir A Lie About My Father captures a legacy of abandonment and addiction

Asa Briggs: a victim of his own ambition

The historian helped transform educational reform and academia in the 60s and 70s – but Adam Sisman’s biography shows the cost of his obsessive ambition

Travels through the ghost towns of Patagonia

María Sonia Cristoff’s False Calm captures the deprivation and resilience of those living in Argentina’s most remote and romanticised region

Fires Which Burned Brightly, Boudicca’s Daughter and more

New books by Sebastian Faulks, Elodie Harper and Andrew Miller reviewed

Stephen King and Maurice Sendak’s Hansel and Gretel is a horror for all ages

Masters of their craft past and present collaborate on a nightmarish version of the classic fairytale

Maria Reva: ‘People are surprised my novel is funny’

The Booker-longlisted Ukrainian-Canadian author of Endling on Russians invading her country and the intricacies of snail sex

HS2 and the blight at the end of the tunnel

Hampered by delays and cancellations, confidence in the high-speed rail line couldn’t be lower, according to Sally Gimson’s book

Love, war and life on the edge of history

Lea Ypi's Indignity mixes biography and fiction to explore the life of her grandmother under Albania's Stalinist regime

Books in brief: A Life and a Half, Ruth and The Course of the Heart

New books by Chris Bryant and Kate Riley, plus a cult classic by M John Harrison reviewed

Marcia Hutchinson’s small acts of mercy

This daring debut is a sobering but sweet tale of a girl growing up in 1960s Bradford with her Jamaican family

Picture books of the month: a really wild show

Michael Rosen reunites with Bear Hunt’s Helen Oxenbury for more animal shenanigans, while elsewhere a buffalo gets a watering

The currency of trauma

Darren McGarvey became the poster boy for Scotland's social ills, but revealing his pain has proved less than cathartic

Sarah Hall’s elemental fiction

The author breezes through the eras in her tales of Cumbria’s Cross Fell, where the Helm wind blows

RF Kuang: ‘I won’t be writing a novel like Yellowface again’

The Chinese-American author on the terror of Trump, why no party is complete without a whiteboard and how the hell of academia inspired her new book