Monthly Spotlight

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991, the third novel in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy follows two old friends working in a fast-food van against the backdrop of the 1990 football World Cup

Barbara Pym’s compassionate and funny novel follows four people in late middle-age with different eccentricities but the same problem: loneliness

Full of backstage scandal and romantic intrigue, this darkly comic novel is about class, the long shadow of war, and unrequited first love

Four men reflect on their pasts as they say a final goodbye to their close friend

Five years after At Night All Blood is Black was awarded the International Booker Prize, David Diop reflects on the intentions behind his novel, and the impact winning has had on his career

The author of My Name is Lucy Barton reflects on where the character of Lucy came from, the importance of surprise, and why the novel is, in many ways, a mother-daughter love story

Set in an unnamed city where it’s dangerous to be interesting, Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel is rife with gossip and hearsay

The author of The Fishermen – shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015 – on his inspirations and influences, his strong bond with the characters he creates, and how being a Booker judge made him a faster reader

The author of The Riders on creating characters who feel like family, the force of weather and geography in fiction, and how being a parent has shaped him as a writer

The Little Eyes author discusses our complicated relationship with technology, and reveals that an affectionate robot vacuum cleaner helped inspire the novel

Five years after winning the Booker for Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart reflects on the pressures of being a prize winner, the queer canon, the politics of dialect, and how the arts have become less accessible for working-class people

Powerful blend of science fiction, absurdism and alternative-historical realism that aims to destabilise the heteronormative world and expose its underlying rot

Whether you’re new to Hot Milk or have read it and would like to explore it more deeply, here is our comprehensive guide, featuring insights from critics, our judges and the book’s author, as well as discussion points and suggestions for further reading.

Richard Powers’ radical and remarkable novel. Nine strangers are each summoned in different ways by the natural world to save it from catastrophe

In Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopian classic, nothing happens ‘that hasn’t already happened at some time or another’

The author of A Brief History of Seven Killings on the madness that followed his Booker win, what Jamaicans thought of his victory, and how hard it is to begin a new book

Twenty years after winning the Booker, the author reflects on his outsider victory with The Sea, his enduring admiration for Georges Simenon, and the inevitability of failure in the pursuit of art 

Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, shares her admiration for Anne Tyler’s 2015 novel, where the ordinary becomes universal and the mundane is transformed with razor-sharp insight

Claire Keegan discusses the short story that inspired Small Things Like These, the role of restraint in her writing, and why love is at the core of her novel

Against the backdrop of the tumultuous political environment of 1980s Italy, Elena Ferrante delivers a searingly honest chronicle of a lifelong female friendship

The author of The Little Stranger, our Monthly Spotlight title for October, talks about using ghosts to embody middle-class fears, and the writers who showed her that queer fiction could be clever and ambitious

The Nobel Prize-winning and International Booker Prize-shortlisted author reflects on his writing process, how music influences his prose, and reveals the philosophical works that shaped his thinking

Ten years since he won the Booker, the author reflects on the responsibility he felt when writing The Narrow Road to the Deep North, growing up in a house with almost no books – and his love of translated fiction 

The author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, our Monthly Spotlight title for July, talks about the authors who have inspired her, making the invisible visible, and her ‘slightly insane’ writing routine

To mark the 20th anniversary, the author reflects on the transformative impact of his Booker triumph with The Line of Beauty – a novel that propelled LGBTQIA+ narratives into the literary mainstream 

Whether you’re new to Time’s Arrow or have read it and would like to explore it more deeply, our comprehensive guide includes critical analysis, author quotes and discussion points

The author of Washington Black talks to us about the tireless research she conducted for the novel, her passion for the classics – and why she’ll always return to The Catcher in the Rye 

From unreliable narrators and heartbreaking revelations to ‘the perfect novel’, here is our guide to the 1989 Booker Prize winner’s finest fiction 

Whether you’re new to Normal People or have read it and would like to explore it more deeply, here is our comprehensive guide

In this personal essay, Michèle Roberts pays tribute to the late A.S. Byatt and praises her 1990 Booker-winning novel

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, Any Human Heart tells the extraordinary story of a life lived to the fullest.

The authors at the centre of Iris Murdoch’s best novel embody the tortured philosopher in search of perfection and the prolific, publicly celebrated novelist  

The translator of our October Book of the Month talks about the impact of being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, the Japanese fiction boom – and why this 20th-century novel speaks to 21st-century readers

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, His Bloody Project reveals the provisional nature of truth through a fictional 19th-century triple murder in a remote Scottish crofting community

Muriel Spark was a writer of astonishing productivity, writing 22 titles which were varied in subject matter. So which one should you read first?

Max Porter explains the process behind the publication of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, and why it was essential that it reached new readers
 

Andrea Levy, the author of The Long Song, died in 2019. Here we reproduce some of her comments on the book, including how and why she wrote it

Doris Lessing’s caustic satire, The Good Terrorist still reads as a bracing antidote to political righteousnes. Here, John Mullen discussed the novel’s impact.

In this archive video, the author of Beyond Black explains how writing the book laid the groundwork for her Tudor novels – and how she might have ended up working as a professional psychic

In this guest post, singer-songwriter Dua Lipa explains why Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life does exactly what great literature is supposed to do