The Nobel-winning US economist’s championing of government intervention to nullify neoliberal excesses is ardently expressed but unconvincingIn 2009, the American government loaned almost half a billion dollars to Elon Musk’s Tesla corporation to hasten the development of electric car technology. What did it think it was playing at? Didn’t it remember...

A young female playwright publicly lampoons her novelist father in this astute tale of family differencesAmong an author’s most dreaded readers, their parents rank perhaps most highly. Megan Nolan once stated that her main fear is not “scornful strangers” but “subjecting” her parents to her fiction; while RO Kwon insists she would keep her books away...

The author’s accomplished debut boasts beautifully nuanced characterisation in its compassionate study of small-town lifeAlan Murrin’s assured debut is about the claustrophobia and cruelties of small town life. Set in County Donegal in 1994, when divorce was still illegal in Ireland, The Coast Road focuses on three women trapped by marriage.Colette...

The artist and filmmaker has always enjoyed challenging convention. Now she has written a novel which takes a breathtaking look at menopause, sex, death and transformationMiranda July has rented a little house in LA for 20 years. Every morning she’d drive over from the home she shared with her husband and young child, work on her films and art and writing...

To mark the centenary of Kafka’s death next month, three compelling books – including his unedited diaries – reveal the complexity of the author’s works and why ‘Kafkaesque’ is so reductiveThere is a scene in the American version of the sitcom The Office, one that achieves the buttock-clenching awkwardness of the original series, in which the protagonist,...

The novelist and memoirist on stamina and solitude, the influence of surrealist art on her work, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s revelatory travel writingDeborah Levy’s books include three memoirs and eight novels, half of them published between 1989 and 1999, the other half since 2011, when her Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home came out with a small startup...