When Kaya Wilson, a writer and scientist, transitioned to male, he suddenly realised he could own the streets. In his contribution to this pioneering anthology, he writes about passing a group of drunken men on a dark street, soon after transitioning. …

Silence is not always golden, as the prizewinning British journalist and filmmaker Harriet Shawcross attests in Unspeakable. At the age of 13, she tells us, she lost the ability to speak more than was absolutely necessary to function. Nearly …

“Language is important,” Sarah Maddison tells us at the start of The Colonial Fantasy, a necessary and purposefully confronting book. She sets out the vocabulary on which she believes any discussion of black–white relations in this country …

The 20 short stories in this collection by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin ooze with menace, seethe with anxiety and bristle with humour. The children of a mining town in “Underground” excavate a mysterious mound of dirt and then themselves disappear …

Make Me a City is a biography of Chicago in its first, dynamic century, and a wondrous, bold and playful first novel. Seductively fascinating characters, real and imagined, populate this fiction with their interweaving and intergenerational stories. …

The protagonist of The Hollow Bones, Ernst Schäfer, is an ambitious young German zoologist and hunter. It is the 1930s and he has joined Himmler’s SS for the opportunities it will give him to lead a major specimen-collecting expedition to …

Nakkiah Lui is one of the country’s funniest, smartest and most deliciously outrageous playwrights. To call her a force of nature is less accurate than saying she is a one-woman cyclone. Her work – including her scripts for TV and her podcast Pretty …

Chigozie Obioma’s spectacular second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, begins with the quotation of an Igbo proverb: “If the prey do not produce their version of the tale, the predators will always be the heroes in the stories of the hunt.” …