“Family and selflessness are at the heart of the culture that I was raised within,” writes Zoya Patel, whose debut memoir charts the “mishmash” of her Fijian–Indian–Australian heritage. “Self-determination is a conceit, and the wellbeing …

Kids at school say Simon is “weird”. His brother Davey questions why he never speaks. Grandma secretly takes him to various doctors, while Mum won’t get out of bed. Cassie, his first friend in years, affectionately calls him “numpty”. In Simon’s …

Introducing They Cannot Take the Sky, a collection of testimonies from people in detention on Manus and Nauru, Christos Tsiolkas wrote of the intellectual abstraction necessary to make refugees’ futures fodder for public debate: “We forget …

Even in the tsunami of fourth-wave feminism, we’re still asking whether women can “have it all”. Career remains family’s nemesis, the balancing act laden with moral judgement no matter where the scales fall. To procreate or not to procreate is …

When my mind returns to Jessie Cole’s grief memoir Staying, her third book after the novels Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water, my thoughts flood with a lush green. It returns often, to the secluded Eden in northern …

When David Peace moved to Japan in 1994, the first book he read was Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s Rashōmon and Other Stories. So began the writerly romance between one of the 2003 Granta-crowned Best of Young British Novelists and the father of the …

In Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, the writer starts training a falcon after her father’s death. The bird is both solace and wild embodiment of grief, renowned for being “murderous, difficult to tame, sulky, fractious and foreign”. This …