“Tall buildings afford looking, not so much outwards from the citadel, but inwards and downwards, into the thing we have built, its circuitry and grid.” Mark Cousins explores status and frailty in this extract from The Story of Looking.

“Yuknavitch’s weirdly beautiful Joan is a reinvention of what being human is. We are not something against nature but something within nature, permeable and dependant on the world, no matter how we tell ourselves we can stand above our planet and exploit it.”

“Characterisation is where Kidd excels. Cathal Flood is wonderfully enigmatic and complex, and the first description of Maud’s landlady Renata … is assurance if any were needed that this is a writer with a poet’s skill of balancing clarity and inventive flair … Just as Mulderrig in Himself was conjured out of a beautiful, often erotic lyricism, so Bridlemere is brought to life by Kidd’s rich depictions of decay and eccentricity”

“Holloway has not died, but has spent the past few years — indeed, much of his life — thinking deeply about death, the result of which is a new book, Waiting for the Last Bus. He is also an avid reader of other people’s obits, which is why he has agreed to contribute to this, a first draft of his own. ‘I love the obituary as an art form,’ he says. ‘Done well, it’s like a short story, an encapsulation of a complex life.’”

“Bloody January, Alan Parks’s excellent first novel, propels him into the top class of Scottish noir authors. Glasgow detective Harry McCoy, a shambolic mess dedicated to the truth, is so noir that he makes most other Scottish cops seem light grey”

“Post-apocalyptic fiction too often pays lip service to serious problems like climate change while allowing the reader to walk away unscathed, cocooned in an ironic escapism and convinced that the impending disaster is remote. Not so with Lidia Yuknavitch’s brilliant and incendiary new novel, which speaks to the reader in raw, boldly honest terms. “The Book of Joan” has the same unflinching quality as earlier works by Josephine Saxton, Doris Lessing, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and J. G. Ballard. Yet it’s also radically new, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum…”

Margareta Magnusson and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning in this Guardian longread on death, how we obsess over it and how we prepare for it: “Life will become more pleasant and comfortable if we get rid of some of the abundance.”