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WH Auden formed ‘intense friendship’ with sex worker who burgled him, unseen letters reveal

Exclusive: the newly released correspondence reveals how a strong bond developed between the Funeral Blues poet and the sex worker who broke into his home

A “once in a century” discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial.

York-born Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called “Hugerl” in the posthumously published poem Glad.

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‘They disappeared when the wall came down’: German author Jenny Erpenbeck on the objects that contain vast histories

From the drip catchers of coffee pots to the typewriter she used for her first works, the International Booker prize-winning writer reflects on the hidden significance of everyday items

Drip catcher
The carpet hangers disappeared from the rear courtyards when wall-to-wall carpeting and vacuum cleaners were introduced – when the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, when the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.

The shop where I used to take my tights to get them mended when they had a run in them, back when I was a little girl – a shop called “Run Express” – disappeared when the Wall came down and the west was able to sell its cheap tights in the east.

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‘It’s insanely sinister’: horror writers on the scariest stories they’ve ever read

Bloodthirsty ghosts, sadistic supercomputers, creepy childhood games ... Mariana Enríquez, Paul Tremblay, Daisy Johnson and others on the tales that kept them up at night

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
I read this years ago and it’s a story that’s truly haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons from New York, who rent the same off-grid country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What do the locals know? Every time I read Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.
Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray.

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A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke review – a brilliant, blunt and beautiful memoir

The actor on being called ugly, telling Johnny Rotten to F-off, and striking gold at Cannes

Kathy Burke’s mother, Bridget, died of stomach cancer when she was 18 months old; she writes that it made her “feel dead famous” in her community. She was raised by her older brothers, John and Barry, who were 10 and eight when it happened, and sometimes by their father Pat, an alcoholic for many years, violent with it, who struggled to care for his family. Pat and Bridget had moved to London from Ireland, and the Burkes lived on an estate in Islington, where the other families played a vital role in raising and feeding the children. On his deathbed, in 1994, Pat asked Kathy to do two things: to give up smoking, and to write more. It has only taken her 30 years, she says, but she’s finally done the latter.

The entertainment industry is top-heavy with people from middle-and upper-class backgrounds who have a limited understanding of lives that don’t resemble their own. In my experience, one of the misconceptions they have about working-class life is that it is all grey skies and kitchen‑sink misery. Burke’s memoir has its painful moments, but the joy radiating from it is palpable and invigorating.

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Booker prize launches £50,000 children’s award

Children will help judge the new prize along with children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce

• ‘The Children’s Booker prize will tell kids that they matter’: Frank Cottrell-Boyce

The Booker prize foundation has launched a major new literary award, the Children’s Booker prize, offering £50,000 for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12.

The new award will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award. The inaugural chair of judges will be Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the children’s author and current children’s laureate. He will be joined by two other adult judges, who will help select a shortlist of eight books before three child judges are recruited to help decide the winner.

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The Children’s Booker prize will tell kids that they matter

As the number of children reading for pleasure hits a record low, the new award highlights its importance for wellbeing, and will give away thousands of books

At the end of the movie Ratatouille, the food reviewer Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O’Toole, makes this beautiful defence of the art of the critic: “There are times when a critic truly risks something. That is in the discovery and defence of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” The Booker prize has been a friend to the new – new voices, new names, new ways of telling a story – for 56 years. It has made household names of writers whose work might otherwise only have been enjoyed by a few. More importantly – especially since the launch of the International Booker in 2005 – it has helped broaden the horizons of readers.

Now there’s going to be a Booker prize for children’s books aimed at readers aged eight to 12, and I am going to be the first chair of judges. Despite my vast vocabulary, I can’t begin to tell you how hopeful this makes me. Because if the Children’s Booker brings the same energy and boldness to the world of children’s books, it’s going to make a real difference to the lives of thousands of children. It comes at a crucial moment. Everyone knows that children who read for pleasure do better educationally and emotionally. Yet – as we approach the government’s Year of Reading – we find ourselves in a situation where the number of children who read daily has dropped to a 20-year low. We risk losing a whole generation.

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The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits audiobook review – an American road trip with a twist

A law professor leaves his failing marriage and faltering career and hits the open road in this Booker-shortlisted novel of midlife turmoil

At the start of The Rest of Our Lives, we learn that Tom, a 55-year-old law professor from New York, plans to leave his wife just as soon as he has dropped their youngest child off at college. Tom and Amy have been together for 30 years. He believes theirs to be a “C-minus marriage” which was irreparably ruptured when Amy had an affair 12 years previously. And so, after leaving their daughter Miriam at college in Pittsburgh, he keeps on driving, revisiting old friends and places in search of his departed youth.

Benjamin Markovits’s 12th novel – which has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize – could be seen as a companion piece to Miranda July’s celebrated All Fours in its exploration of the dissatisfaction of middle age. Tom is not a reliable narrator of his life, though he is nonetheless a compelling protagonist even in his flagrant moments of self-deception.

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The Rose Field by Philip Pullman – nail-biting conclusion to the Northern Lights series

The Book of Dust trilogy is brought to a complex and fitting end as Lyra battles the Magisterium over her lost imagination

Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman’s magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force “is destroying the air and the seasons”; at the same time, “money’s going bad, and no one knows why”. Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. “Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly”, says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. “Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way.”

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman’s concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It’s a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

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New Mr Poirot and Little Miss Marple books to be published

Agatha Christie’s popular detectives feature in new Mr Men and Little Miss stories – Mischief on the Nile and Muddle at the Vicarage

The latest adaptation of Agatha Christie’s works features an unlikely new suspect: Mr Tickle, of Mr Men and Little Miss fame.

Joining the likes of Mr Nosey and Little Miss Chatterbox are Mr Poirot and Little Miss Marple, who star in new retellings of some of Christie’s most famous stories.

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