Finding Freedom author, recently revealed to have been informed by a briefing from a senior aide, promises follow-up boasting ‘deep access’

Journalist Omid Scobie will publish a follow-up to his bestselling book Finding Freedom, an unofficial biography of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

Scobie, who co-authored Finding Freedom with journalist Carolyn Durand, has yet to reveal the title of the second book, which is due out next year.

In an era of global heating, fixed boundaries may soon be unsustainable. What are the alternatives?

Last November, Simon Kofe, the foreign minister of Tuvalu – a nation formed out of a series of low-lying atolls in the South Pacific – addressed the Glasgow climate conference from a wooden lectern. Exactly what you’d expect at an international summit. Except that the lectern, and Kofe in his suit and tie, were part-submerged by several feet of ocean. In his speech, which had been pre-recorded on location in Tuvalu, he told delegates that his nation was “living the reality” of climate change. “When the sea is rising around us all the time,” he said, “climate mobility must come to the forefront.”

Tuvalu has long been viewed as a kind of laboratory for climate change – the first nation in history likely to be consumed by sea level rise, its population of 12,000 set to be among the earliest climate refugees. Many Tuvaluans bristle at this portrayal, which can fetishise their plight as the inhabitants of a drowning world. They don’t want to be classed this way because it makes them feel less than fully human. Instead, they are developing a different approach to the physical disappearance of their dry land. Kofe’s phrase “climate mobility” is shorthand for a radical notion in international law: that a country can retain its statehood, even as it loses its physical territory.

A lonely poet has been warned against a wandering ‘lunatic’ but feels more envy of his mental state than fear

On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because it was Frequented by a Lunatic

The tale of his 19th-century ancestors in fictional form is undercut by the author butting in to remind us of his exhaustive research

There’s something irresistible if slightly solipsistic about researching your own ancestry. Thanks to digitised and searchable records, all the frustrating blanks in your family tree can now be enticingly fleshed out. Sometimes those blanks will reveal something remarkable and dramatic, but as any fan of BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are? will attest, even the mundane tales can be strangely touching.

Simon Mawer, Booker-shortlisted for The Glass Room in 2009, now enters this arena with his new novel (his word). Composed largely of fictionally presented chapters from the lives of his own 19th-century forebears, its narrative progress is peppered with authorial interruption as Mawer seeks to remind us of its underpinning reality. These interruptions come in many forms: photographed register entries in copperplate; his own musings on the nature of his project (“It could be the start of a Dickensian novel, couldn’t it?”); and somewhat pedantic footnotes making sure we know that those are the “very words, taken from his letter home” or that he isn’t misspelling “Babarbadoes”.

A collection of the poet’s stately prose from the 1950s reveals his shift into confessional writing and the bipolar disorder that led to hospitalisation and regrets

In an exceptionally gifted generation of American poets, Robert Lowell was, in his lifetime, number one. That was the critical consensus at least after Robert Frost’s death in 1963 left space at the head of the table. Since Lowell’s own death in 1977, however, his reputation has waned, while others in his circle – especially his friend Elizabeth Bishop – have outstripped him.

Born to one of the grandest families in the US, Lowell was a difficult figure. His early work was all hellfire and bombast, leaning on Milton and his zealous Catholicism. It won him acclaim, but the brimstone fervour was accompanied by what we would now call bipolar disorder, resulting in bouts of “enthusiasm”; short-lived love affairs, hospitalisation and stultifying regret.

A gripping kitchen memoir, an intensely emotive novel about fertility, and a sharp family saga

Rebecca May Johnson
One, £14.99, pp240

To order Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, This Beating Heart or The Latecomer go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

A student falls for a guy who seems too good to be true in Babalola’s witty and charming debut novel

From the author of the bestselling short story collection Love in Colour comes this funny and charming debut novel, a university romcom geared towards young adult readers who like a touch of snark with their love stories. The plot of Honey & Spice is simple: Kiki is a self-controlled, ambitious and intelligent heroine who prides herself on being able to see through charming seducers, play them at their own game and emerge emotionally unscathed. One day, however, she meets a new student called Malakai. Handsome, clever, secure and nice, he must be too good to be true. Or is he exactly what he seems – and just what she needs?

The book unfolds with the ease of a Netflix algorithm-generated miniseries. The usual romcom impediments arrive in the form of gossip, scheming, deception, bad timing and misunderstandings. But Bolu Babalola also teases out the traces of vulnerability and wariness beneath Kiki’s bravado, the mistrust and fear that underscore the female characters’ interactions with the young men in their lives. As Kiki confesses to Malakai: “You’re the only guy who’s ever held my hand without the intention of getting something from me. You just hold my hand to hold it. To hold me. Like you like doing it or something.”

A fiftysomething sous chef and carer for her husband craves a fresh start in Raisin’s character-driven study of the human experience

Ross Raisin’s career began explosively when his debut, God’s Own Country – the story of a disturbed youth terrorising a community, in the tradition of William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth and Niall Griffiths’s Sheepshagger – won him nine prize shortlistings and the Sunday Times young writer of the year award. But as my boss once told me, being promoted is all very nice but then you have to do the work, and Raisin’s follow-up, Waterline, was a misstep. His third novel, A Natural, however, was one of the best books of 2017, though weirdly overlooked by prize juries.

His new novel, A Hunger, is its equal, and his most ambitious achievement yet. It reminded me of those cliched blurbs promising that a book “tells us what it means to be human” – which they rarely do. Yet here is one that does just that, encompassing work and family, desires and appetites, responsibility and identity.

An unexpected guest disturbs a widow’s holiday with old friends in this blistering literary thriller

One of the problems with having a runaway success with a side project is that it tends to cast a shadow over the rest of an author’s work. You feel that John Banville may sometimes resent the way that people have rushed to embrace Benjamin Black (although I’m sure his bank manager isn’t complaining). Joyce Carol Oates’s mysteries written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith outsold all but a handful of the (many) books published under her own name. Stephanie Merritt (also an Observer critic) has written a series of superior literary thrillers, from her excellent debut, Gaveston, in 2002, to While You Sleep (2018). Her novels are about circles of friends trapped in literal or metaphorical crucibles, about privilege and failure, obsession and revenge. That Merritt’s output has been rather thin is down to the fact that her alter ego, SJ Parris, has become one of the most successful writers of historical fiction in the country, selling more than 1m copies of her Giordano Bruno series of mysteries.

Now Merritt has returned to her own name for Storm, another literary thriller of the highest quality. Jo, our hero, is reeling from the death of her husband, Oliver. Their marriage was far from perfect – Oliver was controlling and self-centred – but his death has opened up a void in her life, one that she fills by cosseting their daughter, Hannah. When an invitation arrives to go to a chateau in France where she and Oliver holidayed in the early months of their relationship, she leaps at the chance, even though it means leaving Hannah behind. She wants to go away with Arlo, Max and Leo, Oliver’s closest friends, knowing that it is a way of staying close to him. They, she realises, are still “trying to work out what they owed her, for his sake, in terms of attention and inclusion”.

The author draws parallels between her own life and that of DH Lawrence, making this memoir-cum-self-help book more than a little mystifying

Last year was an unexpectedly big one for DH Lawrence. Not only did Frances Wilson publish her wild biography of the writer, there were also two Lawrence-inspired novels: Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, which transposes elements of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of her time with Lawrence in Taos, New Mexico, on to a contemporary East Anglian landscape; and Alison MacLeod’s Tenderness, inspired by the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. For some, all this will have been stirring. Even a Lawrence refusnik like me thrilled to Wilson’s confounding book. But others will have looked on, waiting for it to pass, trying hard not to shudder. To read Lawrence is, as even some of his admirers admit, to be in the company of a bully, a preacher and a narcissist. Fascinating, he might be (in small doses). Good company he most definitely is not.

But, wait. It seems we’re not done with him yet. Lara Feigel, the academic and writer, now arrives late to the party, determined not only to reassess Lawrence, but to use him as some kind of guide to life. Yes, I know, this is somewhat hard to fathom. He’s not exactly M Scott Peck, is he? However, there are special circumstances. Look! We Have Come Through! is a pandemic book, born in extremis, of sorts. As Feigel explains in the introduction, just before the first lockdown in 2020, she let her London flat and retreated with her two children to a cottage in Oxfordshire. Though she had, at the time, already “agreed” to write a book about Lawrence, the project now seemed to her to be newly “necessary”. She required him for “urgent literary companionship”, very few writers being, to her mind, so good on “extreme forms of proximity” as Lorenzo. “What I want to gain from him is… a sense of what it means to accept our lived experience as one of perpetual change,” she writes, as if any of us have a choice in the matter.

Roald Dahl’s early years are illuminated in a compact biography mostly purged of unsavoury details

“I’m afraid I like strong contrasts,” Roald Dahl said, not long before his death in 1990. “I like villains to be terrible and good people to be very good.” Dahl himself gave a lie to that formulation. He is very easy to cast as a villain: even friends described him as bullying, overbearing, arrogant and impossible; he was a compulsive gambler, a distant and wayward husband, an unforgivable antisemite. But then, with the assistance of Quentin Blake, there are also the books. Tens of millions of children – myself included – fell under the spell of his joyful, wicked, silly, inventive imagination in stories that suggested he was not of the adult world at all, but still leader of a childhood gang. Books that initiated you, as he hoped and believed, into a lifetime of reading. Books that – despite the waning reputation of their creator – Netflix last year paid upwards of £500m for the rights to adapt.

Several biographers have attempted to fill the gap between these polarities. Jeremy Treglown’s 1994 book Roald Dahl: A Biography set the parameters. Unauthorised by Dahl’s second wife and children, but with access to many of his letters, and to his first wife, the actor Patricia Neal, Treglown offered a seductive analysis of the writer’s psychology. He argued that Dahl’s life of tragedy – the writer’s father and sister had died by the time he was four, he lost his own eldest daughter to measles at the age of seven, and nursed both Neal and their son Theo through severe brain injuries – gave him a profound emotional darkness and the desperate need to find ways to transcend it. Dahl had asked his daughter Ophelia to write an authorised book, but when that proved too tough an ask, the family asked Donald Sturrock, in 2010, to step in. Sturrock trod carefully around some of Dahl’s more uncomfortable behaviour and found a convincing fortitude and late-life generosity of spirit to balance it.

The US essayist and novelist on giving dating a literary treatment, spoofing wellness culture and what she learned about romance from watching Seinfeld

Sloane Crosley, 42, is best known for her droll, acerbic personal essays. Her latest novel, Cult Classic, is a savvy, effervescent caper through the romantic history of its heroine, Lola, a New York everywoman who’s wrestling with misgivings about her fiance when she mysteriously begins running into a series of ex-boyfriends outside the same downtown restaurant.

How did Cult Classic come about?
It’s like, where do babies come from: when an idea and a laptop love each other very, very much, a book comes out. If I try to narrow it down, thematically it comes from avoidance. I didn’t want to write about dating. I’ve written one or two essays that involve dating and I’ve seen what happens.

A classics lecturer draws on the distant past to face a difficult present and dystopian future, in this smart and impressive debut

Delphi is, as you might expect from the title, a novel about the future, but also about the very recent and the very distant past. The narrator is a translator of German fiction and part-time classics lecturer at a London university, living in lockdown with her increasingly distressed 10-year-old son and her increasingly withdrawn partner Jason, who is drinking increasing quantities of alcohol. Her time is divided between trying to care for and home-school her son, trying to do her work and trying not to spend too much time on Twitter. None of these endeavours is particularly successful.

Meanwhile, she’s thinking about the future and particularly about her proposed book on ancient Greek techniques of prophecy. Each chapter heading introduces a way of divining the future – Rhapsodomancy: Prophecy by Poetry; Ololygmancy: Prophesy by the Howling of Dogs; Urticariomancy: Prophecy by Itches, and so on. Often we get a brief account of the Greek method, but sometimes just another day in lockdown. “I am sick of the future,” the book begins. “Up to here with the future. I don’t want anything to do with it; don’t want it near me.”

As we embrace the binary thinking of digital technology the divisions between us are growing ever starker. Can fiction help us imagine a different future?

In 2017, I published my fourth novel, Exit West, and bought a small notebook to jot down ideas for the next one. I thought it would be about technology. I came across an article by Simon DeDeo, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, discussing an experiment he and his colleague John Miller had conducted in that same year. They simulated cooperation and competition by machines over many generations, building these machines as computer models and setting them playing a game together. An interesting pattern emerged. Rather than constant trading for mutual benefit among equals, or never-ending fights to the death among foes, instead a particular type of machine became dominant, one that recognised and favoured copies of itself, and enormous prosperity ensued, built on ever-growing levels of cooperation. But eventually the minute differences that naturally occurred (or were, in the experiment, designed to occur) in the copying process, as they do in organisms when genes are passed on, became intolerable, and war among the machines resulted in near-complete devastation and a new beginning, after which the cycle repeated, over and over.

I remember being struck by this article. Not because I fully understood what the simulation was or even how it worked. No, I was struck by its similarity to a narrative I had already been feeling drawn to myself: that the rise and fall of human society is not merely something that has happened but also something that will continue to happen, that moments of peak cooperation contain within them the tendency for differences to become utterly intolerable, and that the transition from one societal epoch to the next is rarely a series of gently eliding waves, each a bit higher than the previous one – to the contrary, humanity’s trajectory on the way down is often far more steep than it was on the way up.

Actor Bahni Turpin narrates this story about the chance encounters between two girls from different races who first meet as roommates in an orphanage

In her introduction to Toni Morrison’s short story, Zadie Smith offers insight into the Nobel prize-winning author’s intentions. Recitatif, Smith explains, was planned by Morrison as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial”. In telling the tale of Twyla and Roberta, who meet as eight-year-old roommates in an orphanage, Morrison never reveals which girl is Black and which is white, an omission that forces us to confront our racial biases. “When [Morrison] called Recitatif an experiment, she meant it,” Smith says. “The subject of the experiment is the reader.”

Actor Bahni Turpin goes on to narrate Morrison’s story, which was first published in 1983 and which charts the lives of the girls through a series of chance encounters. It opens as they meet for the first time and discuss how they ended up in an orphanage. “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick,” Twyla says. Turpin expertly captures the bluntness of the protagonists’ childhood selves: “All I could think of was that she really needed to be killed,” Twyla says when her mother groans loudly in church.

An angry kitten; a guide to rewilding; Mabinogion magic; wartime adventures; Olympian gods; first love and more; plus the best YA novels

I Am Angry by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Robert Starling, Walker, £7.99
This kitten is angry – angry enough to “bang all the bones”, “smash up stones”, “burst a balloon” and “squash the moon” before falling asleep, exhausted. A funny and affectionate picture-book account of a small person’s enormous rage from the ever-adept Rosen, heightened by Starling’s illustrations.

Rainbow Hands by Mamta Nainy, illustrated by Jo Loring-Fisher, Lantana, £11.99
During the long days of the Indian summer, a little boy paints his nails to match his mood. Sometimes his Papa frowns, but his grandfather knows he will shine bright in this sweet, poetic picture book celebrating self-expression and acceptance.

The author on Ballet Shoes, Annie Ernaux’s lyrical precision, and understanding the world through Henry James

My earliest reading memory
I loved a picture book called Story Number 1 by Eugène Ionesco. It showed a louche 1960s household where the mother and father have a great deal of high life and are always hungover. Their maid, Jacqueline, brings them in an enormous tray each morning on which, sandwiched between the ham, eggs, coffee and postcards, crouches their little girl.

My favourite book growing up
Insane for dancing as a child, I got hooked on Ballet Shoes. There was something about show business being the remedy for genteel poverty that greatly appealed. One evening I found Noel Streatfeild in the phone directory and rang her up!

When did wealth become the defining element of American success? This Booker-longlisted novel is a multilayered interrogation of ‘the fiction of money’

How is reality funded?” asks the wealthy tycoon at the centre of Hernan Diaz’s Booker-longlisted second novel. His answer is “fiction” – specifically, the “fiction of money”. The value of any commodity comes from us buying into its wider narrative. Unless we trust that a banknote “represents concrete goods”, it is just a piece of printed paper, as open to distortion as a novel, or a memoir, or a diary.

Trust incorporates all three of these literary forms. As with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Richard Powers’s The Overstory, its structure relies on interconnected narratives which deepen and destabilise one another. Diaz’s first novel, the Pulitzer prize finalist In the Distance, was about a penniless young Swedish immigrant meeting swindlers and fanatics in California. In Trust, he has built a postmodern version of a historical novel around a character at the other end of the economic scale – a Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York who dutifully hosts lavish parties at which he is rarely glimpsed. His name is Andrew Bevel, a guy who becomes “a wealthy man by playing the part of a wealthy man”. At his side is his seemingly longsuffering wife, Mildred, a figure occasionally reminiscent of Zelda Fitzgerald. The Bevels’s marriage is built around a “core of quiet discomfort”, a shared awkwardness which for them is “inherent to most exchanges”. If every get-rich tale is ultimately a crime narrative – a story of whodunnit, how and why – the central heist in Trust is the Wall Street crash of 1929. By embracing the American spirit of “fake it till you make it”, Bevel finds that the financial crisis makes him even richer. Indeed, some New Yorkers start to claim that he caused it.

A bracingly original tour of the world’s boggy places reveals as much about human behaviour as it does about geography

You never know what horrors may be lurking at the bottom of a swamp. Bogs, meanwhile, sound comical. Marshes are pleasanter, although bring malaria to mind, while wetlands emanate wholesomeness but are also wet in the “meh” sense of take it or leave it. Yet, as Tom Blass explains, these words all refer to the same thing: a place where land and water have got into a tussle and can’t decide which has won. The result is not so much an equilibrium, although these states of semi-submersion can hold their nerve for millennia, more a temporary detente where both sides are too exhausted to declare an outcome. It is in search of these in-between places that Blass travels from Cyprus to Lapland, Romania to Virginia, eyes peeled and treading gingerly lest he fall into the murk that lies beneath.

Early on, Blass reveals himself to be more ethnologist than naturalist. While he pays respectful attention to the fauna that he encounters as he tacks from the Romney Marshes to Louisiana’s bayous by way of the Danube delta, it is the people he is after. The Lipovans, Cajuns and Seminole are all ethnic groups that have moulded a culture from the sludge squelching between their toes and this is the true subject of Blass’s bracingly original work. Above all, he is scrupulous about avoiding cliches. There are, for instance, very few glorious sunsets in Swamp Songs or encounters with gnarly old locals acting as aquifers for ancient wisdom, small mercies for which the reader should be grateful.

In new book, obtained by the Guardian, 2016 campaign manager convicted of tax fraud says he was ‘very careful’ to hide advice

Paul Manafort indirectly advised Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign while in home confinement as part of a seven-year sentence for offenses including tax fraud – advice he kept secret as he hoped for a presidential pardon.

“I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the president’s re-election or, importantly, a potential pardon,” Trump’s 2016 campaign manager writes in his new book.

John Kelly, who Kushner and wife saw as ‘consistently duplicitous’, ‘showed his true character’ in hallway incident, memoir says

While chief of staff to Donald Trump, the retired general John Kelly “shoved” Ivanka Trump in a White House hallway, Jared Kushner writes in his forthcoming memoir.

The detail from Breaking History, which will be published in August, was reported by the Washington Post.

Prize judges, writers and Guardian reader Russell discuss the titles they’ve read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

In this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they’ve been reading recently. This month, recommendations include excellent nonfiction about migration, immersive romance novels and a sharp account of the coronavirus pandemic. Tell us what you’ve been reading in the comments.

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This powerful novel foregrounds the violent misogyny behind 16th-century accusations of witchcraft in Huntingdonshire

In recent years, female writers have found their imaginations energised by the figure of the witch. Standouts include AK Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches, which won the 2021 Desmond Elliott prize, and Elle McNicoll’s children’s novel, A Kind of Spark. Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock features an 18th-century teenager running from accusations of witchcraft, while Jenni Fagan’s Hex, published this year, draws on a 16th-century Scottish witch trial. Jill Dawson’s new novel, The Bewitching, joins a busy and interesting field.

The threads of the true story on which Dawson’s book is based trace a depressingly familiar pattern. The Warboys witch trials in Huntingdonshire took place after allegations were made in 1589 by Jane, the nine-year-old daughter of local squire Robert Throckmorton, who had been having fits and trances. She accused 76-year-old wise woman Alice Samuel of bewitching her, and was supported by her four sisters and servants, who began displaying similar symptoms. Jane’s urine was sent away to a specialist doctor who upped the stakes by raising the prospect of sorcery.

At the heart of Scotland’s success has been an outstanding education system, argues this kaleidoscopic study

In 1995 the Samoan rugby team knocked on Murray Pittock’s door in Howard Place, Edinburgh, the birthplace of Robert Louis Stevenson, and asked to be photographed there. The author of Treasure Island was their hero, having made his home in the Pacific kingdom in 1890, dressing his servants in tartan livery while championing Samoan culture. He left only occasionally – once, in 1893, to address the Scottish Thistle Club of Honolulu.

Scotland: The Global History, which charts the country’s international influence over four-and-a-bit centuries, offers a kaleidoscope of such surreal encounters. It traverses an impressive range of places and arenas of engagement in which Scotsmen and a few women have had an impact wildly disproportionate to the size of their country and its material resources. How was it that this small nation, with its romantic image as a place of “bagpipes, mountains and tartan” came to be “the same Scotland that provided the finance, technology and innovation that drove the steam age”?

The story of a chef whose controlling husband has early onset dementia explores the hardest ethical dilemmas about value, choice and freedom

“OK, so, you can hopefully arrange some time off,” says the consultant to Anita, the central figure in Ross Raisin’s deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy fourth novel. Her husband’s early onset dementia will mean emotional incontinence, aggression, loss of recognition. It’s assumed that Anita’s job will shrink into the far corners of her new life as a carer. From the consultant’s perspective she’s only a cook. “No – I’m a chef,” she says, firmly. That’s what she is and what she does, and it matters as much as the doctor’s work matters to him. A Hunger is the story of how Anita confronts the conflicting demands of work and care, how she weighs past wrongs and present duties, and how she faces the desperately difficult questions that dominate the small hours of so many carers whose partners have asked not to be left suffering.

Ross Raisin made his name in 2008 with God’s Own Country, vividly narrated in the strong Yorkshire dialect of a disturbed young man adrift. It was so pungent that readers expected more from that same rural world. Instead, in Waterline (2011) we got a Clyde shipbuilder enduring the loneliness of grief. Then came A Natural (2017), with its subtly sustained portrait of a gay footballer carrying on his career in the lower leagues where the spotlights don’t reach. Each time, the immersion in particular circumstances is so complete that I have caught myself wondering if Raisin is a farmer, a shipbuilder, a footballer, a carer. Then I remember with relief that I don’t need to know: he is a novelist.