Recently published in English for the first time, Esther García Llovet’s story pays tribute to the resort regarded by many as ‘the worst place in Spain’

Despite spending the summers of her youth in Fuengirola, watching the foreign tourists at play and devouring the English-language paperbacks she found in a little bookshop in the Andalucían town, nothing could prepare Esther García Llovet for the spectacular unreality of the place that inspired her noir novel Spanish Beauty .

“Benidorm is something of a myth in Spain – and a myth that no one goes to because there’s this stigma that Benidorm is the worst place in Spain,” says the writer.

His short story The Feminist went viral. Now the writer is back with more satirical snapshots of Gen Y. Over a bottle of bourbon in his Brooklyn apartment, he talks about dating, politics and rejection

In 2019 Tony Tulathimutte published The Feminist , a short story that went about as viral as any short story could, becoming the most read fiction piece in the literary magazine n+1’s 20-year history, and sending certain corners of Twitter into a frenzy. The eponymous protagonist describes himself on his online dating profile as “unshakably serious about consent”. He doesn’t understand why, despite his impeccable feminist credentials, he keeps getting friend-zoned while men much uglier and less evolved than him get laid. In middle age, he joins online forums such as Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds, where he rages that his chronic sexlessness represents “a mass abrogation of the social contract by legions of treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets”. Finally validated, his resentment becomes murderous.

Like all of Tulathimutte’s recent fiction, the story is extremely dark, mordantly, laugh-out-loud funny, and somewhat morally and politically ambiguous. He received many private messages from readers seeking a “gold bullion guarantee” that their reading of the story was correct – are you supposed to sympathise with the feminist? But Tulathimutte doesn’t like to answer such questions. “I want to be able to complicate any sort of reading that would reduce my work to something banal or ideological,” he tells me.

This multigenerational saga of an Iranian family fleeing to the US during the 1979 revolution is both funny and poignant

“She’d grown pale, her eyes frozen, like she’d seen her own ghost. But aren’t we all exactly that? Each the ghost of an unchosen path,” writes Sanam Mahloudji in her debut, a multigenerational story of five Iranian women from the prestigious Valiat family, separated by personal and political revolutions, and each struggling to accept the path not taken.

The narrative is shared between the five voices, as it shifts back and forth across 80 years. There is Elizabeth, the matriarch, who – not blessed with the perfect features of her sisters – becomes fixated on her looks (“this is the story of a nose”, she tells us). Eventually she falls in love with a boy who loves her back; unfortunately, that boy is the son of her family’s chauffeur: not an ideal situation in 1940s Tehran. Bowing to pressure from her father, Elizabeth eventually marries someone of her own class; frail and elderly by the time the 1979 revolution begins, she decides to remain with her husband in Iran. However, because the family is rich and high profile, and descendants of Babak Ali Khan Valiat, the heroic “Great Warrior”, as the revolution takes hold she insists that her two daughters flee the country for their own safety. Like many thousands of Iranians at the time, they choose to travel to the United States, the land of opportunity.

A little-known writer who works in a bookshop, keeps pet snails and makes psychedelic music as Berlin Horse is the surprise winner of this year’s fiction prize. He reveals the story behind his ‘hazy, hypnotic’ folk horror

A little while ago, Adam S Leslie was in Blackwell’s in Oxford, where he works, when a customer came in, picked up a copy of Lost in the Garden, and started telling his friends how good it was. “Actually, I’m the author,” Leslie eventually admitted, to the customer’s delight. That’s when it sank in for the 50-year-old bookseller: the novel he had written in his bedroom was “actually a real book out there in the world”.

And now that real book has won a real literary prize: last week, Lost in the Garden was named winner of the Nero book award for fiction . “It’s a little bit of an out of body experience,” Leslie tells me. “I’m looking at all the stuff online and going, ‘This person with my name is having a great time!’”

Bookshops staged late-night parties – with fancy dress, quizzes and cakes – to launch the third instalment of novelist’s Empyrean series, Onyx Storm

Rebecca Yarros couldn’t sell her first novel. No publisher would take it. But this week, 14 years later, legions of her devoted readers turned up to more than a thousand midnight-release parties held to celebrate the publication of her latest book.

In the UK alone, more than 180,000 copies of Onyx Storm, the third instalment of Yarros’s blockbuster Empyrean series, sold on day one of publication on Tuesday. Nearly 60 Waterstones branches held late-night parties or opened early on Tuesday morning to mark the occasion. And after some TikTok users posted videos showing that they had managed to buy the book in Asda ahead of its official release, other fans filmed themselves scouring their local branches trying to get their hands on early copies too.

The third book from the twice Pulitzer prize-nominated American author is a complex portrait of parallel lives on a par with the great Russian novels

Adam Haslett is one of those incandescently smart and elegant authors that the US seems to produce almost accidentally and to excess, names who haven’t quite risen to international literary stardom, but perhaps deserve to: think Jonathan Dee, Garth Risk Hallberg, Lauren Groff or Claire Messud. Haslett’s brilliant debut novel, Union Atlantic , looked into the bleak moral heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis. His second, Imagine Me Gone , was a meditation on fatherhood and depression. Now, with Mothers and Sons , he has written a book that circles around an absence: the alienation of a son – Peter, a lawyer in his 40s – from his mother, Ann, who runs an “intentional community”, a women’s retreat in the hills of Vermont.

This is a novel about practice. Chapter by chapter, we move from Peter’s world in the first person to Ann’s in the third, building up a picture of their lives, the rhythms of their days. Peter is an asylum lawyer in New York, his time spent with the desperate and destitute. His personal life is almost nonexistent – he is lonely, hopeless, trapped by his own past. After a brief and hesitant affair with a schoolfriend, tragedy strikes. He blames his mother for the guilt that has haunted him ever since. Now he buries himself in his cases. “I work – that’s all I do. I get people to tell me their stories, I try to prove what they tell me, then I do it again.” It’s a thankless task, with the state increasingly hostile and his co-workers as harassed and frustrated as he is. “Travelling into one life after another, intimacy without intimacy.” Then a new client arrives, a gay young man, an Albanian. The shame and horror of his story opens up a window into Peter’s own dark past.

An astute debut novel follows the personal and political upheaval of three friends in a thinly fictionalised contemporary Mumbai

India and its youth jointly confront the challenge of self-definition in Devika Rege’s excellent debut novel, Quarterlife . Set in the months after the 2014 landslide victory of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s rightwing Bharatiya Janata party (here fictionalised as the Bharat party), the book tunes into the hopes and anxieties of a knot of spirited young individuals, as they navigate caste, class, selfhood, ambition and pride amid the rising tide of Hindu nationalism.

Among them is 31-year-old management consultant Naren Agashe who is back home in Mumbai, after a decade spent in the US. Lured by the economic and policy reforms promised by the new government, he sees himself as part of the “golden generation” that will lead the country into a future of prosperity. Accompanying Naren is 27-year-old New Englander Amanda Harris Martin, a university friend who has accepted a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-dominated Mumbai slum in a bid to find her true purpose. Naren’s younger brother, Rohit, an indie film-maker with whom Amanda gets involved, is on his own private journey of self-discovery, after his once-solid conviction that he and his friends “were the voice of a generation” has fissured. Rohit’s friends “are all outraged that a man with blood on his hands has the nation’s mandate” while Rohit, much like his brother, is optimistic about the future (“Parties evolve,” they both believe).

The New York-based Kittitian-British author on why he set his new novel in the immigrant community of 1960s Notting Hill, the pitfalls of celebrity, and how he never misses a Leeds United match

Caryl Phillips, 66, was born in Saint Kitts and raised in Leeds. The author of 12 novels, including 1993’s Booker-shortlisted Crossing the River , he lives in New York and for the past 20 years has taught creative writing at Yale University. He and I met on Portobello Road in Notting Hill, the location of his new novel, Another Man in the Street , in which a young West Indian finds himself collecting rent for a 1960s slumlord.

Tell us how this book began life.
A few years ago I was wandering around these streets, thinking it doesn’t look like the place I used to wander around as a student: no reggae shops, no guys on the corner smoking dope. It’s where Beckham lives! David Cameron’s got a house here. I began to think about how Notting Hill changed, and the nature of that change, and my own relationship to this gentrified, almost theme-park area of London that years ago meant something entirely different to me.

Her bestselling debut Elizabeth Is Missing was inspired by her grandmother’s dementia. Now the novelist has drawn from her own experiences for a thriller about the power dynamic between personal trainer and client

Emma Healey’s two previous novels explored themes vivid in her own life. The protagonist of her bestselling debut, Elizabeth Is Missing , for which Healey won the 2014 Costa first novel award, is Maud, who has dementia but is forced to turn detective in the hunt for her missing friend. Magnificently rendered by Glenda Jackson in the BBC adaptation , she was in part inspired by Healey’s desire to see the world through the eyes of her grandmother, who had the disease. Her 2018 follow-up, Whistle in the Dark , allowed Healey to consider what her teenage depression might have been like for her mother. Her new novel has an autobiographical element, too.

Sweat is a psychological thriller about coercive relationships, the futility of revenge and when self-control turns pathological. It’s the latter that bled into the plot from Healey’s life. An exercise and fasting regime following the birth of her daughter in 2017 became obsessive and damaging, just as it does for Cassie in the book after she meets Liam, “man of my dreams, star of my nightmares, my mentor, my shadow”. A personal trainer, Liam is physically perfect, from the curl of his eyelashes to the way his muscles “hum”, and when he meets Cassie, he wants to help her be just as perfect. Soon he controls everything from her punishing runs to her calorie intake.