An irreverent heroine brings late medieval England to life in this raucous tale based on a real-life hoax

A Little Trickerie is inspired by the real-life case of Elizabeth, the “Holy Maid of Leominster”, who in the early 16th century appeared as an angel in the priory there and was later unmasked as a fraud. Little is known of the motivation of the real Maid, and it’s the privilege of the historical fiction writer to explore such a lacuna – to imagine how Elizabeth might have lived, and what her voice might have sounded like. This Rosanna Pike does with great panache: white-haired adolescent Tibb Ingleby is frankly and unashamedly herself from the first page, dancing and whooping with her mother “with a big hoot-hoot” and confronting Ma’s well-to-do boyfriend, who looks “like a bun on two legs”.

Raised in vagabond manner by her unstable Ma during an age of tightening vagrancy laws, Tibb regards the society around whose periphery she drifts with a healthy cynicism. She’s endured many horrifying traumas (the death of her infant sister early in the novel is particularly devastating), and the effects are not easily shrugged off, settling as “that old friend called the black snake” around Tibb’s neck, “making my breath grow shallow”.

Morpurgo’s yarn about a kid on a round the world voyage is adapted by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and attractively packaged as a family-friendly animation

Michael Morpurgo’s children’s story is a boy’s-own desert island adventure, closer in spirit to The Coral Island than Lord of the Flies, and here attractively presented as a family animated feature, adapted by the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce. The story itself makes clear that the action must be happening around the time of the original novel’s publication in 1999, and not really the present day.

Michael (voiced by Aaron MacGregor) is a moody, lonely boy on a round-the-world sailing trip with his family, but his immaturity and unreliability exasperate his older teen sister (Raffey Cassidy) and parents (Sally Hawkins and Cillian Murphy). Unbeknownst to any of them, Michael has smuggled his beloved dog Stella aboard and when their craft hits stormy seas, Michael and Stella get washed up on a remote island which he soon discovers is in fact the private kingdom of an elderly Japanese second world war veteran, Kensuke (Ken Watanabe) whose own story is a poignant and awe-inspiring contrast to Michael’s.

The once outlandish predictions of Ballard, DeLillo and (yes) The Simpsons are coming true. It’s time to write our own future

Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked : “Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies … Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.” How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead . Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye – a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.

It’s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades’ fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa’s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.

Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana

No Sally Rooney, one clear favourite and a novel set in space - this is a longlist of unexpected discoveries and big ideas

• Three British novelists make Booker 2024 longlist among ‘cohort of global voices’

It is 10 years since the Booker prize expanded its remit to include American novelists. The naysayers’ fears would appear to be borne out by this year’s longlist in which six of the 13 novels are by Americans, with just three British writers, Samantha Harvey, Sarah Perry and American-born, British-Libyan novelist Hisham Matar. Last year both the long and shortlists were dominated by Irish writers (and people called Paul), but only County Mayo’s Colin Barrett makes it this year. This means that the most feverishly anticipated novel of the year – Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, due out in September – didn’t make the cut (she was longlisted for Normal People in 2018). It also leaves off Irish heavyweights Colm Tóibín with his sequel to Brooklyn (longlisted in 2009), former Booker winner Roddy Doyle and Kevin Barry. Other high-profile names missing include the three-times shortlisted Anita Desai, Rachel Cusk and David Nicholls, who proved that popularity isn’t always a curse when he was longlisted in 2014.

So who are this year’s Booker 13? Leading the pack is Percival Everett with James , a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim. The author of 24 novels and described as “a giant of American letters”, Everett has suddenly gained a much wider audience after The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker in 2022 and his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction last year. Long before it was published, anyone who had read a proof was proclaiming James the novel of 2024 (one writer assured me it was bound to “win every prize going”), with critics duly pronouncing it “a masterpiece” and a “modern classic”. Shocking, funny, compellingly readable, James is the magnificent culmination of 40 years’ writing.

Hisham Matar, Sarah Perry and Samantha Harvey in running for prize, along with the first Native American and Dutch authors ever to be nominated

• The Booker longlist might just be the most enjoyable of recent years

Percival Everett, Hisham Matar and Sarah Perry are among the 13 novelists longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. The “Booker dozen” also features works by Richard Powers, Tommy Orange, Rachel Kushner and Anne Michaels.

This year’s “glorious” list comprises “a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices”, said judging chair and artist Edmund de Waal.

To explore all the books on the Booker prize 2024 longlist, visit guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

The inner thoughts of an Irish community speak volumes about the state of the nation in Donal Ryan’s sequel to The Spinning Heart

Donal Ryan made a stir straight out of the gate. His first novel, The Spinning Heart , published a dozen years ago, won the Guardian first book award and was longlisted for the Booker prize. A work of choral elegance, it is told in a sequence of 21 voices, inhabitants of a community in County Tipperary, Ireland – where Ryan himself is from – and unspooled the long and bitter wake of the 2008 financial crash in Ireland. Some compared the book to Edgar Lee Masters’ lyrical Spoon River Anthology; William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying also comes to mind.

Since then, Ryan has published five more novels and a book of short stories, firmly establishing himself in a generation of remarkable Irish writers – Claire Kilroy, Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Barry, Eimear McBride, the list could go on and on. He is a writer who likes a conceit: a chronological structure to contain the narrative; multiple voices. It is a measure of his skill, and gift for both language and character, that these techniques don’t seem like contrivances, but rather widen the reader’s sense of what a story can be.

Curandera by Irenosen Okojie; The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman; The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer; Toward Eternity by Anton Hur

Curandera by Irenosen Okojie (Dialogue, £20)
Like her first novel, the 2016 Betty Trask award-winning Butterfly Fish, this is made up of two storylines in very different settings. Zulima narrates the first strand, set in 17th-century Cape Verde, where she appears as a mysterious stranger in the village of Gethsemane. She proves to be a hard worker, with a talent for healing, but her behaviour draws suspicion, and she is soon in trouble. The other narrative takes place in present-day London, where Therese, a scientist who is also an alternative healer, encounters three men, lonely strangers to the city, in whom she senses “the mark of kin”. She invites them to join her in a magical project. Their rituals awaken a genetic inheritance of shamanism, and they find, or create, a set of bones from which grow magical berries, increasing their powers. Connections between the stories separated by time and space gradually become more evident, although what it all means is unclear. But the power of this weird, haunting fiction is undeniable, largely due to a wonderfully inventive prose style that verges on the hallucinogenic while remaining bracingly grounded in the physical.

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman (Del Rey, £20)
Collum, a young man with a burning desire to become a knight of the Round Table, arrives at Camelot to discover he’s too late: the king is dead. The few remaining knights include none of the legendary heroes, and even Merlin is gone, replaced by Nimue. Without a leader, the kingdom will fall. Collum proposes they ask for a miracle, as the king used to do, and it works: God (or a pagan spirit in the guise of another Green Knight) obliges. The age of miracles and wonders is not past. Soon, the motley crew set out on a new quest, determined to seek out Sir Lancelot and insist he take Arthur’s crown. Interspersed with Collum’s story are chapters set in the glory days of Camelot that provide backstories for all the characters, and some interestingly different reinterpretations of the originals. The result is a lively, gripping new epic in which the dreamy magic of the medieval romance is refreshed and made newly relevant for today.

From Boy Parts to Brainwyrms, novels by female writers are carving out a new subgenre – but is it a cathartic feminist statement or an internalised version of the misogyny it seeks to subvert?

Women are writing absolutely horrific novels. Women are writing novels about people (usually women, usually young) who stalk, slash, bludgeon, infect, slice, dismember and cannibalise. Recent additions to the literary subgenre some have termed “femgore” – ultraviolent body-horror by female writers – include EK Sathue’s Youthjuice and The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim . In the autumn, Of the Flesh will be published, a new anthology of “modern horror stories” from authors including Evie Wyld , Lionel Shriver and Susan Barker.

The boom in mainstream body-horror novels written by and explicitly marketed to women could probably be loosely dated to the beginning of the decade, and the publication of Mona Awad’s splenetic campus satire, Bunny . Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts , promoted by critics as “American Psycho for girls” with patronising regularity, followed not long after. Both novels achieved huge commercial success and were early case studies in the power of BookTok to drive sales.

The writer on how a creepy, psychological thriller blew her 13-year old mind, her early outrage at unreliable narrators and taking comfort in Saki

My earliest reading memory
A vivid fight-or-flight response to a joke in Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Ha Ha Bonk Book: “ What’s green, lives in a field and has 4,000 legs? Grass – it was a mistake about the legs.” I remember staring blankly at the page trying to parse what on earth was happening, going through scandalised childish versions of denial, anger, bargaining and depression, until finally reaching awestruck acceptance. Unreliable narrators hit hard in formative years, I guess. The realisation that a writer could get away with treating a reader like that was completely outrageous.

My favourite book growing up
What follows is a cop-out answer, so I’ll try to couch it in self-awareness. I miss when reading felt like a dependably easy, inexhaustibly voracious kind of pleasure. For a long while my preference was to have something like three books “on the go”, which now strikes me as completely absurd. For this reason, it’s genuinely tricky to extricate a single book as being a “favourite”, purely because reading always involved a certain amount of contingent rubbernecking between genres. I will say I hit a memorably sweet spot when pivoting between the boric acid pessaries of James Herriot’s Vet in a Spin at home, Kate Atkinson’s tricksy Behind the Scenes at the Museum for the bus journey, and Small Gods by Terry Pratchett waiting in my school locker.