Funny, spooky and surreal, this shapeshifting novel from the Francophone author explores Congolese politics

Best known to English-language readers for his novels African Psycho, Broken Glass and Black Moses , Alain Mabanckou, a social satirist of breathtaking originality, is a leading name in contemporary Francophone literature. His books, which draw on his Congolese heritage, tend to be exuberantly imagined, a tad absurd, very funny and focused on off-kilter and off-centre perspectives. In his piquant and spunky new offering, Mabanckou tells the story of Liwa Ekimakingaï, who returns from the dead in search of closure. Told in the second person and engagingly translated by Helen Stevenson, the novel opens in a cemetery in the port city of Pointe-Noire, where the 24-year-old has risen from his grave in a seismic flurry, attired in an orange crepe jacket, a fluorescent-green shirt, purple flares and shiny red shoes. (If you are new to Mabanckou, you might be interested to know that he employs a personal stylist, and that his own sartorial preference tends toward the bold and bright.) Liwa is a classic Mabanckou character: orphaned, irresistibly charming but cruelly bereft of luck.

Once risen, Liwa falls asleep and begins “the longest dream of his death”, in which images from his four-day funeral mingle with memories of growing up: being raised by his maternal grandmother in the Trois-Cents neighbourhood; getting into mischief with his friends; turning for guidance to the Pentecostal church, officiated by a man later executed for ritual murder; and landing a job as a commis chef in the kitchen of the French-owned Victory Palace Hotel.

The British-Libyan author on Hemingway’s craft, finding comfort in Joseph Conrad, and spending six months drowning in Austen

My earliest reading memory
From as far back as I can remember, before I could read, I was read to mostly from the same book, The Arabian Nights , feeling the reverberations of Shahrazad’s sentences against my mother’s lap, and suspecting that it must be so: that to tell a story is to postpone death, that after she asks her would-be murderer, “Do I have your permission to tell a story?”, the world is made a little less certain.

The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 13 I read Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s Rain Song. I can’t claim to have understood it, but those poems ripped open a veil. The experience of being overrun by language, of being caught in the wake of lines that were just beyond reach, showed me how literature can be both the translation of an experience and also its manifestation.

This powerful debut plunges the reader into a raging battle between a young Afghan woman’s cultural identity and desire for freedom

Nila is the wild, rebellious daughter of Afghan doctors who fled their home before she was born and settled in a brutalist social housing block in Berlin. After 9/11, the family learned to lie (“To resent ourselves with precision”), to hide parts of themselves that seemed too much like “those people”; Muslims in a city where Nazis were alive and well. Then her mother died, and Nila began looking for a way out. Venturing out of her neighbourhood, she saw “people drinking mulled wine at Christmas markets, and between them, everywhere, there was a Mohammed or an Ali or an Aisha trying to get by”. And she hated them, “hated everyone who had the same fate as I did … I was ravaged by the hunger to ruin my life.”

Poet Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl, follows the grieving Nila as she comes of age in the nightclubs of Berlin. At The Bunker, Nila does ecstasy and falls into an unequal romance with a charismatic American author who dominates and desires her in just the way the damaged creature inside her craves. Marlowe Woods offers her an escape from the Afghan ideal of a “good girl”. He is also a tedious narcissist who pontificates about art, obliviously invites neo-Nazis into his house, and finds foreign cab drivers (some of whom are Nila’s uncles) too depressing to talk to. At the same time, he seems to give himself credit for Nila’s artistic awakening as a photographer: an awakening that is rooted in her otherness, in the yearning both to estrange herself from and depict her parents, to make them beautiful to Europeans. Nila loves literature and art because they make her “a person incomprehensible” to her parents, and yet photography gives her access to her mother’s “secret inner life, adrift in our strange city … an unknowable loss marking her eyes”.

This acutely portrayed reckoning with contemporary Indian sociopolitics traces the faultlines of caste, class and religion

Devika Rege’s debut is not a definitive state-of-the-nation novel. Nor can it be characterised as the next “great Indian novel”, although it holds greatness within its pages. This chorus of the collective contains a multitude of ideologies and perspectives.

It is 2014, and the Bharat party – a thinly veiled version of the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP – is newly in power. It was a choice between “the weak governance” of the preceding ruling party, synonymous with decades of corruption, “and fascism”, and India has voted in favour of the rightwing party promising to clean the Ganga river, holy to the Hindu majority.

This episodic, multi-layered debut crosses decades and continents to shine a light on the universality and uniqueness of women’s experience

Catherine Airey’s debut novel opens in New York on 9/11. Sixteen-year-old Cora, who is playing truant, watches the news from her apartment, and knows that her father is dead. Michael was an accountant who worked on the 104th floor of the North Tower. Cora’s mother Máire died seven years earlier, so she is now an orphan.

Cora tells us all this herself. Absconding from her convent school, she has the jaded, unworldly voice of the affluent Manhattan teen (in fiction, at least – The Catcher in the Rye, which is referenced, or Gossip Girl). This is her recollection of her mother’s death: “The morgue had comfy armchairs in the lobby, and I can remember being annoyed that it didn’t take longer for my father to identify the body. I was reading Little Women and would have quite happily sat there all day. I was nine.”

Trainer for the Special Operations Executive who acted as a ‘honey trap’ and later wrote novels based on her wartime experiences

Noreen Riols, who has died aged 98, served within the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE), which coordinated resistance operations behind enemy lines. Her main role lay in training officers for surveillance work by acting as their target. She also acted as a “honey trap” in the final test before agents were sent into the field, trying to seduce them into giving away their mission.

Recruited in 1943, at the age of 17, on the basis of her fluency in French, Riols was too young to be sent into France and was initially employed within F Section, preparing agents to go there. But in February 1944, she was sent to the SOE “finishing school” at Beaulieu in the New Forest, the final stage of every SOE agent’s training course, where a professional burglar taught them how to pick locks, and they were trained in the skills they would need as an agent operating on the ground constantly on the lookout for the enemy surveillance.

The booker longlisted title takes the debut fiction prize while Adam S Leslie, Sophie Elmhirst and Liz Hyder win fiction, nonfiction and children’s categories

Booker longlisted author Colin Barrett has won the Nero book award for debut fiction for his novel Wild Houses.

Meanwhile Adam S Leslie has won in the fiction category for Lost in the Garden, while Guardian Long Reads contributor Sophie Elmhirst’s Maurice and Maralyn was named nonfiction winner. Liz Hyder was awarded the prize in the children’s fiction category for The Twelve, illustrated by Tom De Freston.

Kraf’s charming and challenging fourth and final novel, now published in the UK, is narrated by a New Yorker who experiences psychotic episodes

“I am glad I have the radiance. This time I am wiser,” begins Elaine Kraf’s 1979 novel – now published for the first time in the UK – in irresistibly intriguing style. The narrator is Ellen, an artist living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she regularly experiences periods of what she calls radiance, or what the rest of us would call psychosis, mental illness, or detachment from reality.

And what “the rest of us” think is part of the problem for Ellen, because the radiances make her happy and she is no threat to anybody. “Fools! No one likes anyone for what they really are.” So she becomes Esmeralda, self-styled princess of 72nd Street. “I am not one of those rulers who is never seen on the streets mingling with the common people.”

The US novelist and co-writer of The Wire on why his new book isn’t about cops and robbers, his 80s drug addiction and the authors who have inspired him

Richard Price, 75, is a screenwriter and author whose books include the 600-page drug-war epic Clockers (1992), which was filmed by Spike Lee and inspired the HBO crime drama The Wire , co-written by Price. Michael Chabon has called him “one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature”. Born and raised in the Bronx, he lives in Harlem – the setting for his new novel, Lazarus Man , in which four strangers cross paths amid the collapse of a tenement block.

The book’s acknowledg ments mention its “incredibly long gestation”...
I signed the contract to write this 17 years ago; if it was a baby, it’d now be applying to college. I’d just written Lush Life , a sort of panorama of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and I wanted to try to do the same for Harlem, but I’d only just moved there. New York City is 1,000 cities – move five blocks, you’re in a different one – so I had to live there a while to pick up the nuance. Plus, I was in a new relationship and it took about two years to calm down: it’s not just get up, write, sleep, get up, write, sleep, you know. And I needed dough – you can’t live on royalties from a novel – so I was doing TV serials. Also, honestly, I was intimidated: I’m a white writer in a time where people are very sensitive to who gets to write the stories of who. When I wrote Clockers , there wasn’t that policing of language; the whole world became hyperconscious, probably in a good way.