As her ground-breaking biography of Aboriginal activist Tracker Tilmouth is re-issued, the acclaimed Australian author remembers her late friend and talks about her latest novel, Praiseworthy

On the day she decided she had finally finished Praiseworthy, after almost a decade of writing and rewriting until she was happy with every one of its 700-odd pages, Alexis Wright went out to her garden in Melbourne’s north-east, and started furiously weeding. “It was like another edit!” she laughs. “And that garden was weeded within an inch of its life.”

Wright, an Indigenous Australian novelist – one of the Waanyi people from the Gulf of Carpentaria – has written four novels since 1997. Her most recent, Praiseworthy, described by the New York Times as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, was an exhilarating, exhausting labour. “It took me a while to come down from it,” the 74-year-old says. “I didn’t realise how much emotional, physical energy I was putting into it.”

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An aspiring English journalist enters the life of a fabled painter in this seductive debut of art, love and family secrets

A love story wrapped in a mystery, Lucy Steeds’s vividly poetic debut novel begins cinematically and with a prophetic hint of myth: the arrival of a stranger on a dusty road, in his pocket a paper bearing the single-word summons, “Venez”. The year is 1920, in a Europe that is still under the pall of the war that should have ended all wars, and Steeds’s stranger is approaching a remote farmhouse in the Provençal village of Saint-Auguste where fabled painter Edouard Tartuffe – Tata, “the Master of Light” – lives with only his niece Ettie for company.

The newcomer is young Englishman Joseph Adelaide, a disappointed artist and aspiring journalist, in flight from the tragic consequences of a war that has robbed him of his beloved brother and estranged him from his family, after his overbearing father branded him a coward for his conscientious objection. Hoping to begin a new career as a writer on art, Joseph has petitioned Tartuffe for an interview. He asks more in hope than expectation, as Tartuffe is an enigma around whom myths swirl, and has shut himself away from the world for decades. But then the summons comes, and it seems that Joseph may begin his new life.

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Trapped between a controlling partner and a housing system in crisis, a mother in Dublin struggles to protect her children and herself

About a quarter of the way through Roisín O’Donnell’s unbearably tense debut novel , the protagonist finds herself in the foyer of a Dublin hotel. She picks up a brochure, which advises her to “escape the pressures of everyday life at the Hotel Eden” ; the problem is that Ciara and her two young daughters are not trying to escape everyday stresses, but Ciara’s coercive and domineering husband – and crucially, this time they are trying to stay away for good.

Ireland’s housing crisis means there is nowhere, physically, for them to go. Ciara’s family are based in the UK and Ryan has put a block on the girls’ passports, while his controlling ways have cut Ciara off from all her friends. She is also completely financially dependent on him. What follows, then, is a nightmarish attempt to navigate the housing system – a series of cramped waiting rooms and complex forms and unanswered phone calls, which could be described as Kafkaesque, except Josef K didn’t also have to keep a two- and a four-year-old fed, washed and entertained while schlepping between dead-end court hearings.

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This political satire of insurrection and propaganda during the civil war, which is thought to have cost the author his life, gets an English translation at last

Oromay begins as it means to go on, at hurtling speed. A television journalist wakes late, with 20 minutes to catch a plane. And not just any plane: a plane carrying most of the leadership of Ethiopia. Tsegaye has hardly rubbed the sleep from his eyes when he finds himself in first class, receiving orders. There is to be an all-out push to bring the northern province of Eritrea into line with the revolution. He is in charge of hearts and minds, which must be changed. At once.

Oromay is set in the first months of 1982, seven years after emperor Haile Selassie was killed by a military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, who by then had eliminated almost all opposition. A security agent in Oromay describes Eritrea immediately after the coup: beatings, jailings, extra-judicial killings, “corpses in the streets of Asmara almost every morning” – but this happened all across the country. A 1991 report from Human Rights Watch estimated that a minimum of 10,000 people died in Addis Ababa alone during the Red Terror from 1976 to 78; many more were imprisoned or fled. Those targeted were usually young, urban and educated, even if minimally. “That generation was lost,” the report reads, “with the remainder so cowed and terrified that any expression of dissent in Addis Ababa was unthinkable for a decade.” In Eritrea, which since it was colonised by Italy in the late 19th century had had a difficult and constantly shifting relationship with the Ethiopian capital, the repression had the effect of strengthening resistance. “We share,” says the security agent, “the blame for that” – but this time, he promises, it’s going to be different. With this new Red Star Campaign, two years in the planning, the promise of safety will be paramount. Though of course, “we do have to break the insurgency’s back”.

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Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist?

Fiction has a habit of coming to life in Russia. On the evening of 2 April 2023, the military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky appeared at an event in St Petersburg organised by Cyber Front Z, a group of semi-professional keyboard warriors who boost Kremlin war propaganda online. With more than half a million followers, Tatarsky was a mid-tier celebrity on Telegram, the social media app that has become a hub of Russian news and political debate.

As guests mingled, a young woman with long, salon-waved blond hair approached Tatarsky. She presented him with an unusual gift: a gold-painted statue of himself. About two minutes later, the statue exploded, killing Tatarsky and injuring 42 people. The blond woman – 26-year-old St Petersburg native Darya Trepova – was arrested the next day. She said she had believed the statue contained a listening device, not a bomb, and that she had acted on orders from a man in Ukraine she knew only as “Gestalt”.

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Opposites attract in this subtle coming-of-age debut from an American author known for her short stories

Ask Me Again, the first novel by American short story writer Clare Sestanovich, is structured around a series of questions. Each chapter title is a kind of inquiry: Did You See That?; Can You Feel That?; Can I Tell You Something? It’s a simple device, but it creates an atmosphere of interrogative uncertainty I last felt when reading Carol Shields’s Unless, a book in which adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions serve as chapter headings: Therefore; Instead; Despite. The isolated events that make up a life are connected less by tight plot lines than by little fragments of language and the hunger for connection they represent.

Sestanovich is a gifted writer when it comes to capturing appetites. The 11 short stories in her previous book, Objects of Desire , saw her selected in the US as one of The National Book Foundation’s five best writers under 35. They explored the yearnings of young women navigating the challenges of their 20s and 30s, and the trade-offs of middle age. In Ask Me Again, she starts younger, introducing us to a teenage protagonist, Eva, whose precocious hunger for adult experience is captured in three words on the novel’s very first page: “inconsistency was interesting”.

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From befriending the last African enslaved in the US to meeting with zombies in Haiti, the folklorist, anthropologist and Harlem Renaissance writer – who has a novel posthumously published today – was a sensitive chronicler of other people’s lives

Today, on what would have been Zora Neale Hurston’s 134th birthday, a posthumous novel by the American writer and cultural anthropologist has been published. The Life of Herod the Great, which Hurston was working on when she died in 1960, is a sequel to her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, and up until now has been accessible only to scholars. As readers get their hands on this final work, writer Colin Grant takes the opportunity to look back at some of the gems in Hurston’s long and varied career.

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Authors, journalists and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month

I enjoyed Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox. I am a guilty user of the word pretentious, which the book methodically rebukes over its hundred-and-something pages. Art moves forward because people aspire to things they are not (I certainly feel this as a writer). It’s also a word with deeply classist roots, made even worse by the fact that its meaning is often unclear. Instead of saying pretentious, I now think of other words that more accurately describe why I dislike something, such as vapid, poorly written or ugly.

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Bestselling author and Netflix producer said extensive early experience of grief was ‘very cruel but effective teacher’

American thriller writer Harlan Coben said experiencing “quite a bit of tragedy” in his 20s made him a better writer.

The bestselling author, who wrote the Myron Bolitar thriller series and novels turned Netflix shows such as Fool Me Once and Missing You, said he was in his 20s when his father died of a heart attack at the age of 59 in 1988.

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