Unfolding over 24 hours, this captivating novel set inside the head of a woman consumed by her obsessions is as engrossing as it is unusual

“Many of the residents here are not equipped for life as it is commonly regulated,” reflects the narcissistic, madly distracted yet profoundly cultured narrator Helen near the end of this captivating, strange novel by New York author Lynne Tillman (who writes novels, short stories and criticism). Least of all this clever ex-historian whom I took to be Tillman’s realisation of a postmodern successor to such endearingly digressive women as Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days or Joyce’s Molly Bloom.

That said, our heroine most resembles Ronnie Corbett, who in his weekly monologues on The Two Ronnies would go off on multiple tangents before concluding apologetically: “But I digress.” Helen is like that: a digressive flaneur through a mindscape seething with fixations on chair design, textile manufacture, the Zulu language, Kant’s account of mental ailments, how parasitical fleas prey on kittens in Amsterdam and lots more. Helen reflects repeatedly on one of the Manson murderers, Leslie Van Houten, seeing in her fate, perhaps, something of America’s capacity for evil and refusal of redemption. She also obsessively recalls her mum killing her beloved childhood cat because the cat killed Helen’s parakeet. Unlike Ronnie Corbett, though, Helen never stops digressing long enough to find time to apologise for her self-indulgences.

American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman is published by Peninsula Press (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

A delightful but decidedly unfunny encounter with the author led to a train of thought about his comic books

When I was a teenager, David Lodge , who died last week at the age of 89, meant more to me than any other writer. It wasn’t only that his novels were so wildly entertaining and funny. My parents had been born into the optimistic but class-ridden postwar world he caught with such precision, and for this reason I saw his tales of campus life as helpful guides to the more baffling aspects of adult behaviour.

There was no getting away from the fact that my father, a university lecturer, had an amazing amount in common with both conformist Philip Swallow and randy Morris Zapp, the two professors who enjoy a transatlantic exchange in Changing Places ( the first of a trilogy set in Rummidge, a city modelled on Birmingham, where Lodge both lived and taught).

This elegiac novel tracks a West Indian man’s life in London over decades, exploring the emotional cost of leaving home and being met by hatred and rejection

Will the last one out please turn off all the lights?” This was the joke that spread across the West Indies in the 1950s and 60s as young adults succumbed to “England Fever” in their determination to migrate to Britain. Having saved enough for his ticket from Saint Kitts, Victor Johnson, the protagonist of Another Man in the Street, has his finger on the light switch at the start of Caryl Phillips’s elegiac novel. From his debut, 1985’s The Final Passage, Phillips has steadfastly focused on the precarious lives of migrants in novels such as In the Falling Snow and in his hybrid work Foreigners: Three English Lives. His books have stood out against other accounts of the Windrush generation’s stoicism, exploring the emotional cost of leaving home and being met by hatred and rejection.

The transatlantic journey was a rite of passage for former “children of empire” – now “citizens of the Commonwealth” – on their way to an imagined homecoming in bombed-out, postwar Britain. This has previously been mapped in novels such as Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. But Phillips’s refreshing approach in Another Man in the Street is to ask the question rarely posed: what happened to these pioneers over the decades to come? It’s as if the Kittitian-born novelist has taken a character from Selvon’s seminal work and tracked him over 50 years, charting his progress and consequential missteps.

His trilogy captured my heart – and while Amis, Bradbury and Jacobson spoke to me, Lodge’s writing had an extra something

• David Lodge, Campus Trilogy novelist and academic, dies aged 89
• ‘It’s largely thanks to him that the British comic novel remains in good health’: David Lodge remembered by Jonathan Coe

David Lodge was already a lauded novelist in 1987, when I arrived at the unassuming doors of Foster Court on Malet Place to study English literature and language at University College London. Lodge had taken the same course there himself more than 30 years before, got a first and went on to do a master’s there, too. His name was spoken with pride in hushed, reverent tones – and this was a department that would happily dismiss anything published after 1850 as hopelessly modern. I dutifully bought Changing Places to see what the fuss was about.

The campus novel was a serious literary genre then – Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and Howard Jacobson were prominent names and their novels spoke to me at the time, because I was navigating that scary world myself – but within a single chapter I saw immediately that Lodge’s writing had an extra something: he was properly funny. Not just subtly clever or wryly satirical. Not somewhat amusing if you’ve read the entire works of John Milton and are up to speed on hot trends in lit crit, no – they were bright, lively and laugh-out-loud hilarious, with as many sex and toilet jokes as literary references. His characters were flawed in a real way and became entangled in farcical situations that were completely believable. I was hooked, and explored his backlist like a true fan – or like a student of English who should really have been reading the Romantics.

The author always had a warmth and wry wisdom to his characterisations and his eye for the absurd ensured he was one of the most truthful of postwar novelists

• David Lodge, Campus Trilogy novelist and academic, dies aged 89

‘My imagination,” David Lodge once wrote, “seems drawn to binary structures which bring contrasting milieux, cultures and characters into contact and conflict”. He was talking specifically about the genesis of his “breakthrough novel”, Changing Places , which found so much comedy – broad and subtle, oblique and laugh-out-loud – in the contrast between British and American ways of academic life. But the words could apply to all of his work, and they help to explain why he excelled in a mode of distinctively British comedy that won him devoted fans not just in his own country but all over the US and continental Europe.

Changing Places was published at the high-water mark of the British postwar male comic novel. The ripples sent out by Lucky Jim 20 years earlier could still be felt, Evelyn Waugh’s novels were a recent memory, Wodehouse had only just died, Tom Sharpe and Malcolm Bradbury (Lodge’s close friend) were high in the bestseller lists. To the dry sense of the ridiculous shared by these writers, Lodge added his lightly worn feelings of spiritual angst as an “agnostic Catholic” and a flexible approach to literary technique which came from his admiration for the great modernists. One of the reasons Changing Places still feels so fresh is the way it hops so expertly between literary modes, from letters to found texts, from third-person narration to film script: the work of a man who had read and digested his early 20th-century masters.

The author of more than two dozen books is best known for his trio set in a fictionalised version of the University of Birmingham, where he worked from 1960 to 1987

British author and critic David Lodge, best known for his Campus Trilogy of novels, has died aged 89.

Lodge wrote more than two dozen novels and works of nonfiction, as well as television scripts and plays. He was shortlisted for the Booker prize twice, first for his 1984 novel Small World and then in 1988 for the novel Nice Work, which are the second and third instalments of his celebrated Campus Trilogy.

The prize-winning author on a masterclass from Hilary Mantel, rereading James Joyce, and coming back to Wuthering Heights

My earliest reading memory
I was seven. It was a book called Run With the Wind, by Tom McCaughren, which is like an Irish riff on Watership Down but with foxes instead of rabbits. I loved it.

My favourite book growing up
Alexandre Dumas ’s The Three Musketeers. I think I was 12. I remember finding it funny, gripping and yet also much darker than I’d expected. When I discovered there was a sequel called Twenty Years After, I asked the local bookshop to order it in (the first time I had ever done this), which felt momentous.

The spectre of extinction hangs over the Japanese writer’s brilliantly strange and unsettling vision of evolution

In Keepsakes, the opening section of Hiromi Kawakami’s haunting novel-in-stories, a woman describes her world. Although peaceful and orderly, it is an unsettling and strange place: people are made in factories from animal DNA, then live startlingly brief lives, growing to adulthood in a handful of years and often dying young. Memory, both personal and historical, is fragmentary and, in the case of memories of childhood, actively suppressed. Meanwhile, the society’s anxieties are focused on preserving the children the woman helps raise and the biological diversity they embody: as one of the characters declares, “If we lose the children, that’s the end of the world”.

This spectre of genetic decline and extinction stalks all 14 of the stories that make up Under the Eye of the Big Bird. In one, men – now vanishingly rare due to their genetic fragility – are assigned to breed with particular women; although they “marry” them, the question of consent is never invoked. In another, one of the characters reflects that, “as a species, we simply don’t have what it takes”.

The author of Bellies explores contemporary questions of sex, love, relationship etiquette and gender identity

Disappoint Me is a novel structured around meals, whether assembled distractedly or seasoned with care, and people making strained conversation over birthday barbecues or overpriced small plates in Hackney restaurants. Like her cult debut Bellies , Nicola Dinan’s highly readable and engrossing second novel paints mealtimes as a sociocultural ritual as much as a means of giving characters something to chew on while they reach new understandings or fail to connect. Food and sex, talk and pointed silence, the heart and the stomach are deftly entwined in this deeply contemporary story which explores friendship, queerness, the pacifying allure of couplehood and evolving social mores among millennial Londoners.

Reformed party girl Max meets gallant lawyer Vincent over a sushi date in the opening pages: not so much a meet cute as a swipe right, that’ll do. Dinan is adept at capturing the apathy and cynicism engrained in dating via “the apps”, where the paradox of choice gives rise to a second-guessing diffidence and a shirking of real intimacy. “Would I have sex with Vincent? I guess. If he’s nice,” Max muses. The two bond over their shared Chinese heritage and corporate backgrounds, and to her surprise Max finds an understated attraction and the promise of something meaningful growing between them.