A Town Called Solace: ‘Will break your heart’ Graham Norton

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Magpie (Fourth Estate) by Elizabeth Day is that rare novel that moves and taunts like a thriller, but also envelops and comforts like Middlemarch. Was Elizabeth wrong to allow Clara in her house, without having discussed her previous mental health issues with Clara’s parents? Vanessa Hudgens strikes sexy pose in green-patterned bikini while poolside as she ends more pregnancy speculation. It mines the same narrow, dangerous territory as Beryl Bainbridge and Ivy Compton-Burnett: the dysfunctional family unit. As we cycle through these three characters’ perspectives in alternating chapters, we gradually come to understand the connections between them.

She feels let down by the lies her parents tell her to protect her ("Adults in general were less reliable than they should be"). Here, the larger than life character, though involved in the more dangerous narrative, is made into a secondary character, kept at a distant. I came to think of these three characters, Mrs Orchard ( Elisabeth), the grown up child and previous neighbour of Mrs Orchard, now adult ( Liam), and 8 year old current neighbour of Mrs Orchard ( Clara), as depicting narratives of past, present and future, that overlap.ITV's Love Island All Stars faces backlash from fans over complaints about the format: 'Streaming platforms have me spoiled! Debut novel The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris has been a smash in the US: a revisionist take on civil war history, with a sweeping treatment of forbidden gay love and the aftermath of slavery.

Rooney has an old-fashioned belief that the novel can be a place in which the question of how we should live is continually at play. Orchard was sent for a short stay in hospital, and Clara promised to keep an eye on the house and its remaining occupant, Mrs. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (Fourth Estate) by Rivka Galchen flew a bit under the radar, but it is a wise meditation on the kind of hysterical scapegoating we see so often in the age of the internet, though based on a historical fact: that the mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler was once accused of witchcraft.

Seriously ill in hospital, Elizabeth looks back on her life, addressing her reminiscences to her recently deceased husband. Ishiguro makes the cut alongside some heavyweight names, from Richard Powers, chosen for the yet-to-be-published Bewilderment, about a widowed astrobiologist trying to raise his nine-year-old son, to Rachel Cusk, longlisted for Second Place, in which a woman invites an artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives. Zorrie (Riverrun; published early next year) by Laird Hunt is a tender, glowing novel that is just as beautiful as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. The Promise (Chatto) by Damon Galgut is a remarkable tale of four generations of one South African family and of the country itself.