Shortlisted for the Women’s prize, this epic account of a country and a family torn apart combines the intimacy of a memoir with the urgency of reportage

American writer VV Ganeshananthan’s devastating second novel, Brotherless Night, has recently been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction . Mainly set in Jaffna during the long, blood-drenched years of the Sri Lankan civil war, fought between the Sinhalese-dominated state and Tamil separatist groups, the book is an unforgettable account of a country and a family coming undone.

At its heart is the narrator, Sashi Kulenthiren, an aspiring doctor whose brothers Seelan and Dayalan join the militant Tamil Tigers after their eldest sibling is killed in anti-Tamil riots. In her grief, anger and confusion, Sashi is heartbreakingly human. In one scene, Seelan and Dayalan come home after a training stint in India and we see Sashi pained by their new reserve and fazed by their temerity. “We have been taught to think that Tamil children should only be that obedient to their parents, and it was strange to see another loyalty.” To their mother’s livid and anguished queries – “Why did you leave us? Where did you go? Who took you there? Were you safe? How did you come back here? How long will you stay?” – Seelan and Dayalan give only terse, evasive answers.

A bureaucrat in near-future London finds love with a Victorian Arctic explorer in a thrilling debut that takes a deep dive into human morality

For a book to be good – really good, keep it on your shelf for ever good – it has to be two things: fun and a stretch . You have to need to know what happens next; and you have to feel like a bigger or better version of yourself at the end. Airport thrillers are almost always fun; much contemporary autofiction is just a stretch, largely because it’s very hard for a book in which not much happens to be a page-turner. What a thrill, then, to come to Kaliane Bradley’s debut, The Ministry of Time, a novel where things happen, lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to think about.

Bradley’s book is also serious, it must be said – or, at least, covers serious subjects. The British empire, murder, government corruption, the refugee crisis, climate change, the Cambodian genocide, Auschwitz, 9/11 and the fallibility of the human moral compass all fall squarely within Bradley’s remit. Fortunately, however, these vast themes are handled deftly and in deference to character and plot.

Government arts spokesperson Todd Stephenson’s inability to name a New Zealand author for 20 minutes in an interview has rightfully raised eyebrows

Politicians are used to being asked tough questions – and voters are, by now, used to their stalling in response. Still, you might not imagine that “name a New Zealand author” could ever be one of them – especially for a New Zealand politician, holding an arts portfolio.

Yet that’s exactly how the ACT party’s arts spokesperson, Todd Stephenson, has surprised us, taking 20 minutes to name a single Kiwi author – or even a book – in an interview with Newsroom . In the quite remarkable exchange with Steve Braunias, Stephenson was blithely forthcoming about his limited experience of his portfolio: “It’s an area I’m wanting to learn more about.”

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist and writer

The author of Motherless Brooklyn recalls his deepening relationship with the late author - from a chance book signing to becoming a confidant during tough times

• Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77

• Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generation

I remember the first time I approached Paul Auster. This would have been in 1987. I was an aspiring writer working at a bookstore in Berkeley and Paul appeared at another bookstore nearby, to read from In the Country of Last Things. It seems likely to me now that this was the first time a “major” publisher had sent him on a US book tour. The New York Trilogy was published in hardcover by a small publisher called Sun & Moon Press; up to that point he’d been a poet and translator. Paul signed a book for me. I never told him about this.

I remember that, when Music of Chance was published a few years later, I had the feeling I’d read something by a writer exercising an absolute freedom to do whatever interested him, and that at that moment he was the US novelist I most wished to be.

‘Dog lover’ South Dakota governor said 14-month-old hound was ‘extremely dangerous’ but failed to mention slowly killing a goat

Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota whose chance of being Donald Trump’s presidential running mate was widely deemed over after she published a description of shooting dead a dog and a goat , claimed reports of the story were “fake news” but also that the dog in question, Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer, was “extremely dangerous” and deserved her fate.

“You know how the fake news works,” Noem told Fox News. “They leave out some or most of the facts of a story, they put the worst spin on it. And that’s what’s happened in this case.

Author of The New York Trilogy who conjured up a world of wonder and happenstance, miracle and catastrophe

The American writer Paul Auster, who has died aged 77 from complications of lung cancer, once described the novel as “the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy”. His own 18 works of fiction, along with a shelf of poems, translations, memoirs, essays and screenplays written over 50 years, often evoke eerie states of solitude and isolation. Yet they won him not just admirers but distant friends who felt that his peculiar domain of chance and mystery, wonder and happenstance, spoke to them alone. Frequently bizarre or uncanny, the world of Auster’s work aimed to present “things as they really happen, not as they’re supposed to happen”.

To the readers who loved it, his writing felt not like avant-garde experimentalism but truth-telling with a mesmerising force. He liked to quote the philosopher Pascal, who said that “it is not possible to have a reasonable belief against miracles”. Auster restored the realm of miracles – and its flip-side of fateful catastrophe – to American literature. Meanwhile, the “postmodern” sorcerer who conjured alternate or multiple selves in chiselled prose led (aptly enough) a double life as sociable pillar of the New York literary scene, a warm raconteur whose agile wit belied the brooding raptor-like image of his photoshoots. For four decades he lived in Brooklyn with his second wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt.

From a pioneering 1940s ‘gastrography’ to a recent novel about a real-life 18th-century French peasant cursed with an appetite to eat just about everything

Food in books has a way of lodging in the memory. For some it might be the kidneys on Leopold Bloom’s mind in Joyce’s Ulysses. For others, it’s the hard-won German sausage that Ratty finds at the end of Wind in the Willows. The book may be rich or grotesque, stark or sickly sweet, but we, the reader, are always invited to ask ourselves why, and how, we choose to take it in.

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A grieving son aims to connect with his late father through the cassette tapes he left behind, in a tale of jazz, black ambition and romance

Set across two timelines, 1936 and 2012, Manny and the Baby is a debut novel about a grieving son, Itai, desperate to connect to his late father through the pile of cassette tapes wrapped in newspaper that he left behind. What is recorded on those tapes leads Itai to discover the fervid history of two estranged sisters, Manny and Rita, and a Jamaican trumpeter who is Itai’s grandfather, Ezekiel Brown, who all find each other amid Soho’s smoky prewar jazz scene.

The story starts in 2012 against the backdrop of the Olympics. Itai, a proud London boy, travels to Bath to make sense of his father’s death and why he bought a house in a city he had no obvious connection to. “The place was weird. Surreal. Looked like a film set, a cardboard country, begging for him to huff and puff and blow it all down.” Itai perseveres and moves into the property – filling the place with plants and looking through his father’s archive (he was a scholar in ethnomusicology). He buys weed from local boy Josh, a runner and part-time dealer, whose side hustle is at odds with his athletic ambitions.

This defiantly old-fashioned tale of two misfits, a ghost and a blazing comet showcases Perry’s unerring capacity to make the earthly new and strange

How do you quiet a warring soul? Every one of Sarah Perry’s novels has grappled lavishly with this question. Fate v free will; doubt v certainty; science v God. The metaphysical battleground is Perry’s literary terrain. She cannot seem to escape its gravitational pull, nor the estuarine mud of her home county. And so it seems only fitting that the Essex author’s new novel, Enlightenment, is a tale of orbits, collisions and other cosmic ellipses: inescapable loops.

We begin in the winter of 1997 in the fictional riverside town of Aldleigh, a version of Chelmsford, where Perry grew up. This was a decisive year for Britain: the year of Tony Blair and the New Labour landslide, the handover of Hong Kong, and Princess Diana’s funeral pageantry. But the only event that interests Perry is celestial: the blazing arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet. Enlightenment has its neck cricked upwards, its eyes full of moonlight.