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.

The pleasures of reading and books have been swapped for phonics and grammar. It’s time for change

Too much of what is valuable about studying English was lost in the educational reforms of the past 14 years. A sharp drop-off in the number of students in England taking the subject at A-level means fewer are taking English degrees . Teaching used to be a popular career choice for literature graduates, as Carole Atherton warmly describes in her new book, Reading Lessons . In it, Ms Atherton, a teacher in Lincolnshire, explains the pleasure she takes in teaching novels such as Jane Eyre that she first encountered herself as a teenage bookworm.

But lower numbers of English graduates mean teacher training courses are struggling to fill places for specialist secondary teaching jobs like hers, making entry less competitive. While trainee English teachers used to be plentiful, compared with subjects such as physics, now recruitment targets are routinely missed .

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.

The critically acclaimed American writer has died aged 77 . Here, contemporaries pay tribute to his life and work

• Paul Auster – a life in quotes

• Paul Auster – a life in pictures

British novelist
The exquisite chapter of domestic accidents that opens Paul Auster’s final novel, Baumgartner, leaves us with a microcosm of all that drew a worldwide, discerning readership to this super-abundantly gifted, big-hearted novelist: a limpid present tense; a subtle awareness, comic as well as tragic, of what Virgil identified as “ sunt lac rimae rerum ” – there are tears in the nature of things – which, in Paul’s version, proposed pratfalls as well as death; a perfect expression of a hovering consciousness in the still moment; and finally, a honed prose that seemed to hint that just below its surface were instructions on how to read it and how it was written. The adroit self-consciousness of his writing made him our supreme post-modernist. If his imagination seemed so spacious it was because he was as much a European as an American writer. If he had Thoreau at his back, he also had Beckett. It is possible to cross a Paul Auster Platz and walk down a rue Paul Auster . Not many novelists have been so honoured. As a presence he was ridiculously handsome, worldly, generous, funny and, unlike most great talkers, a highly attuned listener.

The author of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and 4 3 2 1 has died at the age of 77. Here are some of the most memorable quotes from interviews he gave throughout his life

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

I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil – especially for corrections. If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Only a person who really felt compelled to do it would shut himself up in a room every day … When I think about the alternatives – how beautiful life can be, how interesting – I think it’s a crazy way to live your life.

The excitement, the struggle, is emboldening and vivifying. I just feel more alive writing.

You can never achieve what you hope to achieve. You can come close sometimes and others may appreciate your work, but you, the author, will always feel you’ve failed. You know you’ve done your best, but your best isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s why you keep writing. So you can fail a little better the next time.

Generally, I don’t want to do things. I feel lazy and unmotivated. It’s only when an idea grabs hold of me and I can’t get rid of it, when I try not to think about it and yet it’s ambushing me all the time … That’s how it begins. A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It’s a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It’s the music of the language, but it’s also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that’s because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

‘Postmodern’ is a term I don’t understand … there’s an arrogance to all this labelling, a self-assurance that I find to be distasteful, if not dishonest. I try to be humble in the face of my own confusions, and I don’t want to elevate my doubts to some status they don’t deserve. I’m really stumbling. I’m really in the dark. I don’t know . And if that – what I would call honesty – qualifies as postmodern, then OK, but it’s not as if I ever wanted to write a book that sounded like John Barth or Robert Coover .

I think a moment comes at around the age of about five or six when you have a thought and become capable of telling yourself, simultaneously, that you are thinking that thought. This doubling occurs when we begin to reflect on our own thinking. Once you can do that, you are able to tell the story of yourself to yourself. We all have a continuous, unbroken narrative within ourselves about who we are, and we go on telling it every day of our lives.

Some people are able to tell a more or less truthful story about themselves. Others are fantasists. Their sense of who they are is so at odds with what the rest of the world feels about them that they become pathetic … Then, there’s the other extreme, the people who diminish themselves in their own minds. They’re often much greater people than they think they are and, often, much admired by others. Still, they kill themselves inside. Almost by definition, the good are hard on themselves – and the less than good believe they’re the best.

Human beings are imponderable, they can rarely be captured in words. If you open yourself up to all the different aspects of a person, you are usually left in a state of befuddlement.

(When asked about a moment when a boy standing next to him at a summer camp was killed by a lightning strike.) It was the seminal experience of my life. At 14 everything you go through is deep. You are a work-in-progress. But being right next to a boy who was essentially murdered by the gods changed my whole view of the world. I had assumed that the little bourgeois comforts of my life in postwar suburban New Jersey had a kind of order. And then I realised that nothing had that sort of order. I’ve lived with that thought ever since. It’s chilling, but also liberating.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

A Jewish boy’s life splits in two and follows two different paths in this novel of trauma and enduring love in Nazi Europe

‘Where did they all come from, Jens? All those Nazis … ” So wonders 18-year-old Max Spiegelman to his best friend Jens Arnstein, as they prepare to leave Austria for Switzerland. It is 1938 and Nazi Germany has just annexed Austria into the German Reich. The two boys – both Jewish – are struggling to comprehend the actions of their fellow countrymen, seemingly so happy with the new order and the resulting persecution of the Jewish population. “Were they always like that? Did they always hate us? Even when they were smiling and giving us our change and wishing us a good evening?”

The Two Loves of Sophie Strom vividly and engagingly provides the answer in at least one case: that of Max himself. And it depends on little more than chance. One night, in 1933, as people whisper darkly about “those new laws in Germany”, and Brownshirts roam the streets outside, Max dreams of his house burning down with his parents inside. He wakes to smoke and flames, but manages to get himself and his parents out in time. In this moment, his life – and the narrative – splits in two: in one Max survives with his parents, flees to Paris, and joins the French Resistance, and in the other he is orphaned, changes his name to Hans, and joins the Nazi party.