Authors tactfully focus on Plath’s vital hard-won poems, while their introduction affirms how she ‘taught readers to love poetry’

New books by Tony Shaw, Alan McDougall, William Kennedy and Jim Thompson

Author notes, for example, that the superrich in France face an effective tax rate half that of the average French person

Final novel in two-time Pulitzer winner’s Harlem Trilogy traces evolution of its ageing crook characters and of New York itself

Washington prepared to interfere in European politics to influence policy towards Middle East and US tech interests

A nuanced narrative that exposes the tragic heritage novelist and protagonist share as Palestinians

Author expresses an unusual and emotive quality in this novel – pure, unabashed feeling

Collections by Stephen de Búrca, Nithy Kasa, Eamon Grennan and Rita Ann Higgins reviewed

An excellent compendium, and a valuable introduction to the author’s novels

A book about language, memory and the imagination’s resistance to fear

Excellent overview of disorder in our internal chemistry shows author to be an optimistic cheerleader for endocrinology

‘Writing a novel is pretty audacious to begin with. Why not lean into the audacity a little?’

Exploring what it means to ‘live a good life’

A tender novel whose meditations on the self’s uncertain parameters urge excavating the past to better understand the present

At age 17, Forster was invited by the British admiralty to accompany Captain James Cook on his second expedition

Once hailed as the saviour of Spanish democracy, scandal precipitated the former monarch’s abdication and exile

Density of detail in Service’s research means this book is likely to become a definitive account of episode

Moving memoirs from Laurie Hertzel, Kevin Sharkey and Neil Griffiths

The novel is more concerned with the pettiness and absurdities of cancel culture than the scrambled interactions that spark them

A comprehensive guide to buildings that chronicle centuries of conquest, settlement and adaptation