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Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? It’s become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, she’s also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, she’s drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our ...

It all started with Brambly Hedge and those exquisite drawings of Mrs Apple’s kitchen at Crabapple Cottage: her shelves overflowing with homemade jams, woven baskets heaped with currants and rosehips, drying herbs strung up in bunches along wooden beams. I could only have been four or five when I read Jill Barklem’s books, but I already knew I wanted to sit at Mrs Apple’s table and taste her freshly baked bread and blackberry puddings. I longed to be young Wilfred, off on an adventure, gat...