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Shalom Auslander’s last novel, Hope: A Tragedy, featured a “foul-mouthed and geriatric Anne Frank” among its characters, said Sam Leith in The Guardian. In his latest work, he again risks offending readers with a satire about cannibals being a “persecuted minority”. Seventh Seltzer is a New York publisher who belongs to a dwindling band of “Cannibal-Americans”. Having “married out” of his tribe, he no longer participates in family rituals. Yet when his mother summons him to her deathbed, hoping he’ll give her the traditional send-off – for which she has been fattening h...

See all pages Jonty Claypole, the BBC’s director of arts, grew up with a stammer, said Ben Cooke in The Times. In Words Fails Us, he powerfully argues that all conditions which involve “disfluency” – such as stammering, Tourette’s and aphasia – should be looked on more positively. For much of history, he points out, “speech disorders were thought of as “malfunctions”, sometimes treated with grotesque remedies – including, in the 19th century, “gory incisions” to the tongue. Though society has become more enlightened, Claypole believes there is a long way to go: when y...

See all pages Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel, which received rave reviews when it was published in Australia last autumn, is a story of “extinction, both personal and environmental”, said Amanda Craig in The Spectator. It is set in the summer of 2019-20, when raging bushfires were wiping out Tasmania’s “cornucopia of flora and fauna”.  In a Hobart hospital lies 86-year-old Francie, close to being wiped out herself. With her are her three grown-up children: successful professionals Anna and Terzo, and “stammering, chaotic” Tommy. Francie wants to die, but only Tommy respects ...

Share Its brief was simple — ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’. This it has done ever since by publicising an annual shortlist of toe-curling extracts from the sex scenes of a handful of novels published that year, and then announcing the winner at a high-toned party just before Christmas in central London at which the winner, should they have the courage to turn up, is awarded £250, a magnum of Champagne and a ‘semi-abstract statue representing incompetent sex’ pr...