“Richard Holloway is going to die. I, too, am going to die, and so, dear reader, are you. Holloway’s new book is a plangent and profound meditation on the ultimate inevitability.”

“Because Holloway’s attachment to the rigid formulas of religious faith has loosened in the years since his retirement – he refers to himself as a “doubting priest” – he is the perfect inclusive guide to death. The free-flowing structure he adopts as he goes about his task is elegant, elegiac and thought-provoking; questions not answers, interspersed with material from a range of writers – WH Auden, Philip Larkin, C Day-Lewis, Edward St Aubyn and Atul Gawande.”

Journalist and author Ahmet Altan has been sentenced to life in prison without parole. Following the coup attempt of 2016, the Turkish government under President Erdogan instated a state of emergency and began a series of purges that have seen more than 150,000 people fired, detained or arrested. Ahmet was just one of the journalists and writers that have been tried – one of the charges against him was that he had appeared on television to share subliminal messages in support of the coup.

While he was awaiting trial he wrote the essay ‘The Writer’s Paradox’ – now he’s written another essay in the New York Times about his verdict and the cruel absurdity of the situation he is facing. It begins:

“They sit on a bench that is two meters high. They wear black robes with red collars. In a few hours they will decide my destiny. I look at them. They have loosened their ties out of boredom.”

Curtis Dawkins wrote his remarkable and profound short story collection The Graybar Hotel in prison in Michigan, where he is serving life with no possibility of parole. The money he has made from the book was going into a fund for his three children. Now the state is suing him for that money, to make him pay for his incarceration.

“Powered by Sal’s innate sense of justice and her fierce love for her sweary, show-stealing sister, this original, bittersweet tale effortlessly beguiles”

“The planet, gripped by inequality and anthropocentricity, run by men who can only move ‘warward’ or ‘fuckward’, is headed for the end … The story of the Maid of Orléans transferred to the age of AI is a timely reminder that resistance, however futile or dangerous, is always preferable”

“Tall buildings afford looking, not so much outwards from the citadel, but inwards and downwards, into the thing we have built, its circuitry and grid.” Mark Cousins explores status and frailty in this extract from The Story of Looking.

“Yuknavitch’s weirdly beautiful Joan is a reinvention of what being human is. We are not something against nature but something within nature, permeable and dependant on the world, no matter how we tell ourselves we can stand above our planet and exploit it.”

“Characterisation is where Kidd excels. Cathal Flood is wonderfully enigmatic and complex, and the first description of Maud’s landlady Renata … is assurance if any were needed that this is a writer with a poet’s skill of balancing clarity and inventive flair … Just as Mulderrig in Himself was conjured out of a beautiful, often erotic lyricism, so Bridlemere is brought to life by Kidd’s rich depictions of decay and eccentricity”

“Holloway has not died, but has spent the past few years — indeed, much of his life — thinking deeply about death, the result of which is a new book, Waiting for the Last Bus. He is also an avid reader of other people’s obits, which is why he has agreed to contribute to this, a first draft of his own. ‘I love the obituary as an art form,’ he says. ‘Done well, it’s like a short story, an encapsulation of a complex life.’”

“Bloody January, Alan Parks’s excellent first novel, propels him into the top class of Scottish noir authors. Glasgow detective Harry McCoy, a shambolic mess dedicated to the truth, is so noir that he makes most other Scottish cops seem light grey”