When Amer Deghayes departed for Syria in a truck leaving from Birmingham, a worker from a youth arts organisation in Brighton had been trying to get in touch with him. She wanted to inform Amer, an intelligent and creative 18-year-old who had once harboured journalistic ambitions, that his pitch to develop a project about identity in his hometown had been successful. The Heritage Lottery fund had decided to award him £50,000.

Ravi Shankar was one of the giants of 20^th century music. A musician, composer and teacher, he had an extraordinarily fruitful career that spanned nine decades and reached the entire world. He did more to build a bridge between the music and spirituality of India and the West than any of his contemporaries.

South London-based publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions has once more been awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize, confirming its status as a vital home for ambitious, edge-defining fiction. Now in its fifth year, the prize seeks to promote and reward the best in literary fiction from small presses in the UK and Ireland, which it defines broadly as publishers with fewer than five full-time employees.

Assassinate the President! Obliterate history by torching libraries and murdering historians! Crazy leaders and fake news are just a few of the subjects tackled by political journalist and thriller writer, Jonathan Freedland (aka Sam Bourne), in this, his fifth novel featuring the inventive, imaginative, intelligent trouble-shooter Maggie Costelloe. 

Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator – a scarcely fictional version of herself – is of the performance artist Pippa Bacca who, in 2008, set out on a symbolic journey from Milan to Jerusalem clad in a white wedding dress, hitchhiking her way through cities and countryside. Bacca was never to reach her destination.

That any writer “struggling to make ends meet” would apply themselves to the making of Dream of Fair to Middling Women is something of a complexity.

St. Patrick’s Day, and socialising itself, has been all but cancelled. But turn the rickety door-handle of a bohemian pub near Brighton station, and a poignant scene is unfolding.

“Groupthink”, according to Christopher Booker, is “one of the most valuable guides to collective human behaviour we have ever been given.” But what is it exactly? It begins Booker’s final, incomplete and posthumously published work as a descriptor for behaviour dictated by the “group mind”, the fixations of the “human herd”, or a “collective make-believe”.

How do you prevent a sick baby in a high-care cubicle, his frail chest swamped in secretions, from drowning in his own “loose mucus”? Remove a suction catheter from its wrapping and insert it gently into the tiny mouth. “The whooshing sound of the vacuum sucks up his cracking cry. I flip the switch again and the sound stops. The cry subsides, his breath returns to soft chugs. The oxygen saturations on the monitor rise slightly. I tap his tummy and shush hush him back to sleep.”

Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a true novel of two halves and is (excuse the pun) a bit of a curate’s egg. Kawakami’s bio at the beginning of the text explains that the novel was expanded from an earlier novella, made clear by a separation into books one and two. The first book centres on the visit of the narrator’s sister and niece to her house in Tokyo, and the second brings the narrator, Natsume, into the centre of a story about her desire to conceive a child at forty.