Meg Wolitzer: The Female Persuasion review - the many faces of feminism

Novel about sisterhood, mentorship and finding an outside voice

Meg Wolitzer’s 10th novel has been hailed as a breakthrough, a feminist blockbuster, an embodiment of the zeitgeist. (Nicole Kidman has bought the film rights, which goes to show.) But in all her fiction, she deftly explores motherhood, career, misogyny, feminism, the domestic detail within the bigger picture, with a very American, affectionate wit – she’s particularly good at awkward teenagers – though sometimes there’s a feeling of skill at the expense of substance.

Frank Gardner: Ultimatum review - topical terrorism

★★★ FRANK GARDNER: ULTIMATUM Luke Carlton returns to confront Iran's enemies within

A Persian predicament: Luke Carlton returns to confront Iran's enemies within

The journalist Frank Gardner has turned to fiction to illuminate with imagination the world that he knows inside out from years of reporting. His biographical trajectory, from scholar of the Middle East and the Arab world, through BBC correspondent in the region – he was shot by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, which left him confined to a wheelchair – has given rise to a riveting memoir, Blood & Sand, as well as a previous thriller, Crisis.

Sophie Mackintosh: The Water Cure review - on the discipline of survival

Dystopian debut novel carves lyric from brutality

A body can be pushed to the brink, to the point where thoughts flatten to a line of light, and come back from death, but the heart is complex and the damage it wreaks barely controllable. For Grace, Lia and Sky, the three sisters of Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel The Water Cure, living by a discipline which tames their bodies and emotions to strict rituals is more than a matter of self-control – it is a matter of survival.

Clancy Sigal: The London Lover review - a merry prankster's very long weekend

★★★ CLANCY SIGAL: THE LONDON LOVER Memoir of the critic who rubbed shoulders, Zelig-like, with players and walk-ons

Memoir of the critic who rubbed shoulders, Zelig-like, with players and walk-ons

To readers of newspapers and magazines, the name Clancy Sigal will be very familiar, probably as a film reviewer. Addicted to writing, and to his old Smith Corona #3 portable typewriter, “Hemingway’s preferred machine”, he was a version of the man who came to dinner. He arrived – inevitably, for this was the early 1950s – off the boat in Dover, intending to spend a weekend exploring before returning to the US. He stayed 30 years.

Richard Vinen: The Long ’68 review - more impartial than impassioned

A study looks at Western Europe and the US on the edge of nervous breakdown 50 years on

Born into the late 1950s, I was too young to be a 68er, though I remember watching it all on TV: the protests in Red Lion Square and Grosvenor Square, where Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave were the leading lights, demonstrating against Vietnam; Paris, where student protests, strikes and sit-ins quickly spread across the country, and General de Gaulle fled briefly to Germany; the riots across the United States that followed Martin Luther King's death, and at the Democratic Convention in Chicago; and of course the

Joe Dunthorne: The Adulterants review - a richly illuminating comedy of disappointment

★★★★★ JOE DUNTHORPE: THE ADULTERANTS A richly illuminating comedy of disappointment

Thirtysomething aspirations are deftly skewered in an update on Waugh and Amis

Joe Dunthorne's debut novel Submarine (2008) burrowed plausibly inside the head of a teenager worrying about sex and his parents’ marriage. Richard Ayaode latched onto its quizzical appeal in his film adaptation. Dunthorne’s longer and more ambitious second novel Wild Abandon (2011) set up camp in a hippy commune in which social conventions were quirkily upended. It was a happy setting for an author intrigued by the perpetual weirdness of human behaviour.

Afua Hirsch: Brit(ish) review - essential reading on identity

★★★★ AFUA HIRSCH: BRIT(ISH) Memoir meets history in this investigation into race, identity and belonging

Memoir meets history in this investigation into race, identity and belonging

Usually extracts in newspapers should stimulate the appetite of the reader to get with it; this is a rare moment when the glimpses afforded to Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging have peculiarly maligned a complex and amply researched investigation into questions of race, identity, politics, geography and history.

The Best of AA Gill review - posthumous words collected

★★★★ THE BEST OF AA GILL Life lived well, cut short

Life lived well, cut short

Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he suggested Mary Beard should be kept away from TV cameras on account of her looks, and shot a baboon), he was consistently brilliant. Wherever he went, he brought his readers with him.