It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.

How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a question that Ellen McWilliams, in her highly moving and humorous memoir, takes not only seriously but as the stylistic basis of her work. An early rhetorical question she asks haunts the text: ‘who am I to speak?’ The consequences of asking this are twofold and, I think, important.

Anita Pallenberg was a vital presence in the Stones’ most vital years. Her bright eyes and hungry mouth betrayed a ferocious appetite for pleasure and adventure, taking her from a nun-schooled Rome childhood to New York’s downtown art crowd, then modelling in Munich, where in 1965 she engineered an encounter with “shy” Keith Richards, a similarly callow Mick Jagger and her first, violent Stones lover Brian Jones. Richards saved her from Jones’ paranoid abuse in 1967, and they became notorious outlaw lovers for the next decade.

Artist and writer, Heather McCalden, has produced her first book-length work. The Observable Universe examines, variously, her familial history, the death of her parents to AIDS, and the subsequent loss of her maternal grandmother, Nivia, who raised her. It’s a fragmentary work, but the medium (half-memoir, half-essay) responds to the author’s own sense of disconnection and uncertainty, and at its heart is an aching feeling of loneliness and grief.

There are moments that forever remain imprinted in our consciousness, engraved on the general map of our lives. I cannot forget the excitement of seeing snow for the first time in Córdoba, aged three or four, rushing to walk on it only to slip straight away and fall on my behind! Or when I discovered the sea, in Cádiz.

After a first read of the blurb for Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, you might be forgiven for assuming that this is merely a gimmick.

The book does what it says on the tin: each "chapter" begins with the next letter of the alphabet, with the content then roughly alphabetised within this, all of the sentences based on “half a million words from a decade’s worth of journals”. However, this book, written in her familiar, autobiographical style, flourishes against its constraints.

2023 was a good year for Andy Warhol post-mortems: after Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, after Alexandra Auder’s Don’t Call Home, Richard Dorment’s Warhol After Warhol.

The latest translation of Annie Ernaux’s Shame – a text most closely akin to a long-form essay – is an absorbing examination of how one fleeting moment from childhood can have lasting and unpredictable consequences, and how a life might be irrevocably defined by such contingencies.

In a very real sense, Terry Pratchett taught me how to write. I first came across his work when I was 12 years old, in the early 90s.

My parents had been given copies of two of the earliest books in his Discworld series, Guards! Guards! and The Colour of Magic, by a bloke down the pub – which is how you’re supposed to get Discworld books – and, knowing that I was an utter nerd with a preposterously overactive imagination and a love of silly humour, passed them down to me.

In 1988, James Birch – curator, art dealer, and gallery owner – took Francis Bacon to Moscow. It was, as he writes, "an unimaginable intrusion of Western Culture into the heart of the Soviet system". At a time of powerful political tension and suspicion, but also optimism and opportunity, the process of exhibiting Bacon was riddled with difficulties, careful negotiations, joys and disappointments.