Conner Habib, an award-winning writer, teacher, poet, essayist and lecturer – with the unusual distinction of being a prize-winning porn actor, to boot – has been relentlessly interrogating the prevailing cultural narrative for years. His podcast Against Everyone With Conner Habib explores topics as diverse and divisive as sexuality, punk rock and the occult. It’s no surprise, then, that his debut novel is no easy ride, though anyone prepared to succumb to its seductive, if deadly, charms will be amply repaid.

English teacher Todd is estranged from his wife and recently moved to a New England town where he is raising their six-year-old son, Anthony, alone. On the beach one day, in a seemingly chance encounter, he bumps into his high school tormentor, Jack. Charmingly apologetic and apparently reformed, Jack wastes no time inveigling himself into Todd and Anthony’s life. As a few nights on the couch stretch into weeks, Jack takes more and more liberties until, instead of building a new life for himself and his son, Todd finds himself repeatedly drawn back to a past he thought he’d left behind.

The scene is set, and in an evocative narrative that shifts skilfully between past and present, Habib weaves his tale of desire, manipulation and madness. A creeping dread drips off the page from the very beginning, and the act of violence to which it’s been building is shocking in both its brutality and inevitability.

Habib’s prose is compelling and razor sharp. Though this is not a novel for the squeamish or faint-hearted, there’s nothing gratuitous. He examines the legacy of abuse and violence, and ponders whether it’s ever truly possible to escape our past. Anyone familiar with his work will be unsurprised by this development (one of Conner’s best essays tells of the time he was almost beaten to death by a boyfriend), but this is a gripping, compulsively readable thriller for newcomers too. Habib reveals a psychological astuteness and real depth that belies the fact Hawk Mountain is his debut work of fiction. A brilliant novel.

S J Watson is the award winning author of the bestselling psychological thrillers Before I Go To Sleep, Second Life and Final Cut. Follow him on Twitter at @sj_watson

When something terrible happens to a writer, the writer will write about it. There’s nothing else they can do, though it’s fraught with perils: invading emotional territories – your own and those of others; unreliable memories; laying the silk purse of your pain and vulnerability before judgmental swine of reviewers who think they know your family’s suffering better than you do. And there’s the risk of being labelled a “misery memoir” – so distasteful that Abi Morgan’s is actually titled This Is Not A Pity Memoir. But one cannot be glib here.

In Jack and Me: How Not To Live After Loss, columnist Cosmo Landesman writes about the worst death of all, the one with which, when some other terrible loss hits us, we guiltily comfort ourselves, thinking: “Well least it wasn’t that…”.  His son Jack, whose mother is writer Julie Burchill, killed himself at the age of 29.

The book travels in both time and emotion between 2015, when Jack died, and 2022. Landesman plays all the roles in a febrile conversation with Jack, Jack’s ashes, “Old Me” and “New Me”, leading us back and forth, ruminating and challenging, filling in the story of mental illness and drug abuse, one moment chatting, the next self-lacerating (not only self, actually).

The result is startling in its immediacy: lively, self-conscious, brilliant, morbid, at once easy to read and profoundly difficult. The bravura nothing-left-to-lose honesty of a man who, having been through the worst, is damned if he’s going to lie about it, rampages through the text. Brandishing love, regret, guilt, bitterness, self-justification (and its puncturing) and an unquenchably black sense of humour, Landesman relentlessly dismantles his relationships with his son, with his son’s death, and with his own shortcomings. Above all he wants to unravel the “comfort blanket of cynicism” which was his immediate, defensive response seven years ago, and head for some kind of understanding and release.

At one point he wearily suggests: “I could even write a memoir about my son’s suicide which critics will call ‘brave’ and ‘moving’.” Well, it is brave and moving. It’s also wise and heartbreaking, and terribly (in all senses), distressingly, funny. 

What a beautiful volume this is. Alan Rickman’s beautiful face gazes severely and alluringly from the cover. Inside, the endpapers are facsimile pages from his beautifully handwritten – and, here’s a surprise, gorgeously illustrated, by him – diaries. Its editor tells us: “We do not know whether Alan would like to have seen his diaries published,” and Alan himself tells us within that he’s not sure why he kept them, but he did, from 1993 till his death in 2016. So here they are: edited down from a million words; introduced by Emma Thompson; tied up at the end by his widow Rima Horton, with whom he shared life from the age of eighteen.

Some diarists are writing their memoirs all along; a gift for their editors and for their readers. Alan Rickman was not doing that. Of course not! He was too busy living the life of Alan Rickman: being challenging and brilliant, demanding and generous, getting into studio cars at 4am and working till the small hours, flying off to New York, LA, Tuscany, Hungary, filming, getting awards, wishing people were more curious, demanding, ambitious. Like him. Scraps of hilarious anecdote about Emma and Greg, Edna O’B, Kate W, Meryl S, Liam and Tash, Elton, dreadful/mistreated actors, worse/fantastic directors, notes on the ins/outs/ups/downs of plays, productions and friendships, make the reader long for the more complete stories, considered in the warmth of maturity. The nights were brilliant and everyone ended up on the roof or in the fountains, but how did they get there? And why?  So the first thing is to get over that disappointment, and into the thrill of the ride: of the details we are given, and of the man’s considerable and well-expressed day-to-day wisdom. And his one-liners: “People at an adjacent table… phone the restaurant to check if I am me. At this point tiredness makes me wonder.”

He writes: “On the plane. Rereading some of this diary. A lot of people, a lot of places. Eating, drinking. Not too much thinking, shaping, doing…’ If only he had had time to write some books. Something else to mourn. And meanwhile, this to lap up.

I swim most days in a small Essex estuary: brief immersions that in winter leave my limbs aching from cold. Yet, nose to the surface, like the seal who slips away at my approach, every stroke soothes my whirring brain and reawakens my connection to Nature. I’m tinglingly aware of the current of the rising tide, the whiff of pungent mudflats, the slow flapping of a departing egret.

This “sensation of being vigorously, whoopingly alive” is where naturalist Amy-Jane Beer begins The Flow, as she swims bare-skinned in a cold river pool, below a dangerous rapid in Cumbria. It’s a transformative experience that prompts her to embark on a tour of the country’s “rivers, water and wildness”, posing big questions along the way, from “what is a river?” to why we’re not allowed to navigate 97 per cent of ours, and how we pollute them.

Following her thoughts like tributaries, Beer splashes into Welsh canyons, Scottish salmon rivers, Somerset levels and eerie eastern fenlands. Luckily for us, she’s not only a biologist who’s refreshingly knowledgeable about trees, birds and insects, but also has a fine sense of myth and history. Her meditations ripple from water molecules to cloud vapour, taking in human spit and sweat as well as poetic waterfalls tumbling over rocky canyons.

We already know Beer gets her feet wet, and quickly discover she’s a lyrical, insightful writer about the outdoors she loves so much. Visiting a Yorkshire river in autumn, she sees “fecundity and decay press in from either side, channelling life into a silver stream with death on one bank, renewal on the other.”

Death and renewal are central to Beer’s story, because in 2012 she lost a dear friend and fellow-kayaker in a freak accident on the river Rawthey in Cumbria. Visiting the site eight years on is what prompts Beer’s initial transformative swim, her subsequent exploration of Britain’s waters and ultimately this book. She writes passionately of how vulnerable we are in the face of Nature and yet what power its waters have, to connect and heal us.