A visit to a delapidated London flat unlocks a treasure-trove of reminiscences across six decadesIn 1994, Hugo Greenhalgh was a researcher on a television documentary about the history of male sex workers and their clients. Dispatched to interview George Leo John Lucas, a 68-year-old retired civil servant, and a loyalty-card-worthy frequenter of London’s...

The author of Motherless Brooklyn recalls his deepening relationship with the late author - from a chance book signing to becoming a confidant during tough times• Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77 • Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generationI remember the first time I approached Paul Auster....

From a pioneering 1940s ‘gastrography’ to a recent novel about a real-life 18th-century French peasant cursed with an appetite to eat just about everythingFood in books has a way of lodging in the memory. For some it might be the kidneys on Leopold Bloom’s mind in Joyce’s Ulysses. For others, it’s the hard-won German sausage that Ratty finds at the...

A grieving son aims to connect with his late father through the cassette tapes he left behind, in a tale of jazz, black ambition and romanceSet across two timelines, 1936 and 2012, Manny and the Baby is a debut novel about a grieving son, Itai, desperate to connect to his late father through the pile of cassette tapes wrapped in newspaper that he left...

This defiantly old-fashioned tale of two misfits, a ghost and a blazing comet showcases Perry’s unerring capacity to make the earthly new and strangeHow do you quiet a warring soul? Every one of Sarah Perry’s novels has grappled lavishly with this question. Fate v free will; doubt v certainty; science v God. The metaphysical battleground is Perry’s...

A vivid account of bringing a garden back to life underlines the importance of outdoor space for allJust as the first lockdown was easing, which is to say in summer 2020, Olivia Laing moved into a Georgian house in Suffolk that came with the tangled remnants of a once-glorious walled garden. She had always been a plant person, having spent her 20s training...