A frazzled dachshund; a rebellious goatherd; standing up to your family; a dystopian vision of marriage and moreHot Dog by Doug Salati, Pushkin, £12.99 When the summer city is just too hot, a frazzled dachshund is whisked away for a restorative adventure in this witty, gorgeous picture book effortlessly evoking heat, noise and overwhelm, sparkling seaside...

Two girls set out to catch the Yorkshire Ripper in this vividly narrated novel of adolescent curiosity and confusionSet in Yorkshire in 1979 shortly after the election of Margaret Thatcher, Jennie Godfrey’s novel revolves around a working-class family living in the shadow of a new Conservative government and the Yorkshire Ripper murders. The novel opens...

The Irish author on the allure of Nabokov, the comfort of Yeats and the power of Winnie-the-PoohMy earliest reading memory Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty when I was about eight or nine, sitting in the back of my mother’s parked Mini one hot summer’s day, my legs burning on the red vinyl seat, and bawling because they were putting the bearing rein on...

A sensitive account of the poet’s wild life on the West Coast The subtitle of this biography alludes to a line from Hardy that Thom Gunn used as the epigraph for his last collection, Boss Cupid: “Well, it’s a cool queer tale.” Gunn’s life was cool and queer in the way that we use those epithets now; his poetry was cool and queer in the way that Hardy...

A fascination with words and symbols provides a unifying theme in this richly ambiguous collection of short stories A courtroom artist sees the features of her date in the face of a defendant. A woman stranded on the pavement when her office’s automatic doors refuse to open finds her attention drawn to a doppelganger sitting in a restaurant reflected...

Described as a ‘masterclass in tragicomedy’, the novel, set in Syracuse in 412BC, follows two locals who decide to stage Medea in a quarry using prisoners as actorsFerdia Lennon has won this year’s Waterstones debut fiction prize for his “riotous, exuberant treat of a novel”, Glorious Exploits.The novel, which took about seven years to write, is set...