This blackly comic debut is an astute and funny examination of the pain and pleasure of first love

The heart is a peculiar organ. It wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson wrote. Especially when you’re young and have no previous experience of love and desire, or the deleterious effects of time on both. This is the core subject of 24-year-old Harriet Armstrong’s debut novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, published by the consistently adventurous independent press Les Fugitives.

When the unnamed narrator, a third-year psychology student, meets fellow student Luke in their campus kitchen, she falls hard. They begin sharing meals and confidences in her room, which bears a “suicide beam” running the length of the ceiling. This memento mori is archly juxtaposed with the narrator’s breathless infatuation, which feels as if “some great transition was occurring inside me, something was aligning, I could actually feel it”. She finds herself “wide open and completely soft like a small trembling animal held in two hands, two hands which could crush it completely but which would not”.

Demon Copperhead, the author’s retelling of Dickens during Virginia’s opioid crisis, was a global success. Now she has used royalties from the novel to open a recovery residence

In the spotless kitchen of a white clapboard house in the Appalachian mountains, a retired deacon, a regional jail counsellor and I form an impromptu book club. The novel under discussion is Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which is set in this area, Lee County, Virginia, during the 1990s, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. I say that I loved the novel, that it was vivid and brilliant, heart-warming and tragic. Their reaction is more complex – there’s a real sadness behind it. Julie Montgomery-Barber, the jail counsellor, tells me she found the book “hard to read”. The Rev Nancy Hobbs agrees that reading it was painful, “because I felt like: I knew these people. At every level, from foster care to the football coaches to Demon. I knew Demon.”

Hobbs and Montgomery-Barber sit on the board of Higher Ground, the recovery residence recently established by Kingsolver using royalties from the novel. We are viewing the house together as part of its official launch party, on a sunny Saturday in June. The house is a bright and welcoming space. It provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery. Some of its residents have come directly from prison; one was living in a tent before she moved in; current ages range from 33 to 65 years old. Higher Ground gives residents a roof over their heads and supports them in myriad ways, from transport to AA appointments (most have lost their driving licences), to access to education and help with finding employment. The women can stay for between six months and two years. It opened in January and will be at full capacity later this month, when its eighth resident arrives, though there are plans for expansion.

A subtle, intriguing sequel revisits two girls as they grow into adults and question the impact of their unconventional upbringing

Esther Freud’s childhood on the Moroccan hippy trail inspired her 1992 debut Hideous Kinky. That novel was told through a young child’s limited perspective, so daily life was described vividly – almond trees and coloured kaftans – while bigger issues, such as why she didn’t see her father, remained vague and mysterious.

Some 30 years later, Freud has returned to the same narrator, Lucy. But in this accomplished new novel, she explores how Lucy grows up and starts to question the impact of her unconventional upbringing. My Sister and Other Lovers opens with teenage Lucy, her mother and sister once again on the move. It’s the 1970s, her mother has a new son from another failed relationship, and they are on a ferry to Ireland, as they have no money and nowhere else to go.

Subject of a fierce bidding war, this charming debut shows Trevelyan has an impressive knack for character, but is let down by a predictable plot

Writing a story from a child’s perspective works like a filter over a lens. Novels such as Sofie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time use a younger person’s narration to process darker, adult themes and reveal the mythologies of the adult world. Jennifer Trevelyan’s debut A Beautiful Family uses a similar framing to tell an immersive yet imperfect coming-of-age mystery set in New Zealand.

It’s 1985, and 10-year-old Alix – a tomboyish, inquisitive girl who is never without her red Walkman and Split Enz cassette tape – is on holiday with her family, who have left their Wellington home for the nearby Kāpiti Coast. Her novelist mother normally prefers secluded spots, but this time she has curiously opted for a populous beach town. Between her parents’ bickering and her older sister’s burgeoning interest in boys and alcohol, Alix has often felt invisible. This has made her a keen observer, and she understands more than people think.

A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan is out now in Australia (Allen & Unwin, $32.99), UK (Pan Macmillan, £16.99, £15.29 on the Guardian Bookshop) and the US (Penguin Random House, US$28)

Considéré comme l'une des pierres angulaires du cyberpunk, genre majeur de la science-fiction, le roman Neuromancien arrive bientôt en série sur Apple TV+. Voici les principaux points à retenir de cette adaptation du chef-d'œuvre de William Gibson.

Alien spaceships, parallel worlds… the Israeli writer’s seventh collection is vast in reach, yet grounded in the bewildering absurdity of modern life

‘It’s time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener. Giyora Shiro, may he rest in peace, was thinking all this while standing in line to get into the next world …”

That’s quite the opener for a story, isn’t it? The apt but just slightly ridiculous metaphor, which is then revealed as not an authorial pronouncement but a character’s ruminations. And then we meet the character – excellently specific name – and we find out he’s dead, and, in that drolly formulaic aside “may he rest in peace”, we meet the author too.

Stretching from Indiana to North Korea, the US writer’s sixth novel is a study of absence, alienation and affection in a family rocked by tragedy

The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They’re big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled.

While it’s less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi’s Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi’s sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires.

The Hideous Kinky author has always drawn inspiration from her own experiences. Now her sister Bella is writing her own version of their childhood. Does fact or fiction come closer to the truth, she asks

I’m four and I’m pretending to be dead. I’ve been lying here behind the sofa, and I’m hoping I’ll be missed, but more than that I’m hoping it will make a story. The story of the games I like to play, and how I profess to remember my past lives. It is 1967, a few months before we set off for Morocco – my mother, my sister Bella and I – travelling overland by van, taking the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier, breaking down on the road to Marrakech. From then on everything becomes a story. The camel festival we visit, the path into the hills so steep that Bella and I are packed into saddlebags while the donkeys’ hooves skitter and slip. I can’t remember later whether it is a camel that is sacrificed when we reach the top, or a chicken. But either way I keep the description of the chicken to myself, running in circles, blood spouting from its headless neck.

For all the decades since, I’ve been the family chronicler, as much in my novels as in our lives. I’ve kept the few possessions from those years in Morocco. The kaftans we bought in the souk when we arrived, the corduroy patch that I unpicked from a pair of too small trousers, embroidered with a flower by a boyfriend of my mother. “Are you my Daddy?” I’d asked him, as I’d asked others, not because I thought he was, but because I’d read about another little girl asking the same question in a book. I can still see the look of consternation on the boyfriends’ faces, hear my mother’s embarrassed laugh.

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Saucy Books in London has become the go-to destination for romance readers – but fans say misogyny is stopping the genre getting the recognition it deserves

Whether you want a brooding billionaire, a queer awakening, a dragon rider (yes, really) or an old-fashioned enemies-to-lovers tale, there’s a romance novel for everybody at Saucy Books.

England’s first romance-only bookshop opened last week in Notting Hill, west London, instantly becoming a go-to destination for readers and turning into a meeting spot for like-minded folk to share their love stories.