A good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts. A man of conscience. Meg Williams is ‘a bankrupt accountant — two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV’. She’s 45 and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill, where she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety. Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a mobile phone and a letter-writing habit he can’t break. He’s a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection as he runs for his life. Set in 2014,...

A dozen sharp new stories by one of contemporary fiction's acknowledged masters. A. L. Kennedy's latest collection of stories is an investigation of "certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things"-another intense and luscious feast of language from the author of The Blue Book and Paradise. "I want to describe my genuine circumstances on the occasion in question, but I can't," confesses the narrator of "Baby Blue," who finds herself "somewhere like a very big grocers. . a supermarket full of sex." Kennedy hilariously explores the comic possibilities of fake genitalia before landing on a heartbreaking note. In "Takes You Home," a man tries to sell his apartment, the...

An anthology of stories edited by Zadie Smith A stellar host of writers explore the cornerstone of fiction writing: character “The Book of Other” People is about character. Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words (and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures). But the purpose of the book is variety: straight "realism", if such a thing exists-is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this...