Packed with shadowy oddness

Every summer, the press is briefly preoccupied by the question of what reading material we should take on holiday: books pages are crowded with recommendations by public and literary figures, while commentators are obliged to parse the book choices of our political leaders.

A dark alley, just off Memory Lane

Your guide to what's really going on inside the world of the Man booker longlist

Lost classic with a thriller inside

And so one of the longest, bitterest and most entertaining literary feuds of recent times goes gentle into that good night. The Nobel prize-winning novelist V S Naipaul and the best-selling travel writer Paul Theroux sealed their reconciliation with a handshake amid the old tomes and new celebrities that crowd Hay-on-Wye at this time of year. Authors concerned with gravitas and structure both, they could not but appreciate the symmetry: this was the very place where they had fallen out so dramatically 15 years before. Conciliation services were supplied by Ian McEwan, whose novels include Enduring Love and whose latest work, Solar, features a Nobel laureate (albeit a physicist) – so you might say he was supremely equipped for the task.

We're off to Chesil Beach for a mini-break.

The boundaries of romance have spread, and family life has evolved. Lisa Appignanesi argues that the greatest story ever told now springs modern surprises on readers

Clean energy and dirty little secrets

A prize to set a maiden's heart a-flutter

Literary thriller? More a grim tale from the shallow end

When did the modern novel get so long and unwieldy? Sometimes the best things come in small packages, says Arifa Akbar

The liberties film-makers take with characters and plot when they adapt well-loved novels too often spoil the stories for fans of the originals, argues Arifa Akbar

Howard Jacobson richly deserved his Booker prize, but so many other novels divided cultured opinion