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Features & reviews p2

Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard

Writers have long been fascinated by machinery – what it gives and what it takes away. Tom McCarthy, whose experimental work has been hailed as the future of fiction, charts literature's complicated relationship with technology, at once beautiful and menacing

The week in books

Novelists hit the festival circuit; Hay goes to Mexico; a milestone for the ebook
My hero Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds

Adam Foulds: My hero, Oliver Knussen

The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago

Ursula K Le Guin acclaims the wise comedy of José Saramago, who died this month
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Week one: pace

The Third Man by Peter Mandelson

Seumas Milne is struck by the paradoxes of Peter Mandelson's account of New Labour's civil wars
American Caesars by Nigel Hamilton

A collection of waspish mini-biographies of the most recent US leaders enthrals Peter Preston
Et cetera

Steven Poole on pessimism, economic theory and money

Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon

A life of Caravaggio is lost between the personal and the scholarly, says Neil Bartlett

Back to nature

Sue Arnold's audiobook choice
West: A Journey Through the Landscapes of Loss by Jim Perrin

Andrew Motion finds complexity and pathos in a memoir of grief
Silent Summer: The State of Wildlife in Britain and Ireland

Stephen Moss surveys a timely reminder of where the wild things were

And the Land Lay Still by James Robertson

Irvine Welsh enjoys a sweeping look through a Scottish lens at a turbulent era
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Carmen Callil searches for the characters in a Hungarian-Jewish epic of the second world war

Jo Shapcott: I'm not someone chasing her own ambulance

The president of the Poetry Society talks to Sarah Crown

Ten of the best nameless protagonists in literature

John Mullan goes in search of anonymity

Thrillers roundup

Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth | Death in Bordeaux by Allan Massie | To Kill a Tsar by Andrew Williams | The Network by Jason Elliot
Day For Night by Frederick Reiken

Patrick Ness on a set of moving stories that combine into one gripping narrative
The Misogynist by Piers Paul Read

Alfred Hickling finds a reactionary voice more hilarious than objectionable
In the Company of Angels by Thomas E Kennedy

Joanna Briscoe welcomes a profound novel about damaged people rediscovering life

Six-legged Soldiers by Jeffrey A Lockwood

Nicholas Lezard on using insects as weapons
The Cardturner by Louis Sachar

Frank Cottrell Boyce enjoys a cunning and unusual novel

Howard Hodgkin - the last English romantic painter

Jonathan Jones on the artist whose work is in the best intellectual tradition from Cézanne to Twombly

Rereading: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

William Boyd explains why he keeps returning to Le Carré's great espionage novel 50 years after its first publication
The Saturday poem: Curlew by the Humber

by David Wheatley

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