Jessie Thompson

WRITERS ON READING: The ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’ poet shares the book that surprised her the most, the best thing a reader ever said to her, and the few films she thinks are – almost – better than the book

The ‘Gabriel’s Moon’ author on which of his 18 novels means the most to him, and the book he once loved obsessively

Watch out, people. David Nicholls has been thinking about his next novel. “I’ve been trying to draw up a list in my mind of really great literary love stories that I might reread for inspiration,” he tells me. This is the man who broke the nation’s heart with One Day and whose latest novel, You Are Here, is making us all want to go on rainy hikes in search of our soulmate. Now he appears to be restocking his arsenal. Except… it’s reminded him that the great love stories don’t tend to be about love at all. “Often what seem to be love stories are really about class or family or education,” he says, turning it over in his mind.

For all its Eighties tunes, wigs and diamonds, ITV’s new drama about jewel thief Joan Hannington is middle-of-the-road, unable to move its anti-heroine beyond ‘victim’ and ‘girl boss’ templates

As the ‘Leave the World Behind’ author releases his second novel, ‘Entitlement’, he reveals the book that first obsessed him, which writers make up his ‘own private university’, and why he loves reading in the summer

· 4-min read Rumaan Alam's debut novel Leave the World Behind, an eerie thriller full of contemporary social and political anxieties, was one of the breakout literary hits of lockdown.

Nestled amid the dramatic beauty of the island's hillsides, Villa Collection sits above Elia Beach , one of the most popular on the island . This

Jessie Thompson checks in

Screaming girls. Sudden riches. Your face on the cover of Smash Hits magazine. Life in a Nineties boyband sounds like a dream, but one survivor of the maelstrom likens it more to being in the military. Jessie Thompson goes behind the scenes of revealing new BBC documentary ‘Boybands Forever’

In Nancy Mitford’s 1949 novel Love in a Cold Climate, narrator Fanny admits that “ever since I could remember, some delicious image had been enshrined in my heart, last thought at night, first thought in the morning”.