The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Like the house that gives EM Forster’s Howards End its name, the Dutch House in Ann Patchett’s eighth novel is not always a benign space. It is situated in the suburbs of Philadelphia and was owned by a wealthy Dutch family, the Van Hoebeeks, who abandoned it and left their forbidding portraits, furniture and Delftware behind in 1945. A year later, the house is bought by Cyril Conroy, a realestate developer. But his ascetic wife, stifled by the grandeur of the house, walks out on Cyril and their two children, Maeve and Danny, to instead “help the poor of India.”

Danny narrates the story, which begins in the middle of the 20th century and stretches over 50 years. From the start, he worships his maternal sister Maeve, “her black hair like a blanket down her back.” Maeve is a striking example of Patchett’s ability to make goodness compelling and her set pieces with Andrea, the “silky chinchilla” who marries Cyril and becomes the children’s stepmother, are wonderfully drawn. 

I Never Said I Loved You by Rhik Samadder

Rhik Samadder has written a remarkable book. What a lavishly talented writer he is, packing more hilarity and insight into a few sentences than many authors manage in an entire book. Those who are familiar with his journalism, and particularly his Guardian column reviewing kitchen gadgets, will know he has a talent for turning base metal into gold. We mistakenly assumed this was a fluke, a happy accident, that he should be so entertaining about such an unpromising subject. The reason that his piece on a device for cooking eggs went viral, however is that he is an astonishingly original writer, no matter what the topic. And we should all be grateful that he has now turned his attention to the serious matter of mental health.

It doesn’t seem quite right that a book so moving should also be so funny at the same time but this is the case with his memoir I Never Said I Loved You.

The best restaurants for a pre-Christmas meal with friends

Arranging a Christmas dinner with friends doesn’t have to mean settling for a crammed corner and dried-out turkey. Here’s our guide to the best restaurants for feasting.

Festive meals are not always the most relaxing. Whether you’re trying to avoid getting into an argument with your Uncle Geoffrey about the Irish backstop or tasked with finding a restaurant within budget for the office party, they don’t always spell fun times.

The one Christmas meal that has a fighting chance of being enjoyable is the one you have with your friends in early December, after 8,052 messages in the WhatsApp group chat. You’ve done the Doodle poll to find a date everyone can make, now here’s our pick of where to actually go. 

Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas

It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points. Elsewhere, Thomas has written compellingly about her own orthorexia (or obsessive desire to control her diet); but this doesn’t mean that she is above lampooning the hysterical pronouncements of the diet-obsessed — not least that fruit, unless you pick it in the wild yourself, contains so much sugar that you may as well eat Haribo, which is nicer, after all.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Contemporary fiction’s favourite battle-axe, Olive Kitteridge, is back.

Olive’s first outing as the titular anti-heroine in Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 novel won the author the Pulitzer Prize. She was also played by Frances McDormand in a HBO mini-series of the same name.

Strout has said she never expected to write about Olive Kitteridge again but “she honestly just showed up. I could see her in her car, nosing it into the marina […] I just saw her so clearly that I thought, ‘OK, I guess I will have to write this down.’” In Olive, Again, Kitteridge is now in her early 80s but she is the same woman who, in the earlier novel, said to her only son of his new wife, “She’s so nice, Christopher, it makes me puke.” 

Fleishman Is in Trouble

In the heady days of summer before Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, was published and before David Cameron had unleashed his memoirs, the most talked about books all centred on love and relationships. From Lisa Taddeo’s riveting non-fiction examination of female sexuality in Three Women to David Nicholls’s latest novel, the lovely Sweet Sorrow about an adolescent relationship, the books that were most hungrily passed around from reader to reader were those concerning our most intimate relationships. Perhaps the hottest book of all, however, has been The New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s first novel Fleishman Is in Trouble. In fact, so in demand did the novel become, that it was briefly unavailable whilst it was being reprinted. “Believe the hype. Fleishman Is in Trouble is even better than we were promised” was the first line of The Washington Post’s review.