When I re-read Hamnet I could see what the book could do that the movie couldn’t and also what the movie could do that is hard to achieve in a book. Physicality is something the medium of film imparts directly – in pictures, no less. Countryside, buildings, streets, clothes ­– all these have to be described by an author and realised in the mind of a reader. Good cinema hands them to you to enjoy in glorious colour. Hamnet the movie does this movie thing very well and then dou

What if I told you that this is a book about quasicrystals that reads like a thriller? You’d think I was nuts. Well, this is a book about the search for a quasicrystal, something thought to be impossible, that reads like a thriller. The subtitle of The Second Kind of Impossible is The Extraordinary Quest for a New Kind of Matter. Now, we’re getting to it. Matter is matter, isn’t it? New sorts of matter might be the subject of science fiction but not of real science.

Alice Munro is a writer’s writer. Her prose is clear yet solid, like ice with no flaws. Her stories march firmly from beginning to end. And you march with them, reading in perfect time to the rhythms of her writing. Dear Life is a collection of fourteen short stories published in 2012. By then Munro had received numerous awards for her work, including the Man Booker Prize for International fiction. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature as ‘master of the con