The Raptures is Jan Carson’s most autobiographical novel, dealing with a child raised in an evangelical Christian community in 1990s Northern Ireland – which mirrors her own background. In her book, a class of children from the same village fall prey to a mysterious and deadly epidemic. Only one...

“I really don't like the fact that sometimes I'm referred to as kind of a controversial novelist because I don't feel that I am,” says John Boyne, whose novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has sold 11 million copies and mounting, and has been reimagined as a film, play, ballet and opera. The...

Andrew Meehan is nailing his colours to the mast. He writes love stories, he says – although it took him until his third and most recent novel to recognise it. It was only as he was working on his latest novel, Instant Fires, that realisation dawned. “Halfway through I discovered, ‘Andrew, you...