The Latest Breaking News from Thomas Pynchon

With odds of 10/1, the author of Love in the New Millennium, who was also the favourite last year, leads a pack that includes Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood

Ingenious storytelling in 300 pages or less

The Irish novelist on his wife’s response to his darkly comic new book, the ghosts that haunt his country, his love of Thomas Pynchon and distrust of Dickens

Books age at variable rates. Some, indexed to topicalities with mayfly longevities, are decrepit before they’re published. Others, lively and seductive on first appearance, are dry husks a decade later. More durable works may still feel noble a century hence, if suspended in aspic.