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Mrs Danvers is one of those rare characters who has transcended her original setting to enter the wider culture. She has been referenced in novels by Stephen King and Sue Townsend, parodied in films by Mel Brooks and even lent her name to an American all-female pop group. She takes on further life in Rose Tremain’s The Housekeeper, a reimagining of Rebecca that speculates on the inspiration behind Daphne du Maurier’s most compelling creation. Unlike du Maurier, Tremain affords her housekeeper a rich backstory. Now known as Danni, she was born Lilianne Danowski, the daughter of a Jewish tailor in a small Polish town.

China Miéville’s new novel is 1,264 pages long. Following his breakthrough ‘New Weird’ masterpiece Perdido Street Station (2000), Miéville was a productive writer: eight big novels in a decade. Then after 2011’s Embassytown he seemed to fall quiet: a couple of novellas, a history of the Russian Revolution, little else. There were rumours that he had retired from authorship altogether. But not so. We can now see what he’s been doing over the past decade and a half: writing a very, very long novel. The first 190 pages of The Rouse tells the story of Maur (short for Maureen: though why she doesn’t go by ‘Mo’ like every other Maureen in history isn’t made clear), who gets pregnant as a teenager.

In 2023, the author Jon Ronson woke one Sunday in upstate New York, where he lives, to a string of alarming messages from his son. Joel, in his mid-twenties, had gone with some friends to a party in Connecticut that they’d been told about by a guy on a dating app. ‘Castle party Saturday!’ was the message that had lured them all in. ‘3pm to whenever. Dress code: Formal. Tell your friends.’ When Joel and his pals arrived, they found what looked like a castle – turrets, gargoyles, a drawbridge – but no party. Instead there were a few bemused party-chasers like them, a bitey guard dog named Cerberus and a man in his mid-sixties, Chris Mark, the owner of the castle. ‘I’d like you all,’ Mark announced, ‘to take part in my reality show.

The Jamaican-American poet and essayist Claudia Rankine won a slew of prizes for her book Citizen (2014). Her blend of emotive prose and personal recollection helped many people understand the challenges of being black in the US, where the experience is qualitatively different to that in the UK – a subject explored with erudition by the Nigerian-British writer Tomiwa Owolade. The murder of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, along with those of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, made headline news; but many more casual examples of racism or double standards occur every day. In the Netflix true crime documentary The Perfect Neighbor, a white woman in 2023 makes constant complaints to the police about her innocent black neighbours and eventually shoots dead a black mother of four.

For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress. According to this reading of history, banishing odours is a sign of progress. Civilisation doesn’t smell. Neither Bjorn Berge nor William Tullett stand for this. For them, older times may have been smellier, but people were comfortable with living alongside middens, rotting corpses and foul tanneries. Smell in the modern age is now under threat and at risk of extinction or of being even more marginalised – Tullett uses the word ‘ephemeralised’ – than it already is in this age of visual primacy and screens.

Almost two decades ago, Jared Diamond cemented his international reputation with Guns, Germs and Steel, which argued that geography and environment rather than racial differences shaped the rise and conquest of nations. Still going strong at 88, he has now written a book on leadership. This is a crowded literary space, but Diamond offers a distinctive approach. A distinguished biologist and polymath, he has little time for the Great Man theory of history popularised by the 19th--century essayist Thomas Carlyle. Altogether too subjective, he says, never mind the absence of women. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is no better a guide, since it casts individuals as constrained by circumstance, with scant influence over events.