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It’s good to be back in the unspeakable awfulness of Slough House, the decaying London office block in which the security service’s rejects do battle not only with the nation’s enemies but also with each other. Clown Town is Mick Herron’s ninth novel in the series, though he has explored different aspects of Slough House’s skewed universe in seven other books. It follows on from its series predecessor, Bad Actors. The office is looking underpopulated these days. River Cartwright, the nearest thing the series has to a juvenile lead, is recovering from life-threatening injuries sustained in the line of duty and hoping against hope that they will not mean the end of his career as a spook.

The Expansion Project, Ben Pester’s debut novel, builds on the satire of corporate culture that he previously explored in his short stories. It centres on Capmeadow, a business park that proliferates with offices, wellness gardens, chalets, convenience stores and even a temple carved with reliefs of ‘collaborative working practices’. Shrouded in creepy mists, it seems to ‘reproduce itself’ with a will of its own, like ‘a -living community fabric’. Tom Crowley, who writes briefs for fire safety protocol, endures a stressful journey taking his eight-year-old daughter, Hen, to his office, mistakenly believing that it is ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work’ day. She seemingly goes missing. But then Tom is shown CCTV footage which suggests she was never there at all.

At the age of 13, when some girls become passionate about ponies, Anjana Khatwa developed an infatuation with rocks. Growing up in a Hindu family in Slough, she had a moment of epiphany on holiday in south-east Kenya when she walked across an ancient lava flow and felt convinced that the rock beneath her feet was ‘an animate entity… alive with stories that needed to be heard’. From then on, rocks have been, well, her rock. More than a geologist, Khatwa calls herself an ‘earth scientist’. So, while there is plenty of geology in this book, some of it mildly challenging (‘Along with other silica-rich microcrystalline rocks such as obsidian and agate, flint breaks with a conchoidal fracture’), there is also mythology, folklore, ecology and spirituality.

‘Is it any good?’ a friend asked when he saw I was reading this book. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it’s full of wankers.’ By that stage I was only up to page 24, but the remaining 184 pages did nothing to fundamentally alter my view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The works of, say, Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen, not to mention thousands of others, would be considerably poorer if all the tiresome people were filtered out. But it does make it hard to read TonyInterruptor for more than 30 pages at a stretch. One has to pinch the bridge of the nose and go for a little walk.

There is nobody who finds Gwyneth Paltrow, 52, more interesting than the woman who was a teenager in the 1990s. This was the last era of the true pin-up, the heart-throb, the movie star as icon, rather than the whiffy melange of brand-pusher, pound-shop activist and reality star that constitutes celebrity today. I was as Nineties as the next girl living in provincial Massachusetts and when I first saw Shakespeare in Love in 1998, Paltrow’s first and only Oscar-winning role as the late-16th-century actress-in-male-garb Viola de Lesseps, I’d never enjoyed anything as much in my life. And in 2025, Paltrow’s career’s Take Two fascinates the early middle-aged woman who finally gives in to the barrage of wellness marketing sent her way on Instagram.