Christopher Hitchens on God, Margaret Atwood on The Handmaid’s Tale, Hilary Mantel on Wolf Hall … highlights from Hay’s most memorable interviews

Places you’d be desperate to avoid in real life provide a magnetic lure in books by authors from Dickens to Du Maurier and even Richard Adams

An Artist of the Floating World was written in the early 80s, years of crucial, often fractious and bitter transition in Britain. The author recalls how attempts to transform the country influenced his approach to the novel

Books about the erasure of memory are usually about its opposite - the real subject of works as diverse as TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the struggle for fragments of recollection to shore against the ruins