At 83, The Accidental Tourist author discusses the secret to a good marriage, publishing her 25th book and why she can no longer keep politics out of her novels

“I’m ashamed,” Anne Tyler says of the publication of her new novel, Three Days in June, a typically Tyleresque off‑kilter romantic comedy about a long-divorced, mismatched couple. “I didn’t even realise I was up to 25. If you look at a writer’s work and you see that many titles you think, ‘Well, it can’t be very serious work.’ But that’s what happened.”

The seriousness of Tyler’s fiction, which includes much-loved novels Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and the Pulitzer prize-winning Breathing Lessons, has bothered critics for decades. How could a writer of such witty, warm, kind novels about middle-class families that contain very little historical context, no politics or sex, even, really be one of America’s finest living novelists, as so many have claimed? Not to mention her prodigiousness. The author herself couldn’t give two hoots. Unswayed by literary fashion or criticism, she has been writing the novels that interest her, and her devoted readership, for 60 years. “How we handle day-to-day life as we go through it, with its disappointments and its pleasures, that’s all I want to know,” she says.

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John Hughes set the formula for many films and TV shows in his wake with his uneven 1985 high school-set comedy

It is the burden of all art wielding sufficiently vast influence that its revelatory power will be dampened by the many imitators following in its wake; if the 1971 proto-slasher A Bay of Blood now seems to be packed with cabin-in-the-woods cliches, that’s only because it coined so many of them. In the case of John Hughes’ ur-teen-flick The Breakfast Club, still bratty four decades after its zeitgeist-capturing theatrical run, its headlining truth that teenagers possess depth beyond their broad archetypes has since been re-realized ad nauseam by generations of on-screen adolescents. (Smaller, ancillary truths, such as the binding potential of cannabis to bridge inter-clique divides, are where the film really shines.) Of recent vintage, high school crowd-pleasers Booksmart and Bottoms both learned the hard way that the pretty, popular girls descended from Molly Ringwald’s princess in pink Claire face private challenges belied by their put-together exterior. Arguably, grasping that other people exist just as much as you do is the defining milestone of the puberty years, but it still behooves a present-day viewer of Hughes’ film to remind themselves that he first broke ground on what has come to seem matter-of-fact.

Hughes’ unvarnished take on youth culture, replete with joints and F-bombs, arrived in 1985 to fill a vacuum of movies about young people in which they could see lifelike facsimiles of themselves. To one side, they had the risible attempts from much-mocked after-school specials to address Big Issues, and to the other, the cartoonish raunch of Porky’s and its hairy-palmed ilk. Following through logically on the anti-nostalgic purview of Hughes’ tenure at National Lampoon, where he punctured Rockwell’s wholesome Americana to find a waking hell in the ritual of family vacation, The Breakfast Club dared to admit that everything sucks. (In this stance, it announces itself as one of the earliest gen X touchstones.) And while that sentiment’s accuracy hasn’t been diminished by time – teens have no money, they live with their parents, their sense of self is a whirling cyclone of chaos – its articulation has.

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The delusions and desires of a precocious young boy are closely observed as he approaches his senior school years

Michael Amherst’s startling debut opens with a quiet description of the unnamed, unmistakably English town in which the novel’s action takes place. Amherst’s narrator is a faithful tour guide, keen that we don’t miss the preparatory school, where the headteacher is the father of our 12-year-old protagonist, Daniel, or the abbey with its Norman tower. Three rivers traverse the town and every winter they “break their banks and flood the surrounding fields” so that all becomes “hemmed in and dark with water”. Throughout this taut bildungsroman, threats of inundation appear regularly, powerfully underlining the pressures to contain the self and the desire for freedom integral to Daniel’s development.

Amherst’s Daniel is a richly realised child protagonist. The novel’s enigmatic title carries with it a sense of innocence before experience, and, indeed, young Daniel is rather green. He has a charming, wide-eyed callowness – “receiving a new exercise book was one of his chief joys” – and cannot imagine being as old as the 13-year-old choristers. But, skilfully, Amherst makes him so much more than this. Daniel is contrary: in his ruminations about theology, masculinity and the nature of storytelling, he is preternaturally attuned to complexity, the “double storied mystery” of existence (to borrow a phrase from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which gives this novel its epigraph). He is deeply serious, artistic, “sickly”, prideful, endlessly questioning, knowingly precocious and prone to fabulously funny delusions of grandeur. At one point he wonders, quite po-faced, if he “might be Jesus”. Elsewhere he berates himself for having not yet finished his first musical score, given that Mozart did so when he was just four.

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Exquisitely awful guests and drama it’s impossible to look away from: it can only be the third, Thailand-based season of Mike White’s luxury resort drama. Bring on the memes!

Sure, The White Lotus is an acclaimed drama, eagerly anticipated after more than two years away from our screens, but it is also a solid and reliable meme factory. From the second season’s banger of a theme tune, to every line Jennifer Coolidge ’s character deigned to speak, when The White Lotus is in season, the internet transforms into its fan account. For such a rich and well-crafted satire on bored elites and their casual cruelty, it really does translate well to screenshots and parodies. These memes, they’re trying to murder me!

In an age of fragmented attention spans, then, The White Lotus is that rare cultural phenomenon that still feels like a collective activity. These days, only a handful of shows would warrant mass speculation about how a season is going to end, and The White Lotus has become one of them. Inevitably, it returns for a third series under the heavy weight of expectation. Can it survive the loss of Coolidge’s Tanya, killed off with operatic gusto at the end of season two? Can it survive a new theme tune? Thankfully, the answers are yes and yes. It has had a few minor tweakments but the work is subtle, and it basically passes as its former youthful self.

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It’s been 11 years since she published a novel. In that time, the author has lost both parents, seen Trump become president twice – and finally returned to fiction after a bruising reaction to her comments on gender

I arrive early to meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , the Nigerian-American writer, feminist, author of Americanah . Her home, just outside Baltimore, looks Scandinavian somehow amid the snow crust and woodland. Adichie is mid-photoshoot, but the stylist shows me through to the kitchen, telling me to help myself to roast chicken and rice. At a desk in the corner, Adichie’s nine-year-old daughter is wearing headphones and absorbed in what looks like homework. In the middle of the room, watched over by a nanny, are two smiling, 10-month-old boys, one sitting in an activity centre, shrieking with joy, the other gnawing a toy. I’d read a lot about Adichie’s life in the last few years: the sudden death of her father, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, in 2020, the second shock of her mother’s death months later in 2021. I’d heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2023 discussing how motherhood is a glorious gift that comes at a cost: “I could probably have written two novels had I not had my child.” Nowhere had I heard that she’d had twins.

“You’ve met my babies,” Adichie laughs when she appears in a vibrant orange dress. She sits to remove the hair extensions she has worn for the shoot. “I want to protect my children. I’m OK with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them.” Later, she tells me that for a long time people didn’t know she had a husband, either – she married Ivara Esege, a hospital physician, in 2009. “So, here’s the thing, Nigerians are … ” Nosy? “They want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it.”

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Ugly events occur on the beautiful isle of Harris in An t-Eilean. Plus: Brian Cox and Christina Hendricks chat to Jonathan Ross. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Four

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I lost my own husband at a young age. It’s rare (and v.g.) to see a heroine trying to live joyfully despite her grief

Bridget Jones is back and once again blazing a new path, this time as a widow. In Mad About the Boy , our eternally chaotic but lovable everywoman is navigating single parenthood, dating apps and grief. But unlike most widows in romcoms, she’s not here to wither away in a beige cardigan, politely mourning until society deems it acceptable for her to love again. Instead, she’s in bed with a 29-year-old park ranger named Roxster, proving that healing doesn’t have to be quiet reflection – it can also look like great sex with a younger man.

This is where Bridget breaks the mould. In most romantic comedies, women’s grief is pitched as a problem to be solved. We must undergo a period of deep self-reflection before we are allowed back into the world of desire. We must heal, learn and then – maybe – we can be kissed under some twinkly lights at the end of the movie. Hilary Swank’s character in P.S. I Love You waits for divine permission from her dead husband’s letters before even thinking about dating again, whereas poor Demi Moore in Ghost is emotionally tied to Patrick Swayze for ever, choosing to simulate foreplay with a memory over intimacy with the living.

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Anthony Mackie dons the Lycra as Marvel’s shield-chucking superhero in new instalment Brave New World, and Mike White’s resort-hopping black comedy returns for a third season

Captain America: Brave New World
Out now
In the latest instalment of Marvel mayhem, Anthony Mackie stars as Sam Wilson-slash-Captain America, with Chris Evans having bowed out. And replacing William Hurt following the veteran actor’s death is Harrison Ford, hulking out as antagonist Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, president of the USA and occasional Red Hulk. Oh brave new world indeed.

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