Since winning the Booker prize, the Indian author has spent two decades writing a follow-up. She talks about being longlisted again — and the immigration raids creating fear in her New York neighbourhood

Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss , which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny , came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a “modern-day romance that wasn’t necessarily romantic”, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart – class, race, nationality, family history – as those that bind us. Writing the book itself took almost two decades.

One problem with devoting so many years to one book is that people worry for your welfare, Desai says with a laugh. “People begin to wonder what’s wrong. Are you really working on something?” One neighbour – who observed how Desai would rise early each morning to write, eat her breakfast and lunch at her desk, take a short break to do her food shop or housework and then write until as late as she could manage in the evenings – attempted an intervention. “You need to come out of your house,” he told her. “You will go crazy writing a book! This is no way to live!” Her 90-year-old uncle observed, with affection, that she was starting to look “like a kind of derelict”, which she acknowledges was true. “It was becoming absurd!” And yet Desai says she loved living this way, in complete service to her writing.

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The superstar never wanted to be a sex symbol. But we don’t have a language to discuss what great beauty can feel like for men

Robert Redford, who died this week at the age of 89, was, as well as being one of Hollywood’s brightest stars both in front of and behind the camera, graced with “all-American good looks [that] couldn’t be ignored” as the BBC wrote . Breaking through in the “new Hollywood” era, his luscious blond curls, defined jawline and gentle, charming smile provided him the typical pretty-boy advantages that beauty offers for a career in entertainment, though his talent and zest for acting pushed him further still.

It was his role as the gunslinging, sharpshooting Sundance Kid in 1969, alongside the more established Paul Newman, which propelled him to fame – though the film’s creator, William Goldman, had dismissed Redford as “just another California blond … throw a stick at Malibu, you’ll hit six of him”. Yet what comes through about Redford in the commentary and obituaries following his death is this sense that he transcended his beauty; that he defied the blank California Ken doll archetype to become genuinely prodigious within US cinema.

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At Wembley, Chris Martin exhorted the crowd to ‘send love anywhere you wanna send it’. But half-hearted word salad won’t stop the rise of hate

I don’t mind committing to record that I am a fan of Coldplay. A Rush of Blood to the Head, Parachutes and Viva La Vida … are legitimately good albums. And Fix You remains a tearjerker despite decades of overuse in medical dramas.

Yet, if your taste is better than mine, you may not know that they’re on tour . On my Instagram stories, at least, there has been a conspicuous absence of Coldplay posts, compared to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Oasis reunion shows (though I’m not convinced Oasis have more good songs in their catalogue).

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist

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Listening to the album was like waking from a bad dream and liberated me from the shame I’d felt about my sexuality

As a young man, shame was a constant companion to my consideration of my sexuality. It made me question my sexual orientation: was I attracted to men, as I suspected, or did I simply have a desire for gratification?

When I tip-toed around the topic of queerness in conversations with past girlfriends, more than once it was made clear to me that bisexuality was an unattractive trait for a man to have. The shame heaped up. And yet my secret fantasies continued. It wasn’t just men I fantasised about, it was the possibility of different power dynamics, of multiple bodies, of feeling seen.

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David Tennant is at his chameleonic best in this account of the Guardian’s investigation into tabloid malfeasance. Telling this story metes out another small dose of justice

Early on in The Hack – Adolescence writer Jack Thorne ’s new series about the News International phone hacking scandal – Guardian journalist Nick Davies appears on the Today programme to promote his 2008 book, Flat Earth News . It is an indictment of the contemporary British press; its sloppiness and corruption. “The logic of journalism has been overwhelmed by the logic of commercialism,” he tells the host and a glowering Stuart Kuttner, the managing editor of the News of the World. Nowadays, says Davies, so-called reporters are simply “passive processors of unchecked second-hand material”.

My first thought is: OK, this is not your common-or-garden ITV drama. No hand-holding, no pandering, no schmaltz; we’re about to get a proper, grownup deep dive into the tabloid malfeasance – illegal surveillance, toxic power plays – that Davies began exposing in this newspaper in 2009. Bring on the machiavellian office politics, the labyrinthine narratives of your Successions, your Industrys, your Line of Dutys. (My next thought is: second-hand material? What, like yet another dramatisation of a recent major news story?)

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A Neighbours star and a former Leeds United player are in the lineup. Plus: the finale of ludicrous period drama The Count of Monte Cristo. Here’s what to watch this evening

6.40pm, BBC One

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Cillian Murphy shines in a brutal yet hopeful high school drama, while the singer-songwriter from south London returns with her streetwise swag. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell star in a fantasy romance, while the rapper swaps the courtroom for the recording studio

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Out now
Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell play strangers who meet at a friend’s wedding and find themselves magically able to relive key moments from their respective pasts in this fantasy romance, also starring Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Billy Magnussen. Just don’t let the oddly Trumpian title turn you off.

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He was once so stoned he missed his own birthday party, but the Oscar-winning actor has swapped pot for poetry. He reveals the trauma and triumph that taught him why it’s more important to be a good man than a nice guy

“Simon!” Matthew McConaughey barks. “ How do, sir?! ” Matthew McConaughey could not be more Matthew McConaughey if he tried. And he’s only said four words. Charming, sincere, intense, 100% Texan and 101% eccentric.

Five years ago, the Oscar-winning actor wrote a memoir called Greenlights . It wasn’t a conventional memoir, more a collection of life lessons, bullet-point anecdotes and gnomic philosophies. Now he has written a book of poetry called Poems & Prayers . For McConaughey, the two are interchangeable. It’s another memoir of sorts – this time, a portrait of his faith and its impact on his everyday life. In it he addresses faith in the broadest sense. There’s plenty of talking to God as he searches for the divine in himself, loads of Amens, but it’s also about faith in himself, his family, his career, the world, the works.

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