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The Wife of Willesden to be staged for London borough of culture celebrations next year

Zadie Smith is to reimagine Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale for a new production billed as a gift to her home borough of Brent.

Smith’s first play, titled The Wife of Willesden, was announced on Tuesday as a highlight of the programme next year when Brent in north-west London becomes the capital’s second borough of culture.

The former Speaker and MP is set to reveal his thoughts on David Cameron and Boris Johnson in his book, released next February

Two weeks after stepping down as Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow has announced that he will publish his memoirs in February next year.

Titled Unspeakable, the book was acquired by Weidenfeld & Nicolson after significant interest from publishers. The Guardian understands that the deal was “comfortably” into six figures.

Related: John Bercow: ‘I may be pompous and an irritant. But I am completely authentic’

The $25,000 award for Too Much Lip follows her Miles Franklin win earlier this year

Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Too Much Lip has scooped up the top prize at this year’s Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.

The Goorie author can now add the $25,000 Queensland Premier’s award for a work of state significance to her accolades, following her Miles Franklin win in June this year.

Related: Miles Franklin 2019 winner Melissa Lucashenko: 'We need a revolution'

Related: Archie Roach's Took the Children Away: the story behind the stolen generations lament

More than 160 letters written over 20 years shine light on James Bond author’s life

An extraordinary stash of letters that shine a light on the tangled relationship between the James Bond creator, Ian Fleming, and his wife, Ann, from their intense and secret affair to the bitter end of their marriage, are to appear at auction.

Sotheby’s is selling more than 160 letters between the couple, written over 20 years. Gabriel Heaton, a specialist in books and manuscripts at the auction house, said the letters in their scope and scale provided what “must surely be an unmatchable record of the life of the author as his fortunes changed”.

Related: Keeping his end up: James Bond's 10 most unforgivable puns

Donald Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, were forced to cut short a launch event for his book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of loud booing from the audience.

The audience was angry that Trump Jr and Guilfoyle would not take questions.

Trump Jr tried to argue that taking questions risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would distort

• Donald Trump Jr walks out of Triggered book launch after heckling – from supporters

The author now sees his ‘lost’ book Westwind as pacey and prescient

It is an unusual promotional gambit before a book launch. Ian Rankin has revealed that he once disowned his novel, Westwind, and hoped it would “never … see the light of day again”.

When he first produced the manuscript, 30 years ago, he was told to change it so many times that he started “to lose belief in my abilities” and began “doubting my future as a publishable writer”, he has said. Only 1,000 hardbacks were printed when it was first published in 1990.

We visit the hilltop district whose charms and complexity inspired the author’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults

Elena Ferrante’s new novel dominates the window display of Raffaello, a bookshop in the Naples neighbourhood of Rione Alto, and stacks of copies fill its tiny interior.

The presence of a bookshop is among the first notable distinctions between Rione Alto, the main location for La Vita Bugiarda Degli Adulti (The Lying Life of Adults), and Rione Luzzatti, the neglected, rundown area where Ferrante’s phenomenally successful quartet of books that began with My Brilliant Friend are believed to have been set.

Charlie Mackesy’s drawing of a boy and a horse was a sensation online – now the book that image inspired is topping the charts

When he sat down to draw a boy talking to a horse, the illustrator Charlie Mackesy was working out his own feelings. But his drawing of a horse confessing the bravest thing he’s ever said was “Help” became an online sensation. The book that image inspired is now topping charts on both sides of the Atlantic, with Mackesy’s publisher printing hundreds of thousands of copies to meet demand.

Mackesy, who has been a cartoonist for the Spectator and a book illustrator for Oxford University Press, says the straightforward, heartfelt conversations between the characters in The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse were drawn from “conversations I’ve had with my friends about what life really means, what’s important; it was a way for me to think aloud on paper with words and drawings.”

Judges hail collection on the challenge of climate change, Nearly Curtains, as ‘a firework show of bursting ideas’

• Read an extract from the award-winning collection here

When writer Else Fitzgerald was a kid, drought sent her family bankrupt.

They owned a nursery in regional Victoria. “We lived our lives by the weather,” Fitzgerald said. “So I have this fascination with how people deal with the challenges of climate change.”

Related: Being a crime writer doesn’t mean I condone murder. Do I even have to say it? | Garry Disher

Related: Australian literature in universities is under threat, but cultural cringe isn’t the reason why | Julieanne Lamond