Healthcare is a right, insist many of us, and that was the impetus behind Yes Minister writer Jonathan Lynn’s novel Samaritans.

The Guardian reviews Elizabeth Day’s beautifully written novel The Party, out this week in the UK and next month in the US.

The New York Times Book Review podcast has a look at the world of Jane Austen fans.

This week, staff at The Pool are reading, among other things, Nicci French’s hot-off-the-press latest novel, Sunday Morning Coming Down and, appropriately for Bastille Day, what sounds like a lovely French novel, The Reader on the 6.27.

“Poetry is an espresso shot of thought”, says Daljit Nagra, chronicling his rise from school dropout to poetry prizewinner and Radio 4’s Poet in Residence.

Prizes

Kate Wakeling has won this year’s CLiPPA award for children’s poetry for her debut collection Moon Juice.

Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday, a “subtle, erotically charged novella suspended between past and future”, has won the Hawthornden prize.