Emily Gould

We first encounter​ Rachel Fleishman through the eyes of her ex-husband, Toby, who is trying to come to terms with her absence. He notices all the places in his life where she is not. ‘She was not in his bed. She was not in the bathroom, applying liquid eyeliner to the area where her eyelid met her eyelashes … She was not at the gym, or coming back from the gym in a less black...

At some point in his mid-forties, the novelist Tim Parks developed a terrible pain, near-constant and located in embarrassing places: his lower abdomen and crotch. ‘I had quite a repertoire of pains at this point: a general smouldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a...