What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in March

Authors and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Gatsby by Jane Crowther; The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson-Wheeler – Jay’s eternal hold

Two enjoyable debut novels put fresh meat on Fitzgerald’s deathless classic – one a modern-day retelling in which Gatsby becomes a female influencer, another a pacy murder mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie

Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya review – teenage lives at the crossroads

A night of violence exposes the dynamics of race, masculinity and privilege at play in America’s schools

In brief: Taking Manhattan; The Horse; Twist – review

A new perspective on the birth of New York; a magic realist story about a broken-down songwriter; and a resonant tale about a diver keeping the internet’s undersea network alive

Author Vincenzo Latronico: ‘I left Italy out of sadness’

The International Booker-longlisted Italian novelist on why he chose to rewrite Georges Perec, his preference for description over dialogue and being part of an anti-gentrification collective in Milan

‘How can one day be so voluminous?’: the Danish author who has written her own version of Groundhog Day

Solvej Balle had been planning her time-loop novel for a decade when the Bill Murray comedy beat her to it. Thirty years and five volumes later, it is longlisted for the International Booker

Between the lines: what do White Lotus characters’ book choices tell us?

Season three offers up clues to characters’ psyches – or perhaps their fates – by showing us their holiday reads

Cynthia Ozick: ‘Alice in Wonderland seems calculatedly cruel’

The American author on the wonder of Little Women, re-evaluating Lolita and her belated discovery of Thoreau

The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha review – hopeless sons vs brilliant daughters

Families are at war in the new India, in a novel raising complex questions about patriotism, nationalism and how the country is changing

The Theory of Everything by Yumna Kassab review – this kaleidoscopic experiment is a delight

With her fifth book, Kassab leans even further into her fragmented, polyphonic style, exploding the possibilities of what the novel can be and do

Salman Rushdie to publish new collection of stories, The Eleventh Hour

The first fiction the author has written since he was attacked in 2022 comprises three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England and the US

A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland review – a fantastic debut of forbidden desire

This spare, luminously pure novel charts a secret gay relationship in post-industrial Wales

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami review – what if AI could read our minds?

Longlisted for the Women’s prize, this powerful dystopian novel imagines people jailed for their potential to commit crimes

Raw Content by Naomi Booth review – those difficult newborn days

This emotionally astute novel describes a woman’s descent into psychological distress, but some of its ideas remain embryonic

Flannery O’Connor at 100: should we still read her?

She died before she was 40, leaving behind a body of blazingly original short fiction set in America’s segregated south. But her reputation has been tarnished by accusations of racism