The Scottish comedian narrates her traumatic experience of being ‘wired differently’ and why autism is so frequently missed in women

When the Scottish comedian Fern Brady phoned her father to say she had been diagnosed with autism, he was on his daily commute back from London. He said, “Oh right”, and began complaining about the traffic. Brady replied: “Well, they say autism can be inherited from one parent, so I guess that’s answered the question of which one.”

Strong Female Character, written and narrated by Brady, and winner of the inaugural Nero award for nonfiction, documents the turmoil of growing up with undiagnosed autism, during which she excelled academically but struggled with sensory overload and had violent outbursts that baffled her family, teachers and peers. After she began self-harming, her parents sent her to an adolescent psychiatric unit where she was a day patient. She was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, though she knew that wasn’t the whole story. It took until she was 34 to get an autism diagnosis.

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An ill-matched narrator can ruin an otherwise rollicking book. But a good one can bring stories to life – and evoke our earliest childhood memories

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My earliest memory of being read to as a child involves my father gleefully reading AA Milne while stretched out on my little bed, his shoes disappearing over the edge. His enthusiasm was infectious. I still know the poem Happiness by heart: “John had great big waterproof boots on …” Milne’s collection When We Were Very Young marked the beginning of my reading journey and has a place on my bookshelf to this day.

I passed on my love of literature to my daughter, who, like me, took over her own reading duties from a young age. My sons were more reluctant but loved being read to well into their teens. Harry Potter on cassette – and Stephen Fry’s narration – saved us from murdering each other on many a long road trip, although homicide was a distinct possibility the year I accidentally bought the Jim Dale version.

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Miriam Margolyes, Kate Winslet and Nicola Sturgeon among those giving voice to objects including a femur, a thumbscrew and a glass dildo

“I think it’s terribly funny that men have these weird dangles between their legs - I wouldn’t like that at all.” The actor Miriam Margolyes is talking about male genitalia and dildos – subjects she assumes must have been causing amusement for millennia. “I think from the very beginning, women have been just hooting with laughter.”

And yet – how would we know? So often, women’s voices have been squeezed to the margins of history, their thoughts on all kinds of subjects disregarded by those who got to narrate the past. As Margolyes puts it: “Women have had to fight for space from the beginning.”

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Maya Saroya narrates the Booker-shortlisted story of how a family channels its grief on the squash court and produces a potential champion

After 11-year-old Gopi’s mother dies unexpectedly, she and her older sisters Mona and Khush channel their grief at the local sports centre where their father, known as Pa, teaches them to play squash. “I want you to become interested in something you can do your whole life,” he tells his children.

Set on the outskirts of London in the late 1980s, this Booker -nominated debut novel from Chetna Maroo begins a few days after the funeral, when Pa and his daughters are visiting extended family to mark the end of the mourning period. Their aunt Ranjan frets that the girls are going “wild” and suggests she take one of them off Pa’s hands – “Three is too many,” she tells him. Gopi waits for him to decline the offer but he doesn’t answer. This is typical of Pa, who carries his grief silently, leaving his children confused and looking for clues as to what the future holds.

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The Australian writer explores the Nineteen Eighty-Four author’s treatment of women in an empathetic biography of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy

After spending a summer reading George Orwell in between looking after her teenage children, the Australian author and former human rights lawyer Anna Funder observed how few references the Nineteen Eighty-Four author made to the women in his life. She was especially dismayed by the absence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy , Orwell’s first wife, who joined her husband on research trips and who died while undergoing surgery aged 39. And so in the genre-bending Wifedom – which has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize ­– Funder moves “from the work to the life, from the man to the wife”.

The book is both a heartfelt memoir of Funder’s struggles with the concept of “wifedom” and a biography of the first Mrs Orwell, who typed and gave feedback on her husband’s manuscripts in between chores at their freezing Hertfordshire cottage. Funder draws heavily on the letters O’Shaughnessy wrote to her friend Norah Symes, boldly – and controversially – fleshing them out to give a more detailed picture of the couple’s life together.

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A year after adding à la carte sales of audiobooks, Spotify is offering paying subscribers 15 hours of books a month.

The actor Johnny Flynn captures this debut novel’s offbeat humour and the intense loneliness of its protagonist in his terrific narration

Isaac and the Egg, the debut novel by Bobby Palmer, opens with Isaac Addy standing on a bridge at sunrise and considering whether to jump. He can’t recall how he got there though the taste in his mouth suggests he has been drinking. He can see his car at the end of the bridge, with the lights on and the driver’s door still open. Looking at the water below, Isaac lets out a scream of despair, at which “the weir stops bubbling, as if it’s paused to listen. The forest holds its breath. Time seems to stand still. Then, out of nowhere, something screams back.”

Isaac immediately goes in search of the source of the noise. What he finds is not an animal or a human but a living, breathing egg, about two feet tall and “eerily” white, “like a pearl at the centre of the biggest oyster on earth … In his heart, Isaac knows the egg has been abandoned. Like him. He already knows he’s going to take the egg home.”

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