It is typical of Miriam Margolyes’s boisterously entertaining autobiography that the index should juxtapose “Laurence Olivier” with “oral sex”. The book is attuned to both contemporary and timeless concerns and grips throughout. She mixes historical fact with the fantastical in her account of Chopin and George Sand arriving at a Mallorca monastery in 1838, only to be met by Blanca, the centuries-old ghost of a teenage girl who died cruelly young, who makes Sand confront truths about gender and sexuality that she might have preferred to ignore. Nell Stevens’s hugely accomplished debut novel evokes a sense both of place and time with a confidence that augurs well for her future career. She persuasively suggests that Margaret Mitchell’s story has been inspirational in the worst possible ways, leading to everything from Trumpism to racist brutality and has inadvertently led to an America even more divided than before. According to Sarah Churchwell’s bracing new book, it is time to remove the narrative from its undeserved pedestal and examine its problematic treatment of feminism, class and, above all, race afresh. Both the novel and the film of Gone With the Wind have traditionally been regarded as canonical accounts of life in the 19th-century US.

Briefly a delicious life nell stevens