Katie Kitamura is an American novelist, journalist and art critic whose latest book, Audition, has been nominated for this year’s Booker prize (announced on 10 November). A novel that thrives on ambiguity, it begins with a lunch meeting between a successful actress and a much younger man at a Manhattan restaurant, and was praised by the Booker judges for “the way it persists in the mind after reading”. Her previous books include Intimacies (2021), A Separation (2017) and her debut, Japanese for Travellers: A Journey Through Modern Japan (2007). Raised in California by Japanese parents, she now lives in New York with her husband, fellow author Hari Kunzru.

Both sprawling and remarkably tense, The Secret Agent is set in Brazil in the 1970s, during the military dictatorship. A political thriller that delivers on all the promises of the genre, it remains idiosyncratic, surreal and irrepressibly playful. Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho with verve and assurance, the film features a towering performance by Wagner Moura, easily one of my favourite living actors.

Clocking in at nearly 90 minutes – long for a so-called “plotless ballet” – Jerome Robbins’ Goldberg Variations is a challenging and cerebral work. It had its premiere in 1971; I saw it at Lincoln Center, where it was part of New York City Ballet’s fall season. Structured with the same architectural precision as Bach’s music, the work grows, piece by piece, to monumental proportions. The duration is, I think, important – Goldberg Variations demands patience from the audience, and the work is less immediately giving than some of Robbins’ other ballets. But it builds into a transformative, exhilarating and entirely singular experience.

This three-channel installation by Naeem Mohaiemen is an immersive and complex work about memorial culture, the question of who and what shapes historical narratives. The installation is centred on two examples of extraordinary state violence that took place in the US within days of each other in 1970: the murder of four student protesters by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, and the murder of two students shot by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi. The work sets archival footage against present-day interviews and site visits conducted by Mohaiemen. The work’s relevance to the current political landscape is obvious, but Mohaiemen does more than draw a parallel – he shows the continuity between the historical and the contemporary, and the role of narrative in both revealing and obfuscating that lineage.

This ingenious collection, conceived and edited by Yiyun Li, places Greene’s stories in pairs – to be read, as the title suggests, not merely in conversation, but also in opposition and in concert. Each coupling reveals new aspects of Greene’s work, and orders the reading experience in an elegant and nuanced way. But the most revelatory pairing of all might be the one between Greene and Li – a Greene aficionado and one of the most significant writers at work today. Not only in Li’s introduction, but in the pairings themselves, the volume offers insight into her practices as a reader and a writer. The result is a gorgeous and very special reading experience.

I recently had a meal prepared by the Ghanaian-British chef Akwasi Brenya-Mensa and it was extremely, extremely delicious; the omo tuo and groundnut soup was so good a crowded room of very chatty people briefly fell completely silent as they ate. Brenya-Mensa is behind Tatale – formerly a restaurant in Southwark, now something more like a roving food and art project. This particular meal was a one-off in New York, but I’m fervently hoping he opens something here soon.