Quentin Tarantino, YA Fiction, Report from Cannes, The Vegetable Seller

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is a Hollywood veteran and it was the ending of Hollywood’s golden age that was the subject of his last film – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He’s now returned to the story of that film for his debut novel. In his only UK broadcast interview, he explains why he wanted to create a novelisation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

It’s 25 years since Melvin Burgess wrote Junk, a story about heroin addiction. It was an early title in what’s become known as YA and showed the fearlessness to take on challenging topics that has become typical of the genre. His book, Three Bullets, is out this week: it imagines a Britain somewhat like our own but that has been torn apart by war and extreme ideology. It has a mixed-race Trans girl, Marti, as its first person narrator. Melvin Burgess talks about his new book and YA more generally, alongside Sarah Ditum, as part of our series this week looking at the publishing industry. Has fearfulness taken over or is caution a necessary corrective? What stories can be told and by whom? As some voices have been un- or mis-represented in YA fiction, what is the best way ahead for the genre?

Our man on the Croissette, film critic Jason Solomons, gives the last of his Cannes reports and discusses the films competing for the film festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

The painting of a smiling woman selling vegetables had languished for years in a cupboard at Audley End, the grand 17th-century house in Essex. When conservator Alice Tate-Harte began a much needed clean-up she was surprised to discover it was two centuries older than was thought and that the smile was a later addition. Alice tells Kirsty Lang why she wiped the smile off the woman's face, and, also what the array of enticing vegetables tell us.