On Friday Irvine Welsh announced a new sequel to Trainspotting, its story set just after the bestselling novel finishes. Welsh isn’t the only author who has returned to some of his most loved characters recently: 15 years after Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn was published, its sequel came out earlier this year, while Joanne Harris has announced a Chocolat prequel for 2025. Find out why these authors have chosen to return to their famous works straight after this week’s highlights, and scroll down to read books recommended by Ferdia Lennon, who won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction this week.

“I’ve always written the books I wanted to write, and at the time I thought was right,” says Joanne Harris, whose forthcoming novel Vianne will be the fifth book featuring the main character from her 1999 bestseller Chocolat.

“Vianne and I do have a lot in common, not least the experience of motherhood and a certain attitude to food, and we have grown alongside each other over the years,” she says. “Given how much I write about my own experiences, relationships and family, I think it’s inevitable that this character, among all of them, should keep coming back with new stories to tell.”

Many authors seem to feel this compulsion: as well as the books by Harris, Welsh and Tóibín, Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson was published earlier this year – a sequel for adults to her bestselling Girls series for teenagers. And that’s on top of Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, and The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton, a follow-up to The Miniaturist, both published after a long gap.

There are plenty of reasons why a writer might return to the events or characters of a successful novel years later – not least because there is a fanbase ready and waiting. Which, in turn, means there’s more chance of the book making money, if we’re being cynical about it.

But that wasn’t the main reason Irish writer Donal Ryan returned to the characters of his 2013 novel The Spinning Heart in this year’s Heart, Be at Peace. “I wish I was commercially driven, even just for a day!” he says. But, since he has a job as a lecturer outside writing, he says he doesn’t “write with money in mind”, instead focusing on “getting the story right, making it feel true and real”.

It was actually his late mother who made him do it. “She spent a lot of time at her till in Tesco Nenagh discussing the characters from The Spinning Heart with customers, who were curious about what the characters might have done afterwards,” he tells me. “‘Will you just write a sequel?’ Mam said several times over the years. ‘It’d be easier for all of us!’ I should have done it sooner, though, so she could have read it. But Heart, Be at Peace has her spiritual imprimatur for sure.”

For Colm Tóibín, the 2015 film adaptation of his 2009 novel Brooklyn was a significant factor in his choosing to return to the story. “I saw the film a good few times, and the way Domhnall Gleeson played the part of Jim began to interest me. Normally, in Irish films and plays the heterosexual Irish hero is unreliable, charming, but often dark and brooding,” he says. “Domhnall played Jim as stable, decent, but also gave him a sort of glow. I don’t think I would have written the book that became Long Island without the inspiration I got from Domhnall’s performance in the film of Brooklyn.”

Welsh says that, because his Trainspotting characters were the first ones he wrote, they feel “quite personal to me in a lot of ways”. Ever since writing Trainspotting’s prequel Skagboys (parts of which he wrote before Trainspotting) he never really stopped writing about them, always making notes, until he gets to the point that he thinks “I could write this up as a novel”. That’s what gave rise to Trainspotting’s two existing sequels, Porno, and Dead Men’s Trousers, and now the forthcoming Men in Love.

“When something happens in the world, I always think, ‘What would Begbie think of this, or Renton, or Spud, or Sick Boy?”

A recent read I loved was Conor Niland’s The Racket. It’s a unique sports book in that it’s not an inspiring chronicle of extraordinary success. Instead, it’s a poignant, fascinating and often blackly funny look at the life of a professional sportsperson who is talented, dedicated and yet still never troubles the top 100 in their field. Conor Niland might not have been the greatest tennis player of his generation, but he may well have written the finest tennis book.

Other excellent reads include England Is Mine by Nicolas Padamsee. At turns darkly comic, propulsive and heartbreaking, this blistering debut novel follows a young man’s online radicalisation to the far right. Padamsee vividly evokes the intense, often all-absorbing virtual worlds that exist online and their complex interplay with the real world. Padamsee deftly handles this subject matter, which is so central to the anatomy of our current moment, in a way that manages to be nuanced, incisive, and never didactic.

The Ministry of Timeby Kaliane Bradley is a sci-fi romantic comedy with echoes of Terry Pratchett and TV series The Terror, yet very much its own thing. A heady blend of time travel, romance, post-colonialism, and a dashing polar explorer, it’s genre-bending, clever and a lot of fun.