Meshell Ndegeocello: No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin review – a fire reignited

Baldwin’s stinging words on race and America are matched with the kind of musical eloquence that the great writer himself so admired

Let’s Be Honest by Jess Phillips review – the case for democracy

Mixing memoir and polemic, exasperation and enthusiasm, the Labour MP offers a candid account of clickbait politics and Tory misrule

Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu review – haunting American dreams

A journalist travels across the US to unravel the secrets surrounding the life and death of his Ethiopian immigrant father

The NeverEnding Story review – a wondrous world of beasts and young heroes

A grieving boy is drawn into a magical land in Wolfgang Petersen’s ambitious fantasy adventure, rereleased for its 40th anniversary

Werckmeister Harmonies review – Béla Tarr’s brooding masterpiece of a town sleepwalking into tyranny

Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s 2000 film moves slowly around a small town where a very strange circus has arrived. Its eerie power has only grown in a time of rising fascism

A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike review – loveable historical fiction

An irreverent heroine brings late medieval England to life in this raucous tale based on a real-life hoax

The New India by Rahul Bhatia review – how nationalism changed a country

The voices of ordinary Indians take centre stage in this absorbing account of political transformation

Kensuke’s Kingdom review – Michael Morpurgo’s desert island boy’s own adventure

Morpurgo’s yarn about a kid on a round the world voyage is adapted by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and attractively packaged as a family-friendly animation

Strange Relations: Masculinity, Sexuality and Art in Mid-Century America by Ralf Webb review – sex and the literary lions

A concise study of Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin, and how their sexuality informed their work, veers between lecture-hall lit crit and novelistic immediacy

Three review – Yugoslavian trilogy of tales tracks the horrors of the second world war

Aleksandar Petrović’s 1965 interlinked stories focus on the changes wrought in one young Yugoslavian by the brutality of the war and its aftermath

Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo review – in memory of the missing

Inspired by an unidentified boy found dead in the Thames, the first – and only – collection by the late poet is an imaginative meditation on death and those who disappear

Wife by Charlotte Mendelson review – bravura portrait of a marriage in meltdown

A new novel from the author of The Exhibitionist is a family saga of rare insight, with another magnificently grotesque villain at its heart

No Name in the Street; Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin – review

In the centenary of his birth year, the author’s voice is as necessary, human and sharp as ever in a reprinted short story collection and memoir from the 1960s and 70s

All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons and Politicians by Phil Elwood review – a spin doctor for despots

The ‘Hunter S Thompson of PR’’s tell-all about the dark arts of media manipulation, promoting Assad, Gaddafi and the Qatar World Cup, is an entertaining if feverish glimpse into a secretive industry

They Dream in Gold by Mai Sennaar review – love and identity on the 1960s music scene

A glorious debut about a Senegalese singer’s rise to stardom and the woman he meets in New York