Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger review – self-help tips that are more gain than pain

The bodybuilder turned actor and politician reinvents himself as a motivator with an improvement guide that actually works

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor review – an epic hymn to a ‘joyously vulgar’ pair

Drink-fuelled fights, tantrums, fratricide… Roger Lewis’s exhaustive but exhausting study of the Burton-Taylor partnership is as extravagant and uncompromising as its badly behaved stars

You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty by Jane Martinson review – succession saga

A meticulously reported story of power, politics and feuding at the heart of a British media empire

Liberation Day by George Saunders audiobook review – funny, poignant and surreal short stories

Prisoners have their brains wiped, a children’s author searches for ideas, and a grandfather rails at his life under a Trumpian leader in this collection, narrated by actors including Tina Fey and Michael McKean

The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett; West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman; Mrs Sidhu’s Dead and Scone by Suk Pannu; Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming; The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama

Tremor by Teju Cole review – art, history and violence

Cole’s third novel packs in centuries of artworks and continents of human experiences, in a dazzling reflection on colonialism, aesthetics and contemporary life

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller review – what does the hit play gain from being novelised?

On stage this story has won Tony and Olivier awards. But as a book set in the UK, it suffers from the extra padding – and it feels more heavy-handed, too

Decolonising My Body by Afua Hirsch review – reclaiming beauty

A black woman’s gentle quest of learning and relearning how to understand her body

The Women Who Made Modern Economics by Rachel Reeves review – a personal manifesto

The shadow chancellor’s portraits of her economic heroes reveal much about a future Labour government’s agenda

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri review – outsiders in Italy

The Pulitzer winner’s vivid collection of short stories crackles with indignation as it explores the meaning of home and the cost of exile

Christine review – Stephen King’s evil car still has a one-track mind

John Carpenter’s enjoyably pulpy adaptation of King’s 1983 horror novel, about a car that infects its owners with evil, gets a 40th-anniversary revival

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog review – magical thinking

A bracing dive into the film-maker’s darkly beguiling mind

Light Over Liskeard by Louis de Bernières review – whimsy and sexbots at the end of the world

A quantum cryptographer holes up in Cornwall to await the apocalypse, in this quirky tale of rural love in a technological dystopia

Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore review – nerd’s eye view

The Sonic Youth frontman leaves personal confession out of this first-hand account of 80s and 90s alt rock

Julia by Sandra Newman review – a new Nineteen Eighty-Four

This ambitious retelling from Julia’s point of view gives Winston Smith’s lover the agency she lacked