The Long Game: Inside Sinn Féin review – from the Provos to the promised land?
Aoife Moore conducts a painstaking study of the party and its leading figures, revealing Sinn Féin’s future prospects and complicated relationship with the IRA
Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain review – high style and bittersweet yearning
Set in the England of the 1950s and 60s, this short but brilliant novel about life and thwarted love is nothing short of magical
In brief: One Blood; Extinctions; Hysterical – reviews
Black American women navigate the decades in a powerful family saga; a palaeontologist explores Earth’s mass extinctions; and a behavioural scientist explains the gendering of emotion
Beasts of England by Adam Biles review – timely successor to Animal Farm
Set in a petting zoo, this political fable for post-Brexit times is a stark portrait of an isolated, bankrupted community
The Handover by David Runciman review – is the future out of our control?
Surveying everything from hunter gatherers to Elon Musk, the Cambridge politics professor debates whether our fate is sealed by the machines we’ve created
The Fatal Breath: Covid-19 and Society in Britain by David Vincent review – a moving account of the plague of our times
This bold and forensic history of the pandemic, drawing on previously unpublished diaries, underlines the sheer scale of suffering, with the poor and isolated particularly badly hit
The Last Politician review: the case for Joe Biden, polling be damned
Franklin Foer delivers the goods on a president stuck with stubbornly low ratings and ever-present worries about his age
Breaking Through Depression; The Balanced Brain – reviews
Last year, research cast doubt on the dominant ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of depression. Now two persuasive books by scientists Philip Gold and Camilla Nord offer very different causes of the illness – though both are optimistic about our future treatment of the ‘cancer of the self’
A Haunting in Venice review – Branagh’s Agatha Christie whodunnit given horror makeover
No amount of spooky jump-scares can save Kenneth Branagh’s latest Christie adaptation, which wastes its atmospheric setting and stellar cast
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein review – a case of mistaken identity
An insightful and subtle exploration of truth in politics, prompted by constantly being confused with Naomi Wolf
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel audiobook review: existential envy
The author narrates her own brisk tale of a thirtysomething’s caustic coveting of status, sex and wealth with a winningly dispassionate style
The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup
The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar; Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis; The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord; Bride of the Tornado by James Kennedy; The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly
The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman review – a tech tsunami
The co-founder of DeepMind issues a terrifying warning about AI and synthetic biology – but how seriously should we take it?
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron review – secrets and spies
This companion piece to the Slough House series uncovers intrigue and corruption in the secret service, from 90s Berlin to the Cabinet office
The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush review – spaceflight pioneer portraits
From sexist objections to the challenges faced by female crew on Earth and in space, this is a vital record of a giant leap for women