The Woman in Black by Susan Hill audiobook review – immersive gothic horror

Narrator Paapa Essiedu delivers the chills in this atmospheric telling of Hill’s classic ghost story

White Torture by Narges Mohammadi review – solitary savagery

An Iranian political activist, now in jail herself, interviews 12 female prisoners of the Islamic Republic about their experiences

The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz review – California dreaming

Set in the Central Valley of the 1980s, these rich short stories about migrant workers speak of longing, loneliness and vulnerability

Transformer by Simon Doonan review – a walk on the wild side

The former creative director of Barney’s remembers a beautifully transgressive moment in pop culture

Euphoria by Elin Cullhed review – inside the mind of Sylvia Plath

The Swedish writer offers an audacious, gripping novel imagining the poet’s final year and the conflict between creative genius and domestic life

Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol review – humbug hoedown

Parton’s music is as warming as ever but a snowfall of schmaltz and minimal menace make this Dickens adaptation sickly sweet

The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis review – a classic laid bare

TS Eliot’s life and influences are meticulously investigated in this impressive account of artistic creation

The Amazing Maurice review – rodent crime caper is a riot of silliness

A stellar cast have a lot of fun hamming it up in this adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel about a bunch of scamming rats who come unstuck on a con gone wrong

1000 Coils of Fear by Olivia Wenzel review – an energetic debut

This self-interrogating first novel explores the vertiginous experience of living in contemporary Germany as a queer woman of colour

Bad Data by Georgina Sturge review – figures of derision

A parliamentary statistician lays bare the use and abuse of numbers in public life

Kindred review – Octavia E Butler’s daring sci-fi novel makes for hit-and-miss TV

The acclaimed author’s book, about a woman traveling back in time to a slave plantation, is transformed into an overlong yet well-acted series

Pandemic Diaries by Matt Hancock review – rewriting history

Assembled after the fact, these ‘diaries’ strain the usual definition – and the patience of those wanting a fuller account of government mistakes

A Christmas Carol review – glorious musical version of Dickens’s festive treat

Charles Dickens takes to the stage and Ebenezer Scrooge is a woman with a moving backstory in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation

Alice in Wonderland review – Carroll’s classic goes down the Victoria line

Poltergeist theatre company send Alice into the underground in this offbeat adaptation with tube-inspired nonsense language

Between Friends review – the letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

The authors’ intense bond is wonderfully captured in this collection of missives, each supporting the other in their discovery of new forms of personal expression