Benediction review – Terence Davies’ piercingly sad Siegfried Sassoon drama

The tragic life of the poet and soldier is revisited with melancholy and theatricality in a bleak, and often hard to watch, biopic

In brief: The Man Who Died Twice; Aesop’s Animals; Breathtaking – reviews

Richard Osman’s second novel doesn’t disappoint. Plus, the science behind Aesop’s fables and on the Covid frontline with Dr Rachel Clarke

An Island by Karen Jennings review – stranger on the shore

Longlisted for the Booker prize, Jennings’s tale of a lighthouse keeper and an uninvited guest grapples with colonialism and the plight of refugees

The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy review – all work and no play

Time-and-motion studies meets motion-capture acrobatics in a hi-tech saga that’s big on detail but devoid of insight

Ferdinand Mount: ‘You couldn’t not be frightened of Margaret Thatcher!’

The literary editor and novelist on his timely novel exploring the dark arts of the political class

The Letters of TS Eliot Volume 9: 1939-1941 review – of poetry and purgatives

Culinary delights, bodily fluids and finding financial security in cats feature in a 1,000-page volume that inches just two years further into the poet’s correspondence

All In: An Autobiography by Billie Jean King review – a true gamechanger

The tennis superstar and first openly lesbian professional writes candidly about a career that led the way for women’s sports as we know them

Broken Heartlands by Sebastian Payne review – a tour of the red wall’s ruins

The Gateshead-born journalist toured former left strongholds, talking to politicians and local people, to write this illuminating study of a seismic shift in British politics

Travels with George review: Washington, America’s original sin … and its divided present

In what seems a valedictory to his work on the American revolution, Nathaniel Philbrick considers the legacy of the first president – and of slavery

On the Cusp: Days of ’62 by David Kynaston review – dizzyingly varied

Kynaston’s impressive history of Britain comes to the year 1962, when Harold Macmillan pulled out the long knives and the Beatles released ‘Love Me Do’

Freight Dogs by Giles Foden review – surviving Africa’s world war

A teenager’s life is shattered by conflict in this ambitious novel tethered to real-life events

The best recent fantasy, horror and science fiction – review roundup

Dare to Know by James Kennedy; Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; The Black Locomotive by Rian Hughes; Five Minds by Guy Morpuss; and AI 2041: Ten Visions for our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan

Shutdown by Adam Tooze review – how Covid shook the world economy

A cosmopolitan analysis of what went wrong and how we can avoid it next time – because there will be a next time

The Servant review – Losey and Pinter’s nightmarish version of Jeeves and Wooster

The subversive 1963 classic crackles with undertones of class, sexuality and communism, with Dirk Bogarde at his finest as the sociopathic manservant

The Liquid Land review – a memorable Austrian allegory

A town is being sucked down a vast hole in Raphaela Edelbauer’s subtle, whimsical debut about historical memory