Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann review – a funny and furious womanifesto

The novelist rails against everything from Agatha Christie to the US Capitol attack – and, above all, men – in her joyously eclectic essay collection

In Youth Is Pleasure by Denton Welch review – bright glimpses of a lost existence

This 1945 novel, republished as a Penguin Classic, is rooted in its author’s short, intense life

Black Teacher by Beryl Gilroy review – bigotry in the classroom

First published in 1976, this memoir by one of Britain’s first black headteachers is a vital story of survival doused in fury, humour and love

In brief: Black Water Sister; Mr Wilder & Me; Teach Yourself to Sleep – reviews

A graduate is haunted by the voice of her grandmother, Jonathan Coe examines fame through a film director, and Kate Mikhail wants to send us to sleep

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam review – profound meditation on suffering

A young Tamil ponders the death of his grandmother’s carer in a hypnotic novel about ageing, longing and the aftermath of war

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris review – a fine, lyrical debut

Freedom and forbidden love entwine in Harris’s sweeping novel set in the dying days of the American civil war

A Shock by Keith Ridgway review – life behind London’s twitching curtains

An offbeat collection of inner-city vignettes provide a voyeuristic window on the capital’s secrets

Ethel Rosenberg by Anne Sebba review – a mother murdered by cold war hysteria

This powerful biography of a woman executed for espionage, along with her husband, recreates the suffocating atmosphere of the US in the 1950s

Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground by Susan McKay review – a community at a crossroads

Brexit negotiations, LGBTQ+ rights and loyalist violence unite and divide in a collection of candid interviews with those who feel ‘outside the unionist mainstream’

Children’s books roundup – the best new picture books and novels

Mermen and pirate mums, things to do and see outside, black British history in songs, plus the best new YA novels

Ancestors by Alice Roberts review – a story of movement and migration

A brilliant scientific storyteller reads stone, pottery and bones to bring us the latest moving updates about our prehistoric ancestors

The Constitution of Knowledge review: defending truth from Trump

Jonathan Rauch has written an important book but the battle may require appeals to other powers

Burning Man by Frances Wilson review – meets DH Lawrence on his own terms

This extraordinary biography creates a mythology around the author’s wild spirit and his life’s quest for freedom and rebirth

I Couldn’t Love You More by Esther Freud review – mothers, daughters and secrets

The power of storytelling is explored in this finely crafted tale of three generations of women

Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds review – delightfully retro canine capers

Alexandre Dumas’ bitingly good novel enjoys yet another walk around the block in this marvellously muttish animation