Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence review – purgatory and paradise with a wild prophet

Frances Wilson’s book is as magnificently flawed as its subject – and a work of art in its own right

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie review – the malicious surprise

The author reflects on the loss of her father, mourned at a distance during the pandemic, in an exquisitely written tribute

Last Days in Cleaver Square by Patrick McGrath review – memory, ageing and guilt

A veteran of the Spanish civil war is visited by the ghost of Franco in a deftly handled story of past trauma and deceit

If You Were There by Francisco Garcia review – a missing persons report

A sensitive investigation challenges our understanding of what it means to be missing, and how it feels for those left behind

The Ground Breaking review: indispensable history of the Tulsa Race Massacre

On the centenary of the attack on ‘Black Wall Street’, one of the worst racist outrages in US history, Scott Ellsworth has produced an impeccable work

The best recent poetry – review roundup

The Trojan Women by Anne Carson; The Gododdin by Gillian Clarke; Hotel Raphael by Rachel Boast; American Mules by Martina Evans; pandemonium by Andrew McMillan

Everybody by Olivia Laing review – a book about freedom

A moving and clear-eyed history of bodily freedoms that takes as its central character Wilhelm Reich, inventor of the orgone accumulator

The Rules of Revelation by Lisa McInerney review – an ‘unholy trinity’ concludes

The third in McInerney’s brilliant series about Cork’s underbelly brings the comic melodrama to a satisfying finale

The Woman in the Window review – broken thriller is barely worth a look

Amy Adams gives a flat performance as an agoraphobe unravelling a dull mystery in Joe Wright’s cursed misstep now being dumped on Netflix

The Dame and the Showgirl review – when Edith Sitwell met Marilyn Monroe

Emma Thompson plays the poet and Sinead Matthews is the breathy movie star in Simon Berry’s compelling audio play

The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen by Krissy Kneen review – memoir as both fairytale and defiant truth

Kneen weaves a magical and honest story about finding freedom but also about naming the things that shape us

A User’s Guide to Melancholy by Mary Ann Lund review – senses of humour

A learned and readable picture of Renaissance medicine with less comic eccentricity than Robert Burton’s 1621 magnum opus

The Human Voice review – Tilda Swinton on the verge in Almodóvar’s tale of despair

Swinton plays a woman abandoned by her lover in a short, affecting drama that echoes the uncertainties of lockdown

Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor review – beyond words

Disaster in the Antarctic necessitates heroism at home, in this beautifully restrained interrogation of language, care and loss

Empire of Pain review by Patrick Radden Keefe – the dynasty behind an opioid crisis

This examination of the Sackler family, purveyors of OxyContin, lays bear its responsibility for the US’s opioid epidemic