Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon review – bodies and the legacy of slavery

Violence permeates this original account of growing up in a country that distrusts and demonises black people

Night Train by Thom Jones review – intensity, weirdness and a great ear for idiom

The mostly male characters of Jones’s strange and bracing tales about baby boomers court risk – and sometimes even feel remorse

The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick review – dark fable of artistic creation

A slender, but beautifully written evocation of the travails of writing and the deep sources of horror

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh by Carl Zimmer review – the latest thinking on heredity

What do we pass on from generation to generation? This deeply researched book explores the murky past of genetic research as well as its fast-moving present

Varina by Charles Frazier review – clear-sighted view of a divided America

The Cold Mountain author has returned to the civil war for this novel of flight and separation

Philip Larkin: Letters Home review – the poet as loyal, guilt-ridden son

What do your parents do to you? This correspondence, edited by James Booth, reveals a new side of Larkin, as he tries to make up for how much he hated visiting his mother

The Flame by Leonard Cohen review – the last word in love and despair

The songwriter and poet’s final writings are full of youthful spark, beauty and romance

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger – review

Rebecca Traister’s polemic around #MeToo has passion and fury but seems blind to the complexity of its subject

How to Be Right by James O’Brien review – dial M for the moral high ground

LBC phone-in host James O’Brien wants to raise the level of public debate, but he can seem a bit of a show-off

Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World by William Davies – review

The roots of our current anxieties are traced in an absorbing book fizzing with ideas

In brief: Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights; Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants; Land of the Living – review

Jay Rayner shares his kitchen nightmares, Mathias Énard breathes new life into the 16th-century Ottoman empire and Georgina Harding tells of war, loss and survival

Bring It on Home: Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin and Beyond by Mark Blake – review

An entertaining biography of Led Zeppelin’s man-mountain of a manager reveals an intriguing, ultimately tragic figure

Tombland by CJ Sansom review – royals and revolting peasants

In Shardlake’s seventh case, the whodunnit is a pretext for an amiable historical tale of unrest in 16th-century Norfolk

The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal by Horatio Clare – review

A memoir of the winter months is lyrical and vivid but skates too lightly over the author’s seasonal depression

Chamber Music: About the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces) by Will Ashon – review

This fascinating and ambitious insight into one of the defining records – and hip-hop groups – of the 90s goes way beyond mere album biography