Notes from the Cévennes review – an English writer abroad
Adam Thorpe’s erudite memoir reflects on the realities of relocating to a rustic French idyll
Crudo by Olivia Laing review – a shimmering experimental novel
Olivia Laing tests the limits of fiction in this extraordinary debut novel
The Secret DJ review – debauchery with spin
An anonymous exposé of the touring DJ’s drug-fuelled life both entertains and appals
Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard – review
The last volume of the Norwegian author’s Seasons quartet will keep his fans occupied, if not entirely satisfied
Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal – review
Segal’s lightly fictionalised account of her time in England as a Jewish refugee is both moving and timely
In brief: How Britain Really Works; Smoking Kills; Tamed: Ten Species That Changed Our World – review
An engaging guide to Britain’s major institutions, and a comedy about a killer hooked on nicotine
The Restless Wave by John McCain and Mark Salter review – a blindly patriotic, militarised memoir
US senator John McCain’s cancer battle sets the mood for this chronicle of ‘great’ political fights
Thrillers review: The Tall Man; Social Creature; This Is What Happened
A murderous meme, a death foretold and a twisted post-Brexit future – three to spook you
The Rise and Fall of the British Nation and These Islands review – the fate of ‘bullshit Britain’
Even a historian identified with optimism about the UK despairs about the country’s current predicament. Is revival possible?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest review – McMurphy’s misogyny laid bare
There are strong performances in an adaptation that gets closer to Ken Kesey’s novel than the popular film version
The best recent crime novels – review roundup
This Is What Happened by Mick Herron, The Blood Road by Stuart MacBride, The Quaker by Liam McIlvanney, The Poison Bed by EC Fremantle and A Shot in the Dark by Lynne Truss
Ground Work edited by Tim Dee review – anywhere can be a somewhere
Helen Macdonald, Philip Hoare and others celebrate local distinctiveness in these personal essays on places and people
Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson review – life transformed by art
Reinventing themselves and resisting Nazi occupation: the French surrealists Claude Cahun and her lover Marcel Moore inspire a taut, magnificently controlled novel
Florida by Lauren Groff review – rage and refusal as Earth reaps the whirlwind
Women fill with fury at waste, eco-apocalypse and the pressure to be flawless in a lyrical and oblique short story collection
Old Baggage by Lissa Evans review – suffrage and showdowns
In this bittersweet comic novel set in 1928, a veteran of the women’s suffrage movement refuses to give up the fight