21st-Century Yokel by Tom Cox review – entertaining ramble through English folklore
Cox ponders the relationship between people and place in this amusing hybrid of nature writing, memoir and history
Promise Me, Dad review – moving Biden memoir that wonders: could he have beaten Trump?
Joe Biden’s new book describes a year of unbelievable sensory overload, from his son Beau’s cancer to the dilemma of whether to run for president
Ancient Mysteries: Eden Revealed review – all round Adam and Eve’s for a gazelle feast?
Excavations in Turkey reveal tantalising details about humankind’s great leap forward to hunter-gathering, and the role religion played in that shift
The best recent crime novels – review roundup
The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell; The House by Simon Lelic; The Vanishing Box by Elly Griffiths; The Man Who Died by Antti Tuomainen; East of Hounslow by Khurrum Rahman
Alt-America and English Uprising review – Trump, Brexit and the far right
Both David Neiwert’s book on the US radical right and Paul Stocker’s on Brexit argue that economic factors take second place in explaining populism
Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard review – from cotton buds to sex as cannibalism
The second volume of the bestselling author’s seasonal musings meander between the laughable and the sublime
Bantam by Jackie Kay review – home truths from a goddess of small things
Jackie Kay depicts a world of grief, joy, love and humour in the sparest terms
Dawn of the New Everything by Jaron Lanier review – memoirs of a tech visionary
Jaron Lanier is both cheerleader and doomsayer in a highly personal story of virtual reality
The Sex Pistols 1977: The Bollocks Diaries; Punk Is Dead, edited by Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix – review
Two very different histories of punk help to explain why the controversial movement changed so many young people’s lives
Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd – review
The Scottish writer’s social concerns and love of nature are at the heart of Charlotte Peacock’s intriguing biography
Craeft review – not just a load of old corn dollies…
Alexander Langlands’s enjoyable personal history of craft argues that we have much to learn from the ways of the past
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher review – Star Wars memories…
Covering her experiences on set and off in the sci-fi blockbuster, the actor’s last memoir finds her honest and witty as ever
Mother Land by Paul Theroux review – a phenomenally strange novel
The veteran writer’s ‘fictionalised memoir’ of matriarchal tyranny reads like an act of projection too far
The week in TV: Howards End; Love, Lies & Records; Peaky Blinders and more
Our favourite brummie gangsters are back, plus fine drama courtesy of EM Forster and Kay Mellor – but those Christmas ads…
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman review – a tidal wave of imagination
Philip Pullman revisits his great fictional universe with this captivating first story of a new trilogy, The Book of Dust