The Vanity Fair Diaries review – Tina Brown’s supreme balancing act

Brown’s record of her years as editor of the magazine in the 80s is both enthralling and terrifying

The Future Is History by Masha Gessen review – Putin and Homo Sovieticus

The author’s claim that the regime in Russia is ‘totalitarian’ is extravagant, but she has written a fascinating account of the toxic legacy of the Soviet era

Artemis by Andy Weir review – follow-up to The Martian

His self-published debut sold 5m copies. The follow-up offers the same flat, sweary prose, fistfights and scientific mini-lectures - on the moon

Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello review – brilliant essays on immortal beasts

The meanings of Dürer’s rhino, Mozart’s starling, Darwin’s tortoise and others explored with wild imagination and pyrotechnic prose

Justice League review – good, evil and dullness do battle

Ben Affleck’s unconvincing Batman deadens the long-awaited DC adventure as superheroes team up to save planet Earth from destruction, but not boredom

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green review – dark and complex

Teenager Aza embarks on a mystery and a love story but both are soon derailed by her own anxieties…

The Story of Looking by Mark Cousins review – the world through someone else’s eyes

The film-maker’s history of the human gaze is illuminating, but has little to say about today’s image overload

‘Why the response to the centenary is muted’ – the Russian Revolution and its legacy

Books by Masha Gessen, Serhii Plokhy, Yuri Slezkine and Stephen Kotkin shed light on Soviet socialism’s birth and death

The World Goes On review – a masterpiece of fear and futility

Prizewinning Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai’s new collection of stories is ‘deeply affecting’

The Art of Failing review – it shouldn’t happen to a YA author

An enjoyable account of a year of mishaps, as experienced by the writer Anthony McGowan, makes for a good book to dip into

Letters to the Lady Upstairs review – Proust and the sound of silence

This slim book of letters between Marcel Proust and his neighbour the dentist’s wife are a delight

The Robin: A Biography by Stephen Moss review – red in tweet and claw

This portrait of a British favourite is engaging but brings little new to the bird table…

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng – review

A story of morals and motherhood set against the mystery of a burning house is well crafted but leaves our critic cold

My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown review – formidable but destructively flawed

Brown’s memoir is great on his years in the Treasury but suffers from his fixation with the leadership

Black Rock White City by AS Patrić review – crime thriller meets immigrant tale

A poignant portrayal of two refugees from the former Yugoslavia trying to rebuild their lives in Australia is an admirably ambitious debut