Children’s and teens roundup – the best new picture books and novels

A tiger’s tale; the young Henry VIII; a fantasy follow‑up from Katherine Rundell; small-town secrets; ghosts galore and more

No Land to Stand On by Mahmoud Khalil review – a searing account of political imprisonment

The Palestinian Columbia student snatched by ICE writes about his Kafkaesque ordeal with a quiet fury

Cul-de-Sac by Eleanor Limprecht review – a powerful and timely novel about domestic abuse

Limprecht explores male violence without succumbing to tropes, bringing the monster into the room and forcing us to really look at him

My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy audiobook review – gripping vision of a fearless writer

A fictional British author in Paris sets out to explore Stein through the lens of her own friendships, in this inventive, perfectly paced portrait

Bad Apples review – Saoirse Ronan’s suffering teacher best thing about school horror-satire

Ronan plays a teacher who finds a way to deal with a disruptive pupil in Jonatan Etzler’s implausible satire, but it’s not shocking or funny enough

The New Dark Ages by James Marriott review – a grandiose but superficial defence of reading

What is it that makes books so magical? The Times columnist somehow forgets to tell us in this lofty polemic

The Strangers by Naomi Alderman review – where has this odd new species come from?

A bereavement memoir mingles with speculative fiction, in a wise and ragged examination of grief from the author of The Power

Safe Spaces by Tice Cin review – a kaleidoscopic vision of precarity, music and grief

Part spoken-word poem, part journalistic meditation, this is an inventive, tender novel of a songwriter’s journey through love and loss in London

Redwood by Ben Macintyre review – a superbly wrought tale of cold war defection

This story of Soviet agent and his MI6 handler in revolutionary Iran is a page-turning masterpiece

All the Wrong Moves by Anthony Scaramucci review – confessions of an ex-Trumper

The president’s former press secretary has learned all the right lessons, but how come it took him so long?

The Rouse by China Miéville review – a mighty achievement from the ‘new weird’ author

Twenty years in the writing, this paranormal epic of cold war espionage and family tragedy is a quantum leap in terms of ambition and moral seriousness

Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks review – conflict and compromise, from a veteran of the genre

A returning British soldier is haunted by his time in Palestine in this panoramic epic set after the second world war

End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor review – the fightback starts here

A sharp analysis of the damage wrought by the reckless super-rich, and a progressive toolkit for repairing it

Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy review – classical myth burns into modern England

In Ava Pickett’s tense play, Michelle Dockery’s heroine returns to a Towie-styled world where the violence and misogyny are all too recognisable

The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup

Massif by Garth Nix; Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired By Ursula K Le Guin edited by Jonathan Strahan; An Immaculate Deception by Isabela Livino; Serenity Falls by CJ Tudor