The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris audiobook review – a love letter to our feathered friends

This compendium profiles 49 of Britain’s threatened species, with each entry featuring a prose poem evoking the unique qualities of each bird and their meticulously recorded call

Whisper it: becoming a mum can make you a more productive writer

Before having children, I had endless days to think about writing. Now, half an hour can suddenly become a window of creativity, says Tania Roettger, a journalist based in Berlin

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly review – lust at first sight

Shortlisted for the Women’s prize, this story of a writer’s infatuation with an older woman begins with bracing verve

Escaping Babylon by Jesse Bernard review – an intimate history of Black British music

A personal exploration of the sounds that defined a community, from Soul II Soul to Dizzee Rascal

Peter Tolhurst obituary

Other lives: Founder of Black Dog Books, publishing titles celebrating East Anglia’s cultural landscape

Novel about ‘Disneyfication’ of nature wins climate fiction prize

Hum, Helen Phillips’ third novel, featuring a woman whose job is taken by a humanoid robot, is a terrifying look into a future where AI rules and nature is scarce

Carlo Petrini obituary

Italian activist, author and pioneer of the Slow Food movement

The great Australian nightmare: how the housing crisis inspired a wave of brutal – and funny – pop culture

Soaring prices, rental stress and intergenerational inequality are fuelling new films, books and plays, including Birthright and Kill Your Boomers

How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America: ‘One of our nation’s greatest journalists’

A new book looks back at the work of artist and journalist Garry Trudeau and how he told the story of a country’s highs and lows through a comic strip

What We Ask Google by Simon Rogers review – the secrets of our search history

The company’s data editor trawls through billions of queries to deliver a portrait of the world’s preoccupations

Fieldwork As a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy review – story of a deepfake sex tape

The author of When I Hit You returns with a pithy, savagely funny tale of online shaming and the Indian manosphere

‘Writing is exactly like love – you need to do it in the dark’: novelist Leila Slimani on starting a new chapter in her life

Now in residence at the Madrid Prado, the author talks about its dark, inspirational Goyas, the clandestine nature of her writing – and why she finally wrote about her jailed then posthumously exonerated father

Stripteases, ecstatic embraces and a dog in a dress: the full-on photos celebrating queer dancefloors worldwide

A thrillingly unsanitised new photo book captures the liberating power of queer clubs in all their sexy, messy, kinky, cacophonous glory. ‘I wanted it to feel like a night out,’ says the woman behind it

Leonora in the Morning Light review – pioneering British artist who fled convention for the surrealists

From Paris to Mexico, Leonora Carrington’s extraordinary life is retold with intelligence and restraint, though not quite enough imagination

Fairyland review – moving memoir of queer parenting and new kinds of family in 70s San Francisco

Andrew Durham’s tender adaptation of Alysia Abbott’s book finds warmth, humour and heartbreak in an unconventional family unit shaped by love and loss