Malorie Blackman on Noughts & Crosses at 25: ‘It’s even more relevant today’

Her YA classic was inspired by racism in 1990s Britain. A quarter of a century later, she talks about success, death threats and getting shoutouts from Tinie Tempah and Stormzy

A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello review – a profound exploration of the inner life

How are we to account for things that lie outside ordinary language? A woman’s emotions are precisely observed in a novel that brilliantly captures what it means to be human

The play that changed my life: ‘There were cheers, screams and gasps at our story – we couldn’t believe it!’

Dramatising Onjali Q Raúf’s refugee tale The Boy at the Back of the Class brought cheers and boos from a young audience – showing they can handle the truth

Amazon pulls sponsorship from Paris book festival after booksellers’ association boycott

Syndicat de la Librairie Française accused online retailer of trying to ‘flood the market with fake AI-generated books’

The Guardian view on 25 years of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses: a love story that changed an industry

Editorial: Publishing has failed to deliver on its promises after Black Lives Matter. True diversity requires a lasting shift

António Lobo Antunes’s exhilarating novels forced Portugal to confront its darkest moments

With an exacting modernist style and the courage to address fascism and colonialism head on, Lobo Antunes’s writing is a deluge of unforgiving truths in lush prose

The Game of Thrones movie is coming – but how are they going to make audiences root for the baddies?

The early intel from George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels paints the Targaryens as tyrants – so making them the heroes is going to require some hefty literary PR

António Lobo Antunes, Portuguese novelist who chronicled dictatorship and war, dies aged 83

Author of more than 30 novels, including Fado Alexandrino and The Inquisitors’ Manual, was widely seen as one of the most important voices in modern Portuguese literature

From luxury ‘dupes’ to literary doubles: why doppelgangers are everywhere right now

AI ‘twins’, Mar-a-Lago lookalikes, Melania impersonator conspiracies … doubles proliferate in today’s culture – and nowhere more so than in a series of unsettling new novels that draw on a rich gothic tradition to tap into our paranoid times

The best recent poetry – review roundup

Gravity Archives by Andrew Motion; Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway-Smith; Strange Architectures by JL Williams; I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

Saba Sams: ‘I’ve no interest in reading Wuthering Heights again’

The Send Nudes author on rereading Lorrie Moore, finding Dodie Smith at the right time, and the enduring brilliance of Muriel Spark

The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski review – a delicious comfort read

A decaying gothic mansion tells the story of the family who once lived there, in this pitch-perfect debut of disappearances, betrayal and despair

The Manningtree Witches review – Ava Pickett’s gripping follow-up to Tudor hit 1536

The targets of the infamous 17th-century ‘witchfinder general’ narrate a powerful play based on AK Blakemore’s novel

Extra stress or a bit of fun? Teachers and parents discuss World Book Day

As children dress up in UK and Ireland on Thursday, not everyone is on the same page over event’s pros and cons

From thermal underwear to ‘hairy’ jam: World Book Day titles take over UK book chart

Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey: Total Chaos! was No 1 in the chart last week as the Top 10 was dominated by the charity’s discounted children’s reads ahead of annual event