Why are today’s children’s books and films often so much better than adult ones?

It’s not simply that kids’ culture has improved since I was young. Across stage, screen and cinema, grownup offerings pale in comparison to those aimed at my son, writes Catherine Shoard

Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps review – tender portrait of a woman with a learning disability

Longlisted for the Women’s prize, this ambitious debut journeys into the inner world of a vulnerable teenager who is left traumatised by a toxic friendship

Tales of the Suburbs by John Grindrod review – queer goings on behind the curtains

From ‘gaybours’ to treasure hunts in Tunbridge Wells, a tragicomic history of LGBTQ life outside the big city

The Bride! review – Jessie Buckley is electrifying as frizzy-haired, black-tongued monster’s wife

The actor has a blast as bride to Christian Bale’s lonely creature in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s darkly comic and gleefully bizarre reimagining of the 1935 film

Claire Lynch wins Nero Gold prize for debut about 1980s homophobia

The £30,000 award went to novel A Family Matter, about a lesbian affair and a custody battle

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Sixteen novels are in contention for the £30,000 award, now in its 31st year, with settings ranging from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata

From MTV Cribs to The Bachelor Mansion: what reality TV homes reveal about viewers

In book Dream Facades, Jack Balderrama Morley examines houses from shows including Keeping Up with the Kardashians to see what we can learn

Relentless sun and ruthless populists: how the climate crisis will change the next 20 years

Former diplomat Arthur Snell says a heating planet is accelerating conflict and migration – and fostering a new age of empire. Democracies are dangerously unprepared, he warns

Worried about the demise of reading? Come to France, where we’re up to our eyes in print

From hefty literary magazines to thriving book sales, the French publishing industry refuses to let printed matter die, says Paris-based writer Alexander Hurst

‘I owe Iron Maiden my English A-level!’ The great literature our writers discovered through pop music

Ahead of World Book Day on Thursday, Guardian music writers pick out the musicians whose literary references illuminated them – from Adam Ant on Joe Orton to the National on Grace Paley

Share your views: how do you feel about World Book Day?

Do you love it or is it time to put it quietly back on the shelf?

Chasing Freedom by Simukai Chigudu review – a powerful memoir of postcolonial unease

A historian and exponent of ‘Rhodes must fall’ explores how political liberation doesn’t always bring personal freedom

The Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self review – raucously inventive state-of-the-nation satire

Thirty-five years on from his debut collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Self takes aim at London’s chattering classes in an excoriating vision of moral decline

Flagship Harry Potter store to open on London’s Oxford Street

British outlet for the Hogwarts-adjacent ‘interactive retail experience’ will include ‘photo moments’ and exclusive merchandise

Game of Thrones film adaptation in the works at Warner Bros

Blockbuster adaptation of George RR Martin’s fantasy world will focus on events 300 years before the HBO series’ pilot