Children’s reading should prioritise pleasure over learning, says laureate

Frank Cottrell-Boyce tells MPs to focus on early-years reading, with more support for parents and nursery workers

Sally Rooney to publish Hebrew translation of novel with BDS-compliant publisher

Irish novelist will publish Intermezzo through November Books after rejecting translation offer from publisher with ties to Israeli military

Offseason by Avigayl Sharp review – wry comedy of a frazzled teacher

Sharp’s deadpan debut reads like a gen Z update on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, playfully skewering modern literary tropes

If This Be Magic by Daniel Hahn review – how on earth do you translate Shakespeare?

Is Hamlet still Hamlet when every word has changed? A superbly diverting book about language and creativity

‘A book that should be read by all Australians’: Clare Wright wins book of the year at the NSW Literary awards

The historian won $50,000 for her nonfiction book Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions, which judges praised as deeply researched, ‘highly original’ and ‘vividly alive’

Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa review – lost voices from an Irish asylum

Forgotten psychiatric patients are resurrected with imagination and compassion in this extraordinary book

Smallie by Eden McKenzie-Goddard review – the stories behind the Windrush scandal

In this warm and tender debut, the family of Barbados-born Lucinda must try to document her decades in Britain after the Home Office threatens her with deportation

Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean review – a dashing retrospective for a cinematic titan

Cannes film festival: Barnaby Thompson’s documentary on the great British director is an exhilarating delve into the ebb and flow of Lean’s peerless career and sometimes complex personal life – with a grand cast of talking heads

Rowing through the fog: how to increase your tolerance for uncertainty

Journalist Simone Stolzoff in a new book explores why modern life makes not knowing harder – and how to learn to live with it

What should win this year’s International Booker?

Political oppression in Tehran, a witch’s tale from France, a film-maker in Nazi Germany … we weigh up the contenders for the International Booker prize 2026

Illness narratives are broken – and they’re failing women like me

People want my life with premenstrual dysphoric disorder to be told as a neat arc. But chronic illnesses are more like messy, looping spirals – and realising that gave me hope

Clarissa review – Sophie Okonedo mesmeric as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway decamps to Nigeria

Cannes film festival: Commanding performances and a great musical score underpin this seductive drama about regret, memory and young love

Propeller One-Way Night Coach review – John Travolta family plane fantasy is a short-haul joyride

Travolta directs and narrates this 60-minute adaptation of his own short story about a boy who dreams of being a pilot

‘I’m so grateful I got to live these days’: A Ghost in the Throat author Doireann Ní Ghríofa on recovering from depression

The acclaimed author and poet talks about her new book, telling the true stories of patients at a derelict Victorian psychiatric hospital – a place in which she might have found herself at a different time

The Guardian view on Middlemarch: the greatest novel in the English language

Editorial: George Eliot’s masterpiece of provincial life still has much to teach us about sympathy and tolerance