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

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley audiobook review – a topical time-hopping romance

Actor Katie Leung narrates this genre-bending debut in which an Victorian Arctic explorer is catapulted into our brave new world

Department of the Vanishing by Johanna Bell review – brilliantly, terrifyingly plausible

In this wild little miracle of a book, an Australian government office is tasked with cataloguing the casualties of the Anthropocene

Bob Carr, ‘a masterpiece’ and a horny queer fantasy: the best Australian books out in March

Each month Guardian Australia editors and critics pick the upcoming titles they have devoured – or can’t wait to get their hands on

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

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

‘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

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

They by Helle Helle review – a novel to make the reader slow down and take notice

Minimalist but never austere, this mother-daughter portrait from the Danish author finds its power in everyday detail

The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain review – virtuoso portrait of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s final year

Portraying the breakdown of the couple’s marriage through the eyes of the people around them, this deeply researched and utterly convincing debut is an astonishing achievement

Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion and The Terror, dies aged 77

Award-winning science fiction and horror writer died in Colorado on 21 February with family at his side

Butter author Asako Yuzuki: ‘I’m very far from the ideal Japanese woman’

Butter, her novel about a female serial killer, was a global hit. As Asako Yuzuki’s second book is published in English, she talks about criticism at home – and why she’ll be writing darker stories in the future

The National Year of Reading celebrates the ‘joy’ of books. But let’s not forget they can also be deeply troubling, too

Encounters with great art can be absorbing, unsettling and even painful. How has this been tamed into ‘reading for pleasure’, asks Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian’s chief culture writer