TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU explores a tender and urgent new film about the South African novelist Lauretta Ngcobo

MIK SABIERS raises a glass of Lambrini to commentary, diatribes, punk rock riffs, some pontification and a whole lot of fun

DENNIS BROE searches the literary canon to explore why a duplicitous, lying, cheating, conning US businessman is accepted as Scammer-in-Chief

BRENT CUTLER unpicks the complex social relations imagined in a novel about the builders of Stonehenge

SUSAN DARLINGTON laments a version of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes that is unable to solve its own problems

MARY CONWAY welcomes a warm, if microscopic study of an Indian and a Pakistani, both culturally adrift in Britain

New releases from The Thumping Tommys, Dan O’Farrell and The Difference Engine, and Sean Taylor

SYLVIA HIKINS relishes Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant hijack of 1001 Nights to push aside the boundaries set by others

KENNY MacASKILL welcomes a meticulous account of the corruption of the vast US Department of Justice under Trump’s first and second terms

For his study of anti-Muslim Muzaffarnagar Riot, HENRY BELL applauds Joe Sacco for a devastatingly effective combination of graphic novel and investigative journalism

Given the epidemic of corruption in post colonial states, ALEX HALL is disappointed by a failure to analyse the economic architecture that makes it so lucrative

PAUL DONOVAN applauds a new play that revisits in old age the well-known characters of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite TV series