TONY BURKE plots the career of the legendary Senegalese band from Dakar nightclubs to Glastonbury
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Crime fiction
Reviews of Pretty Things by Janelle Brown, How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahul Raina, Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder by TA Willberg and Guilty by Siobhan MacDonald
RITA DI SANTO contemplates two films about journalism that opened this year’s festival
GEOFF BOTTOMS applauds a world-class production King Lear that pits late feudalism against a rising bourgeoisie
MARY CONWAY keeps up with the sheer pace of a drama about the terrible gap between sanitised reporting and real-life turmoil of race and gender
New releases from Brian Fallon, Antony Szmierek and Hollow Hand
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes a revival of Reginald Rose’s classic play that reminds us of the fundamental need for trials with juries
IN PRETTY THINGS by Janelle Brown (Weidenfeld, £8.99) Nina is forced by her con artist mother’s medical bills to abandon her attempt to escape the family trade.
She makes a living stealing from ultra-rich hedonists in Los Angeles but rising hospital bills mean she now needs to devise a more ambitious scam, so she returns to the scene of a teenage humiliation, the Lake Tahoe mansion of billionaire heiress Vanessa.
Nina sees her as a perfect target — rich, vapid and untouched by the vicious unfairness of the class system. But this book warns that when you meet your enemies, you are in danger of discovering that they are human after all and that can cause all manner of complications.
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DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy