MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
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Lyrical search for meaning in an unknowable world
Fireflies and Star Trails
[Mike Lewinski] 
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
New releases from Paul Weller, Wet Leg, and Dino Saluzzi
PAUL DONOVAN relishes the spectacle of a 1950s detective in pursuit of a 500-year-old murder mystery
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
Fireflies
by Luis Sagasti
(Charco Press, £8.99)
“THE WORLD is a ball of wool. A skein of yarn you can’t find the end of.” That's how Luis Sagasti's ambitious novel Fireflies, a quest to find meaning in literature and life, begins.
Retelling a fantastical history of the world, the book, translated by Fionn Petch, is written in a highly lyrical form and it's refreshingly experimental in its structure as it weaves through stories and anecdotes of the famous and the infamous.
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LEO BOIX salutes the revelation that British art has always had a queer pulse, long before the term became cultural currency
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