A headspinning novel from Japan alongside a high concept tale from Denmark, and a French account of migrant tragedy … our critic weighs up the contenders

What unites the books on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize ? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don’t need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses. Ahead of the winner announcement on 20 May, here’s our verdict on the shortlist.

Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Book I (Faber, £12.99; translated by Barbara J Haveland) is easiest to introduce through the film Groundhog Day: its heroine, Danish antiquarian book dealer Tara Selter, is stuck in time. “It is the 18th of November,” she writes. “I have got used to that thought.” Each time she wakes up, it’s the same day again, same weather, same people passing the window.

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Actor will receive a lifetime achievement award on Tuesday for his ‘enduring impact on cinema and the arts’ and ‘decades of artistic brilliance’

Kevin Spacey is to accept a lifetime achievement award in Cannes next week, in what may constitute one of the most high-profile “uncancellings” of the #MeToo era.

On Tuesday, the Oscar-winning actor is set to receive an award for excellence in film and television at the Better World Fund’s 10th anniversary gala dinner at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes.

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Utilita Arena, Birmingham
Performing solo to a backing track, the rapper nevertheless generates extraordinary heat with his fluid and furious flow atop foundation-rumbling bass

Fireworks explode, flames burn, smoke engulfs the room and a screech erupts from the audience as a masked Tyler, the Creator emerges from a thick green haze to the gut-rumbling bass of St Chroma. It’s rare to hear such a frenzied response to new songs but it establishes the mood for an evening during which the LA rapper’s most recent work, from 2024’s Chromakopia , is received with the same level of adoration as old favourites. And he runs through the album almost in its entirety.

Performing solo on stage to a backing track, he bounces giddily but gracefully across the vast space. The bass frequently hits outrageously hard throughout the evening, shaking the building’s foundations, such as during the grinding charge of Noid. While effective, the frequent bass drops do sometimes kill some of the detail in the music, as well as perhaps overcompensating for the lack of live instrumentation.

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It was the political satire that gave us omnishambles, pet asbos and the terrifying Malcolm Tucker. Two decades on, creator Armando Iannucci and stars including Peter Capaldi and Rebecca Front lift the lid on its chaotic creation

Twenty years ago this month we were plunged straight into the middle of an omnishambles. It was a moment in time when petrified politicians lurched from crisis to crisis, scrambling desperately to control the narrative as their endless gaffes derailed even the vaguest attempts to change this country for the better. But am I talking about the tail-end of the Blair years or the televisual tour-de-force that was Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It?

It could be either. It could even be right now – such was the show’s prescient genius. This was a satire that didn’t just mimic the government’s calamities but seemed somehow to foresee them. Over its seven-year run, The Thick of It came up with farcical policies that the government went on to adopt (pet asbos, anyone?), coined new words in the dictionary (the aforementioned omnishambles) and, in Malcolm Tucker, created one of the great malevolent forces of British comedy. Here’s how they did it …

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Exclusive: In The Mood For Love, curated by grandson of early Hockney champion and art dealer, John Kasmin, will feature works from 1960-63

When one of David Hockney’s iconic swimming pool pictures sold for $90.3m (£70.3m) in 2013, he became the world’s most highly valued contemporary artist. Now paintings, drawings and prints that he sold for a few pounds in the 1960s are being brought together for the first time in a new exhibition.

John Kasmin, an art dealer who first recognised Hockney’s potential in the early 1960s when the artist was studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA), told the Guardian that Hockney’s prices then “rarely ever went above 20 quid”.

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The chef, author and presenter wants to be John Bonham and might be found busting out Baker Street at karaoke, but which song reminds him of lost love?

The first single I bought
I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats from Sounds Nice on Birtley High Street, when I was in my teens. I know it was about a school shooting, but at the time, I thought: I have a visceral reaction to Mondays as well.

The first song I fell in love with
Still in Love With You from Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous album. I was learning to play drums and Brian Downey, Thin Lizzy’s drummer, used to do this wonderful shuffle beat because it’s a relatively slow track, and his playing is beautiful. I still play the drums. I’ve never stopped being a musician.

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The full horror of what happened is realised in this moving series. Plus: a gripping crime story with Rose Ayling-Ellis. Here’s what to watch this evening

Sunday, 9pm, BBC One

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Israel finished second, with Estonia third and the pre-contest favourites from Sweden fourth

Austria has won the Eurovision song contest after JJ triumphed in Basel with their song Wasted Love, an operatic ballad with soaring vocals that mutates into a club anthem for the finale. It is the third time the country has won, with JJ following in the footsteps of Udo Jürgens in 1965 and Conchita Wurst in 2014.

Switzerland, which hosted the first ever Eurovision song contest in 1956, was the venue this year after Nemo won in Malmö last year with their song The Code. Austria will be expected to host in 2026, with Vienna having twice held the competition before.

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Lawrence excels as a woman whose bipolar disorder is exacerbated by husband Robert Pattinson’s infidelity, with super-strength direction from Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay brings the Gothic-realist steam heat, some violent shocks and deafening music slams to this movie, adapted by her with co-writers Alice Birch and Enda Walsh from the 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz . It’s a ferociously intense study of a lonely, passionate woman and her descent into bipolar disorder as she is left alone all day with a new baby in a rambling Montana house originally belonging to her husband’s uncle, who took his own life in a gruesome way that we are not permitted to discover until some way into the movie.

Die My Love is another film to remind you that Ramsay believes you should make movies the way VS Naipaul believed you should write books: from a position of strength. There is, simply, overwhelming muscular strength in this picture: in her direction, in Paul Davies’s sound design, in the saturated colour of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, and of course in the performances themselves. Robert Pattinson is Jackson, a guy whose job takes him away from home a lot of the time with a box of condoms in the glove-compartment, and Jennifer Lawrence is Grace, who is supposedly going to write a novel during the baby’s nap times – though, worryingly, there isn’t a single book in the house. Sissy Spacek brings her unfakeable presence to the role of Jackson’s mum Pam, who lives in the neighbouring property, a woman for whom the stress of caring for her husband Harry (Nick Nolte), who has dementia, has caused her to sleepwalk, laughing maniacally and carrying a loaded gun.

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