The scorned woman thriller deftly reimagined, preposterously gripping murders at an ice skating training camp - and a frantic search for a missing daughter

The protagonist of Chris Bridges’s Sick to Death (Avon) is not your run-of-the-mill thriller heroine. Emma is sick with a neurological condition that leaves her crushed by fatigue, prone to blackouts, unable to work. Hers is a disease “without concrete evidence, without affirmative scans or validated cause”, and she is constantly having to justify herself to her family – her mother, cruel stepfather Peter, stepsister and daughter – with whom she shares a tiny council house. “Everyone has their limits of what they can tolerate. It turns out that they couldn’t take me being ill. I can’t stand their lack of care. Why wouldn’t I become angry?” says Emma. When she falls for her handsome neighbour Adam, a doctor, her vague plans to get rid of Peter start to take shape – particularly when she learns more about Adam’s wife, Celeste, and the trouble Adam is in. “My illness doesn’t mean that I have to be relegated to a supporting role, the background character who dies at the end or fades away. I can even be the villain if I want to.” Bridges, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020, writes in an author note that he had had enough of the “tired tropes” around sickness in fiction, from the “sickly sweet ill woman”, to the unwell person who is shown to be a fraud. Sick to Death turns these tropes on their head: Emma is a force to be reckoned with, and although the plot does become increasingly tangled, this is deliciously dark and twisted, and a lot of fun.

Fun is also at the heart of CL Pattison’s First to Fall (Headline) – if you’re prepared to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy this tale of murderous figure skaters. We open with a newspaper report about deaths “at the home of legendary German figure skater, Lukas Wolff” during an extreme blizzard. Wolff, we’re told, is famous “for a spectacular sequence of skating moves called ‘the Grim Reaper’”. Our heroine is Libby, a promising but poor young skater who jumps at the chance to go to Wolff’s training camp in the Bavarian forest. Wolff puts Libby and her fellow trainees through their paces, a harsh but brilliant taskmaster, until the blizzard descends, the mobile reception goes, and Libby’s fellow skaters start dying. Pattison is a great writer, Libby a brave and brilliant character, and it turns out that reading about tricky skating moves is more fun than I’d anticipated. Throw in a corker of an escape down an icy river and you’ve got yourself a winner.

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Given a boost by Jordan Peele, this hyped ‘lost’ movie from Eugenio Mira about freaky goings-on at a hotel finally gets a proper release

This amusingly overwrought mystery-horror-thriller is both a new release and a reissue all at once. Originally made in 2004, and shown at a few genre-specific film festivals, it never secured distribution. Still, it found a way to get seen on alternative platforms like YouTube and homemade DVDs. Frustrated with the lack of appreciation for his work, director Eugenio Mira started sending copies of the film to directors he admired like Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo del Toro among others, exactly the right kind of guys who like to champion neglected cult classics. Meanwhile, lead actor Corey Feldman (once a child star in the likes of Stand By Me and The Goonies back in the 1980s) was conducting his own under-the-radar campaign on the film’s behalf. After it ended up getting shown via a scratchy master print at a screening hosted by director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope) and praised to the heavens, funds suddenly became available for a 4K restoration and a limited worldwide release. Now we can all see what the fuss is about.

Was it worth the wait? Yes and no. The Birthday takes its sweet time getting going as we meet Feldman’s nebbishy protagonist Norman Forrester in a hotel room, all gussied up in a prom-king tuxedo while he bickers with his bossy girlfriend Alison (Erica Prior). (The whole movie, by the way, takes place in this old-fashioned hotel, the action unfurling in real time, an adherence to Aristotelian notions of classical unity that used to be quite popular in indie and arthouse films but you don’t see so often any more). Nervous about meeting Alison’s posh family for the first time at a birthday party being held in the function room downstairs, pizza-parlour employee Norman must navigate between various awkward social interactions – not just with his partner’s family but at another do on another floor being thrown by a friend from high school (Dale Douma) attended by some beefy pharmaceutical bros. Meanwhile, there’s definitely something weird going on with the hotel employees with their deadpan expressions, toiling away in the background.

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The latest issue of Eyeshot magazine celebrates the serendipity of everyday life – where construction site sunbathers and hovering cemetery angels defy logic

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O’Donnell brings the spare intensity of her award-winning short stories to her first novel, a compulsive tale of one woman’s escape intensified by Dublin’s housing crisis

When it comes to escaping an abusive relationship, it’s said that leaving is the simple part; the real challenge is not returning. For Ciara Fay, pregnant and with her two small girls in tow, the difficulty is magnified by Dublin’s housing crisis, still one of the worst in Europe. Having finally bundled the kids into the car, along with a few impulsively grabbed necessities and the little cash she’s been able to save, hidden in a nappy, she’s faced with a stark question: where are they to go?

Nesting , Roisín O’Donnell’s compulsive debut novel, makes of Ciara’s bid for safety and freedom a minutely observed, heart-juddering drama. To the casual onlooker, husband Ryan is a well-dressed, mass-attending civil servant, but over the course of their five-year marriage he has subjected Ciara to relentless emotional abuse and more, isolating her from friends, preventing her from working, controlling their finances. “Things happen at night,” Ciara imagines saying out loud. “My body doesn’t feel like my own.”

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Three school friends discover their adult selves in this fast and flashy adventure debut from director Li Yang

“When you grow up, your heart dies,” is a famous line of dialogue from The Breakfast Club . In this barmy coming-of-age sci-fi a trio of teenagers find out that adulthood really does suck after sneezing themselves 20 years into the future. The movie is a directed by young Chinese film-maker Li Yang on a maximalist scale; it’s noisy and flashy, like a John Hughes movie made for TikTok – every scene sped up or slowed down, stylised with a comic-book animation or pinging with gamer special effects.

The year is 1999 on a planet that looks a lot like Earth (although days are only 12 hours long, so time really does move fast). Three 18-year-old school friends acquire the power to travel forward 20 years in time after falling into a lake polluted by toxic chemicals. High-school heartthrob Chengyong (Yang Song) is appalled to discover as an adult he has become a nasty thug involved in an organ trafficking racket. Zha (Ruoyun Zhang) grows up to be an investigative journalist hopelessly and miserably in love with a colleague who’s so badass she puts on ear plugs to fight: “I hate the sound of men screaming.” Only overweight bullied Pao Pao (Chenhao Li) is pleased with the future. His 38-year-old self is gym-sculpted and living with the most popular girl from high school – which is not without complications.

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Royal Stafford is latest in series of closures as rising costs add to pressures on companies in Potteries

Rob Morley has been made redundant eight times since he was a teenager, working in different ceramics factories across Staffordshire that have all shut or downsized, one by one.

From WH Grindley, where he started when he was 16, the list includes Washington Pottery, Hanley Bank, Imperial, and Eastwood among others, but the most recent is Royal Stafford.

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Songwriter, musician and actor, best known as a heartthrob in one of the biggest bands of the 1980s, Gary Kemp joins Grace for a brand new helping of Comfort Eating. Longtime Spandau Ballet fan Grace hears about the good old days: how Gary poured a tin of golden syrup over baby brother Martin Kemp’s head; how there were eels for dinner kept alive in his nan’s sink; and how hot fish and chips in their wrapper warped his first beloved T Rex record. Gary opens up about how he defiantly started eating meat again after his very public split from actor Sadie Frost, how his film career took him to Hollywood to act alongside Whitney Houston, who worked the catering tent nicely, and unwanted perishable gifts from affectionate fans at the height of Spandau Ballet fame

New episodes of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent will be released every Tuesday

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There were landmark gay kisses, characters who returned from the dead and the biggest earrings ever seen on screen. As the soap turns 40, we round-up Walford’s weirdest, wildest and most heartbreaking scenes

‘Cor, stinks in here, dunnit?” At 7pm on 19 February 1985, we heard Simon May’s now-familiar theme tune and watched those wriggly River Thames titles for the first time – followed by that aromatic opening line of dialogue.

The BBC’s new soap opera was its attempt to make a mass-market, twice-weekly rival to ITV’s Coronation Street. Co-created by the producer Julia Smith and the writer Tony Holland, the gritty saga was set in a Victorian square in the fictional east London borough of Walford. Working titles for the show included Square Dance, Round the Houses and London Pride. They settled on EastEnders .

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Pritzker prize-winner Francis Kéré has designed a memorial to honour ‘Africa’s Che Guevara’, Burkina Faso’s visionary president who was assassinated in 1987

Francis Kéré was the first African architect to win the Pritzker prize when he scooped the “Nobel prize of architecture” in 2022. A native of Gando, a small village in Burkina Faso’s Central-East region, Kéré was once criticised by his neighbours for building a school for the village before constructing a house for his parents. But that project has led to commissions including the new parliament building in Benin , the Goethe Institute Dakar and the Las Vegas Museum of Art .

“I wanted to give something to my people, and that has given me an international career,” he says of his decision to build the school .

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