The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Blue Sisters, the novelist’s follow-up to her debut Cleopatra and Frankenstein, focuses on death and addiction. She explains how she found her way to a more optimistic story

‘Certain themes really choose writers,” says author Coco Mellors from her home in New York, where she lives with her husband and son. “Addiction is a theme I never really chose to write about, but I cannot escape it.”

Mellors’ bestselling debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, is about a whirlwind romance between struggling artist Cleo and functioning alcoholic Frank. Published in 2022, the book has sold nearly 200,000 copies in the UK, catapulting Mellors from obscurity to literary stardom. It became an “It book” on social media, largely thanks to its artfully designed cover (a crudely rendered oil painting of a sad, beautiful woman by Gill Button, designed by Jo Thomson), and was chosen as Carrie Bradshaw’s bedtime read in an episode of And Just Like That . TV rights were sold to Warner Bros in late 2022, with Mellors signed on to adapt it herself.

A compelling debut digs into the conflicting emotions at the heart of an aristocratic family in 2010s England

The cast of Allen Bratton’s debut may sound familiar. Hal, the young heir to the house of Lancaster, wastes his hours in the Boar’s Head pub with his friends Poins and Falstaff. His father, Henry, tries to curtail his son’s bad behaviour, while seeking alliances that might shore up his troubled household. As the pair circle, enter Harry Percy, a dashing family friend who looks set to lock horns with Hal.

Names and themes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV echo through Henry Henry, which explores family, faith and aristocratic succession in 2010s England. Hal heads to pubs, kebab shops and parties, washing down cocaine with gin and beer. He is a rare visitor to the thinktank that nominally employs him, although he does manage to shuffle to morning mass and his father’s private members’ club, which he roguishly visits without a jacket and tie, so that the porter must dress him with whatever spares are available.

(A24 Music)
Cult film company A24’s tie-in merch to its rerelease of seminal documentary Stop Making Sense sounds either like karaoke or disconnected from the source material

Responsible for indie hits like Midsommar, Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once, American film company A24 has created a vast lifestyle brand around its cultish reputation, flogging everything from branded shorts ($48) to a Hereditary gingerbread kit ($62). Now, following its rerelease of Jonathan Demme’s seminal Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense , its tie-in merch includes a tribute album, featuring all 16 tracks from the film’s soundtrack covered by appropriately vogueish musicians.

The tracks largely use one of two distinct approaches. The acts choosing a karaoke-esque run-through include Toro y Moi (Genius of Love), the National (Heaven) and Paramore, whose faithful version of Burning Down the House includes a barnstorming vocal from Hayley Williams, but isn’t particularly compelling.

Campaigners say move to use the arts to reinforce economic ties with Riyadh may help to launder Gulf state’s human rights record

It was an unusual gig for YolanDa Brown, the saxophonist and composer who this week performed high above the clouds for a UK delegation on a private British Airways plane bound for Saudi Arabia.

The flight was part of a trade offensive for British businesses and institutions in Riyadh, with Brown’s performance part of a new focus for Saudi-UK relations – international arts.

Conor tries to impress his ex in the coming-of-age series. Plus: Sue Perkins goes litter-picking on a coral reef. Here’s what to watch this evening

9.30pm, BBC One
Peter Foott’s offbeat coming-of-age, Cork-set comedy continues its fourth series, with Conor (Alex Murphy) back at school to try to pass his leaving exams – all in a bid to impress ex Linda. Cue a very funny (and often touching) run of tutoring with traumatised former teacher Barry. Hollie Richardson

Owners of historic buildings used in likes of Bridgerton warned of potential damage to possessions and reputations

When the owner of Drayton House in Northamptonshire was approached to allow his 127-room mansion to be the location of a film called Saltburn , it was “100%” the generous fee on offer that swayed his decision, he said , adding: “These houses don’t run on water.”

But there were unintended consequences of Charles Stopford Sackville’s decision after the movie’s release last year. The popularity of Emerald Fennell’s class satire led to a rush of selfie-taking trespassers after TikTok videos giving directions to the estate went viral.

This drama about a fake movie fabricated to let Black Panther fugitive Huey P Newton flee to Cuba in the 70s not only dilutes the story of a Black leader – it centres the white characters. Eyes will roll

A few years back, in conversation with three Chicago-area Black Lives Matter activists, I brought up the then-forthcoming film Judas and the Black Messiah, starring Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the Black Panther party in Illinois, who was assassinated by Chicago police, with help from the FBI, in 1969, aged 21. Were they excited to see this hometown hero brought to the big screen? Their collective eye-roll was so hard it nearly put a hole through the wall. “I mean, the CIA has a liaison office in Hollywood, ” said one. “It’s impossible to go through that system and expect an authentic portrayal of an anticapitalist revolutionary .”

The Big Cigar is the latest attempt to pull off such a portrayal, regardless. It stars Moonlight’s André Holland as Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P Newton and tells the (sort of) true story of Newton’s 1974 flight to Cuba to escape a murder charge, with the help of Hollywood producer Bert Schneider (Alessandro Nivola) and an entirely fake movie codenamed The Big Cigar. It sounds similar to the plot of 2012 Oscar-winner Argo, because it is, and because both were originally optioned from magazine features written by the same hot-shot long-read reporter, Joshuah Bearman.

Yes, there were more flame-throwers, but working on Furiosa was pretty similar to starring in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, says the actor. So how does he duck the crossfire that comes with playing JK Rowling’s Strike?

When Tom Burke was cast in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the prequel to the crash-bang spectacular Mad Max: Fury Road , he sat his 77-year-old mother down in front of the television and showed her the previous film in that post-apocalyptic series, just to give her some idea of what he was letting himself in for. Afterwards, she looked concerned. “Will you be mainly inside or outside?” she asked.

Any parent would worry. As Praetorian Jack, he helps the young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) take revenge against the pharaoh-like warlord (Chris Hemsworth) who killed her mother. Jack’s job is to sit at the wheel of the War Rig, one of those whopping great tankers without which any Mad Max movie would be underdressed, and shoot high-speed pursuers off their motorbikes. The character is kitted out in battered black leather, not unlike Mel Gibson in the original trilogy, with a smudge of grease across the top third of his face like the mask on a cartoon burglar. In addition to the actor’s own scar from childhood surgery on a cleft lip, which has left a jaunty crimp on the upper right side of his mouth, he sports as Jack a crooked duelling scar under one eye.