From Northern Irish handkerchief-makers to Scilly Isles fisherman who know when to let stocks replenish, a new book showcases radical solutions to our environmental problems

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From the return of Mario Kart to smash-hit architectural puzzles, an emotional football game and monster-hunting, we look back at the best offerings from the past six months
• See more of the best culture of 2025 so far

This unexpected smash-hit puzzle game has you exploring a mysterious mansion with rooms that are different every time. Faced with a closed door, you get to choose what lies beyond it from a small selection of blueprints, drafting as you go. Crammed with devilish logic problems, memory tests and other conundrums, it’s got thousands of players drawing their own maps on graph paper, just like the ZX Spectrum days. Read the full review . Keith Stuart

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From the high energy and high rises of Manchester to the wild beauties of the moors and mountains, the north of England has enriched and inspired Gavin Higgins. His newest work explores the idea – and the sounds – of being northern

As a child, the idea of “the north” captured my imagination. Images of lonely moors, mist-drenched mountains and driving rain provided backdrops for some of my favourite books, poems and films. But for me, the raucous energy of Manchester had an almost religious pull. It was the birthplace of bands I loved – Oasis, Happy Mondays, Joy Division, A Guy Called Gerald – and home to that palace of techno and acid house music, the Haçienda, which I dreamed of visiting.

I grew up at the rural borderland between England and Wales, but moved to Manchester when I was 16. It was my first time experiencing a real city with its cacophony of police sirens, shop alarms and drunken revelry, a far cry from the woodlands I’d grown up with. It was also the first time I realised I spoke with an accent. Against nasal Mancunian colloquialisms, my broad west country twang made me feel that I was from a different planet. But one of Manchester’s great charms is how its people throw their arms open to strangers. The city quickly became my home and I became a proud northerner.

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The civil war transforms a young trainee doctor’s life as she copes with her feelings for a Tamil Tiger in last year’s Women’s prizewinning novel

Brotherless Night opens with 16-year-old Sashi Kulenthiren, who hopes to be a doctor like her eldest brother, making tea when the kettle slips out of her hand, causing her to pour boiling water on herself. When a neighbour, K, hears her screams, he rushes over to help, cracking raw eggs over the scalds to soothe the pain. “So I began as K’s patient though he ended as mine,” Sashi reflects.

Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, VV Ganeshananthan’s coming-of-age novel – which won the 2024 Women’s prize for fiction – is an epic and hard-hitting tale of family and survival as it documents life during the civil war between Tamil separatists and the Sinhalese majority that lasted three decades. Before fighting breaks out, Sashi’s most pressing problem is whether she will pass her exams at school. But soon violence and kidnapping become the norm, communities are left “brotherless” and ordinary citizens are turned into what the outside world calls terrorists.

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Mirren won best actress at Cannes in 1984 for her role as Marcella, who forms a relationship with John Lynch’s Cal – a man complicit in her husband’s murder

Pat O’Connor’s Northern Irish movie from 1984, adapted by author Bernard MacLaverty from his own novel, holds up very well for its rerelease; better in fact than most of the movies and TV drama made about and during the Troubles. It has an unhurried, thoughtful and very human quality; Helen Mirren won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance here and in fact it is very well acted across the board by a blue-chip cast.

Mirren plays Marcella, a woman from a Catholic background, married across the sectarian divide to a reserve police officer murdered at his parents’ farmhouse by an IRA man who had bullied a bewildered local guy into being his getaway driver; this is Cal, played by the gauntly intense John Lynch. Cal lives with his widowed father; a gentle performance by Donal McCann, who was Gabriel Conroy in John Huston’s The Dead. But as the only Catholics in a Protestant neighbourhood, they are burned out of their home by loyalist gangs. Having quit his job at the gruesome abattoir, Cal gets a job labouring at Marcella’s farm and is allowed to live in an outbuilding; Marcella’s fiercely Protestant brother-in-law and mother-in-law (excellent performances from Ray McAnally and Catherine Gibson) take pity and almost a shine to the poor, put-upon Cal. And Cal, despite or because of being secretly complicit in the murder of Marcella’s husband, and intensely aware of her loneliness and ambiguous nameless yearning, falls deeply in love with her.

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La Belle Rafaëla by ‘revolutionary’ art deco painter to go on sale at Sotheby’s with estimate of £6m-£9m

When Tamara de Lempicka first came across the young sex worker Rafaëla on Bois de Boulogne in Paris, she was enchanted.

Recalling the meeting, the artist called Rafaëla “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen”.

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No cause of death given for influential electronic body music vocalist whose punchy, declarative style found fans across both rock and dance

Douglas McCarthy, the irrepressible frontman and chief lyricist of British industrial band Nitzer Ebb, has died aged 58.

A statement on the group’s social media reads: “It is with a heavy heart that we regret to inform that Douglas McCarthy passed away this morning of June 11th, 2025. We ask everyone to please be respectful of Douglas, his wife, and family in this difficult time. We appreciate your understanding and will share more information soon.” No cause of death was given.

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Forty years on, a Trinidadian woman has never stopped looking for the daughter she gave up for adoption, in a quietly devastating novel

Claire Adam’s 2019 novel Golden Child was her debut, but it felt like the work of a master. It was tender, ravishing, shattering – you believed every word of it. The book had an effortless narrative authority that most first-time novelists would kill for.

Love Forms is every bit as alive and convincing, and returns us to Trinidad, with its potent fizz of colour, heat and political instability. But unlike the earlier book, it’s also set partly in south London – the writer’s own home turf – and has a mother, rather than a father, at its heart.

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Howard, Orlando Bloom and Nick Mohammed star in an entertaining odd-trio crime caper with turns by Sean Bean and Paddy Considine

Producer and screenwriter Colin Trevorrow has co-created this amiable, high-concept action comedy about three hapless improv actors dragooned into going into deep cover to bust a drug ring. It’s entertaining, though I think some of the cast understand comedy better and more instinctively than others. It’s set in London (though Trevorrow might originally have imagined it set in LA or New York) and the credit is shared with his longtime writing partner Derek Connolly, and also with Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, the funny British double act known as the Pin, who also amusingly appear as two squabbling coppers with a Mitchell and Webb energy. The director is the talented Tom Kingsley, who has a substantial TV career and with Will Sharpe got a Bafta nomination in 2012 for the dark comedy Black Pond .

Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kat, an American actor whose career is tanking and who now runs an improv workshop in London. Orlando Bloom is Marlon (as in Brando), a smoulderingly hunky method performer and wannabe star reduced to doing TV commercials, and Nick Mohammed is Hugh, a sweet, shy beta-male IT guy who gets bullied in the office and turns to Kat’s improv classes as a way of boosting his self-esteem. The lives of all three are turned upside down when hard-faced Met cop Detective Billings, played by Sean Bean, offers these cash-strapped losers £200 each to infiltrate a criminal organisation run by a narcotics kingpin played by Paddy Considine, on the grounds that career officers are too easily recognisable.

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