Authors and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

When HHhH by Laurent Binet came out in 2012, I was scared away by the impenetrable title. I still don’t like the title much because it gives no sense that this book is going to be so welcoming, playful and immersive. HHhH tells the true story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich – the high-ranking Nazi officer, “the butcher of Prague” – but it also describes Binet’s research on the subject, an obsession which verges on mania. The book makes a convincing case that Heydrich’s botched assassination was the single most significant event of the 20th century. (It also makes a convincing case that Binet is so deep into the subject matter that his opinion should not be entirely trusted.)

Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst has just won the Nero book of the year prize so it really does not need my recommendation. Nevertheless, I recommend it! It jolts you awake from the very first page, telling a true and uniquely weird love story about a British couple whose boat is sunk by whale-strike while they are sailing around the world. Elmhirst finds moments of transcendence even as Maurice and Maralyn are beginning to starve and decompose, physically and mentally, while adrift in a leaky dinghy in the middle of the Pacific.

The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod is my favourite poetry anthology. The poems are presented in reverse chronological order so that the book starts with recent work from Anne Carson and Patricia Lockwood then steadily dives backwards through time: Eileen Myles to Allen Ginsberg to Gertrude Stein before finally ending in 1842 with Aloysius Bertrand writing beautiful prose poems before the term even existed. Every time I come back to this book I find new gems.

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As she reveals her tougher side in a Liverpool gangland drama, and fearfully prepares to tread the boards in New York, the actor talks about body image, big hair and the blind faith that has always driven her

Saoirse-Monica Jackson has done some dramas where everyone was quite sober and all her jokes fell flat. But This City Is Ours was different, not least because of the number of Scousers on set, the Derry Girls star explains. “It wasn’t, like, so serious,” she says. “We had craic off-camera.” However, while it was fun to make the buzzy new BBC crime drama (the female cast members named themselves the Muffia) the end result isn’t fun – although it is gripping. Featuring betrayals, love and a lot of violence, the show stars Sean Bean as a Liverpool drugs boss, while Jackson plays Cheryl Crawford, the wife of one of his underlings.

Cheryl is on the periphery, though her voice-of-experience warnings ring loud. “There’s nothing good about our men,” she tells Diana, the partner of a senior gang member. Jackson has lived in Liverpool for a couple of years now – which helped with the accent – and it was a treat to be back in her own bed at the end of a day’s filming. A lot of hair extensions helped with the look. “It was so heavy, so hot, to be under it every day,” she says with a laugh. “Our amazing hair and makeup designer, Adele Firth, really wanted to get the picture across of some girls in Liverpool – they take such pride in themselves. Every occasion is an occasion to really get dolled up.” Jackson found herself intrigued by Cheryl. “I think if, like her, you grow up around these types of people, or they’re adjacent to your family, that can blur the danger for you.”

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Holy Cow is a film about underdogs and a bid to make a prize-winning cheese, set against a rural backdrop of sozzled fetes and demolition derbies. Director Louise Courvoisier talks about shooting where ‘people are kind of wild’

Louise Courvoisier grew up the daughter of farmers in France’s eastern Jura region and, by the time she was 15, was desperate to leave this backwater. So she chose a boarding school 100km away in Besançon that happened to offer a cinema course. “I really needed to get out, for sure,” says the director, now 31. “But after my studies I needed to come back, and I had a new point of view. Leaving let me look at things differently and see what others don’t see. And I think that, without getting that distance on the region, I couldn’t have made this film.”

The film in question is Holy Cow, a rough-edged, sharp-tongued but good-hearted tale about one teenager’s quest to make a prize-winning wheel of comté cheese, a Jura speciality. The story appears to be comparable to the likes of The Full Monty or Brassed Off – British underdog comedies that Courvoisier admires for their social conscience.

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King’s Head theatre, London
A dysfunctional brood gather at a wedding-cum-funeral in actor-writer Rosie Day’s dark comedy

A wedding is repurposed into a funeral in writer-actor Rosie Day’s dark comedy. It might be a twisted spin on Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral except the focus is not on a happy family of friends but on the dysfunctional Henderson brood.

Eric Henderson, a less than perfect father, dies just before he can tie the knot with his third wife, leaving his children, his ex and the arriving guests in a room filled with bows and balloons.

At King’s Head theatre, London , until 27 April

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Officers attended theatre in Southend after reports of altercation at end of Paul Chowdhry’s show

Police were called to a comedy show in Essex after a fight broke out in the audience, which reportedly led to a man being assaulted.

Inquiries are ongoing after the altercation at the end of standup comic Paul Chowdhry’s performance of his Englandia tour at the Cliffs Pavilion in Westcliff-on-Sea, Southend.

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Government plan over copyright-protected work would put industries in ‘dangerous position’, Alex Mahon tells MPs

The chief executive of Channel 4 said that artificial intelligence companies are “scraping the value” out of the UK’s £125bn creative industries, and urged the government to take action.

Alex Mahon told MPs that if the government pursues its proposed plan to give AI companies access to creative works unless the copyright holder opts out, it would put the UK creative industries in a “dangerous position”.

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So Sam Mendes has cast his Beatles tetralogy, but none are from Merseyside. Don’t worry, I’ve just invented the Beatles Cinematic Universe

Sam Mendes has announced the cast for his colossal four-film Beatles extravaganza: Harris Dickinson as John, Paul Mescal as Paul, Barry Keoghan as Ringo and Joseph Quinn as George – and to tumultuous acclaim he brought his Fab Four on stage at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas, a now well-established affair in the film world, incidentally, satirised in a forthcoming episode of Seth Rogen’s TV comedy The Studio .

I’m sorry to say, however, that Sam has almost entirely ignored the casting suggestions that I made in February last year. For what this is worth, I went with Leo Woodall as Paul, Finn Wolfhard as George, Harry Melling as Ringo and Barry Keoghan as John (though Barry got Ringo in the end). But I like to think that Sam Mendes and his producer Pippa Harris were thinking on more or less the same lines as me. Interestingly, there are no American actors doing Brit accents – just the kind of well-trained British or Irish actors who can fabricate perfect American accents for American roles elsewhere.

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It was a time of high-octane thrills as cavorting couples put themselves through brutal competitions in the hope of winning the equivalent of a year’s salary. Now sculptor Nicole Wermers has brought the dancefloor craze back to life

Marathon Dance Relief, the latest intriguing work by Nicole Wermers, focuses on the Depression-era craze for endurance dancing competitions, mainly in the US in the 1920s and 30s, where cavorting couples put themselves through brutal, sometimes week-long contests in the hope of winning prizes equivalent to a year’s salary, if they could be the last ones standing. On show at St Carthage Hall in Lismore, Waterford, Ireland, the work is a departure from Wermers’ usual interest in the art of “lounging around”. In contrast to her normal languid figures, the subject here is the body when exhausted or taking strenuous exertion.

Cruder class dynamics – the contestants were almost by definition down-at-heel and watched by more affluent audiences – hovered in the background of such spectacles. Although they gathered swift momentum as a low-cost form of high-octane, mass entertainment, their exploitations took a toll on their participants and could, in rare cases, lead to injury and death. Dovetailing with the era’s boom in photography and the rise of the American picture magazine, many black and white snapshots attesting to these merciless dancefloors remain in circulation as a sombre archive, showing woozy couples slumped and clutching at each other, holding one another up in the effort to stay in the game and not collapse.

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A chubby, rhubarb and custard-coloured tower bedecked with anteaters and moles make a fun neighbour to the city’s dreaming spires. It’s left some locals lost for words

A carved stone pangolin clings to the top of the tower, its scaly tail curled into the crevice of a cornice, as if holding on for dear life. It crowns an arresting arrival to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the anteater taking its place on this skyline of slender steeples and gurning gargoyles, up there at the summit of the newest – and strangest – spire of them all.

“I was thinking, ‘How do you mark Covid in a building?’” says David Kohn, architect of this curious addition to the campus of New College. “We were developing the designs in the middle of the pandemic, when pangolins had been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons.”

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