Everybody by Olivia Laing review – a book about freedom

A moving and clear-eyed history of bodily freedoms that takes as its central character Wilhelm Reich, inventor of the orgone accumulator

A User’s Guide to Melancholy by Mary Ann Lund review – senses of humour

A learned and readable picture of Renaissance medicine with less comic eccentricity than Robert Burton’s 1621 magnum opus

Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor review – beyond words

Disaster in the Antarctic necessitates heroism at home, in this beautifully restrained interrogation of language, care and loss

Michael Lewis: ‘We were incentivised to have a bad pandemic response’

In his new book, the author of The Big Short has turned his attention to Covid and the people who could have prevented it sweeping the US – had they been allowed to

Not Even This by Jack Underwood review – fatherhood, philosophy and fear

A poet confronts his anxieties about becoming a parent in this free-wheeling meditation on the theme of uncertainty

Doom by Niall Ferguson review – how to make sense of catastrophe

A study of horrible afflictions, from famines to pandemics, and our failure to learn from past mistakes

Yoga, karate, skiing … Alison Bechdel on her lifelong obsession with exercise

Ever since she was a child, the Fun Home cartoonist has been fascinated by fitness. The cartoonist talks about the ‘salvation’ of running, polyamory and being seduced by a fan

The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel review – no pain, all gain

The author of Fun Home reflects on self-improvement, death and her lifelong obsession with exercise in an extraordinarily generous memoir

The Sleeping Beauties by Suzanne O’Sullivan review – 21st century health mysteries

Sleeping sickness, strange behaviour and mass hysteria ... a neurologist makes sense of ‘psychosomatic’ illness

First thing I turn to in a book? The thank yous at the back

From a food bank to a pal, I love seeing who gets the nod in a book’s acknowledgments