‘Dream team’ will reimagine black comedy about an epic divorce battle, which originally starred Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas

A remake of 1980s divorce comedy The War of the Roses is to go ahead with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead roles.

In an announcement reported by Deadline , studio Searchlight Pictures said that Colman and Cumberbatch would appear in a new version of the story directed by Austin Powers’ Jay Roach and written by Poor Things’ Tony McNamara. Searchlight president Matthew Greenfield said: “The Roses is a wildly funny, bigger than life, and yet deeply human story … With Jay at the helm, and Benedict and Olivia and Tony, we have a dream team bringing it to life.”

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Author of novels drawing on African and Caribbean history enjoyed international acclaim, including the New Academy prize, which stood in for the Nobel in 2018

Maryse Condé, the Guadeloupean author of more than 20 novels, activist, academic and sole winner of the New Academy prize in literature , has died aged 90.

Condé, whose books include Ségu and Hérémakhonon was regarded as a giant of the West Indies, writing frankly – as both a novelist and essayist – of colonialism, sexuality and the black diaspora, and introduced readers around the world to a wealth of African and Caribbean history.

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The Belfast academic offers vitally important lessons about government strategies, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, warning that few campaigns are a complete success

In January 2002, during his State of the Union address, President George W Bush said that in “four short months” the US had “rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists … and terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own”.

The term “war on terror” had been coined a few days after al-Qaida’s attacks of 9/11 to describe the most extensive and ambitious counter-terrorism operation the world had seen. As Bush spoke, it all seemed to be going rather well.

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A South African woman’s woes are slowly illuminated in a stark, darkly humorous novel by the author of the Booker-longlisted An Island

There’s nothing quite like a writer setting out their stall from the first page of a book so you know what you’re getting. When Karen Jennings – the South African author whose last novel, An Island , was deservedly longlisted for the Booker prize in 2021 – opens her new novel with a woman crouching over a mixing bowl to expel urine as “dark as cough syrup”, we know it will not be a feelgood comedy.

The woman is 53-year-old Deidre van Deventer, and she is in a bad way – but then so is the world. It’s the late 2020s and Cape Town is living under drought conditions (presumably inspired by the city’s Day Zero water crisis of 2018). The drought is not intrinsic to the story, but it affords an intensification of Deidre’s character traits: her laziness in not washing, her selfishness in using money sent by her estranged daughter not for water but for “takeaways and booze”.

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Val McDermid and Douglas Stuart were among many writers to express outrage after Creative Scotland turned down the literary festival funding application

Val McDermid, Douglas Stuart and Andrew O’Hagan are among the Scottish authors criticising the cancellation of Glasgow literary festival Aye Write after its funding application was turned down by Creative Scotland.

McDermid said it was “profoundly depressing” that Glasgow “cannot sustain a book festival”, while Stuart called it “unacceptable”. O’Hagan said that the cancellation is “savage and it shouldn’t be happening”.

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Bring back raucous changing rooms and friendly smiles – things you can’t buy online

Here’s a funny thing. The less we go to the shops, the more we shop. We buy more stuff than ever, now that we can do so without leaving the sofa. We have bypassed the bus ride into town, stepped back from the revolving doors and escalators, silenced the tinkle of muzak, skipped the exchange of smiles and niceties with sales assistants, forgotten what it feels like to journey home from the chase with shopping bags tucked next to tired legs. Instead, we can spend our hard-earned cash with the frictionless brush of an index finger, and collect our spoils from the doormat a few days later.

This, surely, is the worst of both worlds. Let us imagine for a moment a sliding-doors scenario, in which writing shopping trips out of the story had reduced our appetite for stuff. If, thanks to technological advances, we bought what we needed, and only what we needed. Imagine if the technology had been wired so that we could click on and buy a black mascara and a pair of navy socks, or whatever, and leave it at that, without the siren call of a pile of fluffy jumpers or a charming display of splatterware mugs leading us into temptation. Imagine if online shopping had been an Ozempic for shopaholics, blunting our greed, reconnecting us with our willpower. It would still have been bad for bricks-and-mortar shopkeepers, it would still have left ugly grey-shuttered gaps to blight our high streets like rotten teeth – but it would have been in the service of a healthier planet.

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A horrifying story of racial violence told from the point of view of an oak tree bough is all the more disturbing for its imitation of the ballad form

The Haunted Oak

Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?

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Bashful cats and lonely ponies stalk the pages of this month’s choices

Whether slinky and serious or delightfully daft, cats tend to make great picture book stars. They may often excel as witches’ sidekicks, but sometimes simple is best, as with Eva Eland’s Where Is the Cat? (Andersen Press), in which little Suzy goes to visit her Auntie and wants to play with the very reluctant Cat.

An eye-popping palette of neon-pink, green and yellow matches the high energy of Suzy, who greets Auntie on her doorstep, arms flung open, hollering “Where is the cat?”. So begins a familiar yet funny game of hide and seek between the pair – with little readers able to join in too – as Cat tries everything to avoid her: squishing himself pancake-like under chairs, teetering on top of wardrobes and peeking through plants, each page a spotting opportunity. By nap time Suzy is in tears and a sorry-looking Cat gazes on from a shelf looking poised to curl up with her for a doze. But will Suzy get her way?

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Three writers’ pastoral years are beautifully observed in this group biography but seem little more than tangential to their work

On Easter Monday 1930, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was walking along a lane in East Chaldon, Dorset, when she arrived at an unappetising-looking cottage, its muddy stucco powerfully redolent – to most people, at least – of damp and disheartenment. She knew already it was for sale, and having borrowed a set of keys from a nearby pub, she went inside for a closer look. For her, if for no one else, its shabby severity was an essential part of its attraction. So what if it had no electricity or running water? If the surveyor would later describe it as undesirable? Such cons were her get-out clause; her exoneration from naughty “bourgeois cravings”. Unlike other down-from-London types, she wouldn’t pinch the best house from the locals. She would jump on the very worst house, and hope not to crash through any rotten floorboards as she did. Reader, she bought it, warts and all.

A lot of what Warner and her trouser-wearing tenant (later her lover), Valentine Ackland, got up to at Miss Green (the house was named after its last elderly owner) thereafter is perfectly admirable in its way: more thrift shop than Vinterior and Farrow & Ball, even if I don’t like the sound of the words “not a single upholstered chair”. But still, there’s something funny and Marie Antoinette-ish at play here, too. Warner’s aversion to middle-class luxury was so extreme, she threw a strop when a friend installed a bathroom at his country house. At Miss Green, she and Ackland bathed once a week in their kitchen, in a copper filled with rainwater – a bit of kit she had been taught to use by Mrs Keates, her London char. Later, she would write about this copper, and how it required the bather to adopt a posture reminiscent of “ancient British pit burials”. One gathers that she did not regard this as at all a bad thing.

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