Is the follow-up to The Satsuma Complex a celebrity cash-grab, or a sweet, silly meta-commentary on thrillers?

If all you wish is to be gently charmed for a few hours, The Hotel Avocado will pull you along with it. As a comedian, Bob Mortimer spins a shaggy-dog story like nobody else, and this is a rollicking old-school yarn. It is full of splendid phrases (“dingy limpets”, “corned beefer”, “pudding drink”) and cheerful narrative cul-de-sacs. Does the plot hang together? Not strictly speaking! Are the characters in any way real? Not really! Does either of these things matter to the general sense of romp? Well, if they did, it would be churlish to say so when Mortimer is having such a good time. If you loved his first novel, The Satsuma Complex , you will probably have a good time too.

Sequels are famously difficult, something Mortimer deals with by summing up the events of the previous novel in gleefully silly sentences: “You will probably remember that I was shot in the hip by my ex-boyfriend Tommy Briggs just before he killed himself on the back lawn of the house he had imprisoned me in. Well… I’m 99% back to normal now.”

The author on reading Emily Brontë as a teenager, becoming consumed by the Patrick Melrose novels, and the magic of listening to the Midnight’s Children audiobook in Manhattan

My earliest reading memory
My father reading the poems of Ogden Nash. He delighted in silliness, and I delighted in anything he found funny, and so they have stayed vivid since earliest childhood, unlike anything I was later made to memorise at school. At six I learned that “Candy is dandy; but liquor is quicker ” . Sound advice, even if it came a little early.

My favourite book growing up
Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins . I longed also to be left on my own island, alone with only my ingenuity and a feral wolf for company. It made childhood seem not a time of powerlessness but of such competence and courage.

These exceptional tales explore the sweet, infuriating agony of being overwhelmed by passion and desire

To yearn is to feel the pain and pleasure of being alive all at once. It is one of the great rites of passage of youth – wanting someone, wanting to be them, wanting to be wanted. It happens in flashes – a brief eye-lock on the street – or in great love stories that alter our basic narratives. Here are five novels that capture that lightning-struck feeling.

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Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson is published by Picador.

An electrifying retelling of how the Munich air disaster changed football and Britain for ever

Why the plural? There’s only one Munich in David Peace’s new novel, and we see very little of it: the slushy runway where British European Airways flight 609 crashes on February 6, 1958; the hotel room where two survivors spend their first bewildered night; the hospital where their fellow passengers recover – or don’t. This is surely the story of one accident, one time, one team: the air crash that killed 23 out of 44 passengers, including eight of Manchester United’s players, three of its staff, and eight journalists.

But Peace’s reasoning becomes clear over the several hundred pages of this relentless, electrifying, harrowing novel. The Munich Air Disaster, so integral a part of how the football club developed, and which had such a profound impact on the city, the north of England, the sporting community and the country as a whole, might easily not have happened had takeoff been aborted. And what would the world look like then?

This compulsive, claustrophobic account of a bad relationship becomes starved of oxygen in the same way the narrator is

A brilliant, imaginative woman; a mediocre man with too high an idea of himself, in need of a woman to destroy. It’s a dynamic that goes back to George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, novels that wreaked havoc with conventional ideas about to whom brilliance is meant to belong and forced the reader to see how grindingly limited these male characters’ assertions of power were compared with the women’s gifts for generosity and self-creation – for life itself.

Now, 150 years on, the allure of masculine power remains a trap that shimmers enticingly at its victims, male and female. The divorce courts continue to be flooded by men who stake everything on success, only to be confronted by the talents of their wives; men who end up punishing and controlling the woman whose proximity becomes a kind of torture. These wives can turn out to be appallingly suited to the self-sacrificing life they are forced into. Affluent heterosexual marriages are so often the sites of secret, insidious abuse and pain.

In a car-crash promotional tour for the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s controversial novel It Ends With Us, the actor has tried to flog not only her husband’s gin brand, but also a haircare line

Grab your friends, wear your florals, settle down with a tasty cocktail and kick back: this year’s sexiest movie about domestic violence is upon us!

Er … what? If that was your general reaction, you are not alone. For weeks, the weird marketing for It Ends With Us , the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, has been raising eyebrows and causing intense drama on the internet.

A well-crafted historical fiction inspired by the composer’s tenure as music teacher in a Venetian orphanage

In the 18th century, Venice’s figlie di coro was widely regarded as the best orchestra in the republic. It was comprised of girls from the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage established by wealthy individuals and run by nuns. Unwanted babies – those that had escaped being drowned – were “posted” through a tiny hole in the orphanage’s wall. They were given shelter and a musical education, as well as enduring gruelling domestic work, before they were married off or took the veil.

However, a talented few joined the orchestra and performed in churches and private houses, earning money for the orphanage. Despite their skill, members of the orchestra often had to play behind screens because they were disfigured – scarred from the pox or missing eyes and toes. Antonio Vivaldi served as violin director at the orphanage from 1703 to 1715. Anna Maria, a violin prodigy at the tender age of eight, became his star pupil.

The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

The Spanish director’s 12 tales, written between the late 60s and today, are a heady mix of factual and fictitious, befitting of one of cinema’s most imaginative storytellers

“I call everything a story, I don’t distinguish between genres,” writes Pedro Almodóvar in his introduction to The Last Dream – ostensibly the veteran Spanish film-maker’s first collection of short stories , though, sure enough, that description doesn’t quite cover it. Assembled from a presumably dense and disparate archive of prose written between the late 1960s and the present day, the book’s dozen selections mingle elaborately fantastical fictions with candid personal essays and the odd self-reflexive curio piece that sits somewhere in between. A tight, tidy foray into literature was never to be expected from the 74-year-old, whose utterly singular cinema thrives on chaotic melodrama and billowing, sensual abandon. If The Last Dream’s unruliness comes as no surprise – it’s a mixed bag both in its form and its rewards – its occasional crystalline terseness very much does.

Almodóvar invites readers to view the book as a stand-in for the fuller memoirs he steadfastly refuses to write. That notion seems fanciful as you begin reading. The first story, The Visit, describes a transgender woman’s bloody revenge mission; others early on cover queer Catholic vampirism and a peculiar nesting-doll rewrite of Sleeping Beauty. The Last Dream takes more complete if still amorphous shape later with pieces of plain autobiography. The through line here is the restless churn of Almodóvar’s imagination and storytelling sensibility, with sexual, spiritual and cinematic fixations that we sense intrude as much on his everyday life as they do on his art.

Agamemnon’s fateful return home reads like a blockbuster in the colourful third instalment of Barker’s women-centred Trojan wars series

The inconclusiveness of Pat Barker’s previous novel, The Women of Troy (2021) – a sequel to 2018’s The Silence of the Girls – left the impression that it might become the middle of a trilogy, not least because she already had two previous wartime trilogies under her belt. But to judge from The Voyage Home , the third instalment in Barker’s retelling of Greek war myths through the eyes of their conquered women, she may be eyeing an even longer project. Where earlier volumes drew on Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid , here we turn to the domestic bloodletting recounted in the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia , so plentiful in drama that Barker’s heroine in her earlier two books, the enslaved Trojan queen Briseis, doesn’t even get a look-in.

Abruptly sidelining a major player worked well for The Wire , and that kind of box-set breadth seems to be what Barker is after in The Voyage Home , with characters and themes low or high in the mix as best suits. This time, though, I’m not sure the camera is in quite the right place. The novel opens with Troy “fucking pulverised”, in the words of Greek king Agamemnon, preparing to sail home for his victory parade, which is set to be thoroughly rained on thanks to his wife, Clytemnestra – out to avenge the daughter he sacrificed to ensure the gods smiled on his war.