Gavin Francis, the author of the beautiful Island Dreams, writes in the Guardian about the fascination that islands exert.

“The love of islands is a widespread affliction – why else are we still reading Robinson Crusoe after 300 years? Why Treasure Island? Why after 75 years and over 2,000 episodes are we still listening to Desert Island Discs? From the blessed isles of Tír na nÓg and Thomas More’s Utopia to the island-dramas of CS Lewis and Enid Blyton, it seems we can’t get enough of them.”

Michael Spicer, author of The Secret Political Adviser, talks to the Guardian about becoming a sudden comedy star, and satire in an age without subtlety.

“Spicer represents the new vanguard of comedians satirising the political quagmire we’ve become embroiled in since the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. We are living in the age of political gaffes: there are so many of them, and they come so thick and fast, that what would once have led the news agenda for 24 hours gets forgotten in minutes.”

As Terri White’s memoir Coming Undone is published, this harrowing and incredibly powerful extract has run in the Guardian. It’s about what it was like to grow up with abuse, and then move across the world – to the dream job, in the dream city – only to still struggle, chaotically, with drink and with pain.

“What will happen after this news cycle is over and social media posts about diversity die down? Layla F Saad chooses books to fortify a long-term struggle.”

Throughout May we’ve been recommending books (and, as a bonus, dropping the ebook price for each of them to less than a fiver!). If you’d like to see all of our lockdown reads in one place, then do I have the one place for you.

“My mood during the weeks before the operation was the kind of hysterical calm you’d expect from someone who’s just made an appointment to get hit by a lorry. I wandered quietly around the house downloading audiobooks and trying not to have a heart attack.”

Robert Webb – the author of the bestselling memoir How Not To Be a Boy and the new debut novel Come Again – wrote in the Observer about his very real, very close encounter with his own mortality.

‘We’re here to talk about Webb’s debut novel, Come Again, a genre-defying time-travel tale — part adventure, part love story, part comedy, part dissertation on bereavement. It’s about a widow, Kate, whose husband, Luke, has dropped dead from a tumour that had been secretly growing in his brain since childhood. In the chaotic depths of heartbreak and despair, Kate awakes one day to find herself back in her old university halls bedroom. It is freshers’ week, she is 18 again, and here is her chance to remeet the undergraduate she will go on to marry and warn him about the time bomb in his head that, if left untreated, will kill him 28 years later. Come Again is a breathtakingly insightful evocation of grief.’

Patience Agbabi speaks to Ian McMillan on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb about time travel, word play and autism in her debut children’s novel The Infinite. Listen to the conversation and a reading from Patience from 33 minutes in.