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.

Maaza Mengiste speaks to Monocle’s Georgina Godwin about her new book, The Shadow King, which casts a light on the women who went to war in the late 1930s in Ethiopia, the country of Mengiste’s birth.

“This is a lament for a lost London, one which used to be much wilder, darker and poorer … This book will help you see it through new eyes. It is a delight.

Stranger than Kindness, the new collection from Nick Cave traces his transformation from Aussie teenager into an international artist. This book invites the reader into the innermost core of the creative process and paves the way for an entirely new and intimate meeting with the artist, presenting Cave’s life, work and inspiration and exploring his many real and imagined universes.

“We discovered that hope wasn’t to be found in wishing for miracles, but more in the decision to treasure all of the moments we had left, even the sad and difficult ones.”