Former PM’s first-week sales compare with 21,000 for David Cameron’s memoir and 92,000 for Tony Blair bookLiz Truss’s book about her 49-day stint as prime minister sold 2,228 copies in the UK during its first week on sale, after a wall-to-wall promotional media blitz.Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room, combines...

Do you love reading – but all too often find yourself just scrolling through your phone or watching TV? Here is how to get lost in literature againIn the age of digital distractions, it is easy to struggle to find the time and headspace to get lost in literature. How can you get back into the habit? Librarians share the best ways to rediscover reading,...

Philip Pullman will help choose this year’s winners of award set up in memory of the keen young writer who died aged 13 in 2021The Martha Mills young writers’ prize has opened for entries on the theme of “A Secret”.The competition, run by the London Review Bookshop, invites 11- to 14-year-olds living in the UK to submit up to 500 words of any type of...

An ungrammatical egg; a demystifying approach to death; 10 new poets to read aloud; and a stunning gothic mysteryMy Mother’s Tongues by Uma Menon, illustrated by Rahele Jomepour Bell, Walker, £12.99 Written by a 16-year-old author, this richly textured picture book is a moving celebration of immigrant multilingualism: languages “woven together like...

Narrator Simone Collins leans into the dark humour of life at the domestic coalface, where moments of fierce love jostle with soul-sapping drudgeryA thrillingly blunt account of new motherhood, Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize, and finds its narrator addressing her baby, whom she calls Sailor, as she reports...

The British-Ghanaian author on having his mind blown by Malorie Blackman as a child, the allure of John Williams’s Stoner and why Zadie Smith made him want to writeMy earliest reading memory Reading Biff and Chip in my first couple of years of primary school. I loved those books and was always desperate for the next one.My favourite book growing up...