If you live to 100, you might as well be happy: what poverty, jail and war have taught author Rhee Kun Hoo

Joy is all around us, according to the bestselling South Korean author. Here’s what he has learned from a long and often hard life

My life is all food stains and dead pot plants – no wonder I dream of beauty and good taste

I’m tired of the dull, drab and mundane. Bring on the gold lamé dresses and pomegranate-scented potpourri, writes Emma Beddington

Read me a story: why reading out loud is a joy for adults as well as kids

Sarah Manavis and her partner have a guilty secret. What they love to do most of all in private is… read out loud to each other. And, as she’s discovered, it has many surprising benefits

Cold review – theatrically evocative folk-tale treatment of the pain of miscarriage

A man spins a story in a doctor’s waiting room, sparking a fairy tale of loss and desperation

Magic Pill by Johann Hari review – weighing in

There is a useful book to be written about the rise of anti-obesity drugs such as Ozempic, but this flawed account is not it

Bald by Stuart Heritage review – hair today, gone tomorrow

An unexpected twist on the grief memoir sees the Guardian writer chart the five stages of male-pattern baldness

Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey review – apocalypse now

A history of our obsession with the end of days – and the culture it has inspired

‘The courgettes were so good last year, I got a tattoo of one’: life on a Birmingham allotment

A city of welly-wearers, Birmingham has more allotments than any other UK local authority – some of its keen plotholders tell us why

I was the poster girl for OCD. Then I began to question everything I’d been told about mental illness

When I sought help for crippling invasive thoughts, I was told I had a disease like any other. But I wasn’t able to recover until I understood the fallacy at the heart of mental healthcare

‘Thirsty, wet, desolate. The dream’: One Day author David Nicholls on the peculiar pleasure of long, soggy solo walks

The bestselling author has always hated being on his own, so why does he spend a few days every year hiking alone in the wind and rain? Just don’t call it a midlife crisis …