Escape with Madame Kalamazoo! National Theatre launches children’s story service

The NT’s online platform offers personalised, interactive adventure tales for young children during the summer holidays

Author loses spot in Top 10 after buying 400 copies of his own book

Mark Dawson’s purchase pushed his thriller The Cleaner up the Sunday Times chart, but the sales monitor Nielsen has now revised its figures

Four-year-old lands book deal for his ‘astonishing’ poetry

Nadim Shamma-Sourgen’s words, evoking a ‘whole world full of hugs’, were spotted by the writer Kate Clanchy and will be published next summer

The play’s afoot! Watermill reopens with outdoor Sherlock Holmes comedy

The Berkshire theatre will ‘conjure some joy’ with a new version of The Hound of the Baskervilles performed by a cast of three

Book sales hit record highs in 2019, but publishers ‘now need help’

Figures for last year show sales of £6.3bn, up 20% on 2015, but the Publishers Association says sector needs government support to weather coronavirus

Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson to redraw London tube map with women’s names

Suggestions sought for public history project inspired by similar map of New York led by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Josephine Cox, bestselling novelist of family sagas, dies at 82

The author of more than 60 books, which sold more than 20m copies over three decades, died on Friday

Jasper Fforde on rabbits, racism and writing fiction ‘to slightly improve a flawed world’

Author grapples with big issues in The Constant Rabbit, a bonkers story with a dark undercurrent – and plenty of Rickrolling

Shifting gears: how does a literary festival become a drive-in event?

Rethought for the pandemic, this year’s Appledore book festival in Devon will play to audiences in cars, who can flash their lights and listen via radio

Stephen King link helps Highland football team through lockdown

Author ‘over the moon’ after Buckie Thistle raise £900 from signed copy of If It Bleeds, which the club feature in

Munroe Bergdorf receives landmark book deal for gender manifesto

Model and activist signs six-figure contract to publish Transitional, ‘a manifesto for how I see society changing for the better, bringing us all closer’

Mervyn Peake ‘visual archive’ acquired by British Library

Library says illustrations, beginning when he was seven and continuing through his life as a novelist and illustrator, show he was one of the great ‘writer-artists’

Donmar Warehouse to reopen with José Saramago installation Blindness

The London theatre will present a socially distanced adaption of the Portuguese author’s novel, voiced by Juliet Stevenson

Michael Glickman obituary

Architect who researched and wrote about the mathematical sophistication of crop circles

Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit

In a powerful new book, the journalist and historian reveals how her former friends and colleagues became agents of populism