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Sales of Meta whistleblower’s memoir soar after Hay festival ‘silencing’

Sarah Wynn-Williams remained silent during her hour-long appearance, but sales of Careless People have since increased by more than 300%

Sales of the whistleblowing memoir Careless People increased by more than 300% in the UK the week after its author was “silenced” during an appearance at Hay festival following legal action by Meta, the subject of the book.

Sarah Wynn-Williams – who between 2011 and 2017 served as the director of global public policy at what was then called Facebook – sat on stage but did not speak during her hour-long appearance on 31 May on the advice of her lawyer. She appeared alongside the journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu.

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No fairytale: what happened to the real children behind fiction’s best-loved characters?

Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice in Wonderland … being the star of a classic story might seem like a dream, but there’s a dark side, argues the author of The Children

I’d loved the children for years before discovering they were real. I can almost summon the magic I felt when I first saw the photographs that proved it: the little boy clad in an approximation of hunters’ skins, posing victorious. The dark-haired girl with the offset gaze, her interior expression that of a person just growing used to being looked at.

And – this is the one that really kills me – the big-eyed, dimple-chinned seven-year-old in a soft sweater and tenderly mummish haircut, clutching the teddy bear that would end up even more famous than he would.

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Stolen Revolution by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati review – Iran’s recent history explained

This account of the Islamic Republic and its discontents told via six contrasting lives should be required reading

It’s difficult in 2026 to talk about Iran without confronting a lot of crude certainty. The average non-Iranian gets their information in snippets, filtered by algorithms. The Iranian diaspora is too fractured and traumatised to educate everyone. And the regime has muffled the voices inside its borders, responding to every major uprising with internet blackouts that hide both the people’s rage and its own violent response. Meanwhile, its own network of misinformation spreads lies – that protesters are foreign instruments, that the unrest is manufactured by outsiders – exploiting legitimate western anxieties about intervention, Islamophobia, sanctions, oil and Israeli imperialism.

Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati’s powerful history of the Islamic republic is a badly needed corrective because it is at once an engrossing story and a balanced, meticulously researched primer on modern Iran (the clearest I’ve ever read). And it is dramatic, personal and often heartbreaking, told through six lives lived at the forefront of the Iranian people’s almost five-decade struggle with a corrupt regime that has stolen their freedoms, votes and many thousands of their lives.

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A British Childhood by Frank Cottrell-Boyce review – are we raising a bookless generation?

This clarion call about the loss of delight and safety in children’s lives is also a reminder of the sheer magic of reading

Every day, on my walk to work, I pass a primary school. A group of little people are being dropped off by parents. They are met at the gates by a teacher who greets them all by name before leading them up the steps to breakfast club. In the cold and dark of winter, with the school’s windows glowing invitingly, I sometimes envy these children their warm, welcoming cocoon.

I thought of that daily scene often when reading this book, which is inspired by Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s time as Waterstones children’s laureate. During his laureateship he ran a campaign with the literary charity BookTrust called Reading Rights, addressing literacy inequality for children in poverty. It was prompted by the discovery that nearly half of children were arriving at school without having been read to. Many had no clue how books worked. They were trying to swipe rather than turn pages, or expand illustrations by pinching them with their fingers.

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“Far right groups prey on it”: Olivia Laing on the weaponisation of loneliness

A decade after The Lonely City was first published, the writer reflects on what’s changed – and how the feelings that drove them to write their bestseller are key to understanding our turbulent politics

I first had the idea of writing a book about loneliness in 2012. I was 35 and had just moved to New York City when I became lost in a labyrinth of isolation and misery. A love affair had ended abruptly while I was still sky-high with expectation, buoyant with relief that I was finally entering settled coupledom. To have failed in this transition, to have been rejected and left alone, filled me with a shame that felt literally unspeakable.

So there I was: alone in the city, an exile condemned to watch the world go by. It was a humiliating and very frightening feeling. The pain was intensified, as a broken leg or even a broken heart would not have been, by the fact that my loneliness felt inadmissible, a thing that could not be said for fear of repelling other people. This was the most alarming aspect of the experience, in that the need for concealment further entrenched the isolation, so that loneliness grew ever more inescapable, a fortress of solitude whose bulwarks and ramparts would not stop growing.

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Should we ditch the idea of three meals a day?

Our rigid eating habits date to the Industrial Revolution – it’s time to embrace culinary spontaneity

‘One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be ‘balanced’.” So argues American food writer MFK Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. She goes on: “In the first place not all people need or want three meals each day. Many of them feel better with two or one and one-half, or five.”

Fisher wrote her book ostensibly as a guide on how to feed yourself pleasurably and nourishingly during a period of food shortages caused by war, but there is much in her insightful advice to inspire and provoke us today. More than 80 years later, threats to the sacred breakfast-lunch-dinner mode of eating can still make the news: “A nation of snackers: Britons no longer eat three meals a day”, gasped one recent headline in the Times. Deviations from the “standard” model are the subject of research by academics and health professionals, and food retailers commission studies in an attempt to understand (and shape?) when and how customers consume their food.

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Marjane Satrapi captured profound human emotions – and paved the way for a generation

The graphic novelist had a remarkable gift for visual storytelling, in the phenomenon that was Persepolis and beyond. Many of us owe our careers to the space she created, says Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani

• News: Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis and acclaimed French-Iranian artist, dies aged 56

On the morning of 4 June, when I heard the news of Marjane Satrapi’s death, I was stunned. I simply could not believe it. Although I had met her only a handful of times in person – despite having lived in Paris for 16 years and having contributed to her book Woman, Life, Freedom – I felt a deep connection to her work and legacy.

Our collaboration on that book took place mostly through email correspondence, but I always held her in the highest regard. I admired her intelligence, her extraordinary sense of humour and, above all, her remarkable gift for visual storytelling.

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The Children by Melissa Albert review – intriguing fairytale of creativity’s dangers

In her first novel for adults, the YA author explores the dark side of writers who fictionalise their children’s lives

Children’s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged. And, as AS Byatt put it crisply when talking about her 2009 novel The Children’s Book: “Writing children’s books isn’t good for the writer’s own children.” Think of Christopher Milne, raging at having been Christopher Robin; Vivian Burnett, dragging Little Lord Fauntleroy behind him; Alastair Grahame, lying down on train tracks.

This is fertile material, as Byatt recognised, for a grown-up book. The American author Melissa Albert, herself a very successful children’s writer, has made it the theme of her first adult novel. The Children’s protagonist is Guinevere Sharpe, who as a grown woman is trapped by a very public version of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a sort of JK Rowling/Enid Blyton composite, wrote an era-defining run of children’s portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as the named protagonists.

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Dina Nayeri : Marjane Satrapi brought Iranian women like me out of hiding

The Persepolis author understood us and translated us for the world. We have lost our most eloquent spokesperson

Marjane Satrapi has died and every Iranian woman I know is in shock and mourning, while none seems confused by reports of the cause. She died “of sadness”, according to those close to her. Of course she did. Iranians often do. And Satrapi felt everything so intensely.

For my cohort (girls who began their adolescence in 1980s Iran and ended it in the west) Marjane Satrapi was a spokesperson for our trauma, our upbringing and our particular flavour of shame, repression and outspokenness. She made us legible to our western peers in our 20s and 30s, and I was sure she would do it again in middle age.

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