When ill health took away my freedom to roam, searching for beach treasure gave me a vital connection to my island home and more distant shores

Before I had children, my work as a research scientist meant frequent travel. I specialised in nature conservation and discovered that I was pregnant with my first child on a visit to an Ethiopian colleague’s field site in the Bale Mountains. The motherhood penalty in academia is high, and when my husband was offered a post in Shetland, I handed in my notice in the hope of finding a new job that would allow a better work-life balance.

We relocated north on the overnight ferry from Aberdeen, and despite a rough voyage and sea sickness, I was immediately smitten. Shetland is an archipelago of more than 100 islands, 16 of which are inhabited. Weather moves fast here and there is a constant play of light on a sea scattered with islands. I was excited to live in a place where there is always a chance of seeing a pod of orcas.

Forbes Masson stars in Gary McNair’s version of the gothic novella, Tim Key joins Kitson in an Old Vic two-hander and Jason Manford celebrates all musicals great and small

Robert Louis Stevenson’s ever-compelling “strange case” becomes a solo play, adapted by Gary McNair and performed by Forbes Masson at Dundee Rep earlier this year. Directed by Michael Fentiman, it is the latest addition to Original Theatre ’s impressive collection.

This is the perfect time to make lasting changes – whether embracing exercise, learning a new language, planting seeds or painting your house

Take it from a hopeless dopamine addict, spring is inarguably the best season to get into outdoor exercise. The trick to building the habit – as with any habit, really – is to start small, and reduce friction. Decide what you’re wearing and charge your phone before you go to bed. For your first few sorties, don’t worry about distance, speed or doing a whole workout: just get yourself used to getting up and out of the door. Counterintuitively, it can help to not dress like an athlete: if you go out covered in Lycra, it can feel mortifying to slow to a walk, but if you’re less formally dressed you can stop for a coffee. Keep it playful, and enjoy what your body can do: if that’s some step-ups on a bench or pull-ups on a tree branch, great, but even if it’s just going a little bit faster when a good song kicks in, the endorphin rush is what you’ll remember the next time it’s wet and windy. Oh, and don’t underestimate the value of a well-curated playlist. Many’s the morning I haven’t wanted to go anywhere, only for this Rihanna/Game Of Thrones remix to put a spring back in my step. Joel Snape, fitness writer

New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada examines the speeches, writing and linguistic tics of presidents and members of Congress to expose ‘inveterate deceivers’

Politicians mince or mash words for a living, and the virtuosity with which they twist meanings makes them artists of a kind. Their skill at spinning facts counts as a fictional exercise: in political jargon, a “narrative” is a storyline that warps truth for partisan purposes. Carlos Lozada, formerly a reviewer for the Washington Post and now a columnist at the New York Times , specialises in picking apart these professional falsehoods. Analysing windy orations, ghostwritten memoirs and faceless committee reports, the essays in his book expose American presidents, members of Congress and supreme court justices as unreliable narrators, inveterate deceivers who betray themselves in careless verbal slips.

Lozada has a literary critic’s sharp eye, and an alertly cocked ear to go with it. Thus he fixes on a stray remark made by Trump as he rallied the mob that invaded the Capitol in January 2021. Ordering the removal of metal detectors, he said that the guns his supporters toted didn’t bother him, because “they’re not here to hurt me”. Lozada wonders about the emphasis in that phrase: did it neutrally fall on “hurt” or come down hard on “me”? If the latter, it licensed the rampant crowd to hurt Trump’s enemies – for instance by stringing up his disaffected vice-president Mike Pence on a gallows outside the Capitol.

A man swaps his comfortable existence for an affair in Thomson’s lyrical study of a midlife crisis

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, Nausea , the protagonist, Roquentin, suffers a strange “sweet sickness” that is the physical manifestation of a deep existential malaise. Phillip Notman, the hero of Rupert Thomson’s How to Make a Bomb , is, like Roquentin, an academic researching a biography of an obscure historical figure. Like Roquentin, he is struck by a sudden and paralysing nausea, one that threatens to capsize his apparently ordered existence. Like Roquentin, he seeks solace in a woman’s love. Thomson’s 14 novels are overwhelmingly disparate, sharing only a profound regard for style, an engagement with the European avant garde tradition, and an interest in the secret and occluded corners of life.

It is at a conference in Norway that Notman suffers his first bout of illness. He is on his way to the airport after an evening spent in the company of a Spanish academic, Inés. How to Make a Bomb is written in an unusual kind of free verse with line breaks replacing full stops, although, as with any successful stylistic effect, you stop noticing it after a page or two. On the tram to the airport, Notman feels as if:

Artefacts on display in Oxford next month show the ‘humorous insights’ of a writer best known for his nightmarish stories

As Franz Kafka awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into ... a funny guy, actually.

The Prague-born writer, who died a century ago on 3 June, aged 40, is less renowned for his humour in novels and stories such as The Metamorphosis , The Trial and The Castle , and more for his nightmares of ordinary people trapped in impenetrable bureaucratic mazes.

Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London
Fun songs and exciting immersive touches delight children and adults alike in a lively picture book adaptation from actor Cush Jumbo and Katy Sechiari

‘Ha ha!” laughs my six-year-old as a knitted mole pops out of the ground and sneakily drinks a carton of Ribena. There’s a lot of amusement and delight in this lively adaptation of the kids’ picture book Bear Snores On , originally created by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman, and given new life here by co-writers and directors Katy Sechiari and Cush Jumbo (the actor, quite the switch of direction since her last role playing Lady Macbeth ).

A group of animals shelter from a storm in the cave of a hibernating bear, and after a short alfresco intro we join them inside, in a specially created space (so actual inclement weather won’t disrupt the show too much). We get there through a tunnel lit up by the LED wristbands we’ve all been given, a nice immersive touch. “That was really exciting. The wristbands were amazing!” says my son Jamie, who’s also very impressed by some UV light effects on the cave walls – designer Rebecca Brower has done a great job, especially on the chunky knitted costumes that give Mouse, Badger and Hare a Central Saint Martins meets Gardeners’ World kind of vibe.

The Scottish comedian narrates her traumatic experience of being ‘wired differently’ and why autism is so frequently missed in women

When the Scottish comedian Fern Brady phoned her father to say she had been diagnosed with autism, he was on his daily commute back from London. He said, “Oh right”, and began complaining about the traffic. Brady replied: “Well, they say autism can be inherited from one parent, so I guess that’s answered the question of which one.”

Strong Female Character, written and narrated by Brady, and winner of the inaugural Nero award for nonfiction, documents the turmoil of growing up with undiagnosed autism, during which she excelled academically but struggled with sensory overload and had violent outbursts that baffled her family, teachers and peers. After she began self-harming, her parents sent her to an adolescent psychiatric unit where she was a day patient. She was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, though she knew that wasn’t the whole story. It took until she was 34 to get an autism diagnosis.

Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I was lucky enough to be sent an early copy of David Nicholls’ forthcoming novel, You Are Here , a publication well-timed for those who adored the recent One Day Netflix adaptation . Nicholls’ latest book has long been on my radar, as I’ve written extensively about its central themes of solitude and loneliness.