Five Great Reads: mortality (grappled with), motherhood (solo) and mental baggage (unloaded)

Tim Jonze’s world came crashing down when he was told he might have months to live: ‘That’s another thing you learn: how you, and the people around you, will respond in a crisis.’ Photograph: David Vintiner/The Guardian

Good morning. We’re in autumn now, well and truly: it’s giving melancholy, it’s giving feeling-wistful-after-watching-Aftersun-at-the-cinema, it’s giving surprise strains of poetry in the sports reports on the morning radio.

People are waxing serious, thinking about how they want to live and make meaning (does two friends separately rereading Viktor Frankl make a trend?) – of conflict, of death, of new life. This week’s reads all point to that, in one way or another. It’s the existential edition.