There was a time when survival writing was a rather niche market. If you looked really hard, or asked the bored assistant, bookshops tended to stock a light range of boy scout-esque manuals on what to carry as emergency rations, the joys of Kendal Mint Cake and how to light a fire with sticks. More recently (before the lockdown, of course), if you mentioned the term “survival writing”, you would have found yourself conducted to the shelves containing another genre … generally filed under “self help”, the survival in this case being of a different order: how to survive a divorce, how to survive a bereavement, how to survive redundancy…