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A Shirt Box Full of Songs, By Barbara Dickson

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

In an age when a few weeks' exposure on grim reality television leads inexorably to at least one memoir, how refreshing to discover that a singer whose career spans 40 years, a million-selling record, a handful of theatrical awards and an OBE had to be persuaded to put metaphorical pen to paper – and that money wasn't a deciding factor.

Judge approves extension for revised Google book settlement

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

A US judge agreed on Monday to extend the deadline for Google and US authors and publishers to submit a revised settlement that would clear the way for millions of books to be sold online.

Voices Against War: A Century of Protest, by Lyn Smith

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:48 GMT

My father had a bad war, but then most pacifists did. He didn't have a very good peace either, as soldiers returned from a victory in which he was only too aware he had played no part.

Salman Rushdie plans sequel to ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

TheBookseller.com announced on November 6 that Salman Rushdie will write a sequel to his 1990s children's book Haroun and the Sea of Stories. While an official release date is not set, Luka and the Fire of Life is expected to be published by Jonathan Cape in late 2010, reports the UK-based website.

Winning At All Costs, by Paul Gogarty & Ian Williamson

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

"I blame the parents" goes the cliché, and in their exploration of what psychological forces make great sporting heroes great, the authors – a journalist and a children's analyst – seem to agree. The core of their book is the proposition that a desire to please their mother and vanquish rivals for her affections, be it father, siblings or others, is what drives most sportsmen on; their sporting opponents are surrogate foes (for women, substitute father for mother).

Women authors left off list of the year's top 10 books

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

The publishing world has been plunged into a new row over sexism after the authoritative Publishers Weekly omitted to include a single female author in its list of the year's top 10 titles.

Nation, By Terry Pratchett

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Nation, Terry Pratchett's latest novel for younger readers, starts promisingly: with the creation myth of an island people in the South Pacific – sorry, in Pratchett's alternative world, that's the South Pelagic Ocean. Then Mau, a boy of the Island people, returns from a solitary ordeal on a neighbouring island to find his whole nation wiped out by a tidal wave. He loses his faith in the Nation's gods – though they will keep jabbering to him in his head – and braces himself to deal with an influx of refugees from the tsunami, including Daphne, daughter of the heir to the British throne. The stage is set for a clash of cultures.

The People's Train, By Thomas Keneally

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

The dark relationship between individual and society is a vexed, and vexing, subject in Russian history – and so, too, in The People's Train, Thomas Keneally's at-times brilliant retelling of the experiences of two men in the lead-up to, and during, the momentous October Revolution of 1917.

Telling Tales, By Melissa Katsoulis

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Melissa Katsoulis's entertaining account of literary hoaxes from the ancient world to the present day covers all three main kinds of hoax: the "genuine" hoax, that is to say the hoax that was never intended to be discovered (the Hitler diaries, the Ossian poems); the mock hoax, where a writer adopts a persona to create a new literary voice, such as James Norman Hall's invention of the 10-year-old poet Fern Gravel; and, most deliciously of all, the entrapment hoax, perpetrated to make a fool of a specific target.

The Vagrants, By Yiyun Li

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Yiyun Li takes on the omniscient voice of a 19th-century realist novelist for this bleak story set in a provincial town in China, 1979. A people who had endured the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution might have expected a thaw after the death of Mao – but it was a long time coming.

A lore unto himself: Owen Sheers is having his way with an ancient myth

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

There is something incongruous about interviewing Owen Sheers amid the rooftop haunts of Piccadilly. Sipping mint tea, blue-eyed and improbably boyish, he sits perched in a private room on the forelock of the old Simpsons building. With its metropolitan solidity and Art Deco twists, this one-time gentleman's outfitters and now flagship Waterstone's store is a resolutely urban environment in which to meet a writer so indelibly linked to the rhythms of the rural Welsh countryside.

False Dawn, By John Gray

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Events since False Dawn was first published in 1998 would seem to bear out John Gray's thesis that global capitalism leads not to universal prosperity but to chaos. In chapters on the US, Russia, China, Japan and developing countries, Gray shows again and again that laissez-faire capitalism is the problem, not the solution. On virtually every page there is some insight that makes you think: for instance, Gray points out that America's unemployment figures look far better than they are if you factor in the US prison population of more than a million.

A Freewheelin' Time, By Suze Rotolo

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Suze Rotolo is the girl nestling up to Dylan on the album cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. She met him in 1961 when she was 17 and he was 21, and this book is a record of their time together in folky, smoky Greenwich Village.

Conquest: The English Kingdom of France, By Juliet Barker

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

The books that first brought Juliet Barker renown were moving studies of the Brontës' lives and letters, and an immense life of Wordsworth. Her reinvention as a medievalist with her last book, Agincourt, seemed extraordinary, but in fact the interest in heraldry and chivalry predated her appointment as curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Agincourt was a thrilling read, immensely informative and eye-opening. Henry V was a painstaking accountant, and rarely have military shopping lists made such exciting reading.

A life of rhyme: John Cooper Clarke, the 'punk Poet Laureate', grants Robert Chalmers his first major interview in more than 20 years

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

The late Tony Wilson once told me, "I'm not the one who will have his life turned into legend, in the way that happened to Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud. It won't be me. It will be John Cooper Clarke." "Bloody hell," says the poet. That conversation took place 20 years ago, I tell him – when Wilson was still running the Haçienda; years before the release of Control and 24 Hour Party People, films which would help Greater Manchester to become, in Cooper Clarke's words, "a kind of a magical realist place, a bit like Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Nabokov's unfinished -- and unburned -- novel reappears

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Vladimir Nabokov wanted it burned on his death, but "The Original of Laura" survived and now, 32 years later, the unfinished novel is about to be published for the first time.

Modern comic genius: the graphic art that's not just for geeks

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Walk into the ICA this weekend and you won't find the usual contemporary art installations. For the next three weeks it's all about art with a cool comic-book twist. At the sixth Comica festival, the annual London gathering of some of the biggest international comic and graphic novel writers and artists around, hip twentysomethings will be watching their heroes drawing a collaborative comic strip live on to the wall and being projected into the bar next door. There will be the latest comic anthologies for sale, DJs, film screenings and talks by some of the biggest names in the comic-book business, including the co-founder of the Forbidden Planet shops, Mike Lake, and Bryan Talbot, author of the first British graphic novel, giving an illustrated lecture on his new steampunk detective thriller Grandville.

Modern comic genius: not just for geeks

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Monster success: The Gruffalo is best bedtime story

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Didn't you know? ... the nation's favourite bedtime story was yesterday revealed to be The Gruffalo. Although the black tongue, orange eyes and poisonous wart on the end of its nose might be enough to induce nightmares, Radio 2 listeners declared it was the best story for children heading to the Land of Nod.

Talking about Detective Fiction, By PD James

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Considering the longevity of a form which began with Oedipus and which remains our most popular kind of TV drama, detective fiction has had surprisingly few essays written about it. PD James's slim, elegant and thoughtful eight chapters on the subject defines it on a number of levels as a history of the genre, as examinations of individuals authors she especially likes, and as an overview of a kind of fiction which has never seemed more compelling. "Whether we live in a more violent age than did, for example, the Victorians is a question for statisticians and sociologists, but we certainly feel more threatened by crime and disorder than at any other time I remember in my long life." It is PD James's longevity, as well as her serene intelligence, that makes this book especially noteworthy and enjoyable, for at 89 she has grown up with the Golden Age of detective fiction as well as made a substantial contribution to it. Perhaps the best meditation on the deep-seated charms and satisfactions of the genre since Auden's essay, "The Gentle Art of Murder", it comes to us from the mind of somebody steeped in nearly a century of literature.

Blood's a Rover, By James Ellroy

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Nearly 20 years after he started work, James Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy is finally complete. Begun during the administration of George Bush Sr., former director of the CIA, its final part emerges in the bright new dawn of Barack Obama's administration, appropriately enough for a series that covers the years from November 1958 to May 1972, the decade or so of struggle out of which Obama's America was formed.

The Last Jews of Kerala, By Edna Fernandes

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

"It is the end of history for the Jews of Kerala": after 2,000 years of tolerance on the Malabar coast, fewer than fifty remain.

The Word On: Penguin's twitterature

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Twitterature: The World's Greatest books Retold Through Twitter, is an irreverent, profane and sometimes brilliant collection...The Tweets of (authors) Emmett Rensin and Alexander Aciman combine the knowledge of an English major with the snarky shorthand of a teenager's text message"

Book Of A Lifetime: The Periodic Table, By Primo Levi

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

In 1985, Primo Levi was known in Britain and America for a single book, If This is a Man, his memoir of survival in Auschwitz. Then came The Periodic Table, which arrived in this country garlanded with eulogies from Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.

Manituana, By Wu Ming (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

As a literary project, it looks at first glance like a giggly stunt positioned in some mischief-making space midway between Monty Python and the Sex Pistols. In 2000, a quartet of cultural pranksters and gadflies from Bologna published Q, a historical novel of adventure and ideas set in the 16th century. They chose as their first sobriquet "Luther Blissett": improbably enough, the name of a Watford striker subject to racial abuse after a transfer to Italy to play at AC Milan. Following a quizzical reaction from the real-life Blissett, the group recruited a couple more anonymous writers, picked for their next incarnation "Wu Ming" "no name" in Mandarin and continued to develop a unique brand of intelligent period fiction, with 54 also translated into English.