- Books RSS Feed

Will Dean's Ideas Factory: Billr app means an end to asking 'Why am I paying for your steak?'

Wed, 23 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Somehow, it's never easy. Even if there's an even number of you. Even if everyone has the same meal. And the same drinks. Even the tip can make things complicated.

Future's not Orange: book prize loses its sponsor

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

The Orange Prize for Fiction is looking for a new name and a new sponsor after the communication company announced it was stopping its support for the literary award.

Master and God, By Lindsey Davis

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

For the background to this novel, Lindsey Davis picks up on Suetonius's biography of the Roman emperor Domitian, as well as more recent histories. Suetonius's dramatic account of Domitian is perhaps now unfashionable, but his spindly-legged madman stabbing flies with a pen is far more fun than the rather swotty legislator of modern scholarship.

Profits read well at Bloomsbury

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Bloomsbury proved there is life after Harry Potter yesterday as revenues and profits both jumped, with cookery books by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Heston Blumenthal selling strongly.

Trending: Hardbacks vs e-books: the sequel

Mon, 21 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

In the world of journalism it's called a "reverse ferret" – a story breathlessly announcing that Black is White, just 24 hours after confidently asserting that Black is Black. In the genteel environs of publishing, it's a volte-face. Whatever it is, James Daunt, owner of Daunt Books and managing director of the Waterstones chain, executed a classic twirl at the weekend.

The Server, By Tim Parks

Mon, 21 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Beth Marriot is a volunteer at the Dasgupta Institute, a Buddhist retreat set deep in the English countryside. She's been here – preparing the rice and beans, cleaning the loos, getting up at four to meditate – for nine months, an unusually long time for a server given that most parents "don't put you through school to have you spend your life cooking and cleaning for free".

Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, By James Runcie

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:38:50 GMT

There is a bloody battle afoot in the world of crime fiction. Few would deny that the status quo in the fictional worlds of murder and detection these days is a grim and gritty one, with operatic levels of violence practically obligatory. And this isn't just the male practitioners of the genre; many female writers now cheerfully out-Herod Herod when it comes to upping the body count.

Between the Covers 20/05/2012

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:56 GMT

We love flavorwire.com's new collection of "extremely silly photos of extremely serious writers", which shows that even Nobel Prize-winners kick back and let their hair down from time to time.

The End, By Ian Kershaw Incognito, By David Eagleman Beirut, Ed. Samuel Shimon Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, By Paul Torday The Chicken Chronicles, By Alice Walker

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:21 GMT

The End, By Ian Kershaw

Penguin £9.99

*****

Reality, Reality, By Jackie Kay

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Short story collections sometimes lack unity, betraying their origins in a jumble of different commissions. In Jackie Kay's third collection, two stories stand out a little awkwardly: "The First Lady of Song" first appeared in Jeanette Winterson's anthology of opera-themed stories, Midsummer Nights. A bluesy riff on Jancek's The Makropulos Case, it's a fine piece of work but could have done with the Winterson book's brief opera synopsis to make full sense for the reader. Likewise, "Hadassah" perhaps suffers from being taken from its original context. (It was part of a performance cycle retelling Bible stories.) It is beautifully written but this voice of a trafficked woman feels like an exercise. An ongoing and horrible news story is in danger of turning into a literary cliché.

The A303: Highway to the Sun, By Tom Fort

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Compared to the bland and brazen utility of, say, the M4, the A303 – which comes off the M3 at Basingstoke and runs down to Honiton in Devon – is a rich and magical road. For me, and I am sure many others, it has always been, and is now, if not a highway to the sun, at least a highway to a windy beach, with a good few sights along the way. I remember picnicking on the stones at Stonehenge – in the days before they were roped off – during a stop-off on the way down to a holiday in Minehead in my parents' Morgan. While the motorway might get you west more efficiently, the A303 offers more freedom, more poetry. It is a romantic road. It meanders. It is not just about travelling from A to B.

On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin, By Marie Colvin

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

It is sometimes said that journalists write the first draft of history. For the vast majority that is a grandiose inaccuracy. But just leafing through the contents pages of On the Front Line provides you with a record of modern conflict. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Chechnya, East Timor and many more: there was no war the US journalist Marie Colvin would not brave, believing she had a moral responsibility to give a voice to those suffering in the midst of battle. Published just three months after she lost her life in Syria, aged 56, the book is a fitting memorial to her insightful journalism.

Photography: Soho, By Anders Petersen

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

For the latest in his ongoing series of "City Diaries", the Swedish black-and-white photographer Anders Petersen spent a month living and working in London's Soho.

Railsea, By China Miéville

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

If you're a discerning reader of fiction, two things – maybe three if you're particularly fussy – might put you off this book. The first is the blurb: "On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt". The second is the description of this novel as "for all ages". The third, well, perhaps you're the sort of reader who won't entertain anything that is science fiction or fantasy.

The Forrests, By Emily Perkins

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Emily Perkins' new novel opens with the making of a home movie and retains the feel of one, full of fragmentary impressions; momentary visual clarity mixed with the jumpy blurrings induced by a handheld camera. The extended opening shot is a swirl of activity, and captures siblings Dorothy, Michael, Eve, Ruth and their new friend Daniel messing about in the garden, then charging into the house for an impromptu game of Scrabble and witnessing their cat give birth in a sweater drawer.

Bring Up the Bodies, By Hilary Mantel

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Anne Boleyn's story is not an unfamiliar one, but it continues to tempt chroniclers because of its uncertain outline. Details, such as the idea that the queen had six fingers, were often added later by historians with an axe to grind or a patron to please. Many of the agents of the queen's downfall had, we must assume, good reason to destroy any evidence of their involvement. Mostly, what we know for certain is how terribly swiftly her fall occurred – perhaps between 20 April and 19 May 1536, when she was executed by a French swordsman who died with her.

The Blagger's Guide To: Michael Frayn

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Michael Frayn's latest novel, Skios, will be launched on Thursday. It will be his eleventh novel. He has also written or translated 31 plays, and published 12 works of non-fiction, including a collection of his journalism, Travels With a Typewriter (2009) and a biography of his father, My Father's Fortune: A Life in 2010.

Invisible Ink: No 124 - Hans Fallada

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

His pen-name was created from two characters in Grimm's fairy tales, but his novels had little in common with the moralistic fantasies of mittel-Europe. Rudolf Ditzen was a magistrate's son, raised in Berlin and immersed in Dickens, Flaubert and Dostoevsky. He became one of the greatest German authors of the 20th century, but was not translated into English until 2009.

The curious world of Norton Juster

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Some people are very easy to interview. Norton Juster is not one of them. He's delightful and articulate, but listening to the recording of our time together, it's striking how much more interesting his answers are than my questions. So our conversation entirely failed to resolve classics such as "Where did the idea for your book come from?" and ended up instead about vocational education, bipolar disorder, obscure Edwardian ghost-story writers, C P Snow, synaesthesia and the walks Juster used to take with his older brother. In some respects, it's hardly surprising; Juster has been giving interviews about his children's classic The Phantom Tollbooth for half a century, so might be forgiven for wanting his conversations to roam elsewhere.

How Aharon Appelfeld chronicled the Holocaust

Sat, 19 May 2012 08:00:01 GMT

Blooms of Darkness, in Green's graceful, grave and irresistibly readable English version, tells the story of Hugo, a young Jewish boy in an occupied town in eastern Europe who loses his parents to the camps but stays alive thanks to the shelter and salvation offered him by a local prostitute, Mariana. It extends and deepens one of the most remarkable journeys in all modern literature. In a prolific career whose highlights include novels such as Badenheim 1939, Tzili, The Immortal Bartfuss and The Iron Tracks, as well as the memoir The Story of a Life, Appelfeld has interrogated the meaning of what happened to him, to his community, and to humanity itself, during Europe's era of genocide.

Gwendoline Riley: A portrait of the artist as a brooding young woman...

Sat, 19 May 2012 08:00:01 GMT

Gwendoline Riley was finishing her first novel at the age that most of us were sleeping in, bunking off, or congregating around a pint at the student union bar. Turning her university dissertation into her debut, Cold Water (2002) she signed a two-book deal at the age of 22. Since then, she has accumulated a hipster-ish following and several literary awards (Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Award, a John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial prize shortlisted nomination).

The Wandering Falcon, By Jamil Ahmad

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

The first of these interconnected stories dramatises an honour killing in the desert plains of Pakistan's tribal territory and it made its debut author a star at the age of 78 when it was first published in Granta.

All in a Don’s Day, By Mary Beard

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Despite the asinine remarks of A.A.Gill, Beard is great on TV but transforming her blog into books (this is No.2) may be a step too far.

Civilization, By Niall Ferguson

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

Written by a historian lauded in The Times as "the most brilliant of his generation", this defence of Western civilisation contrives to be off-puttingly trendy in its sub-title ("The Six Killer Apps of Western Power") and starchy in its preface (two pages devoted to the historiography of R.C.Collingwood from 1939). Fortunately, the narrative proper bears Ferguson's hallmarks of readability and impressive research. With the skill of a master strategist, he marshals facts and opinion.

Death and the Dolce Vita, By Stephen Gundle

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:00:01 GMT

The discovery of the body of a 21-year-old woman on a beach near Rome in 1953 initiated a scandal that rocked Roman society and was an inspiration for Fellini's still potent La Dolce Vita.