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Observations: First Capital Connect launches book club
<p>Isn't it frustrating when you've just started the first few chapters of a new book, one that has you gripped after only several pages, and then all of a sudden you have to put it down? Maybe it's because you were on a First Capital Connect train earlier this week, and you finished reading one of the 32-page free book samples that were handed out to commuters. </p>
Books Burn Badly, By Manuel Rivas trans. Jonathan Dunne
<p>This is an exceptional book by an exceptional writer. Even among the near-industrial quantity of books now published on the Spanish Civil War, it is unusual. And within Manuel Rivas's own measured and exquisite output, not only does it attain the stature of a magnum opus, being roughly the combined length of his four preceding novels (all ably translated from Galician by Jonathan Dunne). It combines the folkloric lyricism of his In the Wilderness with the theme of the civil war already pursued by his first novel, The Carpenter's Pencil. </p>
Did You Really Shoot the Television? A Family Fable, By Max Hastings
<p>When Max Hastings's mother bumped into her husband in a hotel in Africa, she was furious; she thought he was in Berkshire looking after the kids. This was not "home alone", as they had a nanny devoted to young Max and his sister Clare, but it demonstrated again that this husband (for both it was the second of three marriages) was not exactly a family man. To be fair, she was not totally a family woman herself. </p>
Brooklyn, By Colm Tóibín
<p>Eilis Lacey, the biddable heroine at the heart of Colm Tóibín's prize-winning novel, is a young girl with seemingly few prospects. It's the 1950s and the best job on offer in her hometown of Enniscorthy is a position at the local grocery shop. Thanks to the intervention of her older sister, Rose, and the auspices of a well-meaning priest, Eilis is offered the chance to start over in New York. "Parts of Brooklyn are just like Ireland," she's told. "They're full of Irish."</p>
The Family Man, By Elinor Lipman
<p>
Elinor Lipman has a reputation for sharp, perceptive social comedies, but her
ninth novel proves more screwball than hardball. Manhattan attorney Henry
Archer, a gay man of a certain age, has recently discovered that the
coat-check girl at his local hair salon is Thalia – his long-estranged
stepdaughter.
</p>
The Immortals, By Amit Chaudhuri
<p>
The Immortals was published after a novelistic hiatus of nearly a decade
during which the seasoned Indian author, Amit Chaudhuri, also focused on his
other central passion: making music.
</p>
London Calling: A Countercultural History of London Since 1945, By Barry Miles
<p>It's said that if you remember the Sixties, you weren't actually there – a saying variously attributed to Grace Slick and Paul Kantner, both of Jefferson Airplane, and Dr Timothy Leary, so-called "Galileo of consciousness". Barry Miles was there throughout: present at the recording of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life", the climactic track of Sgt Pepper, and at the live recording of "All You Need is Love", which marked the first global television link. </p>
The Music Room, By William Fiennes
<p>
True life has a knack of splicing literary genres in a way that would baffle
coventionally-minded publishers. William Fiennes's tender, affecting
portrayal of his upbringing yokes together, as his past did, disparate
emotions and experiences.
</p>
Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, By Jeffrey Herf
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<p>Although Jeffrey Herf's book mostly chronicles German radio broadcasts to the Arab world during the Second World War, it also covers German propaganda directed at Turkey and Iran, as well as Italian propaganda to the Arabs. In addition he pays a lot of attention to the activities of the notorious Palestinian leader, Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. </p>
The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, By Tim Bale
<p>Once the Conservatives won elections with their eyes closed. Then they started to behave as if they wanted to lose. This book explains why and in doing so hits upon a wider theme, one that runs as a sinister undercurrent from the beginning to the end. </p>
Boyd Tonkin: Stories from the shifting sands
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<p>What do you call a monarchy in which a popular reformist politician-writer can enjoy the warm support of the ruling dynasty but still find some of his books banned from sale at home? There can be only one answer: the unpredictable Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The author in question, novelist and minister of labour Ghazi al-Gosaibi, is living proof that the gnarly contradictions that encumber questions of free expression in the Gulf may stretch right to the topmost branches of the tree of power. Not long ago, I heard about a minister in one Gulf state who told a publisher abroad that his wife, a serious researcher, had written a fine objective history of his country. It deserved to be published but, sadly, would have to be censored on home ground. Who would do the banning? Why, the uxorious minister himself, of course.</p>
Thatcher's Britain, By Richard Vinen
<p>
Where were you when Margaret Thatcher came to power? Richard Vinen, a
historian both sharp and tough, recalls his O-level Latin class in Solihull
and makes the point that the first female premiership "cut deeply"
into British private lives.
</p>
Tehran, Lipstick and Loopholes, By Nahal Tajadod
<p>
Nahal Tajadod, an Iranian academic visiting relatives in Tehran, needs to
return to her husband, the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, in her
adoptive homeland of France post-haste, but her Iranian passport needs
renewal.
</p>
The Spy Game, By Georgina Harding
<p>
On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna Wyatt's mother
disappears into the fog - "a kiss no more than a brush of breath and
powdered cheek" - and fails to return. On the same day, five Soviet
agents are arrested in connection with the theft of Admiralty documents from
the Portland naval base.
</p>
Ruby's Spoon, By Anna Lawrence Pietroni
<p>Anna Lawrence Pietroni's debut novel takes place in the summer of 1933 in a small industrial town in the Black Country. Cradle Cross and its canal-bound environs provide a realistic backdrop to the florid melodrama of this tale about "three women, one witch, one mermaid and one missing". The 13-year-old Ruby lives with her grandmother. Her mother is dead and her father a recluse who never leaves his boatyard. Her real father figure is Captin, a cuddly bear of a man who runs the fish-and-chip shop where Ruby works and dreams of escaping to the sea, a fantasy piqued by the arrival of a strange woman in a deep crimson cloak: Isa Fly, with one white eye and, though young, a mane of snow-white hair. </p>
Reading all over the world: The long-list for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize spans the globe
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<p>The numbers fell; but not the scope or the quality. A preference for safe bets and low horizons in recession-era publishing did serve to thin the field of translated fiction published in the UK during 2009. Entries for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shrank by more than a quarter. That only means, take note, that the total of titles considered by the judges (Tibor Fischer, Kate Griffin, Daniel Hahn, Kirsty Lang and myself) merely returned to its level a few years ago. </p>
The Preacher, By Camilla Läckberg
<p>
A well adjusted Swedish policeman? Surely some mistake, but Camilla Läckberg's
creation, Detective Patrik Hedstrom, is just that – as well as being a
decent cook and attentive partner to his pregnant girlfriend, Erica.
</p>
Pitt the Elder: Man of War, By Edward Pearce
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<p>The 18th century is confusing. There were too many people with the same name – at least one William Pitt too many, with almost everyone else apparently called George or, again, William. Conversely, the same people had too many different names, changing them as they acquired peerages. To make identification just that bit trickier, all the men wore wigs, and in formal portraits usually seem to be in some kind of uniform: even if, like this book's main subject, their actual military service was brief, leisured and risk-free. There were far too many wars and battles, some also bearing several different titles, and involving too many European countries which no longer appear on the map and were some of them too small to find even when they did exist... </p>
The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, By Frances Stonor Saunders
<p>At least four people tried to assassinate Benito Mussolini, but the Honourable Violet Gibson, child of a rich and prominent Anglo-Irish family, was the only one to draw blood. She travelled to Rome with the original intention, it appears, of murdering the Pope, but then changed her plan. On 7 April 1926 she took her revolver and a stone wrapped in a cloth (for use in case she needed to smash the window of his car) and walked to the Campidoglio, Michelangelo's magnificent piazza. There she shot the Italian prime minister at close range. Her first bullet nicked his nose, drawing copious blood; the second jammed. She was set upon by the furious mob and only saved by the police from being lynched. </p>
Hard science and soft humanity: At home with Ian McEwan
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<p>'Bald, short, fat, clever", Ian McEwan's latest protagonist gorges on junk food, routinely cheats on his myriad wives and lovers, robs a dead employee of his breakthrough ideas about cheap renewable energy, and rests in his randy, portly way on the laurels of the Nobel Prize in physics that he won many years before. Surely no biographical truth could ever match this florid fiction? Yet McEwan, the most consistently science-friendly major writer of his age, has even at this early stage felt the shock of recognition from his collaborators on the other side of the "two cultures" divide. </p>
Lark & Termite, By Jayne Anne Phillips
<p>
The opening chapters of Phillips's fourth novel might leave even dedicated
fans flailing, but once you've got your bearings -1950s Korea - this
distinctive wartime narrative starts to fall into place.
</p>
One Minute With: Sophie Hannah
Corrag, By Susan Fletcher
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<p>The 1692 Massacre of Glencoe can still rouse passions today, so it's a brave author who tries to wrest fiction from it. In her third novel, Susan Fletcher approaches the massacre using two main characters, one historical, the other semi-legendary. What emerges is very much a literary, rather than a traditional historical, novel.</p>
David Foster Wallace archives to go on display
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<p>The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archives of writer David Foster Wallace, announced the center on March 9. Highlights of the collection, some of which can now be viewed online, include handwritten notes and drafts, research, and teaching materials owned by the <em>Infinite Jest</em> author, who died in 2008.</p>
Israeli novel wins Best Translated Book Award
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<p>Gail Hareven's <em>The Confessions of Noa Weber</em>, translated from Hebrew into English by Dalya Bilu, was given the 2010 Best Translated Book Award on March 10. Organized by international liteturature resource Three Percent at the University of Rochester, the Best Translated Book Award honors the best original works of international literature and poetry published in English in the US over the past year.</p>
Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, By Lydie Salvayre
<p>Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, as in the French writer Lydie Salvayre's other novels, treats us to a meditative work of fiction narrated by someone trying to find their foothold in the void. This time, Salvayre's void is high finance and the "free market". An unnamed female narrator has agreed to write the authorised biography of the richest man in the world, a fast-food magnate called Tobold the Hamburger King.</p>
New app delves further into Booker Prize-winner 'Wolf Hall'
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<p>On March 9, HarperCollins imprint 4th Estate and app developer Enhanced Editions released a new <em>Wolf Hall</em> application for iPhone and iPod Touch. The app includes an e-book version of Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winning title, as well as family trees, an essay by Mantel, a video discussion, and a news feed.</p>
Hilary Duff to write young adult book series
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<p>American actress and singer Hilary Duff is set to publish a series of young adult novels, announced publisher Simon & Schuster on March 9. The first novel in the series, <em>Elixir</em>, will be published in hardcover in October 2010.</p>
Kindle bestsellers: 'Shutter Island,' non-fiction picks, 'A Reliable Wife'
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<p>Dennis Lehane's <em>Shutter Island</em> holds the top spot for the fourth consecutive week on Amazon.com's list of bestselling Kindle e-books, released March 9 by Publishers Marketplace. Holding on to second and third place for the week ending March 6 are longtime bestsellers <em>The Help</em> by Kathryn Stockett and <em>The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo</em> by Stieg Larsson.</p>
The Moment of Psycho, By David Thomson
<p>The Jacobean tastes of Alfred Hitchcock, that working-class Englishman, have wormed their way into the cultural mainstream. Especially with Psycho, a film with a wavering sense of near-farce saved by the most brilliant musical score in movie history, by Bernard Herrmann. Go to see Martin Scorsese's new film, Shutter Island; you'll find Leonardo DiCaprio taking a shower. The shower head, a fully referenced Psycho flower of radiating water, is like an advancing medical instrument in an alien laboratory.</p>
Dear Jackie... how America mourned JFK
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<p>They arrived from every corner of the country. They were from men women and children, of every race, age, class and calling. Half a century on, they have come to life again, expressing Americans' grief, shock and collective sense of bereavement at the news of John F Kennedy's assassination.</p>
Big Think: If God 'evolves' are some faiths more advanced?
Poetry in motion: Carol Ann Duffy is going the distance
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<p>It's 11.45am and the Central Hall in Westminster is heaving with yakking schoolkids. Fifteen-year-olds, with iPods, notebooks and temporarily customised uniforms, file up the stairs chattering like jackdaws, as though at a hip-hop gig. </p>
Mornings in Jenin, By Susan Abulhawa
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<p>
It's almost 62 years since the "nakba" or cataclysm that saw the
invasion of Palestine or, to put it another way, the founding of the state
of Israel.
</p>
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, By Laurie Viera Rigler
<p>The protagonist Courtney Stone wakes up in a dream, and "doomed to be an anachronism" since it is now 1813 England, rather than the present-day Los Angeles from which she hails. She revels in the reflection of the unfamiliar woman gazing back at her – a woman called Jane Mansfield. She also has to inhabit an entirely different body of thought and feeling, and over the course of the novel will struggle to fit into some rigid notions. Jane has just awoken from a riding accident and is confronting a world deciding how to treat her: is she best off in an asylum? Or having "the offensive humours in the blood" drained out of her? Or simply eating and sleeping well? </p>
Heliopolis, By James Scudamore
<p>Twenty-seven-year-old Ludo, who was born Ludwig Aparecido dos Santos, works for a communications company high above the city of Sao Paulo. Real communication, though, is more mysterious and complex than any corporation can master, especially communication across the gulf between rich and poor that exists in such a place. </p>
Notes on a scandal: Iris Murdoch's letters to pupil who became her lover are revealed for first time
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<p> February 1964, and a portly female lecturer in early middle age sits hunched beneath a Goya print in her top-floor office at the Royal College of Art (RCA), marking scripts. In the corridor, a man 20 years her junior hovers, waiting to be invited in to discuss his thesis. Within moments, David Morgan would be standing before Iris Murdoch. Little did either know this meeting would signal the start of a relationship of increasingly emotional encounters and a correspondence whose tone would veer from passion to acrimony over a period of three decades. </p>
London Calling, By Barry Miles
<p>The first task facing anyone who sits down to write "A Countercultural History of London Since 1945" is to work out what he means by countercultural. Is it just another word for bohemian, or a blanket term to describe any self-consciously left-field artistic activity? In his introduction, Barry Miles mentions London's "creative life... more particularly its bohemian, beatnik, hippy and countercultural life", but that, too, begs more questions than it answers. The ever-reliable adjective "transgressive" pops up every so often, yet this is a book which places Kingsley Amis alongside Genesis P Orridge, and prompts the thought that any net capable of tangling up Lucky Jim and COUM Transmissions in a single mesh is so vast as to be scarcely worth the flinging.</p>
I've had the rhyme of my life: Inside a prestigious getaway for 15 Young Poets of the Year
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<p> For an indication of the health of British poetry, says Lemn Sissay, look no further than the strength of the entries to young people's competitions. "They're the momentum in a movement," he says – the force against a "competitive note" that has entered the contemporary poetry scene. The 42-year-old performance poet has just completed a week teaching the 15 winners of last year's Foyle Young Poets Award, which drew a record 14,000 entries from all over the world – and, by his reckoning, the future of the art form is very bright indeed. </p>
Mary Tudor: England's First Queen, By Anna Whitelock
<p>On the morning of 18 February 1516, at the royal palace in Greenwich on the banks of the River Thames, the daughter of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon was born. On 14 December 1558, she was buried in Westminster Abbey. This rigorously researched book brings back to life the period in between; a period in history in which unprecedented events took place. </p>
The House of Wisdom, By Jonathan Lyons
<p>
Jonathan Lyons dedicates his book – an account of "How the Arabs
Transformed Western Civilization" – to his father, who introduced him "to
the power of ideas". In its pages, key ideas which shape our world are
passionately explored – how they originated and their influence and legacy.
</p>
The Seamstress, By Frances de Pontes Peebles
<p>Although this is Frances de Pontes Peebles' first novel, her prose flows with the assuredness of a natural storyteller's. Each sentence of her epic narrative is stitched with meaning and insight, and the reader's imagination is woven into the novel from the very first paragraph </p>
Point Omega, By Don DeLillo
<p>Twenty-six years ago, in White Noise, Don DeLillo wrote about the Most Photographed Barn in America, a tourist attraction that was an attraction simply because it was an attraction, and thus bestowed with a significance entirely unjustified by its architectural or historical standing. Read now, the vignette feels like an uncanny prophecy of celeb reality. "No one sees the barn," says Murray, an academic on a day trip. "What was the barn like before it was photographed? What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura."</p>
Revealed: Iris Murdoch's secret love affair
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<p>Intimate details of a tempestuous 30-year relationship between the author Iris Murdoch and a former student are revealed for the first time in today's Independent on Sunday.</p>
The Grudge, by Tom English
<p>No Grand Slam at stake for either England or Scotland in rugby union's Calcutta Cup game at Murrayfield next Saturday, but on 17 March 1990 both sides had all to play for. </p>
Invasion of the Swedes: A cultural incursion from the north
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<p>They revolutionised British design though Ikea; gave us fast fashion at H&M and, of course, we thanked them for the music of Abba. Now the Swedes are taking over in the world of British page and screen.</p>
Zombies meet trekkies in new Quirk Books title
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<p>Kevin Anderson's <em>Night of the Living Trekkies</em> is set to be published by Quirk Books, announced industry resource <em>Publishers Lunch</em> on March 4. Due out in September 2010, the mash-up novel, "mixing a zombie apocalypse with the enduring mythology of Star Trek," will join such Quirk Books titles as <em>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</em> and <em>Android Karenina</em>.</p>
Indy Choice: The best of the new books
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Adventures on the High Teas, By Stuart Maconie
<p>
This book by an admirable fixture at Radio 2 explores a milieu notable for "loft
conversions, CCTV cameras, white-towelling hen parties in health spas,
trampolines in suburban gardens..." In other words, Middle England.
</p>
Arifa Akbar: Erotic memoir or a publisher's wet dream?
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<p>When the French art critic, Catherine Millet, published a memoir of sexual exploits from her first masturbatory fumbles to group sex, The Sexual Life of Catherine M led to the blossoming of a sub-genre of the contemporary 'sexual confessional' with a slew of kinky first person accounts published in its aftermath, from a suburban mother's double life as an escort (Dawn Annandale's Call me Elizabeth: Wife, Mother, Escort) to an Italian schoolgirl's adventures (One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed), the Belle de Jour series, and Tracy Quan's variation on a theme (Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, Diary of a Married Call Girl, Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl). </p>
Celebrity, By Marina Hyde
<p>The phenomena explored here include: Jude Law's personal mission in 2007 to bring peace to Afghanistan ("Obviously the situation was too complicated for us to sit down with the Taliban"); Pete Doherty's cat Tinkerbell taken into care when cocaine was discovered in its bloodstream; Madonna's charity event Raising Malawi, where the $800 Gucci bag given to each guest was coincidentally equal to the per capita GDP of Malawi. </p>
This Bleeding City, By Alex Preston
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<p>In recent months a high, teetering pile of factual books about the financial crisis has accumulated, poised for a resounding crash of its own down upon the heads of unwary readers. Now it is fiction's turn and Preston's debut novel could inaugurate a whole genre dedicated to fiscal calamity. He has sound credentials for the job because he worked as a City trader and gazed straight into the bottomless chasm that threatened capitalism. </p>
The Lives of Ants, By Laurent Keller & Elisabeth Gordon
<p>
Pretty much everything is astonishing about ants. Though they prefer a bit of
heat, they are also found in Finland and the Alps. They are more of them
than any other animal.
</p>
The Rise and Fall of Communism, By Archie Brown
<p>
Balanced, insightful, illuminated by intriguing detail and flashes of humour,
this worldwide panorama is a miracle of compression.
</p>
A Day and a Night and a Day, By Glen Duncan
<p>
Glen Duncan sets the scene, crisply, creeply and most evocatively, as Augustus
Rose is led into an interrogation room, for a day and a night and a day (of
the title) for his torture, before yielding the names demanded by his
interrogators.
</p>
Posthumous Keats, By Stanley Plumly
<p>
The title refers to Keats's own description of his "posthumous existence",
the final 18 months when the medically trained poet recognised that he was
not long for this world.
</p>
Journeys home: Rose Tremain reflects on the past and her present life writing in the south of France
<p>I trudge up the hill to the handsome Regency mansion on the edge of Norwich where (in one wing) Rose Tremain has lived with the biographer Richard Holmes for the best part of two decades. A car glides round a bend; at the wheel, Holmes himself. On a chill day after snow, one half of this most serenely complementary of literary couples promises me that a roaring fire waits for me inside. As it does, a proper hearth inside a proper home, crackling companionably while the novelist brews coffee and the Norfolk drizzle falls on white-dusted lawns outside. </p>
The Temple-Goers, By Aatish Taseer
<p>India's seamy underbelly, though hardly news to Indians, is a trendy subject for novels and movies, such as The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire. If you have seen Monsoon Wedding, you should have a fair idea of the milieu of The Temple-Goers, a first novel by Aatish Taseer. He was born in New Delhi of an abortive affair between a well-connected Sikh journalist mother and a philandering Pakistani politician, and now lives there and in London, where he has worked as a journalist. Like the film, the novel moves among Delhi's wealthy middle class in all its energy, brashness, pretentiousness, perversion and corruption, supported by a cast of thrusting, upwardly mobile hustlers and servants, all tinged with Bollywood-style romance. </p>
Task Force Black: the Explosive True Story of the SAS and the Secret War in Iraq, By Mark Urban
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<p>It was quiet, too quiet. The tension was palpable as Mark Urban waited for the inevitable attack. He knew too many secrets and had to be silenced. This, after all, was 'Big Boys' rules, the code of the shadowy and deadly world he had dared to enter - the world of the SAS.</p>
The Snowman, By Jo Nesbø, trans, Don Bartlett
<p>What sort of issues do you expect your crime fiction to cover? If you feel that personal responsibility, cracks in the welfare state and the problems of parenthood are fair game for the crime novel, then Jo Nesbø is your man. All of these (and many more) are crammed into his weighty latest book, The Snowman. </p>
Where the Serpent Lives, By Ruth Padel
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<p>Having worked in many fields - poetry, non-fiction, broadcasting, conservation, the Darwin industry - Ruth Padel has now attempted a novel. Where the Serpent Lives is an ambitious work: set in London and India, it blends Padel's well-known interest in animals with the travails of 21st-century Londoners. At the centre is Rosamund, her wealthy and philandering husband Tyler, their incommunicative son Russel (named after naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who almost scooped Padel's great-great grandfather Charles Darwin) and his dog Bono. </p>
One Minute With: Aifric Campbell
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Living Dolls, By Natasha Walter<br />The Equality Illusion, By Kat Banyard
<p>There has been a powerful revival of feminist anger at a new strain of misogyny in popular culture in recent years. I expected to feel a sympathetic engagement with both of these books, which tackle the problem of womens' objectification head on. What I did not anticipate feeling was such a deep sense of shame at the catalogue of tawdry horror stories laid out in these pages and what these tell us about the society we have created for ourselves. </p>
Book Of A Lifetime: A Writer's Diary, By Virginia Woolf
<p>I first read Virginia Woolf when I was an undergraduate longing to write novels; she was not yet part of the canon or the course. I bought her early novel, Jacob's Room, and fell in love with its vivid, vanished past. Now, many decades later, after writing my first non-fiction book, a memoir called My Animal Life, I admire the very different Woolf of the Diaries, which face in the opposite direction to Jacob's Room – towards the future she would never see and the briefer, faster idiom of our own time, the era of texts and emails. I love the intimacy and clarity of this voice, and tried for a similar directness myself in My Animal Life, taking the reader into the secrets of my heart.</p>
The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour, By Andrew Rawnsley
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<p>Political writing is not what it was. The biggest book written about Margaret Thatcher while she was in office, by the late Hugo Young, was a meticulously researched account of Thatcher's public actions, spiced by a small number of illustrative anecdotes written from the standpoint of an outsider. His contemporary counterpoint is Andrew Rawnsley, political commentator for The Observer, who writes as an insider. He is a master of the zeitgeist, a craftsman who skilfully steers readers through what they half know already, reinforcing what they already think.</p>
The £4.6m question: Is Tony Blair's 'Journey' worth the advance?
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<p>When Tony Blair delayed his memoirs until after the general election, it was widely assumed that he would not pull his punches in describing the ups and downs of his turbulent relationship with Gordon Brown. </p>
Wolf Hall, By Hilary Mantel
<p>
Any reader who has so far resisted last year's Man Booker laureate should
sucumb to its appealstraight away. Hilary Mantel's scintillating tragi-comic
novel of the career (up to 1535) of Henry's VIII's enforcer Thomas Cromwell
has virtues to trump every sceptical objection.
</p>
Involuntary Witness, By Gianrico Carofiglio
<p>
Recent events in Italy have made a compelling case for the return of this
bestselling police procedural by a master of the form. Now a Senator in
Rome, Gianrico Carofiglio used to prosecute mobsters in Bari.
</p>
Mary Tudor, By Anna Whitelock
<p>
"One sees nothing but gibbets and hanged men." The aftermath of Sir
Thomas Wyatt's Kentish rebellion of 1553 characterises the tormented reign
of Mary, sandwiched between the Stalinist revolution of Henry and the
economic flowering of Elizabethan England. But worse was to come for Mary.
</p>
Isa and May, By Margaret Forster
<p>The narrator of this curious novel has an unusual name. Her parents, James and Jean, have called her Isamay, after her paternal grandmother, Isabel, and Jean's mother May. Isabel, or Isa, lives in some splendour, with Mrs Roberts to clean for her and the obliging Elspeth to bake the cakes that accompany afternoon tea. She also has a gardener on call. May, by contrast, lives alone in the two-up, two-down terraced house in which she shared her life with her husband Albert, a plumber of beloved memory, and raised four children, only one of whom, Jean, remains in London. Isamay is devoted to her widowed grannies, whose very different kinds of courage and tenacity are a source of both irritation and inspiration to her. Throughout the novel, she is working on a dissertation for an MA in Women's Studies, taking as her subject the importance of the grandmother in the family. Her supervisor, the forbidding, middle-aged Claudia, advises Isamay to examine the way certain figures from history have behaved towards their grandchildren - the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, for instance, and Queen Victoria. There are others, but it is really Isa and May with whom she is chiefly, and deeply, concerned.</p>
The Diary: Philip Glass's Satyagraha; World Book Day; Tamasha; Cirque du Soleil; Darcey Bussell
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Books to be reinvented as tablets become mainstream
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<p>Penguin Books CEO John Makinson provided a look at how media devices might shake up the way we define text-based publications in the future.</p>
Weekly book agenda: Read an E-Book Week, Best Translated Book Award
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<p>March 7 marks the start of Read an E-Book Week, during which tech-savvy readers, or those who wish to be, can download free titles from a variety of sources. On March 10, one winner will be chosen for the annual Best Translated Book Award, which honors titles from around the world that are available in English translation.</p>
Does the Female Ennuch still have balls?
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<p>A few years ago, someone had the bright idea of designing a T-shirt with the slogan "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" running proudly across the chest. The Feminist Majority Foundation, selling them online, reported a run of orders from college campuses across America. In the UK, equality champions the Fawcett Society plugged the T-shirt on their website, asked prominent faces – from Tracey Emin to Ken Livingstone – to wear it in public, and it became a bestseller. Then, last year, Ms, the American feminist magazine, put Barack Obama on its January cover. There he was, a shiny illustration of a President, chin uplifted, staring heroically into the middle distance, ripping his white shirt open, Superman-style, to reveal that T-shirt. </p>
Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, By Amos Oz
<p>
This is a tiny book that doubles both as a children's fable and an allegory
for adults. It may be a fast read, but it has enormous resonances. The
narrative is based in a mysterious town without animals or birds. Legend
tells that they have been spirited away by the Pied Piper figure of Nehi,
the mountain demon. The animals live in a paradise where no beast devours
another and harmony reigns.
</p>
Apps, children’s book publishers offer Read an E-Book Week specials
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<p>During 2010 Read an E-Book Week, scheduled for March 7-13, dozens of booksellers and publishers will offer free downloads of electronic titles. In anticipation of the event, founder Rita Y. Toews told Relaxnews about some of the new and notable offers that have been added the to the website's E-Book Store.</p>
Blair's memoirs to be published in September
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<p>Tony Blair's memoirs of 10 years as British prime minister will be published in September, entitled "The Journey", the publishers said Thursday.</p>
A lover's guide to older women
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<p>In the mid-1960s, readers with a furtive interest in literary sex weren't exactly spoilt for choice. Lady Chatterley's Lover had been available in Penguin paperback since 1960, more than 30 years after it was first published and banned; it was worth hacking through the jungle of Lawrence's prose to find the rude dialogue and the daisies-in-the-pubic-hair scene. Lolita had been around since 1959, making us swoon with its sensuous inspections of flesh and the American landscape, though it was frustratingly metaphorical and imprecise about sexual mechanics. Then in 1966, a new star appeared in the heavens: In Praise of Older Women by Stephen Vizinczey hit the shelves. </p>
The Crowfield Curse, By Pat Walsh
<p>With the present looking dodgy and the future perhaps worse, writers seeking to provide young readers with good, cheerful stories seem increasingly drawn towards the past. Their positive young characters are often tougher, if not better, than their counterparts now, mainly because they have already had to bear so much hardship in order to come through so far as decent human beings. </p>
'Germaine Greer? She has no idea what makes women tick,' says Nowra
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<p>Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch is considered a seminal text of the women's liberation movement. But according to a fellow Australian writer, Louis Nowra, Greer fundamentally misunderstood how women tick, and modern realities have debunked her vision of how they would live after casting off traditional shackles.</p>
Tim Burton to produce 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' film
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<p>"Alice in Wonderland" director Tim Burton is set to produce a film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's mash-up novel <em>Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter</em>, reported <em>The Bookseller</em> on March 3.</p>
Kindle bestsellers: 'Fantasy in Death,' 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks'
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<p>Dennis Lehane's <em>Shutter Island</em> holds the top spot for the third consecutive week on Amazon.com's list of bestselling Kindle e-books, released March 2 by Publishers Marketplace. In second and third for the week ending February 27 are <em>The Help</em> by Kathryn Stockett and Stieg Larsson's <em>The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo</em>, both longtime bestsellers.</p>
Miss Thing, By Nora Chassler Two Ravens Press, £9.99 Order for £9.49 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030
<p>At the heart of Nora Chassler's shimmering debut novel is 16-year-old Andromeda, whose famously shocking academic/film-critic mother, Sophie, has just committed suicide by jumping from the window of their New York apartment. In theory, Sophie's own mother is now looking after Andromeda. But she's too busy romancing the girl's headmaster. So Miss Thing is left to her own devices and the gaze of a colourful cast of characters, most of whom want to write their idea of her into creative projects.</p>
Jewish Book Week: You don't have to be Jewish
<p>
Whether you’re Jewish or not, JBW is quite simply the capital’s finest
literary festival.
</p>
Here's to the small print: The past and future of compact literature
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<p>
One of the strange by-products of the digital revolution that we are going
through at the moment is that no one seems to know how big anything should
be.
</p>
La Rochelle, By Michael Nath
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<p>Well-read, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking consultant neurologist Mark Chopra is in love with his best friend Ian's partner, Laura. Mark and Ian certainly like a drink and are on first-name terms with the landlady at Ian's local, where the "Remand Hero" and other suspected villains regularly give the golf game a hammering. </p>
February best-selling books on Amazon (UK and US)
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<p>In the UK, the best-selling book during the month of February was <em>Mums Know Best: The Hairy Bikers' Family Cookbook</em>, written by the hosts of the BBC's "Hairy Bikers" television series. In the US, the month's best-selling title was <em>A Patriot's History of the United States</em>, a historical account from Columbus's discovery of the continent through the present day.</p>
On the agenda: Bird's Eye View Film Festival; Alan Moore; Where Three Dreams Cross exhibition; Christopher Hirst's 'Love Bites'; Nicole Richie; The Wapping Project
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Americans in Paris, By Charles Glass
<p>In the midst of these stories about American expatriates in Paris during the Nazi occupation (such as Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and the remarkable surgeon Sumner Waldron Jackson, who took over the American Hospital of Paris after its director committed suicide on the Nazis' arrival in the city) is the tale of one who left right at the beginning of the occupation. </p>
Apathy For the Devil, By Nick Kent
<p>Nick Kent was the louchely charismatic head boy of that school of music journalism which saw it as a rock writer's professional duty to emulate the decadent excesses of his subjects. And the first 45 pages of his long-awaited "1970s memoir" might make an effective recruiting tool for the Salvation Army. </p>
Byron in Love, By Edna O'Brien
<p>The antidote to the fashion for doorstopper biographies that leave out nothing are compact "lives" written by well-known authors of today. Sometimes they can be just as revelatory as any 700-page authority, and as Edna O'Brien mentions in her introduction to this one, there is also something fascinating about writers writing about other writers. </p>
No and Me, By Delphine de Vigan
<p>
Little Parisian girl Lou Bertignac is 13 and very precocious indeed. With an
IQ of 160 and two years ahead of her age-group at school, she spends her
free time conducting scientific tests, developing theories about how the
world works, counting and defining things – as a way of entertaining
herself, and to take her mind off matters that would otherwise make her cry.
Her family has been struggling to hold things together since the death of
her baby sister, and her mother is distant.
</p>
The Little Stranger, By Sarah Waters
<p>It was Sarah Waters' misfortune to have published such a first-rate novel in the same year as Hilary Mantel's exceptional Wolf Hall, for without that particular competitor she may very well have bagged the top literary prizes. This complex, intelligent novel is one part ghost story, one part analysis of the postwar class system, one part creepy but convincing exploration of relations between the sexes, one part psychological profile of a disturbed individual. </p>
The Victorians: Britain Through the Paintings of the Age, By Jeremy Paxman
<p>This enjoyable book, written to accompany the BBC series of the same name, doesn't challenge too many of our assumptions about the Victorians. We know now that a stuffy exterior hid many a seedy life, as Jeremy Paxman illustrates with the life of one popular and populist painter, William Powell Frith: he managed to father 12 children with his wife, and seven with a mistress he kept hidden in another part of London. </p>
A Single Man, By Christopher Isherwood
<p>Reviews of Tom Ford's film adaptation of A Single Man suggest that the fashion designer hasn't quite captured the depth of Christopher Isherwood's slight, but angry and affecting 1964 novel. </p>
Hanif Kureishi: 'We're all mixed-race now
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<p> Hanif Kureishi is, by some accounts, a hard man to interview. In the days before our meeting, any number of people insist that the author of My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album is cantankerous, sarcastic and prone to lengthy lacunae in the middle of conversation. This portrait is corroborated by some of those closest to Kureishi: his sister and more than one ex-partner have complained of literary parasitism, that their lives have been exploited in the service of Kureishi's art. It is a charge that he doesn't exactly refute: "If [your writing] doesn't upset your family, you must be doing it wrong." </p>
By The Sword, by Richard Cohen
<p>For several thousand years, the sword held sway as the pre-eminent weapon of choice. And almost from the start it seems to have been realised that practice in swordplay could be stylised as a sporting contest; an Egyptian relief from Luxor dated around 1190 BC clearly depicts two men fencing, complete with judges. </p>
Forgotten Authors No 49: Dorothy Bowers
<p>I have the excellent crime writer Martin Edwards to thank for this discovery. Dorothy Bowers was born in Leominster, Herefordshire in 1902. She was the daughter of a bakery owner, and after a short and not especially joyful life, died at 46 from tuberculosis. At least she had the satisfaction of knowing that she had just been inducted into the Detection Club, a society formed in 1930 by a group of Golden Age mystery writers that included Agatha Christie and GK Chesterton, and it seemed she might have gone on to greater things but for the ill health that clearly affected her final novel.</p>
Frame academy: A new book celebrates the glamorous world of fashion photographer Norman Parkinson
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<p>Standing six feet five in his Edwardian smoking jacket (or his Indian tunic or his favourite pyjama top) and the embroidered Kashmiri wedding cap that he habitually wore while at work, Norman Parkinson always stood out from the crowd. An 18-carat eccentric, born into a middle-class Edwardian family with an exotic history – his mother's grandfather Luigi was an Italian operatic bass who taught Queen Victoria to sing – he spent his career perfecting an image of the English gentleman while mix-and-matching, in his photographs, the homely and the bizarre. </p>
In defence of a great novelist
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<p>My enjoyment of the new Martin Amis novel The Pregnant Widow, and it is very good indeed, is being derailed by some or other non-drama about the novelist in the press. In fact, "non-drama" won't quite cover what is currently going on around Amis: "anti-drama" would be a neater fit for all of it, for it contains none of the necessary elements of drama – conflict, tension, action – but instead its opposites: the humdrum, the tedious, the inert.</p>
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