Books Features

Celeb Memoirs: Bookshop bingo!

Published: 24 September 2006

Publishers will be biting their nails between now and Christmas. With an estimated 60 celebrity memoirs hitting the shops, some with eye-watering advances to earn back, they'll be praying for a bestseller. Danuta Kean surveys the field and finds out about the all-important 'Bluewater factor'

Cover Stories: Paul Merton, Joanne Harris, Rosemary Davidson, Isabel Losada

Published: 22 September 2006

*Paul Merton, star of Have I Got News for You and Room 101, has signed up with Random House for a serious book on comedy. He'll explore not the stand-up variety, but silent comedy and, with it, the early days of Hollywood. Publisher Nigel Wilcockson, who defected recently from Penguin, believes Merton will bring "a comedian's insight to bear on the art of making people laugh".

Michael Frayn: In the gardens of the mind

Published: 22 September 2006

Boyd Tonkin meets a writer who thinks big, but never loses the human touch

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published: 22 September 2006

From Gordon Brown to Billy Bragg, George Alagiah to Trevor Phillips, every talking head in public life now itches to have their say about the nature of British and/or English identity. By and large, we're having a civilised chat over our ale or tea (or chai). Every sensible chap grasps that we refer to culture and values, not to ethnicity and certainly not (horror of horrors!) to "blood". The toxic pseudo-science of "race" surely died with the genocidal criminals who forged it. So it did. Yet here comes Oxford's professor of human genetics with the fruit of an utterly fascinating project aiming to establish who the folk we might label "old-stock" British and Irish really are. And what does he call his book? Blood of the Isles.

Inside the Nazis' most notorious death camp

Published: 22 September 2006

Primo Levi's earliest account of the Holocaust was not a memoir or a novel but a document detailing what happened inside the Nazis' most notorious death camp. Compiled in collaboration with a fellow survivor at the request of their Soviet liberators, the Auschwitz Report is a work of extraordinary restraint and lucidity. As it appears for the first time in English, we tell the story of how it came to be written, and publish extracts

Breast wishes, Dita

Published: 17 September 2006

It's not enough just to buy a book these days; we have to get a hasty signature and a few seconds of face-time with it. Rebecca Pearson looks at the contemporary cult of book signings, and trails Pelé, Dita Von Teese and Paulo Coelho

J G Ballard: The comforts of madness

Published: 15 September 2006

The master of the urban dystopia tells Marianne Brace why consumerism is a new fascism, and why it fascinates him

Cover Stories: Dame Helen Mirren; Caroline Gascoigne; Craig Brown

Published: 15 September 2006

*As The Queen opens, Weidenfeld publisher Alan Samson is finishing his deal for a scrapbook celebration of the life of its star, Dame Helen Mirren, just garlanded at the Venice film festival. It's not an autobiography: Dame Helen says she will never write one, so fleet-footed Samson spotted an opportunity. He suggested as a template a similar volume by another biographical refusenik, Dame Judi Dench (left). Mirren loved the idea, for she has "literally, a trunk" of cuttings and photos. The actress, who will write about her Leigh-on-Sea childhood and Russian family, does not require a ghost and expects to complete in time for publication next summer.

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published: 15 September 2006

What do you call a state that puts a writer on trial because of remarks made by a character in a novel, on a charge that carries a three-year sentence, and then schedules the hearing for a few days before her first baby is due? A likely candidate for swift progress towards entry to the European Union? Probably not. Yet, in Turkey, the surface story seldom tells the entire truth.

Gender and fiction: So, can a man create women?

Published: 14 September 2006

Television producer Daisy Goodwin commented this week that 'you can't have a seriously written romantic book written by a man'. Below, Boyd Tonkin debates this proposition, while seven women authors select characters that work - or not - for them

Cover Stories: Robert Harris; 20 British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century; Reading groups continue to thrive

Published: 08 September 2006

*Innumerable politicians turned out to the Terrace Bar at the Commons to help launch Imperium, the latest Roman fiction by the former political editor Robert Harris. Tony Blair's pollster Philip Gould, Lord Gould of Brookwood, was there, with his wife Gail Rebuck, chief executive of Harris's publishers Random House - currently in a wheelchair with a badly broken ankle. Having stood up to make a brief speech, she managed a nervous laugh when Harris said that all political lives ended in tears. No doubt a seven-figure cheque for his memoirs would assuage Blair's grief - but there are rumours that he will desert Rebuck to take the Murdoch shilling via HarperCollins.

Love in a time of tolerance

Published: 08 September 2006

The latest of Barry Unsworth's vivid historical novels brings to life a golden age of Muslim-Christian partnership

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published: 08 September 2006

You used to know where you stood with literary stereotypes. The Russians did agony; the French, ecstasy; the Americans, naivety. And the British? Ah, the British did irony. How things change. A bestselling American author - OK, he does live here - publishes a memoir just bulging with droll narrative swerves, shimmies and double-takes that at the same time overegg and undercut his subject and himself. The result is a sophisticated book about simplicity, and a knowing account of ignorance. So what happens to it in the alleged capital of the sarky and the snide? The volume arrives to a literal-minded chorus of patronising praise that utterly fails to register the chill beneath its charm. I think we must be suffering from a surfeit of mind-rotting Betjemania.

A very odd crime unit

Published: 03 September 2006

London peculiar: Christopher Fowler explains how he created his curmudgeonly detective duo, Bryant & May

Claire Messud: Manhattan before the catastrophe

Published: 03 September 2006

Claire Messud's novel, set in the run up to 9/11, has just been longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Suzi Feay talks to her about her writing and what it's like being married to the fiercest literary critic on the block

Cover Stories: L'Oréal; Saqi Books; Jamie Oliver

Published: 01 September 2006

*The death at 94 of the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, whose great Cairo Trilogy is published by Everyman's Library and in single volumes by Black Swan, will draw attention again to the scarcity of Arabic voices on our shelves. But Saqi Books - for long the best British route into Arabic writing - has now rescued from Beirut its new volumes of stories by Lebanese and Palestinian women, Hikayat and Qissat, and will publish them later this month. On 28 September, Saqi is also releasing an anthology as a tribute to "the suffering and resilience of the Lebanese people", with fiction, poetry and essays by Harold Pinter, Orhan Pamuk, Jung Chang, Arnold Wesker and John le Carré. All profits from Lebanon, Lebanon will go to Save the Children.

Maggie O'Farrell: Mother love - and loss

Published: 01 September 2006

Why her latest heroine is incarcerated in a mental asylum

Making a pig's ear of Orwell

Published: 01 September 2006

'Animal Farm' was brazenly manipulated by the CIA to turn it into an anti-Soviet Cold War cartoon, Tony Shaw explains

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published: 01 September 2006

Let no one say that the British book business has lost the knack of laughing at itself. The next six weeks or so will blow in an autumn windfall of celebrity memoirs, some of which have cost a fortune in return for the short and simple annals of barely-adult lives. Among the C-list screeds, I'm a Celebrity... victor Kerry Katona offers her confessions. Her title? Too Much Too Young. You might, in due course, find those words inscribed on the tombstones of many foolhardy publishers.

The Parati festival: a novel idea

Published: 30 August 2006

As well as attracting global literary luminaries to the shores of tropical Brazil, the Parati festival is a big hit with the locals. Boyd Tonkin is impressed

The Great War and its aftermath: The son who haunted Kipling

Published: 29 August 2006

It was only his father's intervention that allowed John Kipling to serve on the Western Front - and the poet never got over his death. Now a TV drama is to retell the story

Howard Brenton's passion for Abélard and Heloise

Published: 29 August 2006

Romeo and Juliet, Cathy and Heathcliff, Scarlett and Rhett... The names of doomed lovers live forever in our minds. Yet one tale is often forgotten: the true story of the brilliant scholar Abélard and his beautiful, gifted pupil Heloise. Here, the acclaimed British dramatist Howard Brenton, who revives the couple in his new play 'In Extremis', explores the scandalous romance that rocked medieval France - and still has the power to captivate

John Connolly: 'Never listen to readers'

Published: 27 August 2006

John Connolly has taken a break from his popular Charlie Parker series of crime novels and ventured into weird new territory with 'The Book of Lost Things'. Tim Martin meets him in Waterford to discuss his change of direction

Cover Stories: Classics for children; Waterstone's/Ottakar's merge

Published: 25 August 2006

*This week, Bloomsbury launches a series of classics for children, each introduced by a celebrity author (Meg Cabot, Phillip Reeve, Darren Shan among them) and stylishly packaged in covers by Yeti McCaldin. The first titles, which include Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Treasure Island and Frankenstein, introduced by Benjamin Zephaniah (left), neatly coincide with Education Secretary Alan Johnson's insistence that the school curriculum feature classic writers. Each volume concludes with an "Extra" section with news stories and items of interest from the time of the book.