Books Features
Ian Rankin: Serial thriller
Published: 05 February 2007
Why horror writing will be big in 2007
Published: 04 February 2007
Fred Vargas: French crime writing at its best
Published: 04 February 2007
Sympathy for the devil: Mailer's satanic new novel
Published: 02 February 2007
Christina Patterson: A Week in Books
Published: 02 February 2007
"My mother said whatever you do, don't become a writer. Just," said the speaker with a charming smile, "stay well away." The mother in question was Anita Desai, the speaker her daughter, Kiran, and the venue was a large hall, packed to the (beautiful old Dutch) rafters in the Sri Lankan city of Galle.
Xiaolu Guo: Far East to East End
Published: 26 January 2007
Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books
Published: 26 January 2007
Some iconic figure utters views that could be construed as racially prejudiced. Critics weigh in with appalled attacks, and heated defences which claim that the opinions have more to do with class or culture than ethnicity. Then it turns out that the alleged bigot might not have said what we assume they did; or, if so, that the meaning depended on the context... and so, interminably, on. Welcome to the world, not of downmarket reality TV, but of modern literary scholarship.
Kapuscinski: A disptach from the late master of reportage
Published: 26 January 2007
Samir El-youssef: At home with the heretic
Published: 19 January 2007
News of the world: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Published: 19 January 2007
Cover Stories: Marie Helvin; Decibel Penguin Prize
Published: 19 January 2007
*After many of the celebrity books piled high and cut deep in the run-up to Christmas still failed to sell, you might think that publishers might have made a resolution to buy fewer such titles. But Weidenfeld has already signed Marie Helvin, "one of the most beautiful women of her generation". It's true: La Helvin does possess a beauty and grace that many of today's so-called supermodels can only dream of. And it's also true that Helvin was (and is), in the 1960s sense, one of the beautiful people, whose address book has included Sartre and De Beauvoir, Warhol, Fellini, as well, of course, as Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson. She was married to photographer David Bailey, and is now settled with Mark Shand, brother-in-law of Prince Charles. Her autobiography, due this autumn, was handled by Ed Victor's agency. Which makes one thing certain: Helvin won't have come cheap.
Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books
Published: 18 January 2007
Everyone who has judged a literary prize knows the temptation of Gong Fatigue. Some grand old-ish man or woman yet again submits outstanding work. But s/he has won plenty of races already, and to add another award to a cupboard full of silverware will, you suspect, do little more to burnish an already lustrous name. So you pass on to some lesser light, obscurely guilty that familiarity has bred an indifference that (if the writer only knew) would probably feel a lot like contempt. Respect, then, to the TS Eliot Prize judges, who on Monday forgot about the life and rewarded the work when they gave the victor's £10,000 to Seamus Heaney for District and Circle.
Benjamin Markovits: Leaps in the dark
Published: 12 January 2007
Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books
Published: 12 January 2007
What a delight to see Jeffrey Archer, himself the recipient of some of the largest handouts in the history of British publishing, co-hosting an ITV show called Million Pound Giveaway. Inflate that sum by 1,000 per cent, and you begin to approach the level of largesse Archer grew accustomed to in his mega-deals with HarperCollins and Macmillan. Prison for perjury cramped his style, of course. Yet, soon enough, his jail testaments led to swift rehabilitation. Last spring, the art theft-plus-September 11 romp False Impression implied that schlocky service had resumed. But his latest project suggests that this champion fantasist has been dwelling on the meaning of denial and betrayal in typically hyperbolic terms.
Cover Stories: Costa Book Awards; Death of a Dissident; Foodie Competition
Published: 12 January 2007
*The category winners for the inaugural Costa Book Awards (previously sponsored by the coffee chain's parent, Whitbread) proved a triumph for independent publishers. Bloomsbury, whose William Boyd won the Novel category with Restless, is scarcely your average independent. But for Atlantic, with Brian Thompson's Keeping Mum (Biography), Quercus, with Stef Penney's (left) The Tenderness of Wolves (First Novel), and Seren with John Haynes's Letter to Patience (Poetry) the list is a vindication. Readers who'd like to sample them before the Book of the Year is chosen on 7 February should pop along to any Costa branch, where for £1 The Finalists offers a chapter from each. Proceeds go to charity.
Inspiration and Co
Published: 07 January 2007
Andrea Camilleri: Once upon a time in Sicily
Published: 05 January 2007
Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books
Published: 05 January 2007
"It is a new dawn, is it not?" As the Blair decade grinds to its end, the literary verdict will begin to arrive on the premier's rhetorical question as the sun rose after his first triumph. And the majority vote will answer: "Sorry, Tony, it was not." The first half of 2007 will see an unusually broad span of writers reflect on the Britain of the Blair era, especially in fiction. Sometimes, the drive to connect personal and national histories will be explicit, as with Blake Morrison's multi-stranded saga South of the River (Chatto & Windus, April), Sebastian Faulks's rogue's progress, Engleby (Hutchinson, May), and Adam Thorpe's satirical romance, Between Each Breath (Cape, May).
Cover Stories: Serpent's Tail; William Armstrong dies; Litvinenko
Published: 05 January 2007
*Many publishers were still on the slopes when Andrew Franklin, managing director of Profile Books, announced this week that his firm had acquired fellow-independent Serpent's Tail. The acquisition was the result of discussions initiated by Pete Ayrton, who founded Serpent's Tail in 1986. This most benign of takeovers gives the enlarged company a turnover of around £10m. Aside from allowing Ayrton to return to the editorial role he likes best, there will be no change to the activities of either. Serpent's Tail will become a stand-alone imprint, and will continue to plough its own, distinctive furrow. More than three-quarters of the list is fiction, around a fifth of it translated. Writers such as the Austrian Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek, Michel Houellebecq and Walter Mosley owe their British careers to Ayrton's sharp eye.
Anthony C Winkler: A playful pirate of the Caribbean
Published: 05 January 2007
The Independent Podcast: John Walsh talks to Stuart MacBride
Published: 02 January 2007
John Walsh goes to Aberdeen to interview Scottish crime writer Stuart MacBride about his latest novel, Dying Light.
Simon Armitage: Under a bardic Curse
Published: 31 December 2006
Knickers to Virginia Woolf
Published: 31 December 2006
