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Books Features

Godly pleasures: Sacred texts at the British Library

Published: 07 May 2007

A collection of sacred texts at the British Library reveals the similarities between the major religions - and the creativity of those who have practised them.

In search of novels about working life

Published: 06 May 2007

Considering so many of us spend our days toiling in offices, where are the great novels of working life? D J Taylor surveys over a century of fiction and finds a disturbing reality gap

Make merry and save the planet

Published: 06 May 2007

We need to work less and make time for pleasure and creativity, says the American campaigner Barbara Ehrenreich - our survival depends upon it. Tom Hodgkinson couldn't agree more

Paperbacks: Afterlands
Bring the Noise: 20 years of writing about hip rock and hip-hop
Swung
Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You
Digging to America
The Boy

Published: 06 May 2007

Afterlands by Steven Heighton (PENGUIN £7.99)

Nova Pilbeam: The lady vanishes

Published: 06 May 2007

She's the British Greta Garbo. He's a New York artist who partied with Andy Warhol and Patti Smith. Philip Hoare asks Duncan Hannah about his unlikely muse, the reclusive Nova Pilbeam

Cover Stories: Booksellers Association Conference; British Book Industry Awards; International fiction awards

Published: 04 May 2007

* Two themes dominated the annual Booksellers Association Conference in Harrogate: digitisation of content, and whether booksellers would have a role in the wired world; and sustainability. They seem to overlap, for Dr Michelle Harrison of the Henley Centre declared that books - with their heavy use of paper - are unethical. She foresees a future when we will all be downloading. Penguin MD Helen Fraser noted that publishing, by cutting down trees and the creation of landfill, is an industry vulnerable to charges of over-using resources. CEO Victoria Barnsley (left) announced that, as of July, HarperCollins will switch to green electricity sources and print all Fourth Estate titles on 100 per cent recycled paper. No mention of swapping the chauffered limo for a small electric car.

Lionel Shriver: Why she's worried about the publicising of her new book

Published: 04 May 2007

Lionel Shriver follows up her timely bestseller about a teenage killer with a novel that explores life's forking paths. Katy Guest asks her to weigh up the options

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published: 04 May 2007

Who would swap a zestful hour in "Extremistan" for a numbing lifetime in "Mediocristan"? Our movers and shakers in finance, the media and the academy have a penchant for "dangerous sports" with all the real risk removed. So it is, I'm afraid, predictable that their current wild ride of choice should be not a stock but a book: The Black Swan (Allen Lane, £20) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Once a refugee from Lebanon's civil war, later a Wall Street options dealer, Taleb is now the writer, professor and student of extreme random shocks who advises us always to expect the unexpected.

Out of Africa: Prize-winning author Eduardo Agualusa

Published: 03 May 2007

Boyd Tonkin and David Constantine hail the winner of this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Science books: Words of wisdom

Published: 02 May 2007

For science authors, it's the biggest award of all - so who'll win the Royal Society Book Prize? Steve Connor distils and condenses the titles on this year's shortlist

Eureka! (as the ancients put it)

Published: 30 April 2007

When a medieval scribe 'recycled' ancient manuscripts to make a prayer book, his pious work obscured significant texts. Now yet another jewel has been revealed, reports Andy McSmith

Colin Wilson: It's time to look back in anger

Published: 29 April 2007

Colin Wilson's book 'The Outsider' kick-started the Angry Young Man movement, though its other members soon turned on him. Now he's getting his revenge, says Gary Lachman

The rector of Stiffkey: Britain's most infamous clergyman

Published: 28 April 2007

He was one of the most scandalous figures of the age. But who was the rector of Stiffkey? In his new novel, JOHN WALSH tells his story – and, here, uncovers the startling facts of a sensational life

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published: 27 April 2007

After so much bloggers' blather about why expert critics don't matter, let me remind you why they do.

Cover Stories: Carl Bernstein; London Book Fair; Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Published: 27 April 2007

Bob Woodward, one half of the Washington Post Watergate team, has since maintained a significant profile, though some believe his recent books come close to an apologia for George W Bush. His partner, Carl Bernstein, has been much quieter but, come June, the fruit of his labours will be in bookshops.

Joseph O'Connor: The bestselling author talks about his new novel

Published: 27 April 2007

Joseph O'Connor's tale of Irish migration was an international bestseller. He tells James Urquhart why, with the sequel, he wants to make his readers work

Novelist Toby Litt reveals the medical profession's eye-popping trade secrets

Published: 22 April 2007

The novelist Toby Litt often wondered if he should have joined the medical profession. But the eye-popping trade secrets he learnt while researching his latest book, 'Hospital', have put him off the idea for life.

Jonathan Bate: The best of a Bard job

Published: 22 April 2007

Jonathan Bate, the biographer of John Clare and one of Britain's foremost Shakespearean scholars, has edited the Complete Works with the RSC in mind. Murrough O'Brien asks him what's so radical about his version

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published: 20 April 2007

Barring the sort of upset that happens more often in novels than in life, Gordon Brown will soon have the chance to place an even heavier hand on British culture. How intriguing, then, to find out that the Chancellor - already plugging his imminent book on courage like any veteran scribbler - believes that the rise of book groups and literary festivals points to a nation sick of celebrity and keen to embrace serious pursuits.

Cover Stories: John Calder; Ego; Xiaolu Guo

Published: 20 April 2007

Ever since John Calder - the friend of Samuel Beckett who has published many other Nobel laureates - announced that he was to retire, speculation as to who would take over his interests has centred on Faber. So Calder's choice of Oneworld Classics, jointly owned by Alma Books and Oneworld Publications, has come out of left field. Calder's bookshop near Waterloo will also be run by Oneworld. The move is a testimony to the excellent publishing of Alma's Italian founders, Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini.

Daniel Kehlmann: A global literary sensation

Published: 20 April 2007

Viennese writer Daniel Kehlmann became a global sensation with a comic novel - about German scientific heroes. Boyd Tonkin asks him about the magic formula

Why so many novels never make it to the big screen

Published: 15 April 2007

The cinemas are full of turkeys yet that brilliant novel you read three years ago has never been made into a film. Danuta Kean descends into development hell and finds out why so many authors get trapped there

Kurt Vonnegut: Me myself and I

Published: 13 April 2007

One of America's best-loved novelists, Kurt Vonnegut, who died this week, was often asked to explain his craft and the events that inspired him. In this seminal conversation with 'The Paris Review', conducted over more than a decade and finally published in 1977, the writer offers a fascinating glimpse into his early life, shares his wicked sense of humour - and reveals the humanity that underpins his work

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published: 13 April 2007

Other international book fairs choose "countries of honour" and celebrate the guest nation's writers as a literary centrepiece to the commercial buzz around them. Pragmatic and mercantile as ever, the London Book Fair - which runs from next Monday to Wednesday at Earl's Court - instead selects a "market focus". Well, literature craves honour, but it must also go to market. And this year's beneficiary of the "market focus" has done pretty well in finding one on these often-apathetic shores: Spain.

Cover Stories: Dawn French's memoirs; ethnic diversity; Abu Dhabi Book Fair; IMPAC award

Published: 13 April 2007

With hands still raw from post-Christmas wringing over celebrity flops, why did half a dozen publishers apparently table bids of £1.25m and up for the memoirs of Dawn French? Century won with a bid believed to be near £2m, via agent Robert Kirby of PFD. It was Century, of course, who published Peter Kay, whose memoir, The Sound of Laughter, absurdly beat Claire Tomalin's life of Thomas Hardy for "biography of the year" at the Galaxy British Book Awards. Now Century is describing French as "the next Peter Kay", a lazy piece of shorthand, although they are thinking only in sales terms. They hope.

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