Born in Zimbabwe in 1971, Petina Gappah came of age after independence in 1980. As a child, she also lived through the ending of the liberation war and the start of majority rule. Today she belongs to the Zimbabwean diaspora, working in Geneva as a lawyer. All of this experience has shaped the 13 stories of An Elegy for Easterly, 12 set in Zimbabwe.... [More]

Jose Saramago has launched a blistering assault on Silvio Berlusconi, whose publishing house has dropped the Portuguese Nobel laureate’s latest offering because it describes the Italian prime minister as a “delinquent”.

This year’s Lions will, just like their 1938 counterparts, play three Tests against South Africa. But there the similarity ends; the Blue Lions – a reference to the colour of their rugby shirts, not their politics – were the last to travel by ship, and the full party consisted of 29 players and two managers.

The curious coupling of a writer and a taboo can produce offspring such as Mary Roach’s books, which tread in the controversial scientific territories of sex, death and the supernatural. Her previous books include Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

Henry James haunts the style and content of many a contemporary novel. In this one, the protagonist, Tom, is renting a friend’s house in the Australian bush as he polishes off his book, Meddlesome Ghosts: Henry James and the Uncanny. The meddlesome ghosts in his own life are unleashed when his beloved dog – who really is his best friend –... [More]

Music pulses at the heart of this hauntingly lyrical novel by the novelist and saxophonist James McBride, the author of the acclaimed memoir The Colour of Water. Song is not only a motif, it powers the novel’s plot of imprisonment and escape in the fraught days before the American Civil War.

Chefs have not fared well in recent fiction. In Irvine Welsh’s last-but-one novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, Alan De Fretais was about as appealing as the proverbial reheated soufflé. Marrow, by Tiffanie Darke, a former close friend of Gordon Ramsay, was about an arrogant, sex-obsessed (and entirely fictional) celebrity chef. So... [More]

Welcome to an almost surreally incongruous world. Yes, there are sleazy nightclubs full of masturbating men and innuendo. But we also get serious authorship, acting, passionate leftish political activism, endless charity work and, finally, a career as a popular TV presenter. Nothing was predictable or conventional in the rollercoaster, rags-to-riches,... [More]

The hardback cover of Sarah Waters’ fifth novel, The Little Stranger, has been made to look like a second-hand 1940s pulp novel. With its bashed-up corners and a silhouetted picture of a woman running melodramatically up a staircase, it promises a tale of female hysteria from an era when banisters were still made of finely turned wood, and dresses... [More]

Since stepping down as prime minister, riches that would have done Croesus very nicely, thank you, have ineluctably accrued to Tony Blair. When Clement Attlee left Downing Street in 1951, however, Blair’s far more illustrious predecessor had no such luck. The People’s Party’s greatest premier worried, by contrast, that he might not... [More]

Some authors will tell you that they fall in love with their characters. Some can become almost cripplingly involved in the worlds they create. One writer told me she grieves acutely after finishing her novels, feeling the loss of the imaginary people she has been living with. Sarah Hall is not like that at all. “Characters don’t... [More]

A favourite game is to ask friends to name their own forgotten author, and here’s one that has come up time and again. Mazo de la Roche was a prolific Victorian Canadian, born in 1879 in Ontario. She became the author of a popular series of novels, and remains a Canadian icon, but her books are almost unknown in the UK. Roche was a... [More]

I suppose you could describe literary festivals as a sort of live porn show for the educated classes writes Simon Heffer.

This thrilling historical account of the ebb and flow of the Normandy campaign is rich in awesomely complex detail and masters the battle from all sides

Dirk Bogarde’s letters Elizabeth I’s gardens and Janice Galloway’s sensitive memoir