Judges say evocative language of ex-home secretary's This Boy helps readers 'smell the pie and mash' of postwar Notting Hill Alan Johnson's memoir of his childhood in the slums of west London has won the former home secretary and Labour MP the £10,000 Ondaatje prize, an unusual literary award which goes to the book that best evokes the spirit of a place. Johnson's This Boy , said judge and poet...
Beyond: Edward Snowden comic book promises to show 'the man behind the headlines' and includes the NSA whistleblower's meeting with Glenn Greenwald Whistleblower Edward Snowden will appear on the pages of a comic book this week in a new graphic biography promising to reveal "the man behind the headlines". By Marvel Comics' writer Valerie D'Orazio, Beyond: Edward Snowden is narrated by one...
Also: Jennifer Weiner on blurb inflation; the best books coming out this week....
The lists are compiled from weekly surveys of close to 500 independent bookstores nationwide....
Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See follows a blind French girl and a young German private during World War II. It debuts at No. 2....
One of notorious Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro's three victims shares the details of her abduction in Finding Me . It debuts at No. 10....
In The Longest Ride , Nicholas Sparks tells the story of a widower who befriends a young college student and her cowboy boyfriend. It appears at No. 9....
At No. 8, Dan Jones' The Plantagenets explores the royal dynasty that preceded the Tudors....
The Merriam-Webster dictionary has added more than 150 terms this year, including many from technology. This shows that dictionary editors are becoming more aggressive about reflecting common speech....
Poet Tess Taylor reviews the posthomously published poetry collection Abide , by Jake Adam York....
Among his colleagues at the CIA, Robert Ames was considered the quintessential spy. Integral in the Oslo Peace Accords, the late secret agent is now the subject of Kai Bird's book, The Good Spy ....
My friend and teacher Baruch Urieli, who has died in Ireland aged 90, was a curative teacher, administrator, community leader and spiritual guide. Ordained in 1975 a priest of the Christian Community, a high church movement for religious renewal with a Quaker-like quality, Baruch founded the first congregation in Ireland at Glencraig near Holywood, Co Down. He was deeply in tune with the spiritual...
Books containing scenes with potential to cause distress said to include Things Fall Apart, The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway Students in America have been asking for "trigger warnings" to be included on works of literature which deal with topics such as rape or war. The request was formally made by the student government at the University of California in Santa Barbara, according to the...
A classical music broadcast foregrounds fears of a cheapening of culture, and the possibility of mass brutalisation, in this late work from a poet with a unique and original voice This week's poem, Sonnet of Irreconcilables, is from the 2006-2009 section of Christopher Middleton's Collected Later Poems , a magnificent winter harvest of recent work. It belongs to a gathering of poems headed For Want...
Pulitzer-prize winning author's comments that 'the default position of reading and writing ... was white, straight and male' are backed by writers including Aminatta Forna and Daljit Nagra Pulitzer prize winner Junot Díaz's blistering attack on the "unbearable too-whiteness" of creative writing courses in the US has been echoed by experts in the UK, with author and professor Aminatta...
Grownups might not "get it," but subjects like bugs and poop can make history lessons a little more palatable for middle schoolers. Author Sarah Albee says she writes books for her inner 12 year old....
From Alice Walker to Irvine Welsh via discussions about atheism and a poetry slam, there's a wealth of things to see at this week's books event. Here's our pick Sydneys being overrun by big-name international authors, local favourites and over 400 other bookish types this week, as the Sydney Writers Festival kicks off with a huge selection of talks, performances, and odd shenanigans that defy description....
Her last book, Room, was an international hit. Now the writer is back, at the Sydney writers' festival, to reimagine a piece of history the steamy saga of a murdered cross-dressing woman in a menage a trois Late one night in the summer of 1876, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet was shot dead through the window of her hotel room at San Miguel station, just outside San Francisco. With her when she died...
The caustic US humorist's jovial assessment of the generation that 'had it all' only highlights its dubious legacy Those of us born soon after 1945 belong to the most undeservedly lucky generation in history. As children in the 1950s, we enjoyed the benefits of an affluence that spread around the world from the US; as adolescents in the 60s, we made love, not war, and defied a society whose restrictions...
With more digital works than ever being published in translation, it pays to let foreign houses sort the wheat from the chaff Every month, the website Three Percent updates its database on literature in translation. Being US-based, it refers only to original novels and poetry published in the US, but it's a good bellwether for the state of translation in general, not least because, with ebooks, books...