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John Crace reduces a sprawling tale of high-stakes international intrigue and romance to juicy, bite-size chunks
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In the age of Instagram poetry, Robert Montgomery takes the written word to the most physical of spaces. He talks about fans tattoing his words, making poetry accessible, and discussing literature in a police van
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Escape and survival prove fruitful themes in settings from Tennessee, Alaska and Australia to Nazi-occupied Poland
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From Easter hunts, to the intricacies of Asperger’s, to the fun of a Muslim wedding – our pick of books for under-fives
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Alexander McCall Smith gives us a lion tamer, Sophie Thompson a zoo keeper, and Lucy Worsley medieval sex and violence…
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She’s working on two film scripts, a TV series and a novel, but can still squeeze in time to talk childhood mealtimes, cross-dressing divas and changing the world
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As an Italian historian denies claims that she is Elena Ferrante, we look into the history of pseudonymity for clues as to how long the secret will hold
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Science fiction has offered many visions of a computer-controlled future, and the future doesn’t look good for humanity
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Top 10sTop 10sTop 10 books about the dangers of the webCyberbullying and the Dark Net meant little to Helen Fitzgerald before she began to research her novel on the horrors of the viral world
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Reading groupReading groupNearly normal: JG Ballard's High-Rise and the 'uncanny valley'Doctors, lecturers, architects run amok in Ballard’s 1970s tower blocks, capitalising on our fear of the weirdness that walks among us
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100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time100 Best Nonfiction Books of All TimeThe 100 best nonfiction books: No 7 – The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)The author raised reportage to dazzling new levels in his quest to discover what makes a man fly to the moon
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PodcastPodcastWriting about art, music and loneliness – books podcastRobin Ince and Green Gartside explain why the music world needs a book prize and Olivia Laing follows Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol down lonely street
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With Radovan Karadžić’s verdict due next week, this powerful, pacy account details the tortuous journey to track down the warlords and bring them to justice
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Book of the day Every Song Ever by Ben Ratliff – embrace the pleasures of streaming
Richard WilliamsA music lovers guide to the compensations of digital listening, from shuffle settings to Spotify
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Autobiography and memoir The Lonely City by Olivia Laing – Warhol, Hopper, Garbo and the art of loneliness
James LasdunMemoir and scholarship combine in an original exploration of New York artists ‘troubled by loneliness’ -
Philosophy At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell – we need Sartre’s ideas of freedom today
Lara FeigelIn our age of surveillance and consumerist laziness, it’s time we looked again at the existentialists, argues this highly engaging work of philosophy and collective biography -
Proust or Joyce? I may be long past my university days, but I am still a sucker for this kind of question
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History Incarnations: India in 50 Lives by Sunil Khilnani
William DalrympleSultans, poets, business moguls… these engaging, warts-and-all biographies of great Indians down the ages capture the true heart of the subcontinent
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A classical translation and a moving new collection make for a double achievement
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An extraordinary portrait of two lives that moves between Norwich and smalltown India poses fundamental questions about existence
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Gijsemans captures the isolation of city life in this debut graphic novel about a solitary middle-aged man
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Fragmentary prose is welded by a hypnotic voice
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This hot and sprawling tale captures the horror and absurdity of the Vietnam war and its aftermath
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Rigged elections, murdered journalists, jailed dissidents, skimmed billions … ‘the biggest crook in Russia’ is haunted by his past
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The fortunes and friendship of two aspiring female writers who meet in 1945, in an unexpected sequel to Curtain Call
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The Diary of a London Call Girl blogger has swapped sex for mortuary scenes and Scottish politics in her first novel published under her real name
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Comedy performer and author whose Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series won her legions of teenage fans
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At a Guardian Live Book Club event, the Norwegian literary phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard explains how and why he has put the most intimate details of his life into his autobiographical novels
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Following panic from Game of Thrones fans in the wake of Beatles producer George Martin’s death, author insists his own passing has been exaggerated
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Jane Sutcliffe and John Shelley tell us about their book Will’s Words, which celebrates the massive impact The Bard has on the way we talk today
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As the dawn chorus fills the early morning skies again, Maria Ana Peixe Dias and Inês Teixeira do Rosário share inspiration and nature discovery tips from their wondrous book Outside, with beautiful illustrations by Bernardo P Carvalho
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A chance to see an asparagus forest come to life and witness the strange little men frolicking in your loo roll… iconic illustrator Serge Bloch opens a window into his mind with these re-imaginings of ordinary objects as gifs and hopes you want to come and play too
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When the great Spanish artist Joan Miró came to England in 1964 the place he most wanted to visit was London Zoo, and author Antony Penrose went along too as a young boy. The trip eventually inspired Antony’s new book Miro’s Magic Animals and this gallery shares charming insights into Miró’s life and love of animals, together with stunning photographs by Lee Miller
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Submissions are now open for publishers to enter the Guardian children’s fiction prize 2016. The closing date is 22 March 2016 so enter ASAP!
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David Solomons’s My Brother is a Superhero, which won the Best younger fiction category, has been declared the overall winner of the Waterstones prize
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Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) aren’t just for boys - and here’s author Christiane Dorion’s 10 amazing STEM girls from YA to prove it
A selection of our favourite literary content from around the world
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The Little Library CaféThe Little Library CaféFood in books: spaghetti and meatballs from The GodfatherKate Young reminisces about meeting her stepfather and what he brought into her life – including Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and, of course, its food
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Translation Tuesdays by AsymptoteTranslation Tuesdays by AsymptoteTranslation Tuesday: two fictional encounters with Henry KissingerThis excerpt from forthcoming faux-memoir A Room of My Own by Dutch writer Joost de Vries imagines two meetings with the former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon
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Exotic animals have been kept in Britain for more than eight centuries, inspiring wonder and terror in those who saw them – despite the cruelties of their captivity. The zoologist Caroline Grigson takes us on a tour of the UK’s historic animal visitors, from agouti to zebra
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We look ahead to a dystopian California and a world where the wealth brought by oil no longer fuels autocrats and extremists
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Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a book that most people know but few have actually read (though you may have seen an adaptation, including the recent six-episode TV series). So how did Cozy Classics co-creators Jack and Holman Wang abridge the 587,287-word tome in just 12 words and 12 images for very young children?
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Sigmund Freud refused painkillers so he could choose the moment of his death, Susan Sontag fought it until the very end, Maurice Sendak drew it obsessively and John Updike wrote poems about it. Katie Roiphe finds beauty and comfort in the way great writers confronted their mortality
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My mother, before I knew her
Jeanette Winterson, Julia Donaldson, Julian Barnes, David Hare and othersInspired by Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Before You Were Mine, writers reflect on photographs of their mothers before they were born -
The performance poet and mother Hollie McNish considers the best literature that ‘these ingenious areas on a woman’s body’ have inspired
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From Joan Didion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, our readers have been sharing their favourite books by female authors. Ahead of International Women’s Day, here’s our celebration of life-changing, beautiful and inspiring stories by women
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George RR Martin 'astonished' by fan support over missed Game of Thrones deadline
This article is 2 months old
Obituary Barry Hines: author of A Kestrel for a Knave, 1939-2016
News Barry Hines, author of book behind Kes, dies