Features

The ten best audiobooks

Monday, 29 August 2011

As the last grains of sand are shaken from your beach reads, why not use the autumn commute to get stuck into these great recent audiobook releases?

The Reading List: Schools

Monday, 29 August 2011

Memoir'Up and Down in The Dales' by Gervase Phinn (Penguin, £8.99 )Wry, spry and dry – the former teacher and school inspector's fourth book of memoirs charts the time he spent roving over the Yorkshire Dales inspecting village schools. It has a belly laugh on every page.

'When someone dies, I want people to care'

Sunday, 28 August 2011

The 'Wire in the Blood' killer is back, but his creator Val McDermid tells Danuta Kean there is more to her work than violent crime

Between The Covers: 28/08/2011

Sunday, 28 August 2011

Your weekly guide to what's really going on in the world of books

Invisible Ink: No 91 - Charles Dickens

Sunday, 28 August 2011

There was once a comedy sketch from the Monty Python precursor At Last the 1948 Show in which the annoying bibliophile Marty Feldman tried to buy a copy of Rarnaby Budge by Darles Chickens.

The Blagger's Guide To...The Richard and Judy Book Club

Sunday, 28 August 2011

If you want to get ahead, get in the club

Charlotte Roche: Troubled mind of a taboo-buster

Saturday, 27 August 2011

The British-born author scandalised her adopted country of Germany with an explicit debut novel, Wetlands. So will her semi-autobiographical follow-up cause a similar sensation?

'Miracle' in Battersea: Francesca Kay has turned from the enigmas of art to the mysteries of belief

Friday, 26 August 2011

In recent English literature, genre and custom tend to compress the roles and thoughts available to the people of inner-city South London. Thanks to a tradition that swings between satire and miserabilism, they may figure as victims or villains, emblems of class divisions and demographic shifts, or (you suspect, in the near-future) the sullen tinder of riot. For spiritual crises, dark nights of the soul and searing flashes of grace or grief, fiction often calls at a swankier address. But not always: Graham Greene in Clapham, or Muriel Spark in Peckham, have found ecstasies and epiphanies in the sort of postcode where Essex cabbies rarely choose to drive after dark.

The Diary: Daniel Kitson; One Day tour; National Museum of Scotland; Stuart 'The Brand' Baggs; www.fakefringe.com

Friday, 26 August 2011

Book Of A Lifetime: The Demolished Man, By Alfred Bester

Friday, 26 August 2011

In 1985 I bought a 30p second-hand paperback because I liked the title: 'The Demolished Man', by Alfred Bester. This fits into a rare category of novel - short science-fiction - and I read it during my first two days as a student. University promised friends, drinks, adventures, but I preferred life on Mars. On the third day, I read it again.