Books, Issue 580

Lucy Hawking

What do you do when your father is one of the world’s most respected theoretical physicists, author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time and you want to be a writer? The answer was obvious to Lucy Hawking, daughter of Stephen: write a book…

All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well

DEBUT NOVEL TOD WODICKA All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well (Jonathan Cape) What an exceptionally odd yet utterly compelling debut novel this is, quite unlike the typical…

Alan Warner

Edinburgh International Book Festival

Edinburgh International Book Festival The man who talks Alan Warner may no longer be the wild man of Scottish literature. But he still has plenty to offload on Adrian Turpin about the press, his image and a looming mid-life crisis

Debut writers

Edinburgh International Book Festival

This year’s batch of debut authors is rich and varied. Suzanne Black finds that while some of them may be escaping from a successful parent’s shadow or scripting identity dramas, they ultimately have one thing in common

Loung Ung

Edinburgh International Book Festival

Edinburgh International Book Festival Surviving the peace Author, campaigner and victim of Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, bestselling writer Loung Ung talks to Allan Radcliffe about how she managed to carry on after the hell of the killing fields

Children's books

Edinburgh International Book Festival

Anna Doherty (14), Lotte Fisher (13), Keira O’Sullivan-Robertson (13) and Archie Fisher (10) take their pick of the Book Festival’s exciting children’s programme

Ben Okri

Impoverished student, witness to the Nigerian civil war, paint shop employee, poetry editor for West Africa magazine, and BBC broadcaster, Ben Okri is now a much-lauded writer. Five years in the writing, his latest novel Starbook is a tale of slavery in…

Neil Boorman

To the casual observer, burning £20,000 worth of expensive designer gear to cinders in a central London park might not seem like the wisest of actions. For lifestyle journalist Neil Boorman, this ritualistic, highly public destruction of his worldly…

Rupert Everett

Film Special

FILM SPECIAL A man of many faces Innocent, plotter, maniac or queen? Rupert Everett claims to be all of the above but Kaleem Aftab finds the actor in sanguine form Rupert Everett just gets better and better. The actor and now producer of…

Lin Anderson

Flight of fancy Edinburgh crime writer Lin Anderson tells Allan Radcliffe that living in Nigeria and feasting on the news have both influenced her latest novel Lin Anderson has tended to get lumped in with the Tartan Noir squad of Scottish…

A Light-Hearted Look at Murder

BLACK COMEDY MARK WATSON A Light-Hearted Look at Murder (Chatto & Windus) (Image: © Emilie Fjola Sandy) Mark Watson has been described as ‘a Will Self with dignity’. Admittedly, it was in his spoof biography for the BBC2 comedy Time…

Hitlist - The best books, comics & events

• Harry Potter Week Regardless of whether you love or loathe JK Rowling’s teenage wizard and his fearsome chums, the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and the culmination of the most successful children’s book franchise ever, is cause…

Lost Oasis

TRAVEL ADVENTURE ROBERT TWIGGER Lost Oasis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) Following in the footsteps of explorers such as Theodore Almasy, the inspiration for The English Patient, author and macho adventurer Robert Twigger decides to search for…

Now is the Hour

SOCIAL DRAMA TOM SPANBAUER Now is the Hour (Jonathan Cape) With a flower in his hair, 17-year-old Rigby John Klusener is hitching his way to San Francisco, reciting an abbreviated litany of the chain of events that forced him to come out…

Let the Right One In

HORROR DRAMA JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST Let the Right One In (Quercus) Swedish magician turned stand-up comedian turned novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist’s first book features numerous sleight-of-hand tricks and sly jokes. In the opening chapter…