Books

Encounters series offers insight into themes running through the Edinburgh International Festival 2012

2 for 1 deals on Encounters talks during the last week of 2012 EIF

The Fringe/Book/International Festivals are coming to their various ends, but there's no need to dissolve into a flood of fest regrets: there are still gems to be found, and we can help you locate them. Encounters is a series of lectures and talks…

Zadie Smith - NW

Orange Prize-winner's fourth novel breathes and mutates like the city it encapsulates

The fourth novel from Orange Prize-winner Zadie Smith takes its title from a universal urban sign-post, that of the North-West district in a(ny) city. But its geographic, social and cultural landmarks are so embedded in Smith’s hometown of London (the…

Top 5: Sports novels - The Damned United, Dead Cert and more

Chris Cleave brings Olympics-based novel Gold to Edinburgh Book Festival

As Chris Cleave brings his Olympics-based novel, Gold, to the Book Festival Brian Donaldson kicks off the search for some sporty fiction

Julia Donaldson, James Robertson (trans) - The Gruffalo in Scots

James Robertson's translation breathes fresh life into Julia Donaldson's story

Can there be a children’s bookshelf in the land that doesn’t hold a copy of The Gruffalo? Julia Donaldson’s picture book has been a perennial hit with pre-schoolers since it was first published in 1999, with new toddlers discovering it all the…

Mark Millar & John Romita Jr - Kick-ass 2

Fast paced follow-up lacks edge and satire of precursor

Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass was a darkly humorous, violent take on the idea of men in spandex. It also made for a fantastic film. Now we’re back on the streets of New York, where real life superheroes have come out of the closet and patrol the night; while…

Will Gompertz - What Are You Looking At?

The BBC Arts Editor's latest book is an accessible and entertaining guide to art history

‘It’s a fact of life,’ declares the BBC’s Arts Editor in his new book, ‘arts folk talk bollocks’. In a bid to buck this trend, Will Gompertz’s lengthy diversion through the history of modernism is a straight-talking, chronological journey across 150…

First Writes: Julia Keller

The author of A Killing in the Hills talks about her favourite books

Give us five words to describe A Killing in the Hills? Mountains, mayhem, monsters, mothers, memory. Name one author who should be more famous than they are now? Irish author Peter Cunningham. The Sea and the Silence is astonishingly good. The…

Richard Milward on karma and a girl called Kimberly

The writer reads from latest book at the Faber Social Unbound event in Charlotte Square

‘One of the best books I’ve ever read about being young, working class and British,’ said Irvine Welsh of Richard Milward’s 2007 debut, Apples. The 27-year-old followed it with Ten Storey Love Song (2009), a riotous tale of tower-block living written in…

Robert MacFarlane at Edinburgh Book Festival with The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Finding a calling in nature writing

A new generation of authors is bringing an incredible range of skills to nature writing: literary style, social observation, memoir, geology, cartography and psychology amongst them. All of which can be found in Robert Macfarlane’s remarkable third…

John Gordon Sinclair on taking the plunge into crime fiction

Actor discusses debut novel Seventy Times Seven at Edinburgh Book Festival

On approaching your first novel after decades spent working in another industry, it stands to reason that your job will influence the writing. It makes sense then that John Gordon Sinclair’s debut, Seventy Times Seven, has a cinematic quality to it…

Award-winning journalist James Meek to speak at Edinburgh Book Festival

Meek will speak on his upcoming novel and the importance of book festivals

James Meek’s upcoming novel, The Heart Broke In, is billed as ‘a seductive drama full of scandal, dilemmas, love and sacrifice’. Coupled with his previous form, the acclaimed The People’s Act of Love and We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, the Charlotte…

Autumn books round-up: celebrity memoirs

Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster, Danny Baker and Jack Straw pen biographical tales

Why has Salman Rushdie penned an autobiography entitled Joseph Anton: A Memoir (Jonathan Cape), you’re definitely thinking? Well, because that was the moniker he chose for the police to call him during the time under the Ayatollah’s fatwa and this book…

Ian Rankin to deliver keynote speech at Bloody Scotland 2012

The first book festival dedicated to crime fiction will take place in Stirling

It had to happen sooner or later. Given the uncanny and possibly disproportionate ability for Scotland to churn out crime writers by the dastardly dozen, someone somewhere just had to suggest inaugurating a festival wholly dedicated to the felonious…

Husband and wife graphic novel team Bryan and Mary M Talbot - interview

The pair collaborated on Dotter of Her Father's Eyes

‘I think we’re living in the golden age of the graphic novel,’ explains veteran comics artist and writer Bryan Talbot, whose art has graced the pages of 2000AD, Batman and Sandman. ‘Every major literary festival has something on graphic novels these…

Lavinia Greenlaw set for Edinburgh International Book Festival date

Poetry collection The Casual Perfect addresses getting older

At 49, Lavinia Greenlaw is hardly ancient, but her thoughts turn to the experience of getting older in her most recent collection of poetry, The Casual Perfect. ‘I wondered for years, thinking, if the casual perfect were a tense, what would it be? Then…

Interview: Stuart MacBride - author of Birthdays for the Dead

Author at Edinburgh International Book Festival with a serial killer book

Give us five words to describe Birthdays for the Dead? Dark, Dark, Dark, Dark, and Dark. Seriously, it’s a very dark book in the classical noir tradition, rather than the ‘Tartan Noir’ marketing sense. Which author should be more famous than they…

Will Self - Umbrella

Self's first Booker long-listed work is a challenge to literary conventions

An extravagant beast of a tome, Umbrella’s long-listing for the 2012 Booker Prize – Will Self’s first – suggests a line in the sand being drawn after last year’s panel called for ‘readability’. But someone needs to further represent the voice of…

Pat Barker - Toby’s Room

The novelist's latest war story also deals with art, history and incest

Pat Barker has rarely strayed from the war novel since the success of her ‘Regeneration’ trilogy in the early 90s. And although Toby’s Room follows this well-trodden historical path, the story is far from familiar. Toby and Elinor Brooke are brother…

Janice Galloway wins 2012 Scottish Book of the Year award with All Made Up

Category winners include Ali Smith, Angus Peter Campbell and Simon Stephenson

Janice Galloway has won the 2012 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award for her memoir All Made Up, her second autobiographical work, which follows the highly evocative This is Not About Me. The author, who hails from Saltcoats in…

Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon is back with his first novel in five years. In Telegraph Avenue, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are the broke but not yet beaten owners of Brokeland Records (‘the Church of Vinyl’), which is now under threat…

August 2012 books round-up: travel

Travel books from Dom Joly, Tom Feiling, Guy Delisle, Cathy Birchall & Bernard Smith and Dan Smith

In Trigger Happy TV, Dom Joly filmed people dressing up as animals and upsetting or confusing the public at large. Whether this has any link whatsoever to his new book is wholly unclear. Scary Monsters and Super Creeps (Simon & Schuster) is not the…

Joe Stretch - The Adult

A sad, funny and true family saga from author, musician and academic Stretch

Author, musician and creative writing lecturer Joe Stretch’s third novel is a tragi-comic coming-of-age story/family saga narrated with a sardonic sense of humour by a lost lad named Jim Thorne. Growing up in the north of England in the 1990s, Jim is…

Richard Milward - Kimberly’s Capital Punishment

Punchy, super-smart prose fuels Milward's bittersweet paean to London

With two great books already under his belt, Richard Milward has got critics in a tizz with a devilishly intoxicating style that’s been compared to Irvine Welsh, JD Salinger, Gabriel García Márquez, Skins and the Arctic Monkeys. And this latest effort…

Anthony Cartwright - How I Killed Margaret Thatcher

Political statement disguised as kitchen sink drama from the author of Heartland

Political statement disguised as kitchen sink drama, Anthony Cartwright’s third novel sees him return to the Black Country region of Cinderheath last seen in Heartland, 2009’s exploration of the BNP. Except this time the clock has been wound back more…

Roger Gibson & Vince Danks - Harker: The Book of Solomon

TV is a medium that does police procedurals very well and Harker would slot in nicely alongside the current crop of cerebral shows. The most obvious small-screen comparisons could be made here to Sherlock and Whitechapel, as a mutilated body is found on…