Pages & Proofs

Stephen King’s next novel, Joyland, will be published only in the physical format. This is shocking news for Stephen King fans who adore their ereaders. They have to touch a real book, perhaps even go to a bookshop to buy it – how will they manage? The novel is set in an amusement park in […]

American novelist Madeline Miller won the final ‘Orange’ Prize for Fiction last night with her debut novel, The Song of Achilles – a tale of love among the Greek warriors at the siege of Troy. The £30,000 prize acclaims English language fiction written by women and this is the final year of Orange’s sponsorship. The […]

This video answers the age old question ‘why do old books smell?’ Prepare for a bit of science from AbeBooks.

Hilary Mantel is back and the novelist has been receiving warm reviews for her latest book, Bring up the Bodies. It’s the sequel to the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall and the second of a planned trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who became Henry VIII’s chief minister. The book is […]

Chris Cleave (remember Little Bee, which sold and sold and sold?) has a new book called Gold. The Telegraph carries an interview with him. The novel concerns cycling with much of the action set in the Manchester Velodrome. “This is where they would have trained,” he says, referring to the characters at the heart of […]

I discovered a new author yesterday, or rather I discovered an old one – H.L. Gee. That’s Herbert Leslie Gee to be precise. Gee was a prolific writer and one of his favourite subjects was Yorkshire, particularly its seaside. He wrote Folk Tales of Yorkshire and Cloud and Sunshine: Some Account of a Plain Man’s Journey […]

A study by Oxford University Press reveals British children are adopting more and more Americanisms in their written language. Fairycakes have become cupcakes, a dinner jacket is now a tuxedo, pavements are becoming sidewalks, trainers are becoming sneakers, and torches are becoming flashlights. Rubbish is garbage. The database (of children’s writing) – which dictionary compilers […]

Paul King’s Midnight in Peking is currently Book of the Week on Radio 4. French’s book is a historical crime story about the investigation of the 1937 murder of British woman, Pamela Werner. Pamela’s body was horribly mutilated (her heart and some other organs were missing) and dumped in a ditch. The mystery was never […]

The Daily Telegraph tells us about the best biographies of Queen Elizabeth II with her Diamond Jubilee celebrations well underway. The last royal Diamond Jubilee was Queen Victoria’s in 1897 so that illustrates Queen Elizabeth’s longevity. Her stock has soared since the dark days of September 1997, when, in the aftermath of the death of […]

AbeBooks’ bestselling book in recent months is easily Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane. It’s a debut  novel and probably marks the appearance of a real writing talent. The book blurb describes itself as “Forty years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by […]