When Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a child she had a recurring nightmare in
which pleasant occasions %26ndash; family tea-times, parties, picnics %26ndash; were
disrupted by a scary apparition with no hands, a ghastly stare and
formidable powers of disguise. %26ldquo;It might be Mummy or Daddy or Nannie,%26rdquo; she
recalled, %26ldquo;someone you were just talking to. You looked up into [...]

FICTION Suite Fran%26ccedil;aise by Ir%26egrave;ne N%26eacute;mirovsky (Vintage %26pound;7.99) A
modern classic: second-world-war France gets the War and Peace treatment in
two superb novellas, written by an author who died in Auschwitz
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Picador %26pound;7.99) An uncompromising vision of
postapocalyptic hell, as a father and son search desperately for safety in
America
Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allen (Bloomsbury [...]

CAN THIS BE THE FIRST TIME A novel has come with a matching designer shoe? And
what does that say about modern literature and marketing? The shoe is
undeniably fine: a high-heeled, red velvet, peek-toed sandal. The
accompanying book, The Lollipop Shoes, is similar: entertaining,
pandering to female fantasy, extolling the art of bewitching.
The bestselling author Joanne Harris is [...]

Michael Chabon
Gentlemen of the Road
224pp. Sceptre. %26pound;12.
978 0 340 95345 9
At the end of Gentlemen of the Road, after all the derring-do is derring-done,
and the dust has settled on the corpse-strewn plains of the Caucasus,
Michael Chabon has a quiet afterword with his readers, in which he confides
that, despite the book%26rsquo;s official title, he cannot help [...]

Award-winning novels come under much more scrutiny from book clubs. Your
overall verdict on The Tenderness of Wolves was that it was worthy of a
first-novel prize, but perhaps not quite accomplished enough to be crowned
the Costa Book of the Year.
It is not perfect. I agree with Gill Vaughan that the bone tablet in the story
should not [...]

So, the Harry Potters ended with a good deal of pain, unfinished business and
the possibility of posthumous revelations, like an actual bereavement. The
sequence deserves wild applause. But important information was later added %26ndash;
through webchats and at author events %26ndash; about the characters%26rsquo; jobs,
marriages and (less need-to-know) sexual orientation. In future, perhaps it
will be necessary only [...]

A former winner of the Betty Trask prize and a screenwriter whose credits
include the BBC series Murphy’s Law, Bateman is the author of a string of
novels, whose titles %26mdash; aimed, like this one, at a pop-literate readership %26mdash;
suggest their boisterous humour.
Set in present-day Belfast, they describe a society in which bitter memories
of the Troubles intermittently [...]

Before I interview Emma Roberts, the instruction has come from her PRs not to
ask her about her famous aunt, Julia. You can%26rsquo;t blame Warner Bros for
wanting us to focus on the 16-year-old Roberts Jr %26ndash; who is a fine actress in
her own right, as she proves with a sweetly formidable turn as the eponymous
teen detective [...]

Novelist Seicho Matsumoto’s best-known mystery, Ten to Sen (Points and Lines), will be aired this weekend from 9 p.m. on the TV Asahi network.
The popular trick in the film known as the “four minute hiatus” will be shown, while computer graphics will be used to re-create scenes of the 1950s.
The bodies of a couple are [...]

By Rob Van Zeijst
A lot of confusion and mystery surround a player who completely dominated the go world after World War II, beating every opponent hands-down in juban go series, a series of 10 games either with the same opponent or with a team of opponents. Although at his peak about 50 years ago, Seigen [...]