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Harry Potter first edition a notable read
Only 500 copies of the first edition of the first Harry Potter book were published, and a very special one is up for auction, crammed with notes and drawings by JK Rowling, writes Martyn McLaughlin
Iain Banks updates fans on chemo hopes in new blog
AUTHOR Iain Banks has revealed his latest medical news, as well as his progress through the thousands of messages of support he has received and his purchase of a high-powered sports car, in his latest blog post.
Jenni Fagan on James Tait Black prize shortlist
DEBUT author Jenni Fagan has been shortlisted alongside Salman Rushdie and Alan Warner for the UK’s oldest book awards, further propelling the Scottish writer towards her position as the nation’s brightest young literary star.
Book review: All That Is by James Salter
IF AN aged, once-eminent author, close to the end, ekes out one almost-certainly-last novel, and it’s of an indifferent standard, or worse, should it be published out of respect for his or her more glorious past?
Book review: Inferno by Dan Brown
ONE of the first characters to appear in Inferno is a spiky-haired, malevolent biker chick dressed in black leather.
Book review: The Devonshires by Roy Hattersley
A PUNCH cartoon, two dukes at a party, one whispering into the other’s ear: “Don’t you think it must be just terrible being an earl?”
Book review: Grace And Mary by Melvyn Bragg
OVER the years, Melvyn Bragg’s writing has attracted a degree of (jealous?) teasing, but the dissenting voices compete with a louder chorus of praise in which he is favourably compared with DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.
Stephen McGinty: Going to town on Positano
The Italian ‘dream place’ and its famous hotel popularised by John Steinbeck 60 years ago still casts its spell over celebrity and non-celebrity guests alike, writes Stephen McGinty
Book review: Dial H: Volume 1, Into You by China Miéville
To my mind, China Miéville is one of the most interesting literary writers currently working in Britain, an accolade undiminished, though perhaps sometimes obscured, by his wholehearted commitment to genre.
Bookworm: UIlapool Book Festival
Next year’s UIlapool Book Festival will be the tenth, and so clearly all the stops will have to be pulled out to make it the best one yet. All of which must be a bit of a headache for the organisers, given that the ninth, which ended on Sunday, was such a resounding success.
William McIlvanney: The father of tartan noir
As Canongate set about reprinting his classics, William McIlvanney tells Susan Mansfield that we may not have heard the last of DI Laidlaw
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Book review: Between Friends by Amos Oz
In 1954, aged 14, Amos Klausner changed his name to Amos Oz, leaving behind him his home and father, exchanging city life for the relative privations of the desert, cutting his teeth (and his new identity) on life in an Israeli kibbutz.
Book review: The Lion Rampant by Robert Low
With The Lion Rampant and its vivid, imaginative and blood-curdling account of Bannockburn, Robert Low, one assumes, has concluded in splendid bravura style, his sequence of novels on the Wars of Independence.
Book review: Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley
Quickly described, Clever Girl, the new novel from Tessa Hadley, is the story of a woman’s life, from childhood to middle age. Like that John Lewis advert of a few years ago, it moves briskly through 50 years, touching down on experiences that will be very familiar to white, first-world women born during the second half of the 20th century.
Book reviews: The Fragile Empire| Sweet tooth| The Faithful Executioner
A roundup of the latest book releases
Book review: Perilous Question by Antonia Fraser
Eighteen thirty-two used to be a well-known date in British history. It was the year of the Great Reform Bill, when an outdated political system gave way to a wider franchise allowing a number of middle-class men to vote for the first time. Antonia Fraser’s latest book is a spirited attempt to bring the controversy and passion of the era to a new audience.
Poem of the week: Chrissy Williams – ‘The Burning of Houses’
If there was a prize for poem titles, Chrissy Williams’ collection Flying Into the Bear (HappenStance, £4) would surely win it.
Interview: Jay Griffiths on children and the natural world
Jay Griffiths’ last book was called Wild. It was an extraordinary, freewheeling, and ecstatic roam across the planet in search of wilderness and the people and creatures that inhabit it.
Sir Walter Scott penned songs while a court clerk
SIR Walter Scott was penning songs when he should have been recording details of court cases in his job as a clerk of court, it has been revealed.
Da Vinci Code author Brown’s new book instant hit
BESTSELLING author Dan Brown unleashed his latest page-turner yesterday, as eager fans made Inferno an instant chart-topper.
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Dundee International Book Prize shortlist drawn up
A 13-strong shortlist of authors from across the globe has been chosen to compete for this year’s prestigious Dundee International Book Prize.
Claire Black: Reading time is precious and I don’t want to waste it on Dan Brown
DAN Brown has a new book out this week. I confess I am underwhelmed.
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Book review: The Society Of Timid Souls: Or How To Be Brave, Polly Morland
IN THIS fascinating rumination on the nature of courage and cowardice, there’s a chapter titled “Crime And Punishment” in which, among other things, Polly Morland has frank conversations with two armed robbers, now reformed.
Book review: Dear Lumpy, Roger Mortimer and Louise Mortimer
A DEFTLY witty collection of letters from exasperated father Roger Mortimer to his wastrel son Charlie, Dear Lupin was one of the surprise hits of last year.
Book review: The Round House, Louise Erdrich
LOUISE Erdrich takes us back to the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that she has conjured and mapped in so many of her novels and made as indelibly real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin.
Adrian Laing on his new novel, and his father
AFTER writing a novel based on his famous father, Scottish psychiatrist R D Laing, Adrian Laing says he would rather write about their relationship than go into therapy
Book review: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Vol 1, Charles Moore
Sir Malcolm Rifkind hails a biography of Thatcher that finally offers an authoritative voice on the woman behind the legacy
1 commentBook reviews: Churchill’s First War| The Serpent’s Promise | Scots Who Enlightened the World
A roundup of the latest book releases
Book review: The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas
There’s an interesting collision in Ruth Thomas’s second novel between comedy and reality. In her award-winning short stories, too, she demonstrates this same quiet humour that looks at the world from an angle that is ever so slightly askew yet somehow also comforting.
Book review: If Hitler Comes By Gordon Barclay
As German troops swept through Europe in 1940, it was reasonable to expect that the United Kingdom would be their next target. The main base of the British Home Fleet in Scapa Flow was, after all, only two hours’ flying time from Stavanger and the Nazi army was in Norway. Intelligence suggested that an invasion had already been planned.
Bookworm: Joyce material | No.1 translation
IT’S good to see that Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series seems to be finally cracking America. The ninth novel, A Man Without Breath, which was glowingly reviewed in these pages, is his first to make it onto the New York Times bestseller charts.
Book review: Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy
There used to be a common complaint that the subject of the typical middle-class English novel was adultery in Hampstead or, perhaps, Islington. The charge was exaggerated of course; there was more variety in the English novel, even 40 years ago.
Wayne Johnston: No foreign novelist is more relevant to Scotland
Newfoundland. No matter how hard I try, I can’t pronounce it the way the locals do, the way Wayne Johnston does, with the accent on the “land” not the “new” or the “found”.
Book review: Superman and Philosophy: What Would The Man Of Steel Do?
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical? This series of books, edited by William Irwin, laudably use popular culture to explain philosophical concepts.
Book review: Margaret Thatcher The Authorised Biography Volume One: Not for Turning
WHEN Margaret Thatcher died, the nation broke satisfyingly into factions. Both clashing armies agreed that the lady with the handbag had been personally responsible, if not for everything, then for a prodigious number of things in Britain between 1979 and 1990.
Book review: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler
They were, arguably, the first celebrity couple of the Jazz Era. She was a precocious, spoiled Southern belle and bad girl; he was a Midwesterner and Princeton dropout who had turned his experience into the novel This Side of Paradise.
Stephen McGinty: Judging a book by the cover
In the competitive world of publishing some authors may have to bite their tongue when presented with the marketing image, while others are literally inspired by them, writes Stephen McGinty
Poem of the week: Fiona Moore – ‘The Shirt’
A recent biography of David Foster Wallace was titled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Fiona Moore’s poetry collection, The Only Reason for Time (HappenStance, £4), elaborates on that thought.
Scottish fact of the week: Surgeon’s Hall Museum
SURGEON’S Hall Museum is home to a potted history of Scottish medicine - sometimes astounding, other times gruesome, but always fascinating.
UK children missing out on foreign books, says author
Millions of children are missing out on the best books in the world because so few are translated into English, according to award-winning author David Almond.
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Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps gets digital update
IT IS a timeless thriller that has left generations of readers on the edge of their seats as they follow one man’s desperate attempts to elude an unseen enemy and protect the interests of his country.
Rare signed copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin discovered
A RARE signed copy of the anti-slavery novel said to have laid the ground work for the American Civil War has been unearthed amid the tens of thousands of books donated for Scotland’s biggest annual second-hand book fair.
Book review: The Bonobo And The Atheist, Frans de Waal
IN THE opening scene of Pierre Boulle’s novel La Planete Des Singes, two pampered space travellers, coasting the interstellar tides in a space-skiff, discover an interplanetary message in a bottle.
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Book review: Cities Are Good For You, Leo Hollis
LEO Hollis opens his latest book by asking readers to close their eyes and imagine a place where they feel most happy. The chances are, he points out, this won’t be an urban scene but beaches, meadows, mountains, villages.
Book review: The Humans, Matt Haig
IN THE acknowledgments at the end of his latest novel, Matt Haig reveals that he first had the idea for this story in 2000 while he was in the middle of a breakdown.
Book review: A Place In The Country, WG Sebald
When WG Sebald pays his dues to the ghosts of his literary past he reveals why his own legacy will endure, writes Stuart Kelly
The Great Gatsby kicks off Cannes Film Festival
There’s a delicious irony in Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby kicking off the star-studded celebrations at the world’s most glamorous film festival, writes Hannah McGill
Taiye Selasi on Ghana Must Go
TAIYE Selasi is telling me where she wrote Ghana Must Go, probably the most feted debut novel of the year. “It started in the shower at a yoga retreat in Sweden,” she laughs.
Book reviews: Leviathan | Democracy in Retreat | Renaissance Emir
SUCH was the spectacle at the races on the Epsom Downs, wrote Daniel Defoe in the 1720s, that “I think no sight, except that of a victorious army, under the command of a Protestant king of Great Britain, could possibly exceed it.”
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Weather for Edinburgh
Tuesday 21 May 2013
Today
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Temperature: 6 C to 17 C
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