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Iain Banks: I may reject chemotherapy
AUTHOR Iain Banks has revealed he could undergo chemotherapy within weeks in an effort to prolong his life – but said he will stop the treatment if its side-effects are too debilitating.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.”
Poem of the week: William Wordsworth – Sweet Was The Walk
WORDSWORTH had many of his best thoughts while walking. ‘I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud’, his most famous poem, was inspired by a walk in the Lake District in 1802.
Book review: 1913, The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson
NINETEEN-thirteen was the last full calendar year of what the late, great historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the long nineteenth century”.
Book reviews: The Look of Love | Mick Jagger | Midnight in Peking
SOHO, 1960. A man is auditioning a young woman in his strip club, the Raymond Revuebar.
Book review: Nijinsky by Lucy Moore
NIJINSKY’S dancing was sublime. His life – well, that was a godawful mess, as Lucy Moore’s new biography makes excruciatingly clear.
Book review: Love Sex Travel Musik by Rodge Glass
“Stories for the EasyJet generation” blazons the message on the front cover.
Record baker: Ian Gregg discusses his memoir
We hoover up millions of Greggs sausage rolls and doughnuts each week, but Britain’s biggest bakery chain hasn’t always enjoyed a high (apple) turnover. A fascinating new memoir reveals its humble roots
4 commentsBook review: The Garden of Eros by John Calder
IN THE past, there was a strange alliance between pornographers and radicals.
Book review: CS Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath
LAST night I read a nine-year-old boy a chapter of The Magician’s Nephew, CS Lewis’s prequel to the Narnia books.
Book review: The Enchanted Wanderer & Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov
THE first sentence of the inside cover sleeves boldly declares: “Nikolai Leskov is the greatest Russian writer most of us have never heard of.
1 commentBookworm: Tartan Weak | Blackberry Picking
ON THE bus to work the other day, I found myself next to a hugely important person in the world of Scottish culture.
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Book Week Scotland to become annual event
A WEEK-long national celebration of reading is set to become an annual event after more than 55,000 people took part in a pilot project last year.
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Ian Rankin working on first play for Royal Lyceum
HE MADE his name bringing the dark underbelly of the Athens of the North to the page with his gritty Inspector Rebus novels.
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Mairi Hedderwick kicks off Treasures campaign
Scottish Book Trust launches its Treasures campaign today, which aims to get Scots writing about their most treasured possessions, says David Robinson.
Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie on writing about race
IN CHIMAMANDA Ngozi Adichie’s uncompromising new novel, Americanah, an African-American character talks about the impossibility of writing an honest work of fiction about race.
Book review: Grace and Mary by Melvyn Bragg
IT’S the prospect before so many of us now: a twilight existence, memory wandering and failing, dementia gripping harder, and eventually extinction.
Book reviews: Northern Ireland | Napalm |
“FOR God’s sake bring me a large Scotch – what a bloody awful country,” said Reggie Maudling: English exasperation has been one of the great constants of the Irish conflict.
Book reviews: Lost At Sea | Every Contact Leaves A Trace | The New Few
JON Ronson is extremely funny, and in this collection of his stories you’ll see that he’s funny precisely because he is such a sharp reporter.
Book review: Burnt Island by Alice Thompson
WHAT makes a book happen? Where does literary inspiration come from? These are some of the underlying questions asked by Alice Thompson’s deliciously creepy tale that is almost an homage to surreal horror stories such as Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and John Fowles’s The Magus.
Book review: Falling Upwards: How We Took To The Air by Richard Holmes
AS Richard Holmes shows in this typically erudite and entertaining book (would we expect anything else from the best biographer of Coleridge and the author of The Age of Wonder?) it is not just the preponderance of cheap air flights that has cast a romantic glamour over the idea of hot-air ballooning.
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Weather for Edinburgh
Thursday 23 May 2013
Today
Light showers
Temperature: 5 C to 10 C
Wind Speed: 23 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 4 C to 13 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North east
