Terry Gilliam is the odd man out of the Python squad, the warm and loose American among uptight Englishmen. Yet he may be the team's secret weapon.

T.S. Eliot once wrote that the critic's job was to "exhibit the relations of literature - not to 'life', as something contrasted to literature, but to all the other activities, which, together with literature, are the components of life".

Author Kevin Barry's latest novel Beatlebone delves into the mind of John Lennon as he seeks the solitude of a tiny Irish island that he bought for 1700 pounds in 1968.

Although Paul Hartigan's art has roamed from pop-art painting and posters, to Polaroids and beyond, his neon work is the most familiar.

John Freeman shot to international fame with his contentious 2009 book Shrinking the World: The 4000-Year Story Of How Email Came To Rule Our Lives.

There's no easy way to find out that an old mate has terminal cancer but reading a book about it has got to be one of the most moving.

Will the Pacific save us? In his biography of an ocean, Simon Winchester finds an optimistic note among all the doom we humans trail in our wake.

The style of the narrative can best be described as a darkly comic fairy tale. All the familiar tropes are there; jilted hero, beautiful damsel, dark castle,mysterious forest and a collection of untrustworthy characters who mean our hero no good.

Bill Bryson famously came from Iowa ("Somebody had to"). So do the farming dynasty of Jane Smiley's now-completed trilogy.

The Porcelain Thief describes Hsu's search for it, which, of course, necessitated his taking a job with a wealthy uncle in Shanghai and learning the language and customs of his ancestral home.

It's not at all easy to talk about Grace Jones - disco queen, new waver, Bond villain, diva, android, androgyne - as if she is a real person.

This is a cross-over novel of "stories within stories within stories". We're told at the start it's written by a supine, seriously-injured survivor of some major disaster.

Margaret Atwood takes a playful look at human failings.

The typically demotic title introduces three world-soiled siblings, children of a dangerously attractive and totally untrustworthy refugee from Nazism who's credited with making New Zealand aware of real coffee and really modern buildings.

Salman Rushdie has written his funniest novel in years - but beneath the jokes lies an uncomfortable truth, discovers Gaby Wood.

The tone of Salman Rushdie's latest novel is like a chocolate with a nut centre, beguilingly sweet on the outside but with a hard core.

Author Bruce Ansley cherishes pointing his car along New Zealand's highways and roads.

Morrissey's debut novel has been slated as an "unpolished turd of a book".