A stack of promising new novels has thudded onto the Fiction Addiction desk.

Reading Airini Beautrais' new collection, Western Line, fills me with joy - through what words can do and through the avenues poetry makes available.

This guide has information about the main grounds and teams in the top 18 rugby-playing nations.

Towards the end of his rambling diary of a road trip through his native country, Garth Cartwright engages in a sly piece of critic-proofing sophistry.

Suzanne McFadden talks to Kiwi romance queen Michelle Holman about issues and critics.

Queenstown and Southern Lakes has been named one of Lonely Planet's top 10 regions to visit next year.

British novelist Tasmina Perry is the author of Private Lives (Headline, $34.99).

Martina Cole’s crime novels explore the extremes of relationship dysfunction. She talks to Stephen Jewell about her fascination with the darker, and tougher, side of human nature.

Viva's Zoe Walker explores how characters described in fiction have influenced her through the years.

The blurb on the back of Breton Dukes’ debut short-story collection, Bird North And Other Stories, adds him to an esteemed line of New Zealand exponents of the genre: Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan and Owen Marshall.

Reading this very long book is deep immersion in the horrors of the Holocaust, and after a prolonged session readers may have to lift themselves from a state of depression about the human condition.

If I describe this memoir of life on the Kaipara as “charming”, it instantly sounds as if I’m sending it down the Damn-With-Faint-Praise chute. I’m not.

Michael Ondaatje talks about how he wrote The Cat's Table, where he gets his characters from and re-reading his favourite books.

When Patrick McGuinness’s debut novel The Last Hundred Days was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in July it had sold 64 copies. By September it was nudging 4000 sales.

There are so many fine picture books about New Zealand these days that it's often difficult to find a point of difference that makes one stand out from the others.