In an uncharacteristic fit of efficiency, I started reading my September feature book, Rules of Civility, on the same day I finished my August novel, There But For There.

British author Stef Penney tells Christian House about moving the setting for her second novel from the Canadian wilderness to a sinister England.

Constructed in the manner of ensemble films such as Nashville, Grand Canyon and Crash, this novel by the award-winning Australian writer Carroll again refracts the lives of some characters who have populated his previous work.

In 1967 the great critic Frank Kermode published The Sense Of An Ending, a series of lectures that not only mined the apocalyptic theme in art, but reviewed the ways in which fiction carves order and pattern out of the chaotic flux of time.

When I finished The Story of Beautiful Girl I felt like I needed a lie down.

Adults hacked off with the disappointment of modern life seek solace in children's books, a Cambridge University believes.

I'm loving Rules of Civility by debut New York novelist Amor Towles. And I love the influences he's shared with us in our Q&A.

What kind of historical novelist is Barry Unsworth? Despite his practised ear for the idioms of the mid-18th century drawing-room, and weather eye for the contents of the era's wardrobe, he is not a pasticheur.

More an exercise in global warming propaganda than anything else, really, though the photos of endangered beauty spots are certainly stunning.

Stephen Jewell talks to New Zealand writer Pip Ballantine about why she went to the United States and the good manners of sci-fi followers.

Penny Vincenzi is a bestselling UK author whose new novel The Decision (Headline, $36.99) has just been released.

A family history. Also a social and intellectual history, and a different take on the Australian Dream.

A writer fills in the gaps in his family's dubious past, writes Nicky Pellegrino.

Rachel Simon was browsing through a book stall at a conference in Itasca, Illinois, when she found herself drawn to a short book with an arresting title: God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24, by Dave Bakke.

I'm sure the person who coined the phrase "a picture paints a thousand words" thought a thousand words sounded like a lot. But a single picture can paint - or at least inspire - far more words than that.

An appeal for $95,913 to restore Roald Dahl's garden shed has proved a plot twist too fantastical for the writer's fans.

British writer Hari Kunzru tells Stephen Jewell why he has adopted America as his base and why sci-fi readers are more open to the unusual.

Writer Michael Ondaatje, who won the Booker prize for The English Patient, draws on his own extraordinary life to conjure up evocative tales of displacement. Robert McCrum asks how much reality there is in his fiction.

Call Anita Shreve's books chick lit at your peril, warns Nicky Pellegrino.

Brother, they want me to write you a review but I’m not going to do it. Another book is out. Your collected works.