Images reproduced with permission from Lazy Days: Painting the kiwi lifestyle by Graham Young, published by New Holland, $29.99.

Extensive footnotes make this hard to follow, as Nicky Pellegrino discovers.

Walt and Judy, of 1970s small-town Vermont, can't conceive a child. For all their mutual tenderness, life has become just "a collection of gestures and habits". So they adopt.

A Swedish newspaper has intensified a decades-old allegation by dead crime novelist Stieg Larsson about who was behind the 1986 murder of the country's Prime Minister.

Miranda Carter read history while at Oxford and came to writing after a career in journalism.

The wealth gap is provoking much contemporary anxiety. But the financial imbalance between, say, Bill Gates or Warren Buffet and the Big-Mac slinger is a shadow of that which existed between the first American capitalist barons.

After years of exploring Sweden’s darkest fears in his fiction, Henning Mankell, the creator of Wallander, faces his own anxiety after being diagnosed with cancer. Andrew Anthony writes.

Literary sensation Fifty Shades Of Grey - which has already set sales records - has become one of the UK's most borrowed library books.

Three Aucklanders tell Alan Perrott how they reinvented themselves.

Lea Michele says her illustrated memoir and lifestyle tome, Brunette Ambition, will be out in May.

Do authors own their characters? And if a writer retrospectively meddles with the fate of a beloved figure, should fans pay attention?

A brave Kiwi is trailblazing a new literary trend - women reading books in the nude.

At the start of 1985, Maire Leadbeater took her two children for a January break on Kawau Island.