Latest fromBook Reviews
Camilla Lackberg: Crime is on her side
Stephen Jewell talks to ‘Swedish Agatha Christie’ Camilla Lackberg about her close friendship with her characters, fact being darker than fiction and the myths surrounding her country.
Book review: Northanger Abbey
Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey is the second stage of The Austen Project, for which four writers have been invited to produce a contemporary version of a Jane Austen novel.
Book review: The Bright Side of My Condition
The charming title of this book is a quotation from The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe.
Book review: <I>The World's Great Wonders</I>
No continent is left out in this roll call of diverse and wonderful sites.
Book review: Arctic Summer
On December 19, 1910, a few months after the publication of Howard's End, E. M. Forster began sketching out the plan for a new novel.
Book review: & Son
Hyperbole often surrounds big novels, especially big novels from New York about New York and by New Yorkers, but in Gilbert's case it is all justified.
Gary Shteyngart: Crying with laughter
American novelist Gary Shteyngart tells Alexander Bisley why he likes to combine hilarity, sadness and introspection.
Two scribes go to war
Could Britain have avoided World War I? Historians Max Hastings and Niall Ferguson have presented rival views on the BBC.
Legends of literature in line-up
Linda Herrick surveys the wealth of names coming to Auckland’s Writers Festival in May.
Swords and jandals
An Arabic scene of dunes and camels was the backdrop for a diverse literary event, writes Linda Herrick.
There's something about Jane
Nearly 200 years after her death, Jane Austen has become one of the most widely read authors in history. Kerrie Waterworth finds out why she continues to appeal, generation after generation.
Book review: The Lie
It is not easy to decide which lie Helen Dunmore was talking about when she titled her new book.
The dark beneath the light
British-based writer Tom Rob Smith tells Stephen Jewell how real life drama inspired his new novel in a way that disturbed him far more than he expected.
Ben Atkins: One night out sleuthing
Fledgling Auckland writer Ben Atkins talks to Craig Sisterson about the crime novel he has been working on since he was 15.
Book review: Terms & Conditions
Extensive footnotes make this hard to follow, as Nicky Pellegrino discovers.
Book review: A Beautiful Truth
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.
Toying with times past
Miranda Carter read history while at Oxford and came to writing after a career in journalism.
Book review: Empty Mansions
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.