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.

The charming title of this book is a quotation from The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe.

No continent is left out in this roll call of diverse and wonderful sites.

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.

David Larsen discovers the intriguing backstory behind cartoonist Michael Leunig’s whimsical birds

Many contemporary male novelists, particularly comic ones, are incapable of depicting an unsympathetic female character.

Could Britain have avoided World War I? Historians Max Hastings and Niall Ferguson have presented rival views on the BBC.

Linda Herrick surveys the wealth of names coming to Auckland’s Writers Festival in May.

An Arabic scene of dunes and camels was the backdrop for a diverse literary event, writes Linda Herrick.

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.

It is not easy to decide which lie Helen Dunmore was talking about when she titled her new book.

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.

Consider being commissioned and hard-pressed to write the biography of an old, famous, living author.

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.

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.