The secret to putting together a really satisfying literary journal is to make sure you have an editor with catholic tastes at the helm.

My fairly positive "experience" with this book was abruptly, even rudely, spoiled by the very last item, a contribution by John Key, former merchant banker and Prime Minister of this country.

London-based American writer Patrick Ness tells David Larsen how a childhood accident inspired his new novel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's complex other half remains a mystery, writes Nicky Pellegrino.

William Palmer’s novels have always tried to superimpose great truths on relatively small-scale canvases.

A new novel imagines the shimmering yet ill-fated life of Zelda Fitzgerald, writes Rebecca Barry Hill.

Despite moments of beauty, no one escapes the horror in Nadeem Aslam’s fourth novel.

In the shadowed and sepulchral Florence of the 1690s, with the Medici dynasty in steep decline and the city cowed by the puritanical regime of Cosimo III, a sculptor in wax receives a commission from the Grand Duke himself.

The premise of Richard C. Morais' Buddhaland Brooklyn is that an apparent fish-out-of-water can eventually find, and adjust to, its new pond. Morais takes rather a long time to get there, but he makes it.

Nicky Pellegrino finds the tale of a diary washed ashore intriguing and compelling.

C.K. Stead’s remarkable new collection of poems, The Yellow Buoy: Poems 2007-2012, was completed in his 80th year.

Crime writer Harlan Coben still enjoys confusing his readers, writes Stephen Jewell

The thing I love most about Maggie O’Farrell’s writing is the way she colours in her characters.

Set in Japan and on an island off the Pacific coast of Canada following the Japanese tsunami, A Tale For The Time Being has two narrators, Japanese Nao and American/Japanese Ruth, who are worlds apart yet eerily connected.

Being praised by, among many others, Daniel Woodrell — the author of the bleak Winter’s Bone, which was made into a suitably monochromatic and emotionally grim feature film — shows where Ron Rash’s fiction lies on the graph.

Book clubs, commuters and celebrities have gone wild for Gone Girl, the smash-hit thriller that has Hollywood in a spin. Tim Walker talks to author Gillian Flynn about being this year’s literary sensation

The Franks brothers, famously, are allowed to follow their own training programmes so if All Blacks coach Steve Hansen wanted to get an idea of what they were up to he could do worse than read their new book.

British author Deborah Moggach returns to the rickety hotel setting that earned her big box-office success, writes Stephen Jewell

A story that lets its heroine rework her life holds Nicky Pellegrino spellbound.