The publishing year has cranked up in earnest and the bookshops are beginning to fill with rows of tempting new reads, many of them debuts. Here are our picks for February.

The Auschwitz Violin features an extraordinary moment in the life of Daniel, a Jewish violin-maker imprisoned at Auschwitz.

Edmund White has spoken repeatedly of his crawling conviction as a boy and young man that being homosexual was “bad”.

In this book are a dozen short stories that will take you only a couple of hours to read but far longer to forget.

Shorty St actress Pearl McGlashan opens up about what she's flipped through as a book lover.

According to Claire Tomalin, his latest biographer, children no longer have the attention span to read Dickens. The author was born on February 7, 200 years ago.

E-books are a threat to justice and responsible self-government. Apparently. And here’s naïve old me thinking they were just convenient tools for reading escapist novels.

A new book has found total tax rates on the incomes of rich New Zealanders are now...

The post-apocalyptic young adult novel hasn’t yet been released in America, and already the movie rights have been sold, and Twilight producer Karen Rosenfelt has been hired to take it to the big screen.

There's no doubt that a lot of travellers want to feel that they're doing their bit to save the planet.

A rare condition left critic Nick Coleman unable to hear the music he adored. Here, he explains how he learned to listen again.

Hanging out for your Downton Abbey Christmas Special fix this Wednesday? You’re not alone.

Gwendoline Smith is a psychologist and the author of several books.

What an odd book this is.

It's much easier to find the motivation to chill out with a glass of red wine or take a bubble bath than it is to pull on your sneakers and work up a sweat. That's where The Grit Doctor comes in.

After a fairly quiet summer, the shelves of the bookshops are filling up with promising new fare.

The world is divided between surfers and those uninterested in being drowned, pulverised, eaten by great whites, or having straw hair. Yes, I know, I know ...

The Year Of The Hare, originally published in 1975, has gone on to sell millions of copies in 18 languages and as two feature films.

How do authors come up with a pen name?

Geraldine Johns asks six of our top chefs what their favourite cookbooks are — the ones that really inspire them — and why.

Paul Torday's novel is set in the stately English countryside where he now lives, writes Nicky Pellegrino.