Writer Michael Ondaatje, who won the Booker prize for The English Patient, draws on his own extraordinary life to conjure up evocative tales of displacement. Robert McCrum asks how much reality there is in his fiction.

Call Anita Shreve's books chick lit at your peril, warns Nicky Pellegrino.

Brother, they want me to write you a review but I’m not going to do it. Another book is out. Your collected works.

Cute titles. How do I feel about cute titles? I feel that the authors have to work a couple of degrees harder to justify them. New Zealand-born, Britain-based Connell works very hard indeed in her second romp - and with reasonable success.

Barbara Ewing is a UK-based Kiwi actress and writer whose most recent novel is The Circus of Ghosts.

Who are we really? What's beyond the façade the rest of the world gets to see? How can we communicate without a voice?

Louisa Young's enthralling novel begins in the gorgeous, leafy light of upper-class Edwardian England where wealthy, bohemian-ish families plan lives filled with art and beauty, and ends in a darkened world transformed by the violence and pain of World Wa

Travelling with the original Lonely Planet as a guide, writer Brian Thacker finds what's changed in 35 years.

Books editor Linda Herrick talks to historian Anne Sebba about her new biography of the woman the royal family — and Britain — loved to hate.

It's a gutsy first-time novelist who writes a book about New York society in the early 20th century.

In this volume the Griffith writers look inward and backwards to gain some fresh insight into not only their own lives but the lives of us all.

This thoughtful little tome of short stories is perceptive and entertaining.

Can we relearn a sense? A chef apparently did, finds Nicky Pellegrino.

Mike Ashma is the director of the NBR New Zealand Opera's production of the double-bill Cav & Pag opening in Auckland on September 15.

A terrible thing happened, that day, up at Blackwoods' place, in The Secret River, the first of Grenville's historical novels set in the penal colony of New South Wales.

Every city can lay claim to its fair share of eccentrics. This book is about one of Melbourne's: Edward William Cole.

This book might more accurately have been titled In Love With Dante. It is a wholehearted piece of advocacy for the 14th century writer, of whom Wilson says it "could be argued that he was the greatest of all European poets, of any time or place".

Stephen Jewell talks to New Zealand actress-turned-writer Barbara Ewing about why she’s mesmerised by researching times gone by.

His books sell abroad, but not here. Paul Cleave tells Nicky Pellegrino why.

Why are we so enthralled by the pronouncements of the latter-day gurus of self-help, asks Alex Clark.