Let your tastebuds travel with a cookbook that celebrates the seasonal foods of Italy.

Rachel Simon was browsing through a book stall at a conference in Itasca, Illinois, when she found herself drawn to a short book with an arresting title: God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24, by Dave Bakke.

I'm sure the person who coined the phrase "a picture paints a thousand words" thought a thousand words sounded like a lot. But a single picture can paint - or at least inspire - far more words than that.

An appeal for $95,913 to restore Roald Dahl's garden shed has proved a plot twist too fantastical for the writer's fans.

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.

British writer Hari Kunzru tells Stephen Jewell why he has adopted America as his base and why sci-fi readers are more open to the unusual.

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

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?

Doctor-turned-suspense novelist Tess Gerritsen talks to Craig Sisterson about embracing her heritage and seeing her heroines come alive onscreen.

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

John Boyne, author of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, has published a new novel with links to World War I. The Absolutist traces the experiences of a young serviceman through a deft weave of past and present.

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.

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.

I was in two minds when it came to choosing The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon for my September feature read.

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.

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