It sounds almost too extraordinary to be true: a Kiwi advertising executive makes a pilgrimage across the byways of China, where tourists are rarely seen, and tracks down a long lost son of Mao Tse Tung.

Helen Brown enjoys Sylvia Patterson's memoir, I'm Not With the Band.

The Flintstones are back but they look totally different and they're also kind of anti-Flintstones.

We now know what the houses are, who they're for, and how you get in - plus the history of how the US school got started.

Dr Seuss wrote a book for adults about a man in a bowtie who is wheeled through a hospital

COMMENT: We've just passed a milestone with 12 million books given out on our Books in Homes literacy programme.

An official Unesco City of Literature, Melbourne is also home to 'The Best Bookshop in the World'. In the run-up to its Writers' Festival in August, Dani Wright seeks out the city's best bookish spots.

The 1970s love affair between Meryl Streep and John Cazale saw them both on new acting paths but their journey together ended in tragedy.

Karl Stead is like a grand old sideboard in the dining room of New Zealand literature.

Novels about painters and paintings have been in vogue recently.

Christchurch-based writer Heather McQuillan is the winner of this year's National Flash Fiction Day competition.

Paul Dini has turned a tragic night of fear into an instantly-classic graphic novel.

The plight of an 11-year-old girl at Te Puea Marae with a love for reading has prompted a donation of more than 200 books.

They're calling it a revolution in the way we read - and it's not some new piece of technology.

Elizabeth is a husk of a woman. She feels nothing. Why she continues to live baffles her.

"I'm slightly more blind than Stevie Wonder ... "

Noah is a 4-year-old boy who often wakes screaming from nightmares in which he plays with guns and is held underwater until he blacks out.

Call it a case of life imitating art. Copies of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird have become hot property at Auckland libraries.

John Hart talks to Craig Sisterson about the roller coaster road to publication of his latest thriller.

What a phenomenon James McNeish is. Literary fashions, figures and feuds parade past and all the while McNeish is working steadily and skilfully away.

When I found myself counting the words in sentences rather than actually absorbing them, I realised it was time to give up on the book.

In book publishing, there is James Patterson - and basically everyone else.

From rampaging dinosaurs and Maori myths to Shakespeare and social issues, our best writers for children and young adults tell stories about them all.

A comic book creator and real estate heir has been accused of torturing and murdering his girlfriend in Hollywood.

This year's big important NZ rock book has arrived and it's by the guy who founded Flying Nun. Here, he comes Clean about why and how he wrote it.

COMMENT: Sometimes I can confront my grief - walk right into the physical and emotional pain - but at other times I simply know I'm not up to the task.

When a driver ran through a stop sign, killing 12-year-old daughter Abi two years ago today, Lucy Hone used research into grief to try to ease the pain.

Elspeth Muir examines the culture of binge-drinking that she, too, fell into and the deeper issues it may conceal.

Stephen Jewell talks to British author Chris Cleave about bravery, racism and how he avoids getting stuck in a writing groove.