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Holiday Gift Books for Children
From a 200th-anniversary edition of Clement C. Moore’s Christmas Eve tale to lightheartedly loopy poems for every day of the year. THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMASBy Clement C. MooreIllustrated by Ella BeechThe Folio Society. 42 pp. $60.(Ages 3 and up) Does the world need yet another book illustrating the ubiquitous 1823 poem about stockings hung with…
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An Abundance of Old-Fashioned Yarns to Close Out the Year
A secret, a disappearance, a frozen body and a mysterious stranger — these historical novels have something for everyone. This has been a banner year for historical fiction and it’s not over yet. Here, for your holiday consideration, are six recently published historical novels that would make fine gifts — or fine rewards when you…
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Steaming-Hot Romance Novels for Frosty Winter Nights
Our romance columnist recommends four new books. Romance glows twice as bright when nights grow long. I ushered in winter’s first frost with Alix E. Harrow’s STARLING HOUSE (Tor, 320 pp., $28.99), which is perfect for when you want that Shirley Jackson creepy manor sauce drizzled over the small-town romance plot, in a way that’s…
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9 Mysteries — Some New, Some Old — You Won’t Be Able to Put Down
Need a little diversion? Our crime columnist has plenty of books to recommend. With the holidays upon us after a long and fraught year, carving out a few hours to lose yourself in a good mystery feels restorative. Here are crime novels of all categories, new and old, which will help you do just that.…
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Hernan Diaz: ‘The Tintin books were problematic but they were also gorgeous and gripping’
My earliest reading memoryBecause I grew up in Stockholm, it’s not surprising that my earliest literary memories should revolve around Astrid Lindgren. The first novel I ever read may have been Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter. My favourite book growing upThroughout my childhood I was obsessed with Tintin. It was clear to me even then that…
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Katherine Howe on the Joy of Writing Pirates
For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient…
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Hodder & Stoughton scores two more novels by the author of Knockemout
Hodder & Stoughton has scooped two more novels by “romance sensation” Lucy Score. Commercial fiction publishing director Phoebe Morgan acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Mr Fixer-Upper and The Christmas Fix from Flavia Viotti of the Bookcase Literary Agency. The books will be published in 2024 and 2025. The author has written the Knockemout trilogy (Hodder Paperbacks)…
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SoA announces 50 works shortlisted for translation prizes
The Society of Authors (SoA) has announced the 50 works shortlisted across eight prizes for translation, with a shared £28,000 prize fund. The winners will be will be celebrated at a ceremony on Wednesday 7th February 2024, at the British Library’s Knowledge Centre. The shortlist for the inaugural Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize, which…
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Studied Science to Write Novels
Portrait of FUKUDA Kazuyo A family of descendants of a ninja who have the special characteristic of not needing to sleep are the protagonists in mystery writer FUKUDA Kazuyo’s “Fukurō no Taidō” (The Owl’s Quickening). In this second volume of the “Fukurō” (Owl) series, the family delve into the depths of gene doping in the sports…
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Would I use AI to write my novels? I’d get better results from a monkey with an iPhone
This summer two worlds – literature and technology – collided. News stories began appearing about authors suing OpenAI and Meta for using their works to train their large language models “without consent, without credit and without compensation”. I read them with increasing curiosity, and then I found a review of a novella, Death of an…