Books & Poetry

Are you unhappy? Ever been passed over for promotion? Perhaps you suffer from an embarrassing medical complaint, ontological insecurity or are merely feeling a little credit-crunched? If so, Tibor...

We take toilets for granted, convinced that they will always be there for us, no matter how much paper we stuff into them or the number of household pets we try to flush away. Journalist Rose...

Biddy Baxter never forgot the boilerplate brush-off she received from Enid Blyton after writing to the author as a child. One of her first tasks as producer of ‘Blue Peter’ was to...

As an atheistic pornographer with a cocaine addiction swerves his car off a mountain road and is ravished by the ensuing blaze, divine retribution is not the first thing on his mind. The nameless...

Lauren Child, author of the ‘Clarice Bean’ and ‘Charlie and Lola’ books, has worked her way into the hearts of a generation of children by invoking their endearing speech...

Candace Bushnell has never particularly impressed as an author. She’s sharp and witty, but thus far her work has borne the hallmark of a columnist who’s over-extended herself. The book...

This inspired collection of four stories uses the liver as framework and controlling metaphor – there’s a tale for each lobe – but is less interested in the organ as a metabolic...

Wilsonworld. Where score-settling  predominates (take that Eric Hobsbawm! John Mortimer, I spit in your eye! En garde Tina Brown!) and prissiness rules (it’s J Enoch Powell, and...

It’s no surprise that Gerbrand Bakker worked as a gardener and a subtitler for nature films before writing his debut novel. The pages are infused with the sights and scents of the Dutch land....