Matthew Richardson

Benjamin Black – aka John Banville – is back for another round of detective fun with A Death in Summer. Does the crossover magic work for a fifth outing?   In the Guardian, Mark Lawson admires the way Black’s hero, Quirke, alludes to heroes of the detective genre: “He is known only by his surname

1) The Edinburgh Book Festival has begun in earnest this week. The festival is one of the lengthiest in the country, running from 13-29 of August. The festival was originally launched in 1983 and staged every two years before becoming a yearly feature in 1997. The Book festival links in with the other festivals in

1.) Colin Dexter’s famous creation, Inspector Endeavour Morse, is due to fill our screens once more. ITV has announced that a new Morse film will be on the box next year. However, it comes with a twist. The film will be set in 1965 and feature a younger version of Morse, who will be played

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is a rare example of a dying breed: the collected short stories. Spanning from 1966 to 2000, the singularly spindly tales document the heady social change of the period in question. But more than that, they demonstrate the delightfully tricksy nature of the short story as

Margaret Drabble has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist and biographer. But do her short stories match the standard of her other work?   Stevie Davies, in the Independent, certainly thinks so. He confesses to having been ‘desperately moved’ by the collection. In it, she argues, ‘Drabble exposes and anatomises the tissue

1.) Last week, the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2011 was announced. The lucky authors included established writers like Sebastian Barry and Alan Hollinghurst alongside first-time novelists like Stephen Kelman. The presence of independent publishers attracted admiration in the press. For the betting man, current odds have Hollinghurst primed to nab his second Booker,

1) Last week, P.D. James was awarded the Theakstons Old Peculiar Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. James has been publishing for fifty years. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, appeared in 1962. Her most recent work, the non-fiction book Talking About Detective Fiction, was published in 2009. Speaking recently to the BBC, James hinted

1) Last week, a Jane Austen manuscript sold for £993,250 at Sotheby’s. The manuscript contains the writing of an unfinished Austen novel, The Watsons, complete with numerous revisions and amendments. It has been bought by the Bodleian library in Oxford. Speaking to the BBC, Dr Chris Fletcher claimed: ‘It’s worth every single penny. This was

1) The final Harry Potter film is on general release tomorrow. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Pt 2 has garnered blanket coverage in Fleet Street’s cultural supplements. Reviews so far have been surprisingly promising: Kaleem Aftab, of the Independent, declares that ‘the wait was worth it’ and maintains the film ‘is not a disappointment’,

Following our recent piece on the critical response to Aravind Adiga’s Last Man In Tower, here is the Book Blog’s review by Matthew Richardson. Aravind Adiga’s new novel, Last Man in Tower, is ostensibly a book about Mumbai. It feeds from the sprawl and bustle of that maturing city, meditating on the riches of commercial

How do you top a Booker winner? With difficulty, one imagines. But, in Last Man in Tower, has Aravind Adiga done his best with an impossible brief?   In the Guardian, Alex Clark argues that, while the novel ‘can tend slightly towards the schematic’, it has a ‘broader and more forgiving feel than The White

1) John le Carré recently won this year’s winner of the Goethe Medal. The Medal is for writers ‘who have performed outstanding service for the German language and international cultural relations’. The spymaster honed his German skills while studying at the University of Berne and Lincoln College, Oxford. Traditionally, le Carré has been a reluctant

1) The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize has a turbulent history. The prize came into being after the NCR prize fell into disrepute. Originally kept afloat courtesy of an anonymous donor, the BBC began sponsoring the prize in 2002 through its new channel BBC Four. This year, as part of the BBC’s Year of Books, a

Wish You Were Here is Graham Swift’s ninth novel, and he adopts a trending topic among the literati, namely the ‘war on terror’. But he does so at a slant. Rather than the dinner-party debate staged by his contemporaries, Swift domesticates the war on terror within a very personal story of loss. The novel centres

1.) Clive James has returned to TV criticism. He was poached out of retirement by the Telegraph who proudly billed their latest catch as the ‘world’s greatest TV critic’. It sees him resume where his groundbreaking Observer column, written between 1972-82, left off. Widely cited as turning TV criticism into serious art, James collected his

Our coverage of the final days of this year’s Hay Festival begins today. Here’s a selection of facts and myths about the world’s grandest literary festival. 1) This year’s reconciliation between Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul joins a long list of memorable events at the festival. In 2009, Ruth Padel held her resignation press conference

James Bond is the great chameleon. From the velvety burr of Connery through to the tango tan of Moore and the aluminium pecs of Craig. And then, of course, there is the Bond of the books. Between covers (of the literary sort, at least), Bond transforms again: refrigerated in the black-and-white of print, he becomes

Now Bond is really back. Carte Blanche, Jeffery Deaver’s addition to the Bond series, is on the shelves. Publishing might be enduring hard times, but no expense was spared for 007. The official website had a clock ticking 24-style down to the novel’s midnight release. And the launch event was, as Katie Allen of the

The death of the book has been much exaggerated, it seems. Figures released recently by the Publishers Association show a marked increase in sales of digital books, with total consumer sales rocketing up 318 per cent since 2009. However, there’s no need to dismantle the bookshelves just yet. The digital slice of the book market