By Andrew Donaldson for The Times IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK Black Irish, Stephen Talty (Headline) R235 Compelling, atmospheric crime debut from an established non-fiction writer and a promising start to a procedural series. It is set in a somewhat paranoid Irish-American community in Buffalo, in the impoverished US rust belt, with prickly police officer Abbie Kearney, keen to prove herself, on the trail of a serial ...

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By Jane Shiling for The Daily Telegraph Some natures are drawn to hazard: to explore the familiar from a vertiginously different perspective. The rewards can be great, but so can the risks. Julian Barnes's new book brings together Nadar, the 19th-century inventor and photographer, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, Colonel Fred Burnaby, the strongest man in the British Army - and balloons, in a luminous meditation on love and ...

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By Sally Partridge for The Times Imagine the surprise when Anthony Horowitz was commissioned by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to resurrect the bones of the legendary Sherlock Holmes. Horowitz, along with other teen serialists such as Christopher Pike and RL Stine, has been nourishing the current rising generation of readers. But a closer look at his career ...

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By Carolyn Meads for the Sunday Times At the beginning of your novel it is explained that a snowdrop is "a corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw". When did you come across the term and what made you think it would be a good title and theme for a book? I encountered it while working in Russia as a foreign correspondent. ...

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By Zoë Hinis for The Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine: Kate Mosse's most latest novel is Citadel, published by Orion As co-founder of the Women's Prize for Fiction, are female authors getting the coverage they deserve in terms of prizes and literary prestige? Things are changing. We're seeing more women on shortlists for prizes, sometimes outnumbering male authors. Women have traditionally bought and written the majority of books ...

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By Tymon Smith for the Sunday Times: This year is the 15th anniversary of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. How have you kept it going so long and what makes it so popular? I have had no difficulty in continuing it because I so enjoy the characters and their setting. I think one of the reasons it has proved so popular ...

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By Sophy Kohler for the Sunday Times: The historian in Laurent Binet's HHhH describes himself as "[writing] two pages for every thousand I read". What is the scope of research behind The Second World War and how long did it take to write? I would have thought the ratio was a lot higher than that. In many ways I could say that The Second ...

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By Andrew Donaldson for The Times IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK Petite Mort, by Beatrice Hitchman (Serpent's Tail, R195) A BEGUILING and erotic murder mystery set in the world of the silent movies of Paris circa 1913. Complex and cerebral, the novel unfolds in a series of "back-stories" as Adèle - once an aspiring actress but who landed up in a costume department tormented by the ...

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AFP Relaxnews: The latest James Bond novel named Solo will follow the suave British spy on an African adventure, its author William Boyd revealed. "The journey Bond goes on takes in three continents -- with the main focus honing in on Africa," Boyd told the London Book Fair. "It's what happens to Bond in Africa that generates his ...

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By William Saunderson-Meyer for the Sunday Times

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