[ News
| Homes
| Life
| Entertainment
| History
| Science
| Community
| Shop ]
| Sport
| Culture
| Cars
| Money
| Broadband
| Learning
| Health
| Dating
| Games ]
[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
Home | Hot Books | Tasters | Biography | Welsh Writers | Blasphemy and Belief | Festival History | Find out more
Looking for something a bit different to read? Here's a taste of 18 intriguing authors – some new, some established. You can catch them all at this year's Hay Festival ...
... and you can win all these books in our cryptic quiz!
Minaret by Leila Aboulela
Aboulela's first novel The Translator was a quiet critical success. Her third tells the story of Najwa, a young Westernised Sudanese woman whose family is forced into political exile in London. Newly poor, Najwa takes a job as a house cleaner and awakens both to Islam and to a problematic love for the son of her employer.
Havoc in its Third Year by Ronan Bennett
An exploration of the darker aspects of religion and individual conscience in 17th-century England. The Puritans are pressing coroner John Brigges to condemn to death a Catholic woman accused of murdering her baby. But Brigges suspects the accusers may have something to hide. Bennett's earlier novel The Catastrophist was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Prize.
The White Album and Where I'm From
by Joan Didion
American journalist Didion became an iconic figure in the 60s and 70s for her stylish writings on the counter-culture. The White Album, first published in 1979, is her signature collection, and includes dispatches about the Black Panthers, Janis Joplin and The Doors, and the Manson Family. Didion, who also writes novels, recently published Where I'm From, which traces the history of her family.
This Human Season
by Louise Dean
Dean, who won last year's Betty Trask Prize with her first novel Becoming Strangers, has set her second in Belfast at the end of the 1970s. Kathleen's son Sean, an IRA member, is on dirty protest in the Maze prison; ex-army John Dunn, a Protestant, has just started work there as a guard. In alternating chapters, Kathleen and John tell this story of violence, politics and human entanglements.
26A
by Diana Evans
Already hailed as 'the great Neasden novel', this is the story of identical twins Georgia and Bessie growing up in a mixed-race family in 1980s north London. First-time author Diana Evans has inevitably been compared with fellow north-London novelist Zadie Smith, although her writing is more inward and tender, and the issues of identity are personal rather than political.
Asterix and Cleopatra
by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge
The sixth book in the Asterix series is a classic, and a great place to start if you're lucky enough to have the discovery of the cartoon Gauls still ahead of you. First published in France in 1965, and in this translation in 1969, it chronicles the antics of Asterix and Obelix as they travel with Druid Getafix to Egypt, to help architect Edifis build a palace for Cleopatra. Busy drawings, excruciating puns and lots of sly references to 60s culture.
Wreckage
by Niall Griffiths
Two small-time crooks leave an elderly woman in a coma when they rob her post office in rural Wales. Back in Liverpool, they try to invest the proceeds in cocaine, falling foul of some seriously vicious characters. This is the fourth novel from Niall Griffiths, who is making a name for himself with inventive narratives and lyrical, muscular prose.
Desertion
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In a small town near Mombasa, Kenya, in 1899, Englishman Michael Pearce falls in love with Rehana, who has an air of tragedy. Their passionate affair has consequences that travel down the years to 1950s Zanzibar, and another love is triggered as the island moves towards revolution. Gurnah writes with grace and intensity.
Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and life
by Richard Jones
Current nanotechnology – the manufacture of systems of molecular size – is based on hard, durable materials, but Jones, who is Professor of Physics at Sheffield University, argues that scientists should be seeking to replicate the tiny 'soft machines' found in biological cells. He explains why soft substances work best at the microscopic scale, and explores the potential of soft 'nanobots' in medicine, computers and renewable energy.
Delay
by Tim Krabbe
Krabbe's latest hero, Dutchman Jacques Bekker, uses a stopover in Sydney to look up his first love, Monique. He is swiftly drawn into an intrigue that takes him and Monique to dangerous places, not least their own teenage past. This new relationship thriller promises well from the author of The Vanishing.
Peter Brook and the Way of the Theatre
by Michael Kustow
The director Peter Brook has spent his life pushing the boundaries of theatre and creating new ways of experiencing the world's greatest dramas. His radical productions include the famous 'white box' Midsummer Night's Dream and the epic Mahabharata at his Théatre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. This exploration of his work is based on interviews with Brook and the actors, writers and fellow directors who have worked with him.
Two in a Boat
by Gwyneth Lewis
Poet Gwyneth Lewis, fighting her way out of depression and alcoholism, decided the perfect remedy was to sail round the world with her husband Leighton. But first they had to teach themselves how to sail. This is a story of marital and maritime tempests, and of the ghosts of earlier seafarers, vividly and wittily told by the award-winning poet.
The Last Llanelli Train
by Robert Lewis
Lewis's debut novel mixes disturbing thriller with black comedy and takes shambolic private eye Robert Llewellyn, and the reader, into the darkest parts of Bristol, Wales and points west.
Where You're At: Notes from the frontline of a hip-hop planet
by Patrick Neate
From Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo, from Johannesburg to Qatar, many young people identify with the music that was born in the New York housing projects. Music journalist and Whitbread-award-winning novelist Neate offers a dazzling tour of the global phenomenon that hip hop has become.
Putin's Russia
by Anna Politkovskaya
The campaigning human rights journalist, acclaimed for her book on Chechnya, examines Russia under President Putin. Politkovskaya offers behind-the-scenes reporting of current affairs and reveals how the dealings of the military, the mafia and the political elite affect the lives of ordinary people. These 'jottings made on the margins of life in Russia' have incisiveness, humanity and an unforgiving eye for the misuse of power.
Big Bang
by Simon Singh
The author of Fermat's Last Theorem takes the reader on a tour of the history of cosmology, via Copernicus, Newton, Einstein and a plethora of other, less well-known names. He shows how humanity's understanding of the universe has developed and offers handy summaries of the essential physics and chemistry behind the different theories.
Hope in the Dark: The never-surrender guide
to how the world gets changed
by Rebecca Solnit
A rousing chronicle of what people-power has achieved in the past 50 years. Author and activist Solnit analyses events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico and the huge anti-war movement generated by the Iraq invasion, and argues that a sophisticated and supple 'movement of movements' should make us optimistic for the 21st century.
Divided Kingdom
by Rupert Thomson
Thomson conjures up a dystopian Britain divided into four Quarters - Red, Yellow, Blue and Green - to which people are assigned according to their personality type. The Quarters correspond to the old anatomical idea of the four bodily humours and their moods: sanguine, irritable, melancholy and phlegmatic, and the novel charts one boy's travels around the divided land.
Graphical version of this page