Reviews & features: Books

Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011 line up highlights

Grant Morrison, Will Self and Jo Nesbø among highlights

A selection of international authors, a bunch of Scottish novelists, an array of top non-fiction scribes, a host of children’s writers and a series of exciting innovations: yes, it’s just another Edinburgh International Book Festival programme. A cliché…

Books on cinema - round-up

How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, Tough Without A Gun, The Faber Book of French Cinema

As is always the way in Scotland, summer is kind of here, and now is the time to lie in the grass with that growing pile of tosh novels. But let’s face it, you are going to win a lot more kudos from your film-obsessed mates if you create a tower of…

Leanne Shapton

Crafting a wholly original literary conceit

Title aside, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry is one of the most intriguing US publications from the last 12 months. The story of a couple’s…

Top 5 kids shows at Edinburgh Book Festival 2010

The festival’s last lap features some iconic characters, authors and places

Julia Donaldson Along with Gruffalo illustrator Axel Scheffler, JD’s first event contains an impressive amount of songs, stories and drawings, while event number two is a solo affair in which she will regale the nippers and their guardians with a tale…

Rupert Thomson and Maggie Gee set for Edinburgh Book Festival appearance

Author of This Party’s Got to Stop

With This Party’s Got to Stop, the author of Death of a Murderer and Divided Kingdom has penned a darkly humorous account of how he and his brothers returned to their Eastbourne family home for seven months after their father passed away in 1984. This…

Peter Mandelson appearing at Book Fest

The Dark Lord Cometh

Love him or loath him, it’s sure to be a fascinating night at the Edinburgh International Book Festival when the Prince of Darkness heads to the capital. Following the recent furore surrounding the penning of his swiftly scribed memoirs, Peter Mandelson…

Will Self: ‘The Last Refuge of Greatness’

As part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, everyone’s favourite funny-looking writer, satirist, aesthete and husband of Deborah Orr discusses his lifelong fascination with scale, and investigates the way in which changes in scale influence artistic…

Mark Beaumont to give talk at Edinburgh Book Festival

Enduring the elements on two wheels and two feet

It’s been an incredible year for Mark Beaumont. Nine months cycling and mountaineering, solo, down the backbone of America were followed by three months of back-to-back public appearances. But before writing his second book – the first covers his…

Ewan Morrison - Tales from the Mall

Author's latest project contains pictures from shopping centres

Can you give us five words to describe Tales from the Mall? Anecdotes, confessions, myths, underbelly, consumerism. Which authors should be more famous than they are now? Wishing fame on a writer is tantamount to desiring their demise as…

Tom Chatfield talk on hidden educational power of video games

Pat Kane chairs Edinburgh Book Festival talk

By the end of 2008, the annual sales figure for video games was $40billion, outstripping the movie business by some way. Here’s another stat: 99% of teenage boys and 94% of teenage girls have played a video game. Tom Chatfield’s Fun Inc takes apart the…

Vidal Sassoon

The style icon talks to Claire Sawers about his life and book

At the height of his celebrity, in the peak of his playboy yachts-and-champagne years, Vidal Sassoon was aboard a boat in Capri, where he was spending the summer. Bobbing in the bay, surrounded by friends, Sassoon looked over at an English boy who was a…

Robin Robertson

Poet with an impressive range talks about his newest batch

Though widely known as one of British publishing’s finest editors, Robin Robertson is also a highly acclaimed poet. Since his 1997 debut collection A Painted Field, he has been the recipient of numerous prizes, both for books and individual poems. Most…

Lauren St John at the Book Festival

Writing for a more honest and passionate reader

Remember those series of books you would read as a child? Remember how, when you discovered a new one, you’d just have to devour it as quickly as possible, gobbling up boarding-school tales of lacrosse and midnight feasts and adventure after adventure…

Armitage's first appearance at the Book Festival

Decorated poet goes in a new direction and talks poetry performances

This will be the first Book Festival appearance of Simon Armitage CBE, since the nod was given the much-adored Huddersfield poet’s way in the Queen’s birthday honours earlier this year. ‘Flattered,’ is how he felt. ‘That’s it. Just flattered.’ He’s lost…

Louise Welsh's Naming the Bones

The author's newest novel meanders between boozers and burial grounds

Louise Welsh’s latest novel was inspired during a trip to Germany, but set in her beloved Scotland, though it’s not the reverie of an expat looking through tartan-tinted glasses. Naming the Bones meanders between Edinburgh boozers and Highland burial…

Nick Kent: The rock journo who became the story

Apathy for the Devil will have plenty to talk about at the Book Festival

‘When you get right down to it, the memory is a deceitful organ to have to rely on,’ reflects notorious rock scribe Nick Kent in the opening lines of his memoir, Apathy for the Devil. But even Kent’s near-fatal rock’n’roll lifestyle couldn’t wholly…

Anna Politkovskaya

Marking the work of the assassinated Russian Journalist

The Book Festival is aiming to mark the work of the assassinated Russian journalist every year and in 2010, Charlotte Square Gardens opens its doors to Arch Tait, who translated her books, and Masha Karp, the London-based journo who works with the…

Havers and Blethers brings new spoken-word show to Edinburgh

Daily show features writers, poets, actors and musicians

One of the great things about this time of year is the number of off-Fringe festivals that spring up, like this daily spoken-word-based show, hosted by Kirsty-Jacqueline Lingard and featuring writers, poets, actors and musicians performing short…

Roddy Doyle set for two events at Edinburgh Book Festival

He may be one of Ireland’s greatest living writers, but Roddy Doyle is someone who cares not for being trapped into a single generic pigeonhole as his two events at Charlotte Square Gardens prove. In one, he discusses the history of modern Ireland…

Zaiba Malik

Attempting to dispel a few myths about Islam

Zaiba Malik’s experience of her Muslim faith has been one of humility, humour, exploration, and horror. It has taken her from the comedy and anxieties of a childhood in Bradford to imprisonment in Bangladesh for ‘anti-state activities’, while filming a…

Emily Mackie

Delving into some dark places

One of the most talked-about British debuts of 2010 was Emily Mackie’s And This is True. It featured a 15-year-old boy Nevis and his author dad Marshall who carried on their passive existence living in and out of a white Ford Transit van. Since his…

Joseph Stiglitz

Helping us mend our economic ways

Can money make us happy? This timeless question, made all the more pressing by the brassic ‘financial climate’ we’re shivering through at the moment, is to be addressed by celebrated thinkers in the Meaning of Money strand at this year’s Book Festival…

5 Questions - Nora Chassler

Reviewing her debut novel last year, we described Nora Chassler as ‘a distinctive new voice’. Here, she responds by taking on our Q&A...

Jackie Kay: Finding Family

Red Dust Road is a remarkable account full of passion and humour

The ideas of belonging and identity are at the very core of what it means to be human, but those themes become much more complex when the person in question is adopted. The adopted person’s search for their biological parents is a familiar narrative…

Jah Wobble

Jon Wardle’s memoir about his life as Jah Wobble has given him a taste for writing.

‘I was encouraged to write a book by the people in my band,’ says John Wardle, the English musician and singer who goes by the name Jah Wobble on his tour posters. ‘I’d tell them stories from years ago and have them in stitches, so when they’d tell me I…