If your son was a drug addict and you booted him out of home would you write a book about it, call it a "true story" and then name him? That's what novelist Julie Myerson has done. Publication of her book, The Lost Child, has been rushed forward by her publisher Bloomsbury to capitalis...

Well, I've played the U2 album quite a lot in recent days (thanks to my new CrackBerry), and I've come to the conclusion it's a "grower" and that, on the whole, it is pretty damn good. My favourite track is Breathe and this version, performed on Friday Night with Johnathon Ross, is great. Only Bono ...

 Fiction - paperback; Quercus; 181 pages; 2009. (Translated from the German by Anthea Bell) There were four things going for Andrea Maria Schenkel's The Murder Farm even before I started reading it: it's a crime novel; the author's won several awards for it; it's foreign; and it's from Quercus,...

Two weeks ago I'd never even heard of Mad Men. Then I saw Series 2 being advertised on BBC4 and read a lot of rave reviews about it. So, I went out and bought the DVD boxed set of Series 1 (£12.95 on Amazon) and have spent the past two weekends completely absorbed by it. It's one of those s...

You know how Scandinavian crime fiction is all the rage? Well, apparently the Irish are going to be the next big thing, if you believe this article in the Irish Times. Tana French is leading the charge. I'm yet to read her debut novel In the Woods, but three other Irish authors I have read -- Be...

Fiction – paperback; Sceptre; 378 pages; 2009. Chris Cleave's The Other Hand was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Novel Award. It is one of those books I kept picking up in bookstores and then putting down. I was intrigued but also skeptical. The blurb, surely, was a marketing ploy? This is what...

Fiction – paperback; Virago Modern Classics; 224 pages; 2006. Before I discovered the wonderful world of book blogs I had never heard of the English writer Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975). I simply associated the name with the Hollywood actress.  I made a mental note to read something from her ...

I'm afraid I've become a bit of a sucker for those newly designed Penguin Modern Classics. I'm not sure whether it's the lovely matt covers, the striking images or the use of my favourite font (Helvetica) which does it, but regardless I seem to be snapping them up left, right and cen...

Confession time: I don't think much of the new U2 song Get On Your Boots . Everyone seems to feel it's radically different to anything they've done before but I don't think they've actually moved on at all. Plus, the lyrics just sound like piss-poor t-shirt slogans. I didn't ...

On Saturday afternoon when I sat down and wrote my post about thirsty koalas, the news coming out of Australia about the bush fires in Victoria was pretty terrible. At that stage the death toll was 14 and comparisons were being made with Ash Wednesday in 1983. I have scary memories of Ash Wednesday....