Sebastian Faulks

For book lovers, turning the final page of a thrilling read can be a bittersweet experience. Now bookshops are capitalising on readers' appetite for extra pages to boost their fight back against the online retailers threatening their future, by signing up big name authors to pen bonus material exclusively for their customers. Fans of Chocolat author Joanne Harris who buy her follow-up novel, Peaches For Monsieur Le Curé, from Waterstone's will find it includes an extra chapter not available to those who snap up their copy at a reduced rate …

Has J K Rowling has been "snubbed" by a rather dubious literary award? Rowling's "The Casual Vacancy" is not on the shortlist for the Literary Review's Bad Sex award. The "prize" is given to “draw attention to the crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."

As per The Bookseller:

The judges said that after a “flood” of nominations they had considered Rowling’s book, but: “ultimately concluded that the book’s sins were venal compared with the competition."

—Brian Howard

The Random House Group has launched an ‘emotigraph’ digital campaign, charting the mood and thoughts of the digital world, in order to promote the new novel by Sebastian Faulks, A Possible Life.

Having launched today, the emotigraph will capture and display pictures, text and posts, updating constantly to illustrate the current mood of the digital world based on ‘hashtags’ used by Twitter and Instagram users.

 Now that I’ve directed you to satisfying summer reads , it’s time to return to the books that inspired my love of backlist. The third book in the “Book Lust Rediscoveries” series is Frederick Dillen’s wry, funny, and touching novel Fool , which introduces us to one of the most complex main characters in contemporary fiction. “For Christ sake don’t become a fluffmeister” are the last words Barnaby Griswold’s father ever says to him. Yet a fluffmeister, a fool, is Barnaby’s default position in life, as much as