The book that the world fell in love with, The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared, will soon be movie the world fell in love with. The first trailer has arrived and it looks absolutely brilliant. The film doesn’t come out until August 21, so if you haven’t read the book don’t worry, you still have time! Grab a copy of The One Hundred Year Old M... Read more

Are you a fan of Anne Summers Reports? Lately it has hosted some wonderful articles and opinions on the future of the Australian Book Industry. We thought we’d share some with you. Click the links below to read the full pieces. Fifty Shades of Bookselling by Foong Ling Kong Foong Ling has nearly two decades’ experience as an editor and a publisher of books across a wide range of genres. S... Read more

Gustave von Ashcenbach Thomas Mann’s hero from Death in Venice was based on the composer Gustav Mahler, one of the world’s foremost composers at the turn of the 20th century. Uncle Tom The prototype for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s black slave in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was Josiah Henson, who achieved fame as a Methodist preacher after escaping from the South. Shylock Shakespeare&#... Read more

Q: Have you read the latest Hilary Mantel? A: No. I prefer her earlier work… It’s easy to imagine two cavemen standing at the foot of a rock painting and grunting softly over the irony of using mammoth blood to draw a wounded deer. Readers, like all passionate art lovers, tend to argue over the merit of works at the drop of a hat. All arguments over books boil down to one common poi... Read more

Irish author Eimear McBride has won the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction with her astonishing debut novel, A Girl is Half-Formed Thing. The chair of the judging panel, Helen Fraser, said: “This has been a fantastic year for women’s fiction, as the quality of both the long- and shortlist made clear, and I think what has emerged as the worthy winner is a really original new voic... Read more

Booktopia is so excited to be in an exclusive partnership with New South Books to present the debut novel of Arjun Basu. If you’re a fan of twitter, chances are you’re a fan of Arjun Basu. Arjun has over 142,000 followers on twitter, where his 140-word short stories have drawn a huge following and a mountain of imitators. We caught up with Arjun to chat about his new book, writing c... Read more

After his events at this year’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, John Purcell’s bestselling Secret Lives of Emma trilogy has reached new audiences. We asked a fan of the series, writer Ariane Beeston, to share her thoughts. Unfortunately this wonderful review will do little to stop the boss gloating around the office. For much of my early twenties, I spent hours wandering through the... Read more

More Australians are reading, and they are reading more often, says Arts in Daily Life, an independent study commissioned by the Australia Council, which provides insight into how Australians participate in the arts today. The report provides a comparison of shifting attitudes and behavioural trends by benchmarking the findings in 2013 against those from the original study in 2009. Novels are b... Read more

What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner Women are the monogamous sex. Women crave intimacy and emotional connection. Women don’t want sex with strangers. Right? Wrong. Could ‘the fairer sex’ in fact be more sexually aggressive and anarchic than men? In What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire, critically acclaimed ... Read more

American author and poet Maya Angelou, a trailblazing voice on race and gender best known for her groundbreaking autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, has died at age 86 in North Carolina. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She receive... Read more