Alain de Botton‘s School of Life series is determined to reinvigorate and rehabilitate the self-help genre. Alain, as we know, has done a great deal towards achieving this goal himself. His entertaining and informative guides to life – Religion for Atheists, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work – have lead many to re-examine their lives and helped... Read more

I interview writers every week here on the Booktopia Blog. My Ten Terrifying Questions have been answered by over 250 published authors ranging from mega selling global stars like Jackie Collins and Lee Child to brilliant, relatively unknown debut authors such as Miles Franklin shortlisted Favel Parret and  Rebecca James. In each of these interviews I ask the following question: Q. What advice ... Read more

The Orange Prize for Fiction Winner 2012 From the Orange Prize website: 19.15pm, London, 30 May 2012 — American author Madeline Miller has won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut novel The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury). 2012 marks the seventeenth year of the Orange Prize, which celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world. At an ... Read more

This is the biggest event of the YA year. The two toughest competitors in the YA world will come head to head in a one-off heavy-weight bout on 12th June, 2012. In red corner, Lauren Kate, author of The Fallen Series, one of the highest selling YA series ever, the darling of Random House Australia, and in the white corner, Richelle Mead, author of The Vampire Academy novels, the biggest thing i... Read more

Walker Books Australia is so excited about Broken they have put together a prize pack worth $200 to ensure they have your full attention. I took Broken home and gave it to my tame teen reader who read it in a couple of nights. She absolutely loved it. I tried to get her to do a review for me but she gave me that look, you know the look, and went off to read another book. So how do you win this ... Read more

In Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, Kate Summerscale casts a spotlight on a little known chapter in history. This is a very thoroughly researched case study detailing the true story of an unhappily married woman in Victorian Society.  In this, the age of Cougar Town, Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, when women are applauded for chasing younger men and pr... Read more

HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY PATRICK WHITE Patrick White was born on this day in England in 1912. He was then taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham College and King’s College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Austr... Read more

Fated– Available 1.06.12 Strange things have been happening to Daire Santos. Animals follow her, crows mock her, glowing people appear from nowhere. Worried that Daire’s having a breakdown, her mother sends her to stay with the grandmother she’s never met, who lives on the dusty plains of Enchantment, New Mexico. There Daire crosses paths with Dace, a gorgeous guy with unearth... Read more

The Bourne Legacy Hits Screens in August[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSzy9qQ3mDE&rel=0] GET YOURSELF IN THE MOOD WITH THE LATEST BOURNE NOVEL: The Bourne Imperative– Available 12.06.12. An amnesiac on the edge of death presents a challenge much too close to home for Bourne in the latest from Robert Ludlum’s bestselling series. When Jason Bourne pulls a drowning man fr... Read more

The Booktopia Book Guru asks Daniel H. Wilson author of Amped and Robopocalypse Six Sharp Questions —————————————–  1. Congratulations, you have a new book. What is it about and what does it mean to you? Amped tells the story of a guy swept up in a near future civil rights movement. The furore is caused when peo... Read more