I’m going away for the whole month of October and will not be writing the Buzz for November, so you get a break from me. Instead, the Buzz will be in John Purcell’s capable hands. So for the first time this year I get to choose the books  that are going with me on the basis of pleasure – or at least anticipated pleasure. In case you are interested in what is coming with me here is the lis... Read more

The Secret Lives of Emma series has sold more than 50,000 copies and last year made Purcell one of the best-selling debut authors in Australia. As head of marketing for Australian online bookstore Booktopia, Purcell has tracked a further kick in sales since his unmasking. Read more

There’s nothing tame about this bunch. This month is all about extremes. Extremes of desire, of  behaviour, of crisis situations, of people tested to the limits of desire, survival, transgression and boundaries crossed. Find out how far you’d be prepared to go. Live dangerously. Pick up a book. N.B. Caroline Baum and former Buzz editor, Toni Whitmont, will be chairing sessions at a ... Read more

Looking for things to see at The Sydney Writer’s Festival? Come along and hear some experts from Booktopia chat about the wonderful world of books… Read more

Booktopia’s Editorial Director Caroline Baum lets us in on her amazing bookish US adventure Good to see Anna Funder settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a street that feels like something out of Henry James. It was used to shoot a TV adaptation of Dickens’ A Winter’s Tale a few months ago, and they laid down fake snow. Each house has an individual gas lamp in its front yard. I have no idea... Read more

Booktopia’s Editorial Director Caroline Baum is on assignment in the Big Apple. She shares an experience of musically titillating proportions. So I’m in New York flicking through the show listings in Time Out when an off-Broadway musical catches my eye. Its called Cuff Me, which also works when you say the first word backwards. I book a ticket online, managing to score the last one ... Read more

Booktopia’s Editorial Director Caroline Baum sat down with award-winner Ashley Hay to discuss her new book The Railwayman’s Wife. In a small town on the land’s edge, in the strange space at a war’s end, a widow, a poet and a doctor each try to find their own peace, and their own new story. In Thirroul, in 1948, people chase their dreams through the books in the railway&#... Read more

Booktopia’s Editorial Director Caroline Baum shares her thoughts on book design today. Have you noticed how many book covers these days are not so much designed as cut and pasted? They all seem to be afflicted with a common disease: Getty-itis. Everybody is sourcing images from the same ginormous photo library and it’s producing a kind of sameness, a lack of aesthetic diversity that is ma... Read more

HEAVY HITTER OF 2012 BRING UP THE BODIES  by Hilary Mantel What is there left to say? I just wanted to join the chorus of universal admiration for the second volume of Mantel’s remarkable feat of embodying Henry Vlll’s chief strategist, Thomas Cromwell. Like many, I found it easier to read than Wolf Hall, because the narrative treads more familiar ground (the waning of Anne Boleyn’s power and H... Read more

Booktopia’s Caroline Baum reveals her Five Favourite Australian Novelists ————————————————— I just can’t do this favourites thing, it’s too apples with oranges for me but there are some writers who have helped shape my consciousness over the nearly thirty years since I first came here, ma... Read more