The Places You Will Go

Inside the mad modelling mind of Tyra Banks - Telegraph

A fight to the death to become a top model? Not the new series of ANTM but the plot from Tyra Banks' bonkers fantasy novel Modelland.

BY Belinda White | 15 August 2011

Supermodel Tyra Banks, who rose to fame in the early nineties after becoming the first African American woman to cover GQ and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue , is more famous these days for her television role as the creator and host of America's Next Top Model - now in its 17th series.

With a CV like that, who could be better placed to pen a novel set against the backdrop of bitch fighting and backstabbing that is the model industry?

But anyone expecting Tyra, 37, to write a warts and all exposé of the pressures on young models, or the raw truth behind the fashion business, better think again. Modelland'is not so much an auto-biography as the stuff of a mad man's dreams.

Books of the year | Books | The Guardian (recommended by your favourite authors)

Detail of an illustration by Kate Slater

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.

New Children's Fiction

This is very late but you know what they say ...

Anyway, Reavers by Emily Diamand was announced the winner of inaugural Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition winner, in March (!).

Over 2000 entries were received and Reavers was finally picked from five shortlisted works of fiction.

You can read more about the shortlist and the winner here and here.

Reading Room

In this week's roundup of the latest books: time travel, waxing philosophical and a guide to kissing frogs. Kinokuniya Books at Suria KLCC is offering a 25% discount on the tag price of the featured titles - only with the coupon in today's StarTwo.

Reading Room

It's fiction, but it's real!

Cut out the coupon (available only in the newspaper) to enjoy 25% discount on the featured books, at Kinokuniya Bookstores.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I thought it'd be interesting to highlight three illustrations, by different illustrators, of the same scene in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (originally titled Alice's Adventures Underground) by Lewis Carroll.

I thought it'd be fairly easy to find a well-known scene/image that had been depicted in all three of the editions of Alice that I own and am familiar with, but this wasn't so.

Alice, getting to grips (literally) with a live flamingo as a croquet mallet, is the scene I finally chose, illustrated by Lewis Carroll himself, John Tenniel, and Helen Oxenbury.

Junior Reading Room

The first book in a new trilogy and a ghost story are the two novels featured in today's Junior Reading Room in StarTwo. The other titles are picture books including Barbara Lehman's latest wordless effort and the surreal tale of a dog and his strange encounters of the six-legged kind.

Cut out the coupon (available only in the newspaper) to enjoy 25% discount, on the featured books, at Kinokuniya Bookstore.

Reading Room

This week's Junior Reading Room offers a mixed-bag of books, from exciting thrillers to serious literary fiction to adorable animal-themed picture books. Cut out the coupon (available only in the newspaper) to enjoy 25% discount, on the featured books, at Kinokuniya Bookstore.

Reading Room

No discount this week, but Reading Room's selection offers treats for those who like to be kept at the edge of their seats.

Picture Book of the Month: The Lost Thing

April 2007

The Lost Thing: A Tale for Those Who Have More Important Things to Pay Attention To

By Shaun Tan

Publisher: Lothian Books, 32 pages

A boy encounters a "lost thing" on the beach. Despite it's huge size, no one else seems to notice it, being too busy with ... life. At home, it towers over his parents, as they read the papers and watch telly, but remains "invisible". When the thing is pointed out to them, they make irrelevant comments and then ignore it again. The boy decides to find a place for the lost thing to go. He sees an ad in the paper, posted by The Federal Department of Odds and Ends, whose motto is "Sweepus underum carpetae". It claims to  be the place for lost things. The boy sets off, with the thing, to find this department, but gets mysteriously directed elsewhere. Will the lost thing ever belong? And what about the other lost things in this world. Do we even notice them or do we have more important things to pay attention to?