The Places You Will Go

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.

Beryl Bainbridge dies, aged 75 | Books | guardian.co.uk

Grande dame of British literature ... Beryl Bainbridge. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Maverick, unique and horribly funny, according to her fellow authors: the world of British literature felt an emptier place today following the death of Beryl Bainbridge, aged 75.

She was admitted to hospital last week following a recurrence of cancer, and died suddenly in the early hours of this morning.

The decade's best unread books | Books | guardian.co.uk

Noughtie omissions ... some of the bestsellers-that-weren't

My bookseller friend, Kit, and I were just talking about how we own a lot of books that no one else buys or notices. This piece features some very good books that have just, for some reason or other, failed to sell.

I've only read The Spare Room by Helen Garner. Eric Forbes got it for me after I told him that I'd heard a podcast interview with the author and thought the book sounded interesting.

I really enjoyed The Spare Room. It was painful to read, but, at the same time, liberating. As someone who has cared for the dying, I appreciate the honesty of Garner's story. I would call it a brave book, and a beautifully written one too.

Here's the podcast of her interview on The Book Show, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio programme:

Helen Garner, about The Spare Room

An Interview with Shih-Li Kow

From StarMag

A local author who was shortlisted on Monday for a prestigious international literary prize shares aspects of her writing life.

IN 2007, Silverfish Books published News from Home, a collection of short stories by three Malaysians, Chua Kok Yee, Rumaizah Abu Bakar, and Shih-Li Kow.

The writers were participants of the Silverfish Writing Programme, and had been chosen to contribute to the anthology because they showed promise and commitment. Each had a different style of storytelling, but Kow’s stories stood out as the most original and interesting, and also because her voice was the most confident and natural of the three.

A year later, Kow published Ripples and Other Stories, a collection of her own, to critical acclaim locally. On Monday, that acclaim became international when Ripples was shortlisted for the world’s richest short story prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

The winner of the ‚35,000 (RM175,000) prize will be announced on Sept 30, at the culmination of the annual Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, which begins on Sept 16.

The other titles shortlisted are An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah; Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower; Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy; Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw; and The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip Ó Ceallaigh.

In an e-mail interview, Kow, 40, talks about being shortlisted and other aspects of her life as a writer.

Man Comes Up Trumps

The winner of the IMPAC Dublin award is Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas.

Force of Habit

I love reading about nuns and convents - it must be something to do with the fact that I'm Catholic (lapsed) and attended a mission school from the age of six to 17.

Here is a list of books set in convents (schools as well as nunneries) that I've read and enjoyed:

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy by Rumer Godden

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien

Frost in May by Antonia Frost

Quiet as a Nun (Jemima Shore Mysteries) by Antonia Fraser

New Habits by Isabel Losada (Non-fiction)

There's Something About a Convent Girl by Jackie Bennett And Rosemary Forgan (Non-fiction) 

Read Any Good Books Lately?

Find an opening

By DAPHNE LEE

WHEN I mentioned to a friend that I was writing an article about literary fiction, he asked, “Actually, what is literary fiction?” I immediately referred him to David Lubra’s Guide to Literary Fiction.

A Story to Move You

First published on 10th May, 2002 in StarTwo.

Review by DAPHNE LEE

ATONEMENT

By Ian McEwan

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 388

(ISBN: 978-0224062527)

Gentle Approach to Race Issues

Star Mag, 10th December 2006

Reading the Blues Away

I have been reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels about witches because I needed to be cheered up and they seemed to do the trick.

I came to the end of Lords and Ladies yesterday and now there are no more to look forward to. After I put it back on the shelf I re-read the last 1/4 of A Hat Full of Sky because Granny Weatherwax appears in that and when I first first read the book I'd never encountered her before. I was intrigued though ... and inspired. She is my hero. Every Discworld book about witches makes me admire her more.