Part of my platform when seeking control of this column was to ban all words of Arabic origin, and that's what I'm doing, fulfilling the wishes of the silent majority.

Move over, 1984. There's a new dystopian novel topping the charts.

Works of non-fiction dominate the longlist of this year's Stella Prize for books by women writers.

Literary news and events.

Tanveer Ahmed is concerned with how mental health problems can have less to do with psychiatric disorder and more to do with social alienation or moral conflict.

Last week, Candice Fox's fourth novel, Crimson Lake, was published and the week before the novel she wrote with James Patterson, Never Never, went straight into the New York Times bestseller list in top spot.

A backstory is coming. 

Libby Angel's The Trapeze Act is a high-flying novel that jumps from 19th-century England and Australia to 1960s Adelaide.

Mei Fong found the real world of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in China.

Christine Dibley ambitiously combines three incompatible genres: the police-procedural, the family saga, and a kind of Celtic-Australian magic realism.

City of Friends is the story of four ambitious, well-to-do women in their forties confronting various life changes.

The Atheist Muslim is part wrestling match with the beliefs of Ali A. Rizvi's community, part meditation on Islam and its discontents.

Innocents and Others is awash in the pre-digital technologies of late modernism, especially fancy cameras and phones.

In his graphic memoir, Marcelino Truong captures the child's perspective and life in a war zone.

Beatrice Colin is a writer of ability and ambition. In her novel she explores the year 1887 and the construction of the Eiffel Tower.

When Ayesha wanted to know the truth about her father's death she quickly learned he had been murdered. Martin Sixsmith tells her story.

Some of the un-discovered islands had detailed sightings; others were simply fraudulent. Mallachy Tallack uncovers these geographic mysteries.

Alissa Callen tops the romance bestsellers chart.

The theme of fate looms over every moment in Transit, Rachel Cusk's sequel to her novel Outline.

There is a significant difference between President Trump and his predecessor in what they choose to read, or not read.

Barry Hill reveals his interest in Japan, Buddhism and politics in Grass Hut Work.

The push and pull of home is a constant motif in Linda Neil's memoir, which is as much about place as it is a love letter to the power of song.

In How to Survive a Plague David France tells the story of the struggle faced by gay men in the US for respect, therapies and care.

The appetite for the memoirs of leading political figures shows no sign of abating, even among the vanquished, with Hillary Clinton landing a two-book deal.