Daniel Handler - aka Lemony Snicket - says his publishers were hesitant to brand his new novel as young-adult fiction because of the risky content it explored.

Liam Brown says he will pass copies of The Power by Naomi Alderman on to his sons.

The British author reveals a little known Australian connection to a new companion trilogy to His Dark Materials series.

Former PM Kevin Rudd details losing his mother the day before a federal election - and working with Mark Latham - in an extract from his new book.

Spy of the First Person, a final autobiographical work of fiction by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor and author Sam Shepard, will be released on December 5.

George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo is a worthy winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Lincoln In The Bardo focuses on the night Abraham Lincoln laid his 11-year-old son to rest.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

The English language deals with plenty of things in plenty of ways but in some circumstances words simply don't exist to do them justice.

Guides to Japan and Vietnam top the travel bestsellers chart.

Jesmyn Ward returned to DeLisle, a rural town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, to write her latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's writing on film inspired Anna Broinowski to work in Pyongyang and make a documentary about the world she found there.

What if you couldn't remember anything apart from yesterday? That's the premise of Felicia Yap's debut thriller.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

It's more a mood than anything, but Alexander McCall Smith's assorted Edinburgh characters seem uneasily aware that life is precarious and love is precious and the old Edinburgh seems to be slipping away.

The fates of Tor Udall's characters all became intertwined at a particular moment in London's Kew Gardens.

C.K. Stead's story of emotional entanglements at a Paris Univeristy is set in 2014 but sometimes its world has the feel of the 1950s about it.

In the eighth Rowland Sinclair book, Sulari Gentill draw some historical parallels with Australian immigration policy of today.

Venom is much more than a tense, vividly written human drama about the race to make an antivenom for one of the most deadly snakes in the world.

It is John Lyons' reporting on the slow-motion tragedy within Israel that gives this engrossing book its force.

Marion Rankine's focus is not so much on the history of the umbrella as on its symbolism

Joshua Green says President Trump believes in nothing but himself but was happy to channel Steve Bannon; apocalyptic vision.

Kazuo Ishiguro is both an immensely serious literary writer and immensely popular, because he stirs deep feelings.

As well as being a compelling account of a bad father, this book is a valuable account of life in postwar suburbia.