Links of the week May 13 2024 (20)

Amazon's Audible and Pottermore Publishing, the global digital publisher of Rowling's Wizarding World, will co-produce a brand-new audiobook series for the original seven Harry Potter stories. The new audiobooks are scheduled to premiere in late 2025, with each of the seven English-language titles to be released sequentially for a global audience, exclusively on Audible.

The companies said the full-cast audio productions - with more than 100 actors - will "bring these iconic stories to life as never heard before." The new audiobooks will provide "immersive audio entertainment through high-quality sound design in Dolby Atmos, stunning scoring, a full range of character voices and real-world sound capture," Audible and Pottermore Publishing said.

The novelist CJ Sansom, who has died aged 71, saw the dream of many aspiring writers come true when in mid-career he swapped a routine occupation for the life of a widely acclaimed, chart-topping novelist. By 2020, the former lawyer's Shardlake historical mysteries had sold almost 4m copies. He built up a fan-base vast enough to guarantee that a new title would enter the UK bestseller charts at number one.

Sansom's switch, however, was no lucky break but the fruit of deep thought, hard work and struggle against stiff odds. He overcame the blight of intense early suffering to create a much-loved series of novels conspicuous for their intelligence, integrity and humanity. An underlying idealism united the two, very different, halves of his professional life.