Every reader goes through phases with their selection habits. Last year, for example, I wanted as little to do with the modern world as possible, for reasons I'm sure you can understand. I didn't want to read anything set in the last decade and I certainly didn't feel like reading any dystopian...

Seven years ago, Louise Ross swapped her career in financial law for a life of crime (writing). She has eschewed the traditional model of agents and publishers deciding instead to do it all herself, selling more than seven million copies in the process. Howdunnit?

There's the New York we see. The streets and neighborhoods, townhouses and office buildings, stoops and bodegas. That's a damn good city, electric and irrepressible, but there's another place just beyond that surface and it's populated by our ambitions. A city of nighthawks and hustlers. Around...

Charlie and Lola creator Lauren Child is calling for attitudes towards children's books to change, criticising the "lazy" assumption that "creating work with children in mind is easier or less demanding".

For our latest look at the middle grade category of children's books, we turn to the professionals who work in, well, the middle of it all: the literary agents who serve as intermediaries between authors and publishers. A handful of agents revealed some of the middle grade trends they are...