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Thrillers

Dan Brown frenzy in September

31 August 2009

You can't have missed the news that Dan Brown's latest thriller, The Lost Symbol, will be released worldwide on 15 September. As readers queue up to place advance orders for one of the most eagerly anticipated books in history, there are also anxieties about how this one book will distort the performance of the book trade.   Read more

New Brown mega-seller coming this autumn

4 May 2009

The surprise announcement of a new novel from Dan Brown to be published in the autumn has emphasised yet again the importance of big bestsellers to the book world.  Read more

A new superseller

18 August 2008

A new star has burst upon the publishing firmament. Stephenie Meyer, whose new book Breaking Dawn already has 1.3 million copies in print in the US, recorded the largest-ever first-day sale when it was published there on August 4th. The book is the 745-page fourth book in her high school vampire series The Twilight Saga.   Read more

Can fumes make your writing more lowbrow?

28 January 2008

Joan Brady, the distinguished author of Theory of War, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1993, has made the astonishing claim that the fumes from a factory next door to her home made her writing more downmarket.  Read more

What makes The Da Vinci Code an international bestseller?

10 January 2005

The arrival of Alex Hamilton's year-end paperback fastsellers table for 2004 makes it a good moment to examine the publishing phenomenon of the year. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has been a worldwide bestseller, with more than nine million sold in the US and the same commercial success repeated in translation across the world.  Read more

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'Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.'

— Neil Gaiman

'Poetry is definitely having a renaissance'

22 February 2021

‘Poetry is definitely having a renaissance.There's been a real sea-change in terms of how it's seen, especially in lockdown. Poetry is the perfectly transportable art form. Owning a book is all you need to experience it. Poetry doesn't necessarily give us the answers, but it does give us the tools to think with and helps us process issues.  Read more

8 February 2021 - What's new

February 2021
  • 'It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cost, that any common conversation can.
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