The Guardian's Blog, page 125

The best books on Afghanistan: start your reading here

Our literary tour of Afghanistan takes in tales of war, kite-flying, the Taliban and patience stones

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Bookshop memories: share your photos and stories

As Foyles closes the doors of its world famous, 111-year-old London store and opens a new one share words and images that stir your memories of independent bookshops

Share your photos and stories via GuardianWitness

With Amazon still throwing its considerable weight into the ongoing dispute with Hachette and bean-counters bullish over prospects for the ebook market, this might not seem the best time to be opening a new bricks-and-mortar bookshop. But 111 years after the opening of its legendary Charing Cross Road shop, the independent bookshop Foyles is moving 100m down the road into a gleaming new vision of bookselling's future.

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Poster poems: lawns

Nature tamed or nature fighting to be wild again, the lawn is a great site for summer thoughts. Let's see what you can roll out for this month's challenge

Summer is here at last it seems, with long evenings, the occasional glimpse of the sun between the showers, and the inevitable recommencement of the life and death battle with the patch of green outside the window. Yes, summer, the season of lawns, those slices of domesticated nature that have come to symbolise the march of civilisation, for good or ill.

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Where a book is read can be as powerfully-charged as where it's set

For me, it's childhood holidays in the sun I remember when I revisit the chilly climes of Tolkien. What are your unlikely associations?

There are certain places that draw me magnetically back to certain books. My grandparents' home in Durban, which I visited often as a child, always meant humid heat, har-de-dar birds and The Hobbit, in an old edition of my grandmother's that I read cover-to-cover every time I stayed. It was particularly piquant to read this cold-climate story, full of outdoor survival, mountains, forests, and wolves, in the midst of eye-searing sunlight, mangos and nearby muezzins' calls to prayer.

Just as I always ate certain foods in Durban tiny, spicy samosas, boerewors rolls, and Creme Soda, plinking with ice-cubes, in an unhealthy shade of green there were books without which no South African stay could have felt complete. As well as The Hobbit, I also picked repeatedly through the leavings on my mother and uncles' childhood bookshelf, especially Five Little Peppers and How They Grew: the lively, if distressingly moral, account of an impoverished American family's adventures in a little brown house, with a spiteful stove and no money for Christmas. It seems strange that I should have associated such un-African books so strongly with Durban. But if I read them now, in other surroundings, they transport me not into their own worlds, but to the heat, the smell and the insect-life sounds of the context in which I read them so often.

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Brazil does books as well as football

In the runup to the World Cup, Ángel Gurría-Quintana picks the best new Brazilian writers

At the recent launch event for FlipSide, a festival of Brazilian literature and culture in the Suffolk village of Snape, Brazil's ambassador to the UK aired a grievance. He had just visited the embassy of Argentina, and had been shown a new scholarly companion volume to the works of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. "I was envious," he confessed. "Why aren't there similar volumes about some of the classic Brazilian authors?" The answer, he concluded with regret, is that even Brazilian writers as celebrated as Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) or Graciliano Ramos (1892-1953) are not widely known to English-language readers.

Despite the common complaint that not enough Brazilian literature is published in English, this is an auspicious moment for new Brazilian writing in translation. The past couple of months have seen the publication of works by two authors named among the best of young Brazilian novelists by Granta magazine. Michel Laub's Diary of the Fall (translated by Margaret Jull Costa) is a powerful exploration of memory and guilt, drawing connections between a disastrous high-school prank and the Holocaust, and Daniel Galera's atmospheric Blood-Drenched Beard (translated by Alison Entrekin) features a protagonist who cannot recognise faces including his own.

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How true can crime fiction be?

Real events often inspire writers, but incorporating real-life trauma into entertainment requires very delicate handling

On the afternoon of 12 July 2007, Sergei Yatzenko set off on a motorcycle from his home in Taromskoye, a small village in south-central Ukraine. His mutilated body was discovered by relatives four days later. Yatzenko was a victim of Viktor Soyenko and Igor Suprunyuck, who became known as the "Dnepropetrovsk maniacs": two 19-year-olds who tortured and murdered 21 people in the space of a month, striking at random and without apparent motive. The killers took numerous photographs and videos of their crimes, and in December 2008, footage of Sergei Yatzenko's murder leaked onto the internet.

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Eimear McBride: a genius easily missed

People are full of praise for our decision to publish A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. But it would not have been hard to pass
News: Eimear McBride wins Baileys prize for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

Just over an hour before I started writing this article, I was in the Royal Festival Hall in London. I was drinking champagne watching Eimear McBride win the Baileys women's prize for fiction for A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. And I wasn't dreaming.

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Is your book a self-published masterpiece?

We've chosen our first self-published book of the month. Now we want more, and to champion the best. Please send us your finest work
How to send your entries for next month's prize

The books have been read, in their dozens, and after heated debate the judges have agreed on the first Guardian/ Legend Times book of the month. We are pleased with our winner a sparky and funny novel with some wonderful writing in it.

So what has this process the first bout in what will be a monthly challenge taught me and our judges about the state of the self-publishing market?

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Who should win tonight's Baileys prize for fiction?

Donna Tartt is the bookies' favourite, but that's no guarantee which other nominees would you have a flutter on?

Already the winner of the Pulitzer prize for fiction, Donna Tartt is the bookies' favourite to collect £30,000 as the first winner of the Baileys women's prize for fiction. She will be the sixth consecutive American to receive the award for female novelists (previously the Orange prize) if the judging panel pick her novel The Goldfinch, about a bereaved boy and a stolen painting.

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Reading group: choose a David Mitchell book for June

The impending arrival of his new novel is a good cue to return to his back catalogue. But which one? Cast your vote below

This month on the Reading group we're going to look at David Mitchell. September's release of his new novel The Bone Clocks is set to be one of the publishing highlights of 2014. Sceptre, his UK publisher, is re-releasing his back catalogue to date. And most importantly, he's one of the UK's most respected, popular and consistently daring authors, and someone who definitely repays a good bit of attention.

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