The Guardian's Blog, page 175

Is David Walliams the new Roald Dahl?

Unbeknownst to adults, the Little Britain star has reinvented himself as one of the UK's most successful - and richest - children's authors. So what's his secret?

Between creating award-winning comedy and conquering every grimy body of water within reach, David Walliams has become a phenomenally successful children's author, almost by stealth.

His lifetime sales are creeping towards the £15million mark, and over the past 12 months, his children's books have sold 1.1 million copies, putting him behind only Julia Donaldson (2.7m) and Jeff Kinney (1.6m), both of whom have far more books on the market.

It means he has outstripped both the perennially successful Jacqueline Wilson and Suzanne Collins, whose Hunger Games trilogy has been a chart-topper for the last few years. Without doubt, he's up there in the Rowling league. How has he achieved such a commanding position, and built on it, year on year, in such a fickle and tempestuous market?

Walliams naturally had an enormous advantage as a debut children's author - he started out from a position of unusual power as a well-known and highly bankable comedy star. But comedic fame doesn't automatically translate to the household name status he's since achieved with his kids' writing. Compare Ricky Gervais's Flanimals - though it was initially a strong seller, a proposed ITV Claymation series of the animal miscellany has now been cancelled, and the big-screen version is mired in development hell . What has Walliams done so differently?

Many reviewers and readers have compared his work to Roald Dahl's - more readily because his first two books, The Boy in the Dress and Mr Stink, are illustrated by Dahl's long-time collaborator Quentin Blake. Walliams acknowledges having saturated himself in Dahl's "perfect" work, and the debt is definitely discernible. Mr Stink's egg-and-sausage-festooned beard, for instance, is straight out of The Twits, and casts of obnoxious siblings, tiresome grandmothers and child-hating head-teachers will ring a whole tower of bells for any Dahl aficionado.

But there's more to Walliams's work - and to his extraordinary success - than simply being an apt pupil of a past master. What he does right in his books is to balance pungent and frequently regrettable comedy, of the sort that particularly appeals to younger male readers, with profound, genuine heart - tenderer feelings, deeper unspoken loves than usually appear in Dahl's more dazzlingly imaginative, savage universe. In The Boy in the Dress, understatedly tragic moments drift by: Dennis' sdream of becoming a pro footballer "quietly floating away" now that there's no-one to ferry him to practice, eating "bowls of cereal, even when it wasn't breakfast" since Mum - in charge of nutrition - upped sticks. Walliams's assurance and humanity come across in these quiet lines, even while he retains a keen grasp of such essentials as aggressive burping (the moment when Mr Stink subdues bullying Rosamund, who's just blown £500 of daddy's dosh in Topshop, with a putrid belch whose echoes last a page and a half, made me involuntarily squeal with delight.)

As Walliams points out, too, he lacks Dahl's absolute confidence in world-creation - he uses specific references to brands and products to help with settings' authenticity, which opens his books up to the risk of premature dating and falling by the wayside unread. Many of his chosen goods, however, are already slightly out of date - Um Bongo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - creating a faintly elegiac, wistful sense that the books, for all their contemporary preoccupations, are set somewhere in the author's own childhood.

Writers are often enjoined to "write for the child they were" in order to win over young readers; Walliams, blithely celebrating courage, kindness, tolerance and insanely noxious bodily effluvia, may well have done just that - as young reviewers on the Guardian children's books website will attest.

Children and teenagersDavid WalliamsRoald DahlJulia DonaldsonImogen Russell Williams
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Fictional bad girls are back with a vengeance | Jane Bradley

Violent, sexual and even murderous, today's teen antiheroines have a rich literary lineage dating back to Angela Brazil

It's 1913, and Angela Brazil's 10th boarding school story has just been published. By now, Brazil is well on her way to earning her later reputation as boarding school story grand dame. Her books, depicting all-female micro-societies controlled by teenage girls, have redefined the genre; for the first time in British fiction, their friendships, feelings, fears and frustrations take centre stage.

Unlike those in the fiction for young women that preceded Brazil's books – usually emphasising moral instruction and traditional gender roles – her characters are authentic and multi-dimensional. And with a focus on courage and independent spirit over physical appearance, class or other circumstantial factors, the books' true heroines are the ones bold enough to break the rules.

They sneak out at night, they take matters into their own hands; they're defiant, playful and irrepressible. And despite attempts to control them by archetypal authority figures such as parents and teachers, they never do as they're told. Today, their hijinks can be read as kitsch nostalgia; at the time the books were published, they were far more radical.

Beyond the pages of Brazil's books, the exciting possibilities they depicted remained distant. Although the suffrage movement was gaining momentum, access to education was inconsistent across the UK, especially for working class women, and there was widespread panic about the perceived decline in girls' morals. This is documented in detail in Carol Dyhouse's brilliant book Girl Trouble, which charts the media fascination and fear surrounding young women's progress towards equality throughout the last century (and echoed in Laurie Penny's latest, Cybersexism, which explores the way girls' online behaviour is controlled by a cultural paranoia of predators). Things were shifting, but slowly – and girls were definitely still discouraged from subversive "bad" behaviour.

Fast-forward a century, and girls are still the subject of endless ideological battles. Young women's thoughts, bodies and actions are controlled, pressured and policed at every turn, by a wider array of agendas and influences than ever before.

So maybe it's no wonder that the bad girl is back with a vengeance, giving contemporary fiction lovebites, bruises and a shoplifted bottle of super-strength cider to drink down the park. More than a century since Brazil's first book, and almost seven decades since Enid Blyton's first tale of Malory Towers, the fictional bad girl has gone to the dark side, getting into more extreme scrapes than ever before.

It's a natural evolution that's led from classroom mayhem to today's violent, sexual and at times even murderous teen antiheroines. Jenn Ashworth's Cold Light, for instance, is the chilling account of cruel, beautiful 14-year-old Chloe, found dead in a frozen lake with her much older, forbidden boyfriend in what seems like a Valentine's Day suicide pact – until another body is found nearby. Weirdo, by Cathi Unsworth, charts a private investigator's inquiries into the long-cold case of 15-year-old Corinne Woodrow, convicted amid media frenzy for murdering a classmate. And Anais Hendricks, the fierce, funny 15-year-old survivor who narrates Jenni Fagan's critically acclaimed debut The Panopticon, tells her tale from a detention centre for chronic young offenders, accused of putting a police officer in a coma after being found with matching blood on her school uniform.

The fictional bad girl is getting badder in the US, too – from the joyriding, activism and extortion of girl gang members in Joyce Carol Oates' Foxfire to the "young and out for glory" Sacred Heart Sluts in Colleen Curran's controversial Catholic schoolgirls novel Whores on the Hill, and the manipulative, malicious little madams in Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects. (Flynn's world-conquering Gone Girl is about a rule-breaking adult, but the title itself has kicked off a whole publishing trend very much informed by what society expects and disapproves of in young women.)

Just as the rise of the now-classic boarding school story and its spunky, independent leading ladies corresponded to significant social and political changes further afield, such as the suffrage movement and educational reforms, so too today's bad girls mirror our wider cultural conflicts, issues, frustrations and fears.

It's tough being a teenage girl in the modern world, and – with on- and offline surveillance at an all-time high in real life and in fiction - the ones fighting the system provoke the most extreme emotions. Most bad girls are a combination of instigator and underdog, demanding recognition, respect, empathy and awe, and winning over readers with ease.

The best of this fictional breed are rebels with a cause, fighting for themselves and those they care about, against impossible odds. The bad girl represents the rebellious rule-breaker we all want to be, but with scars to show her fallibility and demonstrate the damage done to young women by today's society. Despite the bruises and broken hearts, her rebelliousness and resilience is intoxicating, and suggests she will endure for another century or more.

Have you got a favourite fictional bad girl? Which rebellious literary heroines would you want to raise hell with, and which ones deserve detention?

Fiction
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Kerry Wilkinson: 'It's simply not true that self-publishers can only be successful if they sell for under a pound'

Six books into a self-published crime series, Kerry Wilkinson has signed a 14-book deal. Will he ever go it alone again? 'Definitely'

How did you come to self-publish?

When I turned thirty, I'd been doing the same job for a while. I wanted to try doing something different with my life, and made a list of things I thought I could do if I put a bit of effort in. "Professional sportsman" was unfortunately a long-disappeared aim, due to my increasingly dodgy back and, more likely, an utter lack of ability. It's also hard to make a living from sitting on your sofa playing The Elder Scrolls. I had been working as a journalist for almost ten years and figured I would try to write a book. It sounds a bit simplistic but I just went for it, working every day around my job until I was finished. I looked at the traditional publishing routes - three chapters, stamped addressed envelope and a tiny piece of your soul to an agent, wait six weeks for the rejection and go again - but figured life was too short. I saw the "self-publish with us" button on Amazon and never looked back.

What sort of books do you write?

My crime series with DS Jessica Daniel set against the backdrop of a rainy Manchester is now five books long, with the sixth coming out in October. The rights were bought by Pan Macmillan and I am working with them on a total of 14 novels, which seems a bit surreal considering where I was two years ago. I have a young adult/fantasy series coming out through them from 2014 and am going to self-publish something else - an urban thriller - by the end of the year.

Did you work with an editor or designer on your novels?

In the sense that I worked within journalism and know a few people who can help out. My friend Claire was invaluable. I had a pop at the covers myself. They were basic but kind of worked because of that.

Do you think this is important?

My biggest regret is that I didn't get a proper literary editor involved to kick my arse a bit. It's more important than the actual writing.

Talk us through how you're publishing - print and ebook? DRM or no DRM? How are you pricing it?

After writing Locked In, I always knew I was going to write more in the series because I had so many ideas left over. I wrote and wrote more or less every day for a year - early mornings and late nights. Because I knew there was more to come, I put Locked In at 98p, trying to sell in bulk, rather than worrying about money. The subsequent books sold for increasing amounts. Pan Macmillan have more or less continued that.

I've seen fellow authors saying it's awful that books sell so cheaply, before putting their own stuff up for 99p and then crowing at sales figures. There are a lot of hypocrites, when people should just be honest and say they want their books to sell. I'm proud that the Jessica books have sold tens - hundreds - of thousands of copies for higher prices. It's simply not true that self-publishers can only be successful if they sell for under a pound. Readers like the character of Jessica and, as long as they don't feel ripped off, they are happy to invest.

As for DRM... I'd rather they were DRM-free. Publishers shot themselves in the foot by looking to be draconian and saying books shouldn't be copied, and then realising they had helped to create a near-monopoly in the e-book market. Consumers don't want to buy a book for a Kindle and then not be able to move it onto a different e-reader, say a Kobo or Nook. As such, many people bought a Kindle and stuck with it. That said, I have a Paperwhite and it's brilliant.

DRM doesn't stop piracy. Pirates are always way ahead of any DRM methods and, if they want to copy something, they will. I think most people will choose to pay for something they enjoy.

Has it been an eye-opener making all these decisions yourself?

Not really - I just get on with it. If things work out, then great. If not, life goes on. I would have figured something else out.

What are the positives of self-publishing?

The freedom of being able to act quickly. I could fiddle with prices, change descriptions, link my own files, and so on. I am a bit of a tinkerer with my listings and try lots of little tweaks to see how they might affect a day's sales.

And the negatives?

When you have a publisher, you know there are professionals doing their absolute best to make things work for you. When you're on your own, it's a lot of experimenting.

Would you do it again?

Definitely - and I will be in the near future...

How did you come to be spotted by a traditional publisher and what sort of deal is it?

I'm not naive - the initial interest came because I'd sold a lot of books, but my editor - Trisha - liked the character of Jessica and the publisher's decisions came from that. Publishing is a business but editors still have to be invested in what they're working on because, otherwise, there's no passion and they may as well be putting out a phone book. It's nice to work with professionals who are keen on your work because they've seen so many things before. I've signed five separate publishing contracts now for a total of 14 books. I'm also published in around 10 languages around the world, plus AudioGo produce audiobooks of my work

Give us a short passage from your work

(This is from a future Jessica Daniel novel)

Jessica blinked her eyes open. 'What time is it?'

Dave's phone lit up the front seat. 'Twenty-to-ten.'

'Have you got any money on you?'

'Dunno, maybe a fiver?'

Jessica sat up straighter and held her palm out. 'Let's have it?'

Dave delved into his coat pocket and pulled out a scrunched-up note. 'What for?'

Jessica grabbed it and reached towards the back seat. 'Arch, you awake?'

'Aye.'

'I've got a really important job I'm going to trust you with - take this money, head directly down the road, second left, first right and keep going until you see the row of shops. Ignore the pizza place and first row of shutters, then follow your nose. I think I saw a chippy down there. I'm large chips, battered sausage and gravy, Dave's small chips, and get whatever you want.'

'With a fiver?'

'I'm sure you've got a few quid on you. Whatever you do, don't forget my sausage and don't let them scrimp on the gravy - now chop, chop: most places around here close at ten so get a move on.'

Archie grumbled his way out of the back seat, complaining that he hadn't spent all the years in uniform and training just so he could end up on the chip run but Jessica told him to stop moaning, else she'd get him tarted up in a short skirt to patrol the estate and see how he liked it.

What other self-published titles would you recommend?

The thing with writing all the time is that you get so little time to actually read. Teen Idol Terror by Paul Plunkett is a novel for young people, a sort of Famous Five-style traditional tale, with mobile phones and modern technology. It's a much-ignored genre among self-publishers. I helped with a little of the editing and really enjoyed it. There's a sequel out very soon.

Self-publishingCrime fictionFiction
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Ten tips to keep up your holiday reading habits

Don't resign yourself to only reading on holiday. With a few top tips, you can keep the page-rate going all year round

1. A glass a day keeps the reader at bay

You might cherish holiday memories of floating on a lilo with a beer in one hand and a book in the other, but sadly it doesn't work once the siesta hour is taken away. Devise a system of reading-time units to keep a healthy relationship between the bottle and the page. If you're having trouble with willpower, let F Scott Fitzgerald or Richard Yates set you straight.

2. Switch the TV off

And don't start Breaking Bad series 1 on Netflix, either. If you're addicted to serials, how about going back to Dickens (he's the HBO writers' writer, after all)?

3. Approach the Man Booker prize longlist with caution

Richard House's 1,000-page thriller The Kills or Donal Ryan's slim debut The Spinning Heart? Colm Toibin's novella about Jesus's mother, The Testament of Mary, or Eleanor Catton's massive New Zealand goldrush novel The Luminaries, a good nine times longer? If it's notches on the bedside table you care about, weigh your reading choices with care.

4. Buy an e-reader with an illuminated screen

Then there's no excuse not to have books with you at all times - and nowhere too dark to read them.

5. Cultivate an interest in poetry

Slip a slim volume into your bag and scatter more in all those other, ahem, places you visit regularly during the day. Ten minutes with Seamus Heaney is worth a lifetime with a lesser writer.

6. Rise with the larks...

There's always a spare half-hour between bed and breakfast if you choose to use it. Perfect for short stories - try last year's International Man Booker winner Lydia Davis, if you want real value-per-minute.

7. … and love your insomnia

Those wee hours between three and five am are perfect for reading, be it a gentle Joanna Trollope or something more suitable to long dark nights of the soul (The Anatomy of Melancholy, anyone?). And face it: if you're not reading, you'll only be worrying.

8. Get into audiobooks

They're great for multi-tasking: there's nothing so bracing as walking the dog with your MP3-player turned to 1.5 times the normal speed. Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, with its repeating stories, especially suits this treatment. But be warned: at normal read-aloud rate, audiobooks take far longer than reading yourself.

9. Join a reading group

You'll be so behind the curve that all the lightweights who only joined for wine and nibbles will have gone by now, leaving the serious readers to get on with it. Particularly good for those books you need to be prodded into finishing.

10. Pick up something you can't put down

Cliffhangers are your friends. Whether it's the must-read-one-more-chapter plot reversals of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, or just something that suits your mood, if you're engaged enough, you'll tear through a title.

FictionSarah WatersF Scott FitzgeraldSeamus HeaneyKate AtkinsonE-readersAudiobooksJoanna Trollope
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Not the Booker prize 2013: The Trader of Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks

The prose may be clumsy, but this tale of the Vietnamese bride trade has a pacy plot and good intentions

It seems cruel to compare a young first-time novelist like Lucy Cruickshanks with a seasoned professional such as Kate Atkinson's work from last week, but such is the nature of literary prizes.

I can soften the blow slightly by noting that Cruickshanks has plenty of time to go on to better things, and that The Trader of Saigon definitely has its merits. Yet the fact remains that moving from the smooth prose of Life After Life to this novel felt like leaving a rendition by the Berlin Philharmonic for one by a school orchestra. Especially since there were so many bum notes. Most of these lapses came in dialogue, and thanks to an amateur's desire to force emotion and reaction on to her characters.

Elmore Leonard's famous rules for writing are there to be broken, but more attention to rule three ("Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue") would have spared a lot of sniffing, moaning and whimpering – and hopefully stemmed a gushing stream of modifiers: "she said, scowling", she "trembled with excitement", she "wrinkled her nose and frowned". It might also have provoked second thoughts about passages like the following: "Hanh had listened in wonder as her father's words floated out from the field."

Oh, floating words! My own sense of wonder was taking a bit of a battering – and it wasn't just the clumsy prose. Early on, I also had considerable scepticism about the scenario. This focuses on three characters in Vietnam, a few years after the last American helicopters have left Saigon. Alexander is the eponymous trader, an American who abandoned his platoon in the war and now earns a living picking up women to sell as brides and prostitutes. Hanh is an innocent (incredibly innocent!) village girl who collects coins outside a squat toilet and is soon "befriended" by Alexander.

Phuc (brave name!) has fallen on hard times, and needs some extra cash to get local communist party bullies off his back. He takes to gambling in the backstreet dens run by the local gangster boss man, Cheung Hu. And guess what? He loses! Loses in a passage whose crushing inevitability would probably have made me give up on the book entirely if I weren't duty-bound to read it.

But while prizes can be cruel in placing novices under the glare of the spotlight, they do at least give them their chance to perform at their best. If I had given up on the book so early on, I'd have missed out on some reasonably good writing.

Those characters never entirely sprang to life, but even so, Cruickshanks gave them just enough emotional weight to at least support her plot, which became increasingly interesting. Phuc's solutions to his growing list of problems becomes pleasingly ingenious. Where once the action seemed all too obvious, by the end it was full of effective surprises.

This plot was wound increasingly tightly, a ticking clock set in motion to tick so loudly that I stopped hearing most of the infelicities in the prose and kept reading.

So I was reasonably pleased to have perservered. Plenty more things didn't work. I found it hard to believe that Alexander could so easily move through the paranoid postwar Vietnamese state without being noticed by Communist party officials, even if, as the novelist tells us, he was pretending to be Russian. I also had trouble with Cruickshanks' attempts to suggest that Alexander could convince himself there weren't consequences to his crimes, and was developing a conscience.

Finally, I wondered about the setting itself. There was enough talk of rice fields and dirty bars with creaking barstools and jungles and grime to give a surface sheen of authenticity, and recreate the world we've all seen in films such as The Deer Hunter. But it never went deeper than that – I didn't really feel immersed in the complexities of a post-civil war communist society.

Yet there was plenty I did believe in – not least Cruickshank's compassion for the victims of the bride trade, and horror at its consequences. In an author's postscript, she says the novel was inspired by a conversation with a real man she met on a plane who openly bragged about trading in women. Reading that partly made me wonder if she might have written a more interesting book with a contemporary setting, rather than this half-realised Vietnam from 30 years ago. But the passage also confirmed my feeling that there's something authentic behind this book. It isn't polished or even that accomplished, but there is a raw energy that makes it worthwhile.

Next week: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

FictionKate AtkinsonAwards and prizesSam Jordison
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The Hugo awards: 'beauty contest' or prize of the people?

Unlike the Arthur C Clarke awards, the Nebulas or the Kitschies, the Hugo science fiction awards are voted on by the public. In an often elitist genre, this has to be a good thing

There are few things as entertaining as the ruck that follows the announcement of literary awards, and the Hugos, handed out for both written work and dramatic presentations in the science fiction field, are no exception.

In fact, few awards divide opinion as much as the Hugos, which are named after the founder of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and have been awarded every year since 1955 with a suitably phallic rocket-shaped trophy. Why "suitably"? Because the Hugos – which were announced at WorldCon in San Antonio, Texas, on Sunday night – are, despite their longstanding provenance, an antidote to SF's more worthy literary awards. And some elements of the very vocal SF fan community don't, it seems, like it up 'em.

The discussion of this year's shortlists was a case in point. The Ruthless Culture blog said: "Like many people surveying the shortlists, I could not help but feel irritation and regret over the fact that genre literature's most prestigious and well-known award continues to get it wrong all too often." The Staffer's Book Review was more concise: "The Hugos are utter twaddle."

First, the headlines. Best novel went to John Scalzi's Redshirts, which deconstructs the Star Trek mythos with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink. Published by Tor in the US, Redshirts took as its focus the ubiquitous disposable crewmen from USS Enterprise on the TV show, usually the first to die on any given mission. It's sort of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for the SF crowd, and perhaps a signal of its popular appeal was the Forbes magazine review that said, "You don't have to be a hardcore sci-fi fan to enjoy Redshirts." There was a UK edition courtesy of Gollancz, though the book – starting off as sort of a comedy, then becoming a bit more meta – had its biggest success in the States.

Best novella was The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson, an author renowned for hugely popular housebrick-sized epic fantasy novels, and for finishing off Robert Jordan's immense Wheel of Time series after his fellow American died. Pat Cadigan took a Hugo for best novelette – long overdue, in many people's opinions – for The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi, and the best short story was Mono no Aware by Ken Liu.

All worthy winners. But the Hugo awards come in for a lot of stick every year, for two main reasons: one, the voting system. And two, they are seen as (gasp) populist – at least in the States, where the winners are most well-known.

That voting system first. You can read the full details on the Hugos website should you wish, but essentially those who attend the annual WorldCon, which takes place in a different city worldwide every year, are eligible to nominate their favourite works in each category. There then follow several rounds of balloting.

The Hugo organisers themselves admit the voting system is complicated: "While the process is indeed involved, the basic idea is simple and the intention is laudable. Basically the idea is to make sure that the winner has majority support. In ordinary governmental elections it is possible for the winner to be someone that 40% of the people like and 60% of the people hate, because that 60% could not agree among themselves on a candidate. The Hugo voting system is designed to avoid results like that."

This differs from the other major SF awards: the Arthur C Clarke award, the Campbells and the Kitschies are all decided by an appointed jury. But is what is essentially a public vote rather than peer-judgment necessarily a bad thing?

Cheryl Morgan, a science fiction critic and publisher, has won four Hugos. She says: "The Clarke has a small, expert jury. The Nebulas are voted on by professional writers. The Hugos are voted on by fans. It is also worth noting that the Clarke and Nebulas are both limited by country of publication, whereas the Hugos are not. The results are bound to be different."

Author Charles Stross, himself nominated for Hugos half a dozen times, said of the Hugos. "It's a beauty contest … Fun, but shouldn't be taken too seriously."

The aforementioned blogs make for thoughtful, in-depth reading. The Staffer's Book Review piece mentions another oft-voiced concern: that the Hugos electorate – essentially those who pay to attend a convention – perhaps isn't completely representative. "The Hugos are nothing more than an amalgamation of like-minded WorldCon members, or agendised voting blocs," it says, "bent on vociferous back patting."

Personally, I've always liked the Hugos purely because they do follow the populist line. The SF world is richly represented by awards that honour different works for different reasons. The Clarkes go for the big, cerebral SF novels of the year. The Kitschies give a nod to the edgy and unconventional. The Hugos celebrate the popular. In a genre whose fanbase is often seen as elitist, this is a very good thing – especially when it comes to perhaps opening it up to a wider, mainstream audience.

Hugo awardScience fictionFictionAwards and prizesDavid Barnett
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading, today?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Autumn has arrived, though we're all hoping for an Indian summer to make up for the Icelandic spring we suffered in the UK this year. Hannah is taking a well-earned late break after the rigours of the Edinburgh international book festival - so I'll be overseeing this thread for the next couple of weeks.

If you missed our daily Edinburgh books podcasts, do check them out, as it gave us a chance to range further and wider than usual, with interviewees including the Colombian-American neo-thriller maestro Sergio de la Pava and Lebanese-Canadian wild child Rawi Hage, the Russian Mikhail Shishkin and Argentinian Patricio Pron (these last two alongside the irresistible James Kakalios, whose talk on The Physics of Superheroes was one of my highlights of the festival).

Back in London, I'm continuing a love-in with Australian literature which began when I spent a month in Melbourne and Adelaide earlier in the year. One of my discoveries was Tony Birch, whose World Writers' conference keynote speech ran on the books website over the weekend (his gothic coming-of-age novel Blood is surely a film-in-waiting). Another is Hannah Kent, whose strikingly accomplished, and distinctly unAustralian debut, Burial Rites, has just been longlisted for the Guardian first book prize. At the moment I'm deep into Belomor, by Nicholas Rothwell - a heady mix of art and opals, in Europe and Australia, now and in centuries past.

But enough of me. Here are some of the books you've been been reading over the last week:

AggieH:

Just finished Timothy Findley's Not Wanted On The Voyage. Why, having read Famous Last Words and Pilgrim, did I stupidly wait so long to read more Findley? And why do I never seen Findley's name mentioned anywhere?

goodyorkshirelass:

Eagerly devouring The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. Had dismissed it previously as I feared it might be twee, but the positive comments of @AggieH and @GetOver99 persuaded me to put aside my prejudices, which I'm happy to say were way off the mark. An absolute delight.

judgeDAmNation

About halfway through 'The Lady in the Lake' by Raymond Chandler, and for my money it's the best one so far - every other sentence I want to read out to someone. Also on a whim, having not really read any graphic novels or comics, I started Chris Ware's 'Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid in the World' which I'm also enjoying - not entirely following some passages, but it can be quite heartbreaking at times, and quite special in its mundanity...

Journokatie says she's finishing up The Kill Room by Jeffery Deaver. "It's his latest Lincoln Rhyme book. No matter how many of Deaver's books I read I never get bored." A rival to Rick Gekoski's Lee Child?. It takes something really thrilling to distract from the tingle of shingles (I know, I've had it). Hope you're back to health soon Journokatie.

Finally, a challenge from capebretoner:

Can anybody recommend any recent travel books? The genre seems to have faded away, or more likely I have failed to keep up. Where are the new Thubrons, Chatwins etc?

Here are some of the books we'll be reviewing this week:

Nonfiction:
Danubia by Simon Winder (Picador, £18.99)
The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? by David Harris-Gershon
The Manager: Inside the minds of Football's Leaders by Mike Carson
Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters by Daniel Gray
Noble Endeavours by Miranda Seymour
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Fiction:
Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris (Sandstone Press, £8.99)
The Bone Season Samantha Shannon Bloomsbury, £12.99)
Malarky by Anakana Schofield (Oneworld Publications, £11.99)
Night Film by Marisha Pessl (Hutchinson, £16.99)

Children's fiction:
More Than This by Patrick Ness (Walker, £12.99)

Paperback:
Grimm Tales for Old and Young by Philip Pullman

Claire Armitstead
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Poem of the week: Łódź by Sujata Bhatt

This meditation on horror and healing, set in a Jewish cemetery that was part of the Łódź Ghetto, achieves a tentative blessing

Sujata Bhatt's newly published Collected Poems explores, with remarkable consistency of voice and style, a lifetime of rich, diverse cultural experience. Born in Ahmedabad in 1956, Bhatt describes her background as "a traditional Gujarati Brahmin family of writers, teachers, social workers, musicians and scientists". She learned English at the age of five, when her father, a virologist, moved the family to New Orleans, and ultimately took an MFA degree at the University of Iowa.

Her absorption in 20th-century American poetics, and her interest in Eastern European literature in translation, are reflected in this week's poem, "Łódź", as is her residence in Germany since the late 1980s.

Originally published in Augatora (2000), "Łódź" forms part of a section titled "History is a Broken Narrative". Some poems pick up various fragments of the limitless human diaspora and solder them together, often augmented by the stories and voices of individuals. Other poems, like this one, centre on a reticent personal act of witness that seems akin to meditation.

In the shadows of Łódź lie several broken narratives of the 20th century. The Jewish cemetery of the poem, established in 1892, formed part of the Łódź Ghetto in German-occupied Poland. "Łódź" acknowledges this history obliquely by beginning with a kind of tactful withdrawal from its own impulse: "I hesitate to say/ what I think:/ 'this cemetery is beautiful' …" The use of dashes throughout the poem, sometimes in lieu of full stops, emphasises the delicacy of feeling, as if more formal punctuation would too severely pin down and possess the poem's subject.

It's entirely fitting that the diction is simple and almost colloquial. This linguistic style might be described as formal-informal. The plainness is not quite that of ordinary speech: "it is" is never elided to "it's". That kind of formality slows and dignifies the utterance. It represents one of the subtle ways in which the poem is accountable to its occasion while minimal in figure and rhetoric.

In the fourth line, the break momentarily urges us to read "the cemetery that was" and it's as if a slight shift of light makes us review the meaning as we get to the next line and follow the sentence to its end: "this cemetery that was/ once in the heart of the ghetto" . A similarly glancing verbal shift is produced by the break after "still".

The poem begins tentatively to move to its emotional core with the image of the earth "trying to heal itself" and the speaker "reluctant to leave". Dashes, as well as suggesting hesitation, make connections. Parallel to these little grammatical silences, the silence of the landscape is an interleaving silence "between the dead" and "between the wild flowers/ and the sky …"

It's also an internal silence "that pulls me/ deeper into my own being" and it accrues a gravitational force. It seals the speaker into the meditation I mentioned earlier.

At this point, the poem becomes very concentrated. While "looking for another/ path I could walk down" the speaker, we sense, is motionless. She scans the area for the inviting prospect of a new path between the graves, and simultaneously an interior avenue seems to make her part of the landscape.

The speaker continues the dialogue with herself, juxtaposing present certainty ("It is May") with the conditional moods of the future. There's a possibility, even a hope, that she would visit every day, and walk here "even during the darkest days of November/ and December –" but the voice seems too wise and too candid to take the intention as far as a pledge.

Characteristically, the poem ends on a dash, not a full stop. Without the slightest arrogance on the speaker's part, it achieves a tentative blessing: a sense that the place has been salved by the vision of historical continuity, that vista of paths which extend before and after the horror of the ghetto. Trees, grass and flowers have sprung up around the gravestones. This Polish cemetery seems warmed and soothed by the green light that emanates from Bhatt's memory of her childhood garden in Poona.

Łódź

I hesitate to say
what I think:
'This cemetery is beautiful' –
this cemetery that was
once in the heart of the ghetto –

But it was there before
the ghetto – and it is still
being used today.

The earth
is trying to heal itself –

I am reluctant to leave –

The silence between the dead –
The silence between the wild flowers
and the sky – the silence that pulls me
deeper into my own being
is what keeps me
standing here looking for another
path I could walk down –

It is May and the green
shadows falling across the stones
make me think
that if I lived in this town
I would visit
this place every day –

It is May but I tell myself
that if I lived in this town
I would walk here even
during the darkest days of November
and December –

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Autumn books: what are your top tips?

As the new publishing season gets under way, tell us about the books you can't wait to read

The Autumn publishing season begins this week, with new novels from Donna Tartt, Stephen King and Helen Fielding, and a slick of celebrity nonfiction coming down the line in October as the industry gears up for the Christmas season.

We've picked out five big hitters, as part of a whistle-stop tour of all the art forms, but we're aware there are hundreds more titles out there. "Would it be too much to ask to have some poetry?" asked one reader. Well, MattheCat, we're looking forward to Daljit Nagra's Ramayana (Faber/ October) - and now's your chance to give us some pointers of your own.

The books currently being read on the Guardian books desk range from John Drury's scholarly account of the life and art of metaphysical poet George Herbert, Music at Midnight (coming from Allen Lane later this month) to Jung Chang's Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (Jonathan Cape, October) and Jonathan Coe's new novel Expo58, which is out this week.

So, whether your taste is for fiction or non-fiction, food or fantasy, let us know which books you hope will light your fire as winter approaches.

Stephen KingDonna TarttHelen Fielding
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Tweeting between the lines with the Commuter Book Club

With stations broadcasting book-related tweets from passengers on digital screens, travellers have a new way to take their minds off delays. But what are you reading on the rails?

If you're lucky enough to be a rail commuter like me, you may have discovered the amusement of following your fellow passengers on Twitter. There's something strangely comforting about knowing that, in your internal commuting strife, you're not alone.

According to JCDecaux, the company that runs the big screens at train stations and airports, 81% of commuters read on their journeys every week, with 38% of these using an e-reader.

So with all that reading going on, the company has introduced something a lot more fun than snarky tweets about delays. Commuter Book Club is a Twitter-based reading group that takes selected book-related tweets and broadcasts them at stations across the country.

Instead of information boards filled with news of cancellations and delays, we'll see @BriteEyedViolet asking, "How have I not read any EM Forster before? Just finished  #ARoomWithAView – a wonderful read." Or share @neilc79's reservations about Joseph Heller's sequel to Catch-22. Though it's hard for @RailBookClub followers to avoid the reality of 21st-century rail travel. @nomadiaz writes: "Just finished Stoner by John Williams, truly moving, puts today's delays into perspective."

I'll be back on the Lewisham train later, reading Franz Kafka's Greatest Stories on the Kindle. Not that I'm expecting my journey to be too Kafkaesque ...

FictionJoseph HellerFranz KafkaEM ForsterTwitterE-readersLiz Bury
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