Authors discover the brazen pioneers and their wheelings and dealings to create the affluent area.

It could be a scene from a cheesy Hollywood movie. An aspiring writer receives a cardboard box containing $6000, and a note: "No Strings Attached".

The compensation for reading a disappointing book is that it makes you better appreciate a satisfying one, writes Bronwyn Sell.

As with many of his generation, American president Franklin D. Roosevelt had been taken by the idea of "Shangri-La". Writer Mitchell Zuckoff shares this fascination in his new tale about a collision of cultures during the early war era.

Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series gained massive success in the shadow of Harry Potter. Expansion into the tricky adult fiction market is the next mission, writes Susie Mesure.

Glee star Chris Colfer has signed a book deal.

When I have a spare half hour to browse in my local independent bookshop, it's usually a combination of the cover and the title that tempts me to pick up something new.

Taxpayers are helping Kiwi musicians to take to the stage at this month's Glastonbury Music Festival in Britain.

With a new cookbook out, one half of Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright, is happy.

Despite the glowing book-jacket recommendations from writers much loftier than me, I started out disliking Elizabeth Day's début novel, Scissors Paper Stone.

One of the most interesting things about reading a historical novel is working out what period detailing preoccupies the novelist and is used as a means of anchoring it to its era.

Never mind its unappealing cover, this debut kids' novel is bound to enchant adults, too.

It's hard to think of a recent debut novel as original and ambitious in its premise - or as successful in its execution - as S.J. Watson's Before I Go to Sleep.

David Hartnell has recently released his autobiography, Memoirs Of A Gossip Columnist (Penguin, $45).

Auckland arts patron James Wallace is worried about financial support for the arts by upcoming generations of wealthy professionals.

Commonplace books are literary scrapbooks - "salads of many herbs" as one compiler put it. They are eclectic, idiosyncratic repositories of bits and pieces that have taken a person's fancy.

Edna O'Brien turned 80 last year. The energy and immediacy of these 11 stories makes that hard to believe.

H.G. Wells? Wasn’t he the guy who wrote that Tom Cruise movie?