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Fiction Addiction: Q&A with Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje talks about how he wrote The Cat's Table, where he gets his characters from and re-reading his favourite books.

Who cares about the Booker Prize?
When Patrick McGuinness’s debut novel The Last Hundred Days was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in July it had sold 64 copies. By September it was nudging 4000 sales.

Book Review: The Cup
Dan Cleary is one clever guy - actor, writer, producer and someone who doesn't mind poking the borax.

Travel book: <I>Visions of Nature</I>
There are so many fine picture books about New Zealand these days that it's often difficult to find a point of difference that makes one stand out from the others.

Book Review: Rugby Shorts
Mark Lynch does love his rugby. I remember once when Lynch and I and a few stragglers went to see the Waratahs play the Stormers in Sydney.

Book Review: Having a Ball
To state the bleeding obvious, we can be a nation of blunt-ended rugby fanatics. As 1987 All Blacks captain David Kirk quips in his foreword of Ian Grant's book Having A Ball, "it's part of the rhythm of life, and long may it remain so".

Jacqueline Yallop: Old habits die hard
The tale of a nun's betrayal proves shocking - and thought-provoking, writes Nicky Pellegrino.

Fiction Addiction: The Cat's Table - Enjoying the Show
Some evenings when I pick up my October feature read, The Cat's Table, I feel like a spectator at a variety show.

Babiche Martens' tasteful pictures
Viva photographer Babiche Martens shares her journey to create a cookbook with leading chef Michael Van de Elzen.

Winehouse's dad to tell 'true story' in memoir
Amy Winehouse's father Mitch is set to publish a memoir to tell the true story about the soul singer's life and to aid his recovery.

Book Review: The Women Of The Cousins' War
Murders, battles, seduction, witchcraft ... and a water goddess. It would be hard not to write a ripping history of the English War of the Roses.

Book Review: The Kindness Of Your Nature
Linda Olsson's novels sell in mega-numbers overseas. There are many places in this tender, loving story where you can understand why.

Book Review: Late For Tea At The Deer Palace
When the stone deer was placed in position in the pool in front of the Chalabi home in Kazimiya, near Baghdad, locals immediately named the palatial home the Deer Palace.

Book Review: The Below Country
Christchurch-born, Britain-based Edlin's first novel, The Widow's Daughter, was a crammed narrative of World War II Auckland, and the reverberations of a sexual liaison across decades and oceans. It was commendably ambitious and inevitably uneven.

Laini Taylor: Elsewhere's other world
Out with vampires, in with other-worldy romance, writes Nicky Pellegrino.

Fiction Addiction: Introducing The Cat's Table
When I picked up my October feature book, The Cat's Table, I recalled a radio interview I had once heard with New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy.

Focus on Lily Richards
Radio personality and bibliophile Lily Richards tells her story to Viva.

Rod Stewart's womanising ways unveiled in memoirs
Crooner Rod Stewart will “hold nothing back” in his autobiography.

Book Review: Pao
"Life is hard" is one of the Noble Truths and Yang Pao, as a young boy landing on the streets of Jamaica in the 1930s, learns that lesson quickly.

Book Review: The Cat's Table
In the opening pages of Michael Ondaatje's new novel, a young boy named Michael sets out for England on a passenger liner. It's the early 1950s.