The best thing to come out of Auckland's Super City amalgamation is that you can borrow 3.5 million items from 55 libraries from Wellsford to Waiuku. Here we choose our favourite handful.

UK journalist James Fergusson tackled questions on the Taleban at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

Just when you thought Sex and the City had taken its last gasp, the creator of the iconic characters releases two novels for younger readers. Rebecca Barry Hill talks to the original Carrie Bradshaw, Candace Bushnell.

Britney Spears' life has been turned into a comic book.

The disintegration of American dreams into nightmares is the leitmotiv of this first novel. Its narrative punches you from the first paragraph: "I'm ten years old ... I opened our front door and found my mother hanging from the rafters..."

Bronwyn Sell opens the discussion on her feature book for May 2011, Sarah Winman's When God was a Rabbit.

David Mitchell is a UK author whose most recent novel is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. He will be appearing at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

Pressure cooking is set to experience a renaissance, which makes this comprehensive cookbook very handy.

Buying ebooks may be convenient but it can't compete with the personality and charm of our best bookshops, writes Danielle Wright.

Brimming from the excitement of the royal nuptials, a story about a self-exiled princess proves timely for writer Monica Ali.

Popular historian Niall Ferguson tells Stephen Jewell how television democratises knowledge and why colonialism wasn't all bad.

Family treasures helped create a stunning, unique cookbook with nostalgic appeal.

Personal time is too precious to waste on rotten reads. That's why our new book club, Fiction Addiction, will only be road-testing the most promising new novels.

There are memoirs that are about a personal life lived, and then there are memoirs about a specific subject on which an author wishes to ruminate at length. Annie Proulx's non-fiction Bird Cloud very much falls into the latter.

Tanya Moir is a Southland writer who recently published her début novel La Rochelle's Road (Random House, $39.99).

This author's début is less than the sum of its brilliant parts.

Don't mention the Cup - or more accurately the fact we haven't won the World Cup since 1987.

It is a tale of two cities and two sisters. Atka and Hana were parted as girls in war-torn Sarajevo but then reunited as young women.

If you've been put off making a curry because it seems too involved, veteran cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey proves that it needn't be the case.