The fact that a reality television show features in Camilla Lackberg's mesmerising new novel will mean little to New Zealand readers of this best-selling Nordic writer, but her fellow Swedes might discern a little score-settling.

A witty, irreverent and gutsy heroine carries this new novel.

Graham Reid considers Steve Winwood's career from teenage soul-boy to mainstream man.

Just as his latest television drama, Downton Abbey, hits our screens, so does writer and director Julian Fellowes' second feature film as director, the family-oriented period drama From Time to Time.

The work of Oscar-winning writer Julian Fellowes is now on screens both big and small. He talks to Peter Calder about the revived appetite for period drama.

Slap this on in the car, turn it up to 11 and you're likely to find yourself back in the summer of 1989 with the window down, a sunburnt arm, and a sore throat from rapping along.

The enormously prolific Howe Gelb is behind the Tucson band Giant Sand (from which Calexico became a more commercially successful split-off) and has also recorded a dozen albums under his own name.

Katy B is a fairly unlikely gritty dubstep queen.

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..."

The first feature outing under the banner of the small, self-sustaining Wellington collective Torchlight Films was Taking the Waewae Express, a small and gutsy effort that took us into the lives of several young men.

"Just treat it like it's a game" says the guy who has woken up yet again on a Chicago commuter train in the body of another man.