We all know that sequels can be a problem. Especially if your first novel happens to have been "Catch-22", breathtaking and one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. Millions of copies sold and a phrase added to the language! The Big Read by the BBC ranked Catch-22 as number 11 on a web poll of the UK's best-loved book. The Observer listed Catch-22 as one of the 100 greatest... Read More
Sir William Gerald Golding, a British novelist, playwright, and poet, won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage. But he is best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. In September 1953, after many rejections from other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber & Faber. Monteith asked for some changes to the text... Read More
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American author. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." During his writing career, he authored 27 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. Ironically he is more popular with critics abroad than in his own... Read More
John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California. His first writing success came in 1935 with Tortilla Flat, a collection of humorous stories. But Steinbeck’s writing is less about humour and more about social issues. John Steinbeck’s timeless novella Of Mice and Men was published in 1937 to considerable acclaim, and the reading public’s appreciation of the text has hardly diminished sinc... Read More
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American author, who wrote 27 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, and epic East of Eden. In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast... Read More
East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s passionate and exhilarating epic, re-creates the seminal stories of Genesis through the intertwined lives of two American families. Spanning the period between the American Civil War and the end of World War I, the novel highlights the conflicts of two generations of brothers, the first being the kind, gentle Adam Trask and his wild brother Charles. Adam eventuall... Read More
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize-winning British novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, but his family moved to the UK in 1960 when he was five. Never Let Me Go is a 2005 dystopian science fiction novel. The novel's title comes from a song on a cassette tape called Songs After Dark, by fictional singer Judy Bridgewater. Kathy bought the tape during a... Read More
John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April 1945, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker. Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried guilt for his brother's death throughout his life... Read More
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist. Grossman has written for The New York Times, Wired, Time Out New York, The Wall Street Journal, and The Village Voice. He has served as a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and as the chair of the Fiction Awards Panel. In writing for Time, he has also covered the consumer electronics industry, reporting on vi... Read More
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, most notable as the author of The Magicians Trilogy: The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician's Land. Lev Grossman's first novel, Warp, was published in 1997 after he moved to New York City. The Magicians was praised as a triumph by readers and critics of both mainstream and fantasy literature. Now Grossman takes us back to Fillory,... Read More
Lev Grossman's New York Times bestseller The Magicians was published in hardcover in August 2009. The book is a dark contemporary fantasy about Quentin Coldwater, an unusually gifted young man who obsesses over Fillory, the magical land of his favourite childhood books. Unexpectedly admitted to Brakebills, a secret, exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, Quentin receives an education i... Read More
Colleen Margaretta McCullough was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and The Ladies of Missalonghi. Before her tertiary education, McCullough earned a living as a teacher, librarian and journalist. In her first year of medical studies at the University of Sydney, she suffered dermatitis from surgical soap and was told to abandon her dreams of be... Read More
Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris is an English author especially known for her award-winning novel Chocolat. Joanne Harris was born in Barnsley in 1964, of a French mother and an English father. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and was a teacher for fifteen years, during which time she published three novels; The Evil Seed, Sleep, Pale Sister and Choco... Read More
Joanne Harris began writing at an early age. She was strongly influenced by Grimms' Fairy Tales and Charles Perrault's work, as well as local folklore and Norse mythology. She was educated at Wakefield Girls' High School, Barnsley Sixth Form College, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where she studied modern and medieval languages. In Coastliners, Madeline, “Mado”, coming back from Paris t... Read More
Joanne Harris is an acclaimed contemporary English writer who writes under mixed genres, such as magic realism and gastromance. She was born in Barnsley in Yorkshire, to an English father and a French mother. Her parents were both teachers of modern languages and literature at a local grammar school. Her first language was French, which caused divisions between her English family, where nobody... Read More
Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris is an English author especially known for her award-winning novel Chocolat. Since Chocolat, all of Harris's books have been UK bestsellers. She has written three more novels in the Chocolat series, continuing the adventures of Vianne Rocher. Gentlemen and Players is a dark psychological thriller, some of the themes may be partly based on Harris' experiences as a tea... Read More
Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris is an English author. Harris is the holder of honorary doctorates in literature from the University of Huddersfield and the University of Sheffield and is an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge. She is an elected member of the Management Committee of the Society of Authors. In Blackberry Wine, Jay Mackintosh is a 37-year-old has-been writer from Lon... Read More
Joanne Harris is an Anglo-French author, whose books include fourteen novels, two cookbooks and many short stories. Her first novel, The Evil Seed, was published in 1989, with only limited success. Sleep, Pale Sister is her second novel. In 1999 her third novel, Chocolat, a darkly magical modern folk-tale, thematically based on food and set in the Gers region of France, reached No. 1 in the Sun... Read More
David John Moore Cornwell, better known by the pen name John le Carré, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality are le Carré's first two novels. The Constant Gardener is a 2001 novel by the author. In August of 2005, Focus Features release... Read More
John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell, is an English author of espionage novels. Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England. From 1948 to 1949, he studied foreign languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 1950, he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who c... Read More