Sally Rooney books may be withdrawn from sale in UK bookshops

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Sally Rooney books may be withdrawn from sale in UK bookshops

2 December 2025

The Irish author, whose titles include Intermezzo and Conversations with Friends, wants United Kingdom royalties from her novels, and any screen adaptations made there, to go to Palestine Action, a British pro-Palestinian organisation.

The British government however considers Palestine Action to be a terrorist group, and banned them earlier this year.

In sending Rooney royalty payments, her UK publishers, and the BBC, who co-produced the 2020 TV adaptation of Normal People, Rooney’s second novel, would be breaking terrorism laws. The author says this could result in her novels being withdrawn from sale in the UK.

Read a chapter of a book daily in your RSS reader

17 November 2025

Made by Las Vegas based software developer Pablo Enoc, who’s also behind indie RSS aggregator powRSS, lettrss will send a chapter of the book you’re reading to your RSS reader each day.

Here’s an idea with merit.

Reading novels is just about the last thing I get to each evening, and I don’t usually cover much ground before falling asleep. If a chapter of whatever I was reading appeared in my RSS feed though, I might make more progress since I read a lot of what takes my interest there. This idea might get a few more of us reading more regularly, since a chapter at a time usually isn’t too onerous.

At the moment only books in the public domain (or those out of copyright) can be read with lettrss. But this idea has possibilities. Imagine if book publishers were to make recent titles available this way, through possibly a subscription model of some sort.

Children’s Booker Prize hopes to encourage younger people to read more books

17 November 2025

The Booker Prize, which recognises English language novels published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has unveiled a new award: the Children’s Booker Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in 2027.

The Children’s Booker Prize, which will launch in 2026 and be awarded annually from 2027, will celebrate the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, written in or translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The aim of the prize is to engage and grow a new generation of readers by recognising and championing the best children’s fiction from writers around the world.

This is good news all around. Not only will the Children’s Booker encourage more younger people to read, it will also support authors with an enticement to write more stories for children. The more literary awards there are, the better it is for literature, writing, and reading, as a whole.

Authors claim Salesforce used their novels to train AI agents

21 October 2025

American novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore have launched legal action against Salesforce, accusing the San Francisco based software company of copyright infringement.

Tanzer and Gilmore allege Salesforce used thousands of novels, not just their work, without permission, to train AI agents.

Salesforce want to have their cake and eat it as well. After replacing several thousand workers with AI technologies, presumably saving the company large sums of money, Salesforce want to pay as little as possible to develop the AI agents that displaced the workers in the first place.

What part of any of this is reasonable?

Mind blown: are these the best science-fiction/fantasy books of the twenty-first century?

25 August 2025

Singapore based Australian blogger, and science-fiction writer Skribe, recently asked his Mastodon followers to name one sci-fi/fantasy novel, written this century, that has blown their minds. From those suggestions, he drew up this list of seven titles:

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, published in 2020
Anathem by Neal Stephenson, published in 2010
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, published in 2013
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published in 2015
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, published in 2020
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, published in 2021
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, published in 2015

In a since closed poll asking people to vote for the title they considered the best, I went for Piranesi. Mainly because it was the only novel from the list that I’d read, but also because British author Susanna Clarke’s tome compelled me to write at length about it afterwards.

Long story short, Piranesi is about someone of the same name, who finds themselves mostly alone in a house of epic proportions. It can literally take days to move from one part of the multi-level structure, to another. The house itself is a character in its own right, and as I read through the story, I almost felt as if I was there with Piranesi, so vivid was Clarke’s description of the sprawling abode.

Cure, the fourth novel by Australian author Katherine Brabon

21 July 2025

Cure, the fourth novel by Melbourne based Australia author Katherine Brabon, was published this month. As with most of Brabon’s novels so far, Cure is set outside of Australia, in Italy:

Vera and Thea are mother and daughter. Vera writes for the internet: she constructs identities and scenarios for brands to cater to the ideal consumer. Yet she also consumes the offerings of the online world herself: the addictive pursuit of a cure, the narratives she craves in which mother and daughter find a way out of the shared experience of chronic illness. She becomes preoccupied with a blog written by a woman named Claudia, a mother whose daughter also has a chronic illness.

While on holiday in Italy, Thea writes in her journal. She is also constructing a character: an image of herself as she grapples with having the same illness as her mother, Vera. But gradually another person emerges in her journal, through her imaginings of her mother in the same house, the same city, at the same age. They have come to Italy to see where Vera’s family originates, but also to chase a promised cure in the form of a man said to be able to heal Thea’s illness.

I read Brabon’s second novel, The Shut Ins, which was published in 2021, and explored the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori, where people shut themselves away from society, as in never leave their room, for sometimes years on end.

I was particularly intrigued by a character known only as M, and wrote a longer piece in 2021, trying to figure out who she was. Some people felt certain they knew who she was, but I wasn’t so sure. It’s not too often a novel piques my curiosity thusly…

The Long Night, the new Christian White novel, October 2025

14 July 2025

Victoria based Australian author, Christian White, that raconteur of the redirect, that teller of tantalising thrillers, has a new novel, The Long Night, being published on Tuesday 28 October 2025. His publisher, Affirm Press, describes White’s fifth book, as his “darkest” yet:

Em has lived a quiet life with her complicated mother and is now looking for love and a potential escape from her small hometown. When a masked man kidnaps her in the dark of night, though, she is drawn into a terrifying world.

Jodie has been trying to forget a troubling time in her life, pouring her trauma into her work and out of her mind. Until one night her daughter is kidnapped and Jodie is dragged back into the violence.

As Em and Jodie race into the darkness, the agony of the past rushes up to meet them. It will take all their devotion and courage to escape this night alive.

Here’s hoping White’s good run of form continues. I’ve read all of his novels except (so far) Wild Place, and will be looking out for The Long Night later this year.

Authors take to TikTok to prove they are not using Generative AI

20 June 2025

Alana Yzola, writing for Wired:

Criticism and warnings of Gen-AI authors snagging coveted deals are flooding both Threads and TikTok, with writers and readers sometimes flinging around accusations when they suspect someone is using AI as part of their creative process. Now, Aveyard and other prolific authors are not only calling out people who use AI to write, they’re also posting livestreams and time-lapses of their writing processes to defend themselves against such complaints.

The camera never lies. But will that be enough to convince book readers who otherwise suspect some authors are using AI tools to assist them write?

Harry Potter producers pull lead actors for ten year TV adaptation from hat

31 May 2025

Two years after the announcement of a ten series TV adaptation of the (original) Harry Potter books, members of the primary cast have been announced.

This includes Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton, and Alastair Stout in the roles of Harry, Hermione, and Ron, respectively. Other castings include John Lithgow as Dumbledore, Janet McTeer as Minerva McGonagall, and Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape. No word yet on who will portray bad guy Voldemort, though rumours suggest this might be Cillian Murphy.

So, another ten years of Harry Potter on the screen. No doubt fans will be delighted. It is anticipated the first series will be broadcast sometime in 2026 or 2027.

I Want Everything, the debut novel of Dominic Amerena

28 May 2025

If literary scandals of the plagiarism variety intrigue you, then I Want Everything, by Dominic Amerena, an Australian author who lives between Melbourne and Athens, Greece, might be a novel worth adding to your TBR list.

The legendary career of reclusive cult author Brenda Shales remains one of Australia’s last unsolved literary mysteries. Her books took the world by storm before she disappeared from the public eye after a mysterious plagiarism case. But when an ambitious young writer stumbles across Brenda at a Melbourne pool, he realises the scoop of a lifetime is floating in front of him: the truth behind why she vanished without a trace. The only problem? He must pretend to be someone he’s not to trick the story out of her.

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