Bid your name into the next novel of a best selling author

Showing all posts about novels

Bid your name into the next novel of a best selling author

4 November 2026

My old English high school teacher once told us authors take great care choosing the names of their characters. He said many writers opted to go with more common names such as, for example, John Smith or Mary Brown. They refrained, we were told, from using unique, made up names. This lest it turned out there was someone named thusly, who might threaten legal action for whatever reason.

But now well-known writers including Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith, are giving people — however common or not so common their name is — the chance to be characters in their upcoming novels. The move is in support of Freedom from Torture, a British charity organisation. I’m not sure if you have a say as to what sort of person — good, bad — your name sake will be though.

Life Out of Order, a novel by Audrey Niffenegger, sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife

26 October 2026

Twenty-three years after writing The Time Traveler’s Wife, American author Audrey Niffenegger, has published a sequel, Life Out of Order.

The focus of the follow up moves to Alba, the daughter of Henry DeTamble, who had a rare genetic disorder that caused him to travel through time, often with little warning. In Life Out of Order, Alba has inherited her father’s disorder, and also finds herself moving back and forth through time.

You’d almost have needed to be able to travel through time when Niffenegger penned the original novel in 2003, to have been able to envisage the world of 2026:

Alba DeTamble is a time traveler, slipping unpredictably through decades like her father before her. But the hardest thing she carries isn’t the burden of futures she can’t understand, or pasts she cannot change — it’s a secret: she is in love with two different people.

Each of them offers a different life. Zach lives in the present and can’t follow her when she disappears. Oliver can travel through time, just like she can.

As Alba careens from time to time, moving from the riot-torn Chicago streets of her present to the eerie, timeless Yellow House, and into the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls and a flooded future London, she must face a question she can no longer avoid: how is it possible to love, and live a meaningful life, in an increasingly troubled, fractured world?

Alba was seen as a child in the 2009 film adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife, directed by Robert Schwentke, which featured Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana.

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton wins number one in Top 100 Australian Books poll

20 October 2026

Listeners of ABC Radio National recently voted Cloudstreet, the 1991 novel by Fremantle based Australian author Tim Winton, to the top spot in the Top 100 Australian Books poll.

Cloudstreet won a number of literary awards, including the 1992 Miles Franklin prize for Australian literature, and went on to be adapted for stage and television. It is quite the yarn:

After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united and — until God seems to turn his back on their boy Fish — religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.

Chance, hardship and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet. Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives.

Other titles among the top ten include The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden, and The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.

Taika Waititi film adaptation of Klara and the Sun slammed by critics

19 October 2026

Not the news I wanted to hear: Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Klara and the Sun, has been slammed by critics at preview screenings. The consensus seems to be the New Zealand/Aotearoa filmmaker overdid his signature whimsy bringing Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, which I liked, to the big screen.

This was something I wondered about after seeing the trailer in June. At the time I wrote if Taika Waititi is directing, we’re going to get Taika Waitit. But his flamboyant style is perhaps not ideal for a novel such as Klara and the Sun, the tone of which could be best described as sombre.

Other adaptations of Ishiguro novels better — perfectly in fact — reflect their haunting source material. The Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go, directed by James Ivory, and Mark Romanek respectively, among them. The book is better than the film? Seems the case for Klara and the Sun.

Exit Party, new novel by Emily St. John Mandel

9 October 2026

Exit Party is the seventh novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, and was published last month. But savour the trademark mind-altering synopsis:

2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party.

Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong…

Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality — and may hold the key to a very different world.

Mandel’s previous works include Sea of Tranquility, and Station Eleven, which was adapted for television. It’s my guess Exit Party ends up with a screen adaptation of some sort.

Books are one-hundred-percent AI free. No, maybe not

2 October 2026

E-books (not paper/print books) seem set to start shipping with extra AI features, akin to the bonus features that once came with film and TV DVDs:

Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows.

These add-ons may not be all bad. I like the idea of being able find out more about parts of a book I’m reading. There could be any number of reasons for doing this.

For instance, in Sally Rooney’s 2021 novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, two characters discuss the Late Bronze Age collapse, which occurred over three-thousand years ago. I’d not heard of it before, even though I visited ruins of the Hittite Empire, whose demised was hastened by the collapse, when I was in Türkiye. I paused reading the novel to find out more about this period of history.

Having access to this information through an e-book would save the bother of looking up a search engine. No surprise then Google wants to be at the forefront of this development.

The German Ward, a new novel by Australian author Pip Williams

1 October 2026

Adelaide Hills, South Australia, based author Pip Williams‘ third novel, The German Ward, was published recently. Her debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words, and second, The Bookbinder of Jericho, were set in Oxford, England, prior to, and during World War I, and share a few characters.

While The German Ward is a separate work, some events also occur during World War I:

France, 1915. An English nurse and German doctor fall in love. He is a prisoner of war; she has never cared for rules. Their love is visceral and urgent, forbidden and doomed, and it would have gone unrecorded if not for a series of drawings found more than a century later.

At first the drawings seem insignificant, but the woman who finds them glimpses moments of intimacy and can’t look away. The images become part of a puzzle she wants to solve: who were the lovers, what became of them, and what story of war was the artist trying to tell?

Williams is presently travelling across Australia until late November 2026, should you be interested in hearing her talk about her work.

A Piece of Red Cloth wins 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction

18 September 2026

A Piece of Red Cloth, written by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, and Djawa Burarrwanga, has been named winner of the fiction category in the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2026.

Australian works of literature are recognised annually across six categories: Australian history, children’s, young adult, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. A full list of recipients in all categories is here.

Unmasking Italian author Elena Ferrante, because we must

10 September 2026

There’s been yet more speculation as to the identity of the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante.

The writer of novels including the Neapolitan Quartet, and The Lying Lives of Adults, has always been upfront about their use of a pseudonym. And despite writing novels since 1992, her identity, their identity, has, so far, remained a mystery.

Nonetheless, the resolve to unmask the person, or persons, behind the works written under the name of Elena Ferrante, refuses to wane.

Of course people want to know who the author really is. For sometime there has been a consensus that Anita Raja, an Italian literary translator, writes the novels attributed to Ferrante.

In a more recent twist though, suspicion has moved towards Italian author and screenwriter Domenico Starnone, who is also Raja’s husband.

The plot thickens.

Starnone has denied the claim. For my part, I couldn’t care less. So far, I’ve enjoyed every of the novels attributed to Ferrante that I’ve read, and hope the writer continues publishing.

Although I’m sure someone will figure it out eventually, learning the identity of the actual writer (or writers) would be an anticlimax. A let down even.

Great going though, for keeping everyone guessing all this time.

Mine, by Adam Ouston, a novel length story written as one sentence

31 August 2026

That’s Mine, by Hobart based Australian author Adam Ouston (Instagram page), which features one incredibly, outrageously, long sentence of perhaps eighty-five thousand words. No full-stops, chapters, or even a few lines of space to break up the text it seems.

I can’t find an official word count for the novel, so made a guess. The hardback version of Mine has two-hundred-and-eighty-eight pages, and if each has perhaps three-hundred words each, then the total number of words would be well north of eighty-thousand.

Whatever the exact number, that’s one long sentence. The synopsis however perfectly suits the seemingly endless flow of words, written in stream-of-consciousness prose:

While searching for inspiration for what will be his final work, an unnamed poet and defender of Tasmania’s wild places finds himself trapped down an abandoned mine in the island’s mountain rainforests. In the darkness he is visited by memories and voices both from his own past as well as the tortured history of the pillaged landscape to which he has devoted his life and work.

That’s quite the predicament to be in. I imagine my thoughts would run into each other ceaselessly, relentlessly, were I in the same situation.

« older posts