Books

To order any of the books of featured visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25Wyndham and Bannerjee creator Abir Mukherjee, above, whose standalone thriller Hunted (Vintage) is out, now says: “Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Macmillan) follows Dave Win, an Anglo-Burmese man, from childhood and through his life as an actor. It’s a poignant book about race, class and sexuality in a changing Britain. Hollinghurst has rightly been described as the UK’s finest living author. The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Vintage) is a Senegalese writer’s quest to uncover the fate of a vanished author, the book weaves together colonial history, identity, and the power of literature. Absolutely haunting.” (Image: Express...

To order any of the books of featured visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25Sir Ian Rankin, above, whose 25th Rebus novel Midnight And Blue (Orion) was one of the smash hits of the autumn, says: “White City by Dominic Nolan (Headline) features postwar, but pre-groovy London in all its gangland glory as communities and individuals clash and race tensions reach boiling point. A hard-hitting novel with a very human heart. Missing Person: Alice by Simon Mason (Quercus) sees a detective specialising in finding people long disappeared methodically searching for a young woman. Hints of Georges Simenon here though the story is set in contemporary England. It’s lean, tense, gripping.” (Image: Orion)Tessa Hadley, above, whose latest...

Dave Rowntree, Damon Albarn, Alex James and Graham Coxon of Blur (Image: Getty Images)Blur bassist Alex James has revealed how the band was fined £20,000 for smoking on stage when they played their two massive reunion gigs at Wembley Stadium. The musician turned farmer, who was rarely without a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth in the Britpop band’s nineties heyday, chuckles: “It’s all there in the tour accounts!”By then, having played to 180,000 ecstatic fans at the sold-out London shows – their best ever, he believes – as well as tens of thousands more around the world, Blur could afford the write-off. But rewind to the run-up to last year’s reunion, and James admits money was so tight he was forced to borrow from his mother-in-law.Sitting on a sofa in a converted thres...

This book is a must-read before the end of the year, it has been called a "perfect book for the festive season” by an expert.Maia Snow from The Bookseller said her book of the year is Orbital by Samantha Harvey.She said: “It might not be very original, but for me, by far the must-read book of 2024 is easily this year's Booker Prize winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.“I read it in a single day when the prize shortlist was announced and immediately my favourite to win and I was thrilled when it did.“It's the perfect book read over the festive season, or even to get you out of a reading slump as it clocks in at just 136 pages - easily devoured in a day, and warrants rereading to really appreciate everything the author packed into such a short book.”This year was huge for books, with reader...

"A good scary book thrills in a way no other genre can quite match, it simply demands to be read," says children's horror author Rachel Burge as I interview her, appropriately enough, on Halloween.Burge has just published her fourth book Whispering Hollow, a spook-fest which melds contemporary teenage life with painstakingly researched English faerie folklore (hard to know which is the scarier, I know...) in a gripping, darting, twisting page-turner of a novel.But be warned, these are not Tinkerbell-esque Tooth Fairies she is writing about. Burge's Faeries are nasty murderous killers just as - pre-Disney - most Faeries actually were."As I looked into British folklore about faeries," says the best-selling writer, "I was surprised to discover just how cruel they could be to humans. In Cor...

The 26-year-old let rip at the luxury car marque in his new book, writing: “If you see someone driving a pickup, you can trust them. You know that if you follow them you’re going to end up at a good pub. But if you follow someone driving a Range Rover, you’ll probably end up down a back alley having your wheels stolen.”The young farming contractor was brought in to assist Clarkson, 64, in running 1,000-acre Diddly Squat Farm in Oxfordshire – using his own expertise to try and teach the petrol-head-turned-wannabe-farmer the basics of the job. Now it appears he is following his boss – famed for his hilariously biting put-downs of cars during his time on Top Gear and The Grand Tour – into the realms of controversy.Writing about the best farm vehicles in his second book, It’s A Farming Thin...

Renée Ballard (Maggie Q) joins Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver) in final episode of Bosch: Legacy (Image: Patrick Wymore/Prime Video)Crime writing titan Michael Connelly has reassured fans Titus Welliver will continue to play his legendary detective Harry Bosch on screen, even when the longest-running streaming series in TV history concludes after its 10th season this spring.Despite an energetic grassroots campaign to save the show, Bosch: Legacy is due to end after 11 years following a final series in March. But Welliver, 62, will continue to star as the rule-breaking cop in Connelly’s as-yet-untitled new series featuring Maggie Q as Renée Ballard.Based on Detective Mitzi Roberts, the recently-retired head of the LAPD’s real-life volunteer Open-Unsolved unit, Ballard has shared book plotli...

As crime king Michael Connelly publishes his new Harry Bosch book, my take on ten of the greatest crime novels ever written. This was the hardest, and possibly most controversial, list to write – there’s no Raymond Chandler, Robert B Parker, Dorothy L Sayers, John Grisham, Mick Herron or M W Craven among others… read it and weep.No.10 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan DoyleThe third of four Sherlock Holmes novels by Arthur Conan Doyle (most of the legendary sleuth’s exploits took short story form), 1902’s Hound of the Baskervilles must be the legendary detective’s greatest case. As gripping as the mud of Grimpen Mire where much of the action takes place, noted one critic. Even after all this time, Conan Doyle’s giant hound remains, frankly, terrifying and the Holmes books co...

Frederick Forsyth in his home in Beaconsfield (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)Wonder aloud why it's not Sir Freddie and the journalist and author chuckles. "I've put too many official noses out of joint," he shrugs. "They've long memories and I've had that from a reliable source. 'It's not there for you Freddie, because everything would have to go before an honours committee studded with mandarins you've upset.'" So for the moment, at least, it's plain old Mr Frederick Forsyth nursing a glass of red wine in a London restaurant even more venerable than he is, sitting beneath a mural showing the late Lady Thatcher, who he hugely admired, as a knight in armour. Don't miss... Freddie Forsyth's ghost story The Shepherd finally makes it to the screen [LATEST] Frederick Forsyth was the wor...

She liked waiting for the wave more than riding the wave.Facing the cliffs, straddling the board, her hips finding the up-and­ down rhythm of the surface. Riding it like a horse, making her think about Kaupo Boy when she was a child. There was a reverence to the moment before the next set came in and it was time to dig down and paddle.She checked her watch. She could fit in one more. She’d ride it all the way in if she could. But she savoured the moment of just floating, closing her eyes and tilting her head upward. The sun was just over the cliffs now and it warmed her face.“Haven’t seen you here before.”Ballard opened her eyes. It was the guy on the One World board. An OG with no wetsuit, no leash, his skin burnished to a dark cherrywood.She braced for what she knew would come next: t...