Between the covers: What’s really going on in the world of books

The novel is set in San Francisco in the 1890s, where “great fortunes are being made and family dynasties established as new money erases the often unsavoury pasts and shady dealings of their founders”. Its publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes it as having “the dark bits of Tim Burton and the shiny bits of Wes Anderson”, while the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Michael Chabon said that Fowler “re-creates a lost world so thrillingly, with such intelligence, trickery, and art, that when you at last put the book down and look up from the page it all seems to linger, shimmering, around you, like the residue of a marvellous dream”.

Good news, too, for fans of Ian Rankin’s famous DI Rebus, after the author (above) implied on Twitter that the retired detective will make a comeback (his fourth) in the novel he is currently writing. After a series of teasing tweets about the book, one follower asked: “Dare I ask if it is a Rebus?” Rankin replied, “Yes”. Between the Covers first met Rankin in 2008, when he seemed happy to have retired the character and written the first, post-Rebus book, Doors Open.

Then again in 2009, to talk about The Complaints, when a fan approached him to say: “If you’re writing another book, please can we have Rebus back in it? I couldn’t get to grips with that last one.” Rankin replied, with remarkable patience: “Don’t make your mind up just yet. I’ve got a new book out in September [Dark Entries]. It’s got an Edinburgh cop in it ....” Nonetheless, Rebus returned in 2012’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave, 2013’s Saints of the Shadow Bible and last year’s short story collection, The Beat Goes On. Rebus proves to be as bad at retiring as Rankin himself, then.

Also in that 2009 interview, Rankin revealed that he was planning on retiring as soon as Dark Entries was published. “I’m contractually obliged to write one more book,” he said, and then he planned to jack it all in and go travelling when he turned 50. He’s now 54, and still going strong. Long may he, and Rebus, continue.

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James Dawson is Queen of Teen books

James Dawson has fought hard to win the title Queen of Teen 2014. And now he has been crowned.

All rise for his majesty the queen as James Dawson, the author of Hollow Pike and Say Her Name, becomes the first male winner of the Queen of Teen award for his latest book, Cruel Summer.

After a vigorous social media campaign, Dawson topped a shortlist entirely nominated by teens (Cathy Cassidy, Beth Reekles, Holly Smale, Cassandra Clare, Veronica Roth, John Green, S.C. Ransom, Tonya Hurley, and Natasha Farrant) to join an illustrious cast of previous winners including Louise Rennison, Cathy Cassidy and Maureen Johnson.

Watch out for our report from the awards ceremony and interview with James by site member Alannahbee coming up!

Cruel Summer is a psychological thriller focusing on a group of teens who, one year on from the suicide of one of their friends, try to get over it by going away to a holiday villa in the Mediterranean. But when a new guest, claiming to have evidence that the suicide was actually a murder, is herself found dead, it's clear that one of them must be the killer…

Helloitsheath called it the "perfect balance of murder mystery, teen fiction and horror movie', which at the same time 'manages to be funny, heartwarming and – murder aside – ­easy for teenage audiences to relate to".

While XoXo Bookworm_98 gushed, "there were SO many times I just HAD to put the book down to take a breather, so that I could process what had just happened – there were just about a million twists that you will Never. See. Coming".

Dawson has been a vocal supporter of LGBT rights (including supporting Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst) and XoXo Boomworm_98 noted that "the LGBT aspect of the book was so different from others I've read, and was a vital, beautiful, heart wrenching part of the tale".

Buy Cruel Summer at the Guardian Bookshop or join the site to get your copy to review!

For all the latest kids books news - and to comment - join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter (@GdnChildrensBks)!

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Judy Blume: 'I thought, this is America: we don't ban books. But then we did'

'I don't know that you become a writer: you just are' … Judy Blume. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Judy Blume, tiny and smiley and as warmly open as befits the author of seminal novels about growing up Forever…, and Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret is sitting in a hotel in London and talking about the hate mail she has received. It comes, she says, every time she speaks out on behalf of Planned Parenthood, an American pro-choice group for mothers.

"I went to a couple of places two years ago and I got seven hundred and something hate-mail warnings – 'We know where you are going to be and we'll be there waiting for you', that sort of thing," says Blume. "My publisher sent me with a bodyguard. He was wonderful, I loved knowing he was there. And nothing happened and probably nothing would have happened, but it was very scary."

It is an incongruous revelation. Blume, 76, is the sort of author who is beloved by her fans, who stretch from the children of today to the adults who read her books when they were growing up, and were astonished at finding a novelist who spoke so clearly, so uncondescendingly, so directly, to their concerns, whether masturbation (Deenie), periods and boobs (Margaret), sex and birth control (Forever…), or death (Tiger Eyes).

Her books have sold 82m copies worldwide since The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo, her first book, was published in 1969. She has been given an award for lifetime achievement from the American Library Association, the Library of Congress living legends award and the 2004 National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. But Blume is also the recipient of a more dubious accolade: she is one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century. Her books have drawn fire from parents ever since the 80s for their frank depiction of puberty and sexuality, from Deenie, the 13-year-old who touches herself in "this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling", to Katherine and Michael, the teenagers who fall in love and have sex – ever so responsibly – in Forever ….

"Deenie, Forever …, every year, somewhere, they're challenged," says Blume. "When I started, in the 70s, it was a good time for children's book writers. Children's reading was much freer than in the 80s, when censorship started; when we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy. My feeling in the beginning was wait, this is America: we don't have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don't do this, we don't ban books. But then they did."

Blume's theory is that children read over what they aren't yet ready to understand. Sometimes, she says, "kids will actually go to Mom or Dad and say 'What does this mean?', which is the perfect time to talk to them about it. But that's when sometimes parents get hysterical. Really. It's like, 'Argh, I don't want to talk to you about this, let's get rid of this book, I don't ever want to talk to you about this, I don't ever want you to go through puberty.'"

Blume most famously tackles puberty is in Margaret, her story of a sixth grader who talks to God like a friend, worries about being the last to get her period, and longs for breasts. "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. I just did an exercise to help me grow. Have you thought about it, God? About my growing, I mean. I've got a bra now. It would be nice if I had something to put in it."

"There's a lot of me in Margaret," says Blume. "I talked to my own private God the way Margaret does. I would plead, 'Just let me be normal', which meant let me have my period, give me some breasts, and hurry up ... You know, the 50s, the body image for women was round and curvy, and I was this skinny little thing, very small, and I wanted to be round and curvy the way round and curvy women today want to be skinny things."

"Everybody who writes fiction draws from their own life, but if it ended there, it would be very boring," she says. "When I talk to kids and they say, 'How do you become a writer?', well, I don't know that you become a writer: you just are. I always had stories, they were always there inside my head. I never told anyone, but they were there."

She trained as a teacher but never taught; she was married before she graduated from college. "It was ridiculous, [the idea] that any marriage would work that starts that early, before you have any idea who you are." She recalls: "It was the most traumatic time of my life. My father had just died and the wedding was scheduled. I was 21, we got married and I did my final year at college. Then, before that ended, I was pregnant, and had two babies by the time I was 25, and then started to write."

She'd make up rhyming stories when she was washing the dishes at night and added her own illustrations, sending them off to publishers. Then she decided she wanted to write novels, took a writing course, and out came Iggie's House, the story of Winnie, a girl whose quintessentially white surburban-American street gets its first black family, and who is confronted with – and confronts – racism.

"Writing saved my life," she says, seriously. "It saved me, it gave me everything, it took away all my illnesses. I loved having little kids, I relate to little kids, but something was missing, and I don't think about this every day, but when I think about it, it's that creative energy. I was an imaginative, strange little girl, and in school I had a lot of creative outlets. I danced, I sang, I painted, there was a lot of that, and suddenly I didn't have any of that. I've thought about this – I think that's why I was having such a bad time. And there was the marriage, too, but that's another story." Her marriage, she says, lasted 16 years and "we're very good friends now. But it was very tough, and I felt lonely and didn't have the friends I had when I was in school. I missed that female friendship." She left, along with her children, in 1975. In 1976 she married again, and moved to New Mexico, but the marriage didn't work out. She has been married to her third husband, George Cooper, since 1987.

Blume talks a lot about friendship, female friendship – as well as George, her best friend, Mary, is here in London with her. It's a key theme of her novels, too – Summer Sisters; Here's to You, Rachel Robinson; Just As Long As We're Together.

What followed Iggie's House was an extraordinary period of creativity: between 1970 and 1977 she published most of the books she is now most famous for, including Blubber; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Then Again, Maybe I Won't and Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself, her most autobiographical book. "I was very prolific in those years ... I was young and I remembered everything. I had total recall," she says. "I think I wrote Margaret in six weeks; now it's like four years. It was spontaneous, it just poured out. And in the middle of that I was writing the Fudge book."

Fudge, the naughty toddler who drives his brother Peter wild, was originally drawn from her son; Forever…, she says, was written after a request from her teenage daughter (it's dedicated to her: "For Randy as promised … with love"). "She was reading all these books, where a girl succumbed [to sex], she would be punished, sometimes she would die. And Randy said, 'Couldn't there ever be a book where two nice kids do it and nobody has to die?' And I thought 'Yes, I need to write this'."

Blume's protagonists range in age from toddler Fudge to the adult Caitlin and Vix of Summer Sisters, but perhaps her best work centres on the crossover from child to teenager, whether it's Tony; in Then Again, Maybe I Won't, making sense of a world where his friend is shoplifting, or Margaret. "I love the cusp," she says. "I always wanted to write, but I wasn't interested in writing about teenagers, because, looking back, I felt teenage Judy was very boring and bland. It was the 50s, and I hated the 50s. We all just wanted to fit in and none of us, not even with a best friend, were willing to go deeper. The 50s was such a time of 'Pretend everything's OK, pretend it's all good.' Our parents had just come through the war, everyone just wanted their families to be happy, we didn't want to rock the boat."

The younger Judy was more interesting, she thinks. The family hadmoved to Florida when her brother was sick, leaving her father, a dentist, behind in New Jersey. "I was making all kinds of bargains with God, feeling that I had to protect my father ... I adored my father, not only worried about him flying, which was a very scary idea, but worried about him being safe. It was a bad year, and I became ritualistic. I took on the burden of feeling responsible for his wellbeing, at nine, but never telling anybody. God, what a burden, when I think about it now, for a child."

Blume's recall of her childhood is exact. She says she finds it easy to "connect with children, to see their side of the story". "I'm very attached," she says. "I don't know why. I think some people just are. And I don't think it's necessary to have children to be like that. Maurice Sendak never had children but he was so connected to the child inside that he never lost that."

She's currently working on a new novel for adults, her first since 1998's bestselling Summer Sisters. The untitled novel is set in the 50s, partially, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Blume grew up, and sees her tackling again a topic which preoccupies her – young pregnancies, and young motherhood. One of the main characters has a baby right after high school, and never tells the father.

"I come back to that again and again – what if, what if – it could so easily happen," she says. "It was a very scary idea that you could get pregnant, and three of the best girls in my school were pregnant, at graduation, and it changed their lives. There was no abortion, you know. Yes, some girls got shipped to Aunt Betty's house in the country and came back without a baby, and some girls had a hasty marriage."

"I think we got married young because we wanted permission to have sex, all the way sex, and so yeah, we all got married young, my generation. Our parents didn't because they came of age during the depression, they had one, maybe two children later. My mother was 34 when I was born, which today is nothing, but in my generation that would have been old. We rushed into marriage and having children before we had any idea what we were doing."

When her American publisher announced publication of the new novel in summer 2015, the news was greeted with rapture and covered by outlets from Time to the New York Times. An earlier New Yorker piece called her books "talismans that, for a significant segment of the American female population, marked the passage from childhood to adolescence".

Blume's younger fans have poured their hearts out to her for years – she even published a book of their letters, and had to go to counselling to learn "how to be supportive without feeling that I needed to save them". Her adult fans recall her as the author who understood. "It's hard to understand, now that YA fiction is so widely written and accepted, that in the early 80s no one else wrote like Judy Blume," says novelist Charlotte Mendelson. "It wasn't only that her protagonists were funny, and sympathetic; they lived in a totally recognisable ordinary world, and had real, painful, modern problems; reading them made one feel much less alone. She signed a copy of Deenie for me recently, and my joy was uncontained."

The musician Amanda Palmer has even written a song about Blume: "You told me things that nobody around me would tell ... I don't remember my friends from gymnastics class, / But I remember when Deenie was at the school ... Margaret, bored, counting hats in the synagogue ... All of them lived in my head, quietly whispering: / "You are not so strange." (Blume loves it: "She's sitting at the keyboard in her bustier and garter and she's singing this song, it's so beautiful.")

Palmer says she'd struggled for years to name her "influences", when asked by journalists, "and then it hit me: I totally forgot about Judy Blume. As I traced myself back, I realised that she'd opened up all these emotional doors and windows that started off locked, and I'd taken it totally for granted. It was such a eureka moment that I had to write her a song. And thanks to Twitter, she heard it. I cry pretty much every time I play it."

Teasingly, Blume says right at the end of the interview that she's now planning, sort of, a memoir up until the age of 12; she's not, she ends by chuckling, "going to do a Philip Roth" and announce her retirement.

"George just read me a really funny one [a blog in the New Yorker], it was, 'Ladies and gentlemen, Philip Roth has announced he has eaten his last sandwich.'" She laughs. George is waiting. She heads off to enjoy London.

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Scroobius Pip and Kate Pullinger on self-publishing books podcast

As the squeeze on author earnings continues, writers are looking for ever-more-inventive ways of getting their work to their readers.

The award-winning novelist Kate Pullinger tells us why she decided to sign a conventional publishing deal in Canada for her latest novel, Landing Gear, and then publish an electronic version herself. She describes how it developed online, out of a collaborative storytelling project. Many more writers are going to have to take control of their publishing careers, she argues, in order to tackle what she calls a "crisis in the mid-list".

Two months after the launch of the Guardian/Legend Press self-published novel of the month, we look back at the first two winners, and talk to Legend's Tom Chalmers about the challenges of seeking them out from the 500 entries that pour in each month.

Finally, we turn to a poet who has never had any truck with conventional publishing. Fresh from Glastonbury, and en route for the Latitude festival, Scroobius Pip demonstrates his unique form of performance poetry.

Landing Gear by Kate Pullinger (Katepullinger.com)
Scroobius Pip Live at the Edinburgh Fringe will be available from Scroobiuspip.co.uk from August 4

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History books of the year – review

Simon Schama: 'learning, wisdom and humanity'. Photograph: Tim Kirby/ BBC/ Oxford Film and Television

Alfred Hitchcock defined drama as life with the boring bits left out. These days publishers are trying to produce history books with the boring bits left out. The public still wants to read history, goes the thinking, but no longer has the time or stamina to wade through doorstops – huge books on big subjects that take weeks to digest. But reduce it to serviceable chunks – single out a year, a moment, or an individual – and they'll go for it.

It's easy to be snobby about this: the American historian Douglas Brinkley has dismissed One Summer: America 1927 (Doubleday), Bill Bryson's bestselling romp through the year that Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Sacco and Vanzetti were finally executed as "remedial pseudo-history", composed of "stray anecdotes", "cliches and hokey summations", even while saying "America needs more accessible, easy-to-read history". I don't think Bryson and Messrs Doubleday will be missing sleep over that.

Actually, the publishers are right: the market has changed. The difficulty is that books produced to a formula aren't necessarily easier to write than other kinds; and they don't always work. In 100 Days to Victory: How the Great War Was Fought and Won (Hodder), Saul David reconfigured a familiar narrative into 100 beautifully sharp snapshots and made a huge subject accessible to a broad readership within a reasonable compass; but the exercise left an unsatisfied feeling – a taster menu, not a proper meal.

Two recent books on the Holocaust were also written to a formula. The detective story approach worked well in Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (Heinemann) but in Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Chatto) the needs of narrative forced Wendy Lower to tell an important story hastily and through a few individuals. It would have worked better at greater length.

These things are subjective, of course. As a general reader I'm quite happy to let others guide me through the labyrinth. And good writers develop their own formulae. Graham Robb's preferred method of travel is the bicycle and 15,000 miles in the saddle lie behind The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe (Picador), an extraordinary book that uses digital mapping and modern software to revive the old thesis about ley lines and straight tracks in pre-Roman Gaul and Britain – Asterix as road engineer. The sources on the period are so limited that it is hard to know whether Robb's speculations about the druids are revolutionary or crackpot. The Romans, by contrast, left a heavier footprint, even in benighted Britannia, and in Under a Different Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain (Cape) Charlotte Higgins set out in a camper van to explore and reflect on the remains – an elegant addition to a long antiquarian tradition.

In Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History (Allen Lane) Catherine Merridale approached a huge subject via a single building, the Kremlin, that gloomy tyrants' lair in the centre of Moscow. Conspiracy and claustrophobia under the onion domes is not normally my thing – I loathe Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible – but here the sharp intelligence and atmospheric prose kept me absorbed.

The truth is, though, that our best historians, being touched with madness, transcend publishers' formulas and assume that readers will happily spend weeks sharing their obsessions. This year several of the big beasts of the jungle were strutting their stuff.

Max Hastings easily saw off his rivals in the battle for the first world war centenary market, which took place a year ahead of schedule. His Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 (HarperCollins) was old-fashioned military history, shamefully readable and spiced up with jibes at the defence policy of Blair and Brown. There were more insights into current debacles in William Dalrymple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury), another book unafraid to retell an old story with enormous gusto, but greatly enhanced by Dalrymple's mastery of Afghan sources and his passion for the subject.

I haven't always been Simon Schama's greatest fan: he can be glib and self-satisfied. But The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000BCE-1492CE (Bodley Head) found him at his best. Perhaps because he was on home territory, the mannerisms were under control and the extraordinary breadth of Schama's learning, wisdom and humanity was allowed to shine through.

Rana Mitter's China's War With Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane), a book that has long cried out to be written, provides Anglo-Saxon readers with an authoritative account of one of the cornerstones of the second world war. But why should we welcome Richard Overy's The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45 (Allen Lane), a veritable doorstop of a book, when there is already a vast library on the subject? Because this topic has reached the point where it needs to be pulled together and Overy, by combining Herculean archival work with lucid writing, has done just that. If not the last word on the subject, the last for while. David Caute's Isaac & Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (Yale) used a minor spat between two refugee Jewish intellectuals, Isaac Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin, as the pretext for a fascinating tour of the cultural battleground of the cold war.

Not many laughs here. So, for my lighter nominations I'll go for O My America! Second Acts in a New World (Jonathan Cape), Sara Wheeler's entertaining account of women who left these shores for the United States in the 19th century, and The Author's XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon (Bloomsbury), a delightful homage to the days when the likes of PG Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle and JM Barrie put willow on leather. It'll make the perfect antidote to grim news from Australia.

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Architecture books of the year – review

Heaven up here: life in an abandoned Caracas office block is explored in Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities. Photograph: Iwan Baan/ Urban-Think Tank

I don't know why, in these end times for communications made with dead trees and days of general impoverishment, but the market for sumptuous, fat, beautifully illustrated books of architecture and design seems as strong as ever. This year saw a Taschen tome on the great Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, by Philip Jodidio, which is over-bright for its subject but still welcome, and an impressive volume on the Italian master Carlo Scarpa from Phaidon and Robert McCarter. Also from Phaidon is a delightful work, with text by Deyan Sudjic, on Shiro Kuramata, a furniture designer simultaneously fanatical, esoteric, postmodern and minimalist. Zeuler Lima's book on Lina Bo Bardi (Yale), the once overlooked, now hugely resurgent genius of mid-20th-century Brazil, is exceptionally fine.

Scarpa, Siza, Kuramata and Bo Bardi are all well known in the worlds of architecture and design, less so outside, and each book is a good way (at a price) of getting to know them. Also educational, and engagingly so, is the second volume of Makers of Modern Architecture (NYRB), in which the American critic Martin Filler deftly summarises the likes of Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen and Rem Koolhaas.

The most compelling books of the year offer contrasting perspectives of cities. In The View from the Train (Verso), we are offered perceptive, educated, un-obvious musings on place and inhabitation by the film-maker Patrick Keiller. The Italian Townscape (Artifice) is a reprint of a 1963 book by Ivor de Wolfe, the pseudonym of the publisher of the Architectural Review Hubert de Cronin Hastings. It is rich in black-and-white photographs, made haunting by the passage of time, that show not only crumbling marble, but also advertising signs, road markings, the shine of a smart car. It is animated by de Wolfe/Hastings's text – pithy, witty, passionate, sometimes florid, sometimes eccentric.

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Bradley L Garrett has academic credentials (Oxford, University of Californiacorrect) in geography and archaeology, with a parallel life as an urban explorer. This means that he and his associates break into places usually off-limits – tube tunnels, abandoned mental hospitals, the tops of skyscrapers – and photograph their experiences. Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso) documents their adventures, combining erudite references (Montesquieu, Walter Benjamin) with compelling photographs of men in hoodies in strange places.

If its appeal is its celebration of the unofficial, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities (Lars Müller) goes much further. With photographs by the great Iwan Baan, it documents a skyscraper in Caracas, left as an incomplete concrete frame and then colonised by squatters, who improvised a multistorey city, complete with churches and brothels. The book, my book of the year, is a breathtaking document of human society and human ingenuity.

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Art books of the year – review

'A soaring airborne breast': Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence. Photograph: Jeffrey Blackler/Alamy

Now that books are shedding weight and dematerialising into electronic pads, I worry about the fate of coffee tables. Books of a certain kind need to be bulky, and they also cry out to be displayed. Leafing through them can be as much of a tonic as the coffee on the table beside them.

The Vatican: All the Paintings: The Complete Collection of Old Masters, Plus More Than 300 Sculptures, Maps, Tapestries, and Relicsby Anje Grebe, Ross King Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

A prime specimen is Anja Grebe's huge, heavy The Vatican: All the Paintings (Black Dog & Leventhal). The subtitle is almost a threat: yes, every last painting is here. Grebe conducts you on an exhaustive tour of the ecclesiastical spoils, concluding with an unexpected display of modern religious art. Ross King's introduction calls the papal HQ "a place sacred to the arts"; I'd say it was a place sanctified by the arts, since the Catholic church almost atones for its iniquities by its habit of commissioning artists. It's good to know that the genius loci predates Christianity: the hill behind St Peter's was once the symbolic resort of Apollo, the god of poetry and music.

Jonathan Jones's The Loves of the Artists (Simon & Schuster) is an antidote to Grebe's pious inventory. For Jones, Renaissance painting is a pornotopia, and the artists he studies are sexual radicals, flagrantly disrupting convention. Their scandals, in his racy telling, are tabloidesque: the erect penis of Fra Lippo Lippi is a symbol of Christ's resurrection, and Donatello's David sports kinky "bronzie lingerie". A painting's "tactile values", as Berenson called them, are only too palpable when Jones appraises the mammaries of Titian's models or the "bulging codpiece" of a figure in Giorgione. Sometimes he gets overexcited. I find it hard to envisage Brunelleschi's dome in Florence as "a soaring airborne breast", and do Venetian windows really resemble slit skirts?

After the worship of Eros in Jones's Renaissance, Vic Gatrell in The First Bohemians (Allen Lane) deals with the late 18th century and its rowdier urban delights, exemplified by Boswell picking up hookers in Covent Garden and adjourning to Green Park for consummation. Jones sees artists as libertines; Gatrell comes close to equating them with whores, since both lived off rich patrons. This is dense, jostling, ripely enjoyable social history, a memento of a time when central London, not yet an over-priced shopping mall, had its own raffish left bank.

Michael Petry's Nature Morte (Thames & Hudson) is equally lively, despite being about corpses. The fauna in this anatomy of contemporary still life is perverse – a two-headed sheep knitted into a jumper by Elaine Bradford, a china dog made of cigarettes by Sarah Lucas – and so is the flora, which includes Petry's own shamelessly randy flower sculptures. Still life, however, is a euphemism, and the final section about death includes work "by the artist who goes by the moniker Jim Skull". Petry's book is a cabinet of curiosities, both beautiful and weird – and it's the first I've ever seen with a lenticular cover.

Turner & the Sea by Christine Riding and Richard Johns (Thames & Hudson) is about the pictorial challenge of a subject that does not stay still and has no fixed form or colour. Contemporary reviewers who grumbled that Turner's works underwent "dissolution" before they reached the canvas paid him an inadvertent compliment. His chaotic storms, blurry mists, smudged rain showers and shimmering rainbows captured the most unstable element and transformed bad weather into great art; even Nelson's naval victories disappear into a luminous haze.

Norbert Wolf in Art Deco (Prestel) begins by rounding up the usual icons – the beaky gargoyles on the Chrysler building, the sharp sleek prow of an ocean liner – but then extends his survey to include Christ extending his arms on a mountain above Rio de Janeiro and Lenin with upraised arm on a design for the Palace of the Soviets. The predatory German eagle, spreading its wings in a Third Reich poster, also qualifies for inclusion. The book is large and lavish, but its sober text saves art deco from the frippery of all those multi-coloured Miami hotels and Erté mannequins: this was the style of the machine age, coldly dehumanised, and Wolf finds in its mannerisms a chilling prognostication of war.

Derek Jarman's Sketchbooks (Thames & Hudson) began as little leatherbound volumes bought in Italy. Jarman painted over the covers, blackened the pages and wrote on them in gold ink, turning them into profane missals that he stuffed with stray feathers, pressed flowers, newspaper cuttings and saucy male pin-ups, even a £10 note, which was his entire fee for directing a film of Britten's War Requiem. This facsimile is a precious relic of an era that was "pre-latop, pre-PhotoShop", when creativity was manual not digital; it is also an entrancing vindication of the book – whether handmade or printed – as an object of art.

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Science books of the year – review

Serving the Reich and Churchill's Bomb study Germany and Britain's failure to win the nuclear arms race. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

We have always lived in a material age of one kind or another. It is just the nature of the dominant substance that has altered — as we can see in the names we have given to the world's key stages of civilisation: the stone age, bronze age and iron age. And the process has continued, says Mark Miodownik in his splendid Stuff Matters (Viking). "Steel was the defining age of the Victorian era … while the 20th century is often hailed as the age of silicon," he points out.

Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made Worldby Mark Miodownik Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

Today a vast library of modern materials underpins our lives and makes them bearable: from chocolates that are artfully structured to explode like taste-bombs in our mouths to carbon-fibre technology, which has transformed sports including cycling, tennis and Formula One, and which might be used one day to construct a "space ladder", a passenger elevator that would rise from Earth's equator to an orbiting spaceship.

In short, stuff matters – for without modern materials, "we would quickly be confronted by the same basic struggle for survival that animals are faced with," argues Miodownik in this artfully crafted, hugely enjoyable study.

Serving the Reich (Bodley Head) by Philip Ball, and Churchill's Bomb (Faber) by Graham Farmelo, look at how Germany and Britain respectively lost the race to be the first nation to build atomic weapons. Ball's narrative reveals a nation stuck in an ethical quagmire in which its quiescent, subservient scientists – including several Nobel prize winners – proved fundamentally lacking in morals and intellect. For his part, Farmelo provides us with a vision of a great leader, Churchill, who hesitated fatally when Britain was given, by the US, the offer of an equal share in the development of the A-bomb. Both books offer intriguing insights into the pursuit of science then and now.

Finally, in What Has Nature Ever Done For Us? (Profile), Tony Juniper gives the reader a readable, timely vision of the natural world as a recycler of waste, controller of disease and mighty carbon storage system – a living entity that we take for granted at our peril.

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Observer Food Monthly's 20 food books of the year

Christmas Cookbooks. Photograph: Katherine Rose for Observer Food Monthly

Proper Pub Food by Tom Kerridge
(Absolute Press, £20)

Crowned king of the Best Restaurant in the UK, with a hit BBC series and astonishing sales of this accompanying book: 2013 has been good for Tom Kerridge. Packed with delicious, do-able recipes from a man who clearly loves creating, cooking and eating food, this is a book to read, to savour, to be inspired by. Big flavours and a big idea from the big man: much loved British pub classics with a simple yet sophisticated twist. As he says: "Chillaxo relaxo, feel good about whatever you prepare." The OFM book of the year from the cook of the year. Proper lush!

Eat, The Little Book of Fast Food by Nigel Slater
(4th Estate, £26)

Beautiful, small, packed like an explorer's journal, Eat, like all Nigel Slater's books, is as much artefact as cookbook, though, of course, it comes with "over 600 ideas for dinner". With recipes written almost as extended tweets, this feels the most "modern" book on the list: the food is comforting, clever, though with a feel for what we are eating now. A perfect stocking filler.

Levant: Recipes and Memories from the Middle East by Anissa Helou
(HarperCollins, £20)

The photos intended for this book were stored on a laptop that was then stolen – and it is a measure of the evocative beauty of the writing that they're not really missed as Anissa Helou guides us through the food and family stories of her home region and childhood. Perfectly crafted recipes – with the instruction you follow them carefully – from a gifted cook.

Simon Hopkinson Cooks by Simon Hopkinson
(Ebury, £25)

A new collection from many peoples' most trusted recipe writer, tied to his recent TV series but with added menus and deliciousness. It is constructed as a collection of meals – A Sunday Lunch, A Continental Supper – with trademark attention to detail. This is after all a man who peels the chickpeas for his hummus. Worth buying for the tomato curry recipe alone.

Traditional Recipes of Laos by Phia Sing
(Prospect, £20)

Originally published in 1981 by Alan Davidson's Prospect Books (Davidson's last posting as a career diplomat was as British ambassador to Laos before becoming a food writer and author of the Oxford Companion to Food). It contains 124 recipes from the late master chef at the royal palace plus an account of Lao cookery and ingredients by Davidson and his daughter Jennifer. An exquisite insight into a largely undiscovered food.

The Paris Gourmet by Trish Deseine
(Flammarion, £22.50)

An essential guide to the food of her adopted home town by Irish food writer and "eat-girl" Trish Deseine. A product of many years of enthusiastic research, it is all here: the places to eat, to shop, to stay, with recipes and insider tips by a talented writer who wears her depth of knowledge as lightly as a Pierre Hermé macaron. The perfect companion to a Eurostar ticket.

DOM: Rediscovering Brazilian Ingredients by Alex Atala
(Phaidon, £35)

Part mantra, part meditation, part manifesto, and perhaps the most important food book of the year. Not because you will be able (or maybe even want) to make meals from ants, or the fermenting fruits, roots, fish and fauna of the Amazon, but because he introduces his reader to a cooking style and culture that is intensely foreign and yet familiar. Any book that has a "treatise on caipirinha" deserves respect. Atala has arrived.

A Work in Progress: Journal, Recipe and Snapshots by René Redzepi
(Phaidon, £39.95)

Something for everyone's attention span: part Instagram fest, part recipe porn, part intimate diary. For food lovers, it is in the journal where the real joy is found: pages saturated with an intense love of cooking and insight to maintaining creativity, plus an occasional "pressed leaf" of meadowsweet or shepherd's purse. An intimate glimpse into the interesting head – and heart – of the most influential chef on the planet. Inspirational.

Mange Tout by Bruno Loubet
(Ebury, £25)

A book to cook and cook again by perhaps Britain's finest French chef. Packed with bistro classics retooled for modern palates, with occasional nods to the rest of the world ("lime pickle and yoghurt aubergines"). Rooted in Bordeaux, remade in Brisbane, Loubet brings enthusiasm, curiosity and knowledge – he was schooled at La Tante Claire and Le Manoir – to his recipes and it shows.

One Good Dish: the Pleasures of a Simple Meal by David Tanis
(Artisan, £17.99)

A deceptively simple idea from the writer of A Platter of Figs. As you would expect from an alumnus of the Chez Panisse school of cooking who keeps a place in Paris, there are flavours of Europe and California, with north African and Asian influences, gathered together with an understanding of what makes for a good plate of food. A cookbook in the real sense, one that deserves to be well-thumbed and kitchen-stained.

Master it, How to Cook Today by Rory O'Connell
(4th Estate, £25)

A series of private cookery lessons from Ballymaloe's pre-eminent teacher, the next best thing to a residential course. Unjustly overshadowed by his sister Darina Allen, O'Connell offers an elegant template to an understanding of good food. A grounding in everything you need to know, effortlessly explained. The man is revered by Claudia Roden – need we say more?

Restaurant Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous
(Bantam, £14.99)

How did it take the author of the gossipy Hotel, Fashion and Pop Babylon so long to get around to the restaurant business? Apparently, "only the names and some of the circumstances have been changed to protect the guilty". The OFM verdict? Very thoroughly researched.

A Greedy Man in a Hungry World by Jay Rayner
(William Collins, £12.99)

This is OFM's own Jay Rayner in iconoclastic mood – chapter headings include Supermarkets are not evil, Is small always beautiful? – challenging sacred tenets of ethical eating not for the sake of it, but to highlight the complexities of feeding a planet whose population will soon reach 9 billion.

Cooked by Michael Pollan
(Allen Lane, £20)

Pollan heads back to first principles, the processes – use of fire, water, the exposure to air that aids fermentation – all of them fundamental to the act of cooking itself. It's a serious read, quoting Nietzsche, exploring the food industry's relationship with feminism and spending quite a long time on the pro and cons of chopping onions. But ultimately it's a book about transformation: how turning base ingredients into food shapes the way we live.

The Green Kitchen by David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl
(Hardie Grant, £25)

Inspired vegetarian dishes, developed from the authors' cult blog Green Kitchen Stories: the Decadent Beetroot and Chocolate Cake and the Beet Bourguignon are already classics. Beautifully designed and photographed (Frenkiel's day job is as an art director), this is vegetable-led eating as a pleasure, never, ever a chore.

No Time to Cook by Donna Hay
(Hardie Grant, £18.99)

Having children prompted Hay – an institution in Australia – to work out how to juggle deliciousness with being time-poor and retaining proper family meal times. No Time to Cook is the result, full of invention and variety, with recipes such as nori-wrapped wasabi salmon with mushy peas, Chinese chicken hotpot, and crispy fish with avocado-lemon salsa.

The Ethicurean Cookbook
(Ebury, £25)

Seasonality is key at Somerset's Ethicurean, whose trump card is its 100-year-old walled garden. Winner of an OFM award for Best Ethical Restaurant, the team's beautifully packaged first cookbook doubles as celebration of their surroundings, although you don't need to live in the Mendip Hills to cook a beautiful roasted tomato and liquorice basil soup, or salsify and Ogleshield gratin.

Tapas Revolution by Omar Allibhoy
(Ebury, £20)

Allibhoy has two restaurants of the same name – one in the Shepherd's Bush branch of Westfield, the other in Bluewater – both good enough to visit even if you're not on a shopping trip. The revolution he's talking about is actually more like fervent enthusiasm for simple, beautiful Spanish dishes: peas with serrano ham and eggs, cod with piquillo peppers, and tarta de Santiago.

Pitt Cue Co: The Cookbook by Tom Adams et al
(Mitchell Beazley, £20)

For the meat lover in your life. The team behind Pitt Cue are obsessed, rearing their own herd of fatty rare-breed pigs in Cornwall, crucial to the beautiful pulled pork that helped establish them as one of the best barbecue restaurants in the country. You'll find the recipe here, alongside clever fruit ketchups, great slaws, pickling and cocktails.

Under a Mackerel Sky by Rick Stein
(Ebury, £20)

Dealing with his father's suicide by heading for the outback, catching a freighter from New Zealand to New York, running a nightclub: Stein has plenty to talk about before he gets to fish restaurants in Padstow and becoming a fixture of food TV. His fine autobiography never shies away from that defining tragedy and how it rippled through his life, even revealing his sudden need, last summer, to swim to the Cornish cliffs where his dad died.

To order any of these books for a special price, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk/ofmcookbooks

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Fiction books of the year – review

Lionel Shriver: ‘exciting, infuriating and very funny’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

One of the most exciting and infuriating books I have read this year is Big Brother by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins), a very funny, ultra-original tour de force about a woman's relationship with her obese older brother. Loosely based on Shriver's own "big brother" (he died in his 50s), it plays on the "what if?" themes Shriver covers so perfectly. What if you had a sibling in that condition? Is it wrong to intervene? Or wrong not to? It has an extraordinary narrative twist that had me throwing the book across the room in disbelief and reluctant admiration.

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld (Doubleday), the "novel about psychic twins which is not really about psychic twins", is a must-read: it's the best dissection of a life spent among small children I've ever read. Equally original and daring is Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs (Virago), an extraordinarily brilliant book, fizzing with anger and wit, which reminded me of the energy of Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal (even though the ending made me very cross).

For an elegant meditation on war and its impact on family life, Elizabeth Day's lyrical Home Fires (Bloomsbury) comes highly recommended. Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings (Chatto & Windus) is a complex, cleverly interwoven analysis of the moment when the lives of six friends begin to unravel. Mark Lawson's The Deaths (Picador) is a must for anyone who hates their own obsession with Waitrose, a satire on Middle England where "every home is almost a village of its own".

Unexploded by Alison Macleod (Hamish Hamilton) is a quietly poetic deconstruction of a marriage imploding in Brighton during the second world war. Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury) is a madcap revision of Richard Coeur de Lion: think The Da Vinci Code for intellectuals. Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant (Virago) is a wonderful reimagining of the lives of the Borgias.

And, if you must have another doorstop in the year of the doorstop (after Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries won the Booker), then go for Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (Little, Brown): a literary page-turner about love, betrayal and the art world. My own 500-pager of choice? Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things (Bloomsbury). Don't read anything about it (spoilers are too easy with this novel), just read it. In some ways 19th-century botanist Alma Whittaker sees all life has to offer. In other ways she gets trapped in a binding closet. Hugely enjoyable.

From the Costa shortlist, Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell (Headline) is a reliably great read, like all her books. This is the saga of an Irish family in London set in 1976. O'Farrell has a wonderful ear for dialogue and an eye for the irritating quirks of domestic life. Far less cheering but just as much of a page-turner is All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape), a weird and wonderful novel about isolation, memory and a dog called Dog. It tells the story of a young woman trying to run away from a complicated past. She ends up on an unnamed island off the coast of Britain, tending sheep which keep mysteriously disappearing.

Of all the novels on the prize shortlists, I most loved two books which have been around for a while and are now in paperback. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple (Phoenix House, shortlisted: Baileys prize), is a dazzling comic novel about a misunderstood architect. It's an eccentric and brilliantly accomplished story with a real screenplay quality to it. Just as funny (and just as American) is May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes (Granta, winner: Baileys prize), a hilariously clever analysis of two brothers. Of the two, AM Homes has more serious aims and her work just gets better. Great stocking fillers. Or get AM Homes's whole back catalogue for a more substantial gift.

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Psychology books of the year – review

Malcolm Gladwell examined how setbacks can aid the underdog in David & Goliath. Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./ Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS

Ever since its origins in the late 19th century, psychology has been a double discipline. There are the laboratory experimentalists who look "objectively" – from the outside – at behaviour, emotions, perception, or thought. Imaging technologies have turned them into neuroscientists who can now follow the routes of all this in the brain. Then there are the psychologists with a more literary or philosophical bent. They probe experience, listen to the inner human story, and may, like Freud, think that this, too, is scientific, even therapeutic – arguably more so than any fashionable diagnostic classifications. This year the most interesting books have come from the latter camp.

Darian Leader's Strictly Bipolar (Penguin) is a passionate attack on the rise of bipolarity as a diagnostic category. Big Pharma's mood-stabilisers have meant that diagnoses have gone up by 4,000%, while pop-cultural evocations have bred unconscious imitation. What is taking place, he argues, is a shoehorning of a complexity of experience into a sloppy paradigm defined only by highs and lows.

Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life (Chatto & Windus) is a finely honed rendition in some 30 vignettes of what passes in his consulting room. There's 21-year-old Matt, reckless in his behaviour, who can't seem to feel his own emotions; Amanda, who imagines terrorists in her flat; Graham, who bores for England. The always surprising "whys" of all this, teased out in the analytic hour, may be individual but they implicate us all.

Doubling as a literary academic and a psychoanalyst, Josh Cohen is well poised to engage in acts of interpretation – of texts, patients, the culture as well as himself. In The Private Life (Granta), he examines some of the tensions in our current snooping- and celebrity-obsessed world, where privacy is in danger of becoming a dirty word. At the same time he journeys into that cloudy terrain of the unconscious to probe the uncanny stranger within, that ultimate guarantor of privacy.

Any list of the psychological best has to include a new volume from Adam Phillips. One Way and Another (Hamish Hamilton), with a brilliant introduction from John Banville, brings new essays together with some selected old ones, to reflect on narcissism, obstacles, compromise, tickling, being bored and more. It doesn't really matter what Phillips puts his mind and prose to. To use Virginia Woolf's words on the essay, he can always "sting us awake and fix us in a trance, which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life".

Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump (Sceptre) is an extraordinary account of how autism feels from the inside, written by a 13-year-old boy. The book, in one way, underlines the theme of Malcolm Gladwell's David & Goliath (Allen Lane), an energetic, counterintuitive exploration of why (and how) underdogs succeed, and how disabilities, traumatic childhoods, and other seeming lacks can sometimes trump power.

The year also brought us the excellent Life Lessons series (Pan Macmillan). These popularising pocket volumes highlight quotations from the great thinkers of the past and interweave them with interpretation that brings them closer to our own times. Brett Kahr's Freud is both elegant and useful in this respect, as is John Armstrong's Nietzsche.

Finally, neuroscientist Giovanni Frazzetto's How We Feel (Doubleday) perhaps signals a trend towards a less imperialist neuroscience. He takes us on a journey through anger, guilt, anxiety, grief, joy, love – and underlines just how far science can now go in its explanations before we have to call in those other kinds of explorers of the inner life, the poets and the philosophers.

Lisa Appignanesi's King's College debate series can be seen at thebrainandthemind.co.uk. Her next book, Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness, is published next April by Virago

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Books: New and noteworthy

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USA TODAY's Jocelyn McClurg scopes out the hottest books on sale each week. 1. Sycamore Row by John Grisham (Doubleday, fiction, on sale Oct. 22) What it's about: In this sequel to A Time to Kill, Mississippi

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USA TODAY's Jocelyn McClurg scopes out the hottest books on sale each week.

1. Sycamore Row by John Grisham (Doubleday, fiction, on sale Oct. 22)

What it's about: In this sequel to A Time to Kill, Mississippi attorney Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey in the movie version) is embroiled in a controversial trial involving a wealthy white man and his black maid.

The buzz: The new novel arrives just as a high-profile stage version of A Time to Kill opens on Broadway.

2. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little, Brown, fiction, on sale Oct. 22)

What it's about: The adventures of orphan Theo Decker, which begin when he is 13 and his mother is killed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a terrorist attack.

The buzz: "Glorious, Dickensian… a novel that pulls together all (Tartt's) remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole and reminds the reader of the immersive, stay-up-all-night pleasures of reading," says The New York Times.

3. This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life by Gavin MacLeod (Thomas Nelson, non-fiction, on sale Oct. 22)

What it's about: Memoir by the actor, now 82, who played Murray Slaughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Capt. Stubing on The Love Boat.

The buzz: Covers the lows (depression, alcoholism, divorce) and highs (sobriety, remarriage, finding religion) of his personal and professional life.

4. Allegiant by Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books, fiction, on sale Oct. 22)

What it's about: Conclusion of the best-selling dystopian Divergent trilogy, set in a futuristic Chicago; teenage Tris must make choices as a revolution threatens her "perfect society."

The buzz: The movie version of the first book, Divergent, starring Shailene Woodley and Kate Winslet, hits theaters in March.

5. If Kennedy Lived by Jeff Greenfield (Putnam, non-fiction, on sale Oct. 22)

What it's about: Subtitle: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History.

The buzz: "Kennedy-era followers will enjoy this book," says the Library Journal.

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This week in books: Richard Flanagan, Stephen King, William Boyd on Bond

Stephen King at his home in Maine, US. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Guardian

Why do male authors still dominate our book reviews pages? This week, the Stella Count was released – Australia's equivalent of the US's highly publicised VIDA results. The statistics, revealing how many books by men and women were reviewed in our major newspapers and literary magazines, highlight a striking disproportion, and you can read my analysis of the disparity in the results here.

A fascinating examination of the history of publishing innovations consders how entrepreneurs such as Penguin founder Allen Lane would have reveled in the opportunities of the digital revolution. “Lane's brainwave was the biggest single book innovation of the 20th century, and in its day the equal of the ebook. For a while, his idea dominated the market. Households across Britain began sprouting those colour-coded spines. A format that at the outset seemed to threaten vested interests became an object of veneration.” Read Robert McCrumb on what Allen Lane would have made of Amazon.

"After writing a novel what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots and so on. I'd much rather listen always." In a beautiful interview, Richard Flanagan talks to Michael Williams over dinner, discussing his relationship with his father through his new work, his discomfort with the literary establishment, and his new novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which the figure of Weary Dunlop looms large over the book. "Dunlop is too extraordinary a character for fiction. God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions," he says.

William Boyd climbs into the interviewer's chair – and back in time – this week as he interrogates the subject of his latest book, Solo, secret agent 007, James Bond. "It was strange being back in Chelsea in 1969, the year of the moon-landing, the year of my first summer in London. Stranger still to be going to interview James Bond," he writes as he walks us through London to Bond's flat. "The door was opened by a rather severe-looking young woman with her brown hair styled in a schoolmarm's sexless bob. I introduced myself and said I had an appointment to interview Mr Bond for the Guardian newspaper. 'I'm afraid we don't take the Guardian, here,' the young woman said in a strong Scottish accent. I said I would make sure a copy reached Mr Bond, somehow."

In our Guardian Books Podcast we’re joined this week by Pulitzer-winning Jhumpa Lahiri who talks about her collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, her favourite short story authors and the challenge of writing from the male perspective. This week was Banned Books Week so we asked readers to send us a photo of their favourite censored books. View our gallery of readers’ favourite banned titles from JD Salinger to Henry Miller.

A book whose “deepest shiverings depend on no made-up devils,” Stephen King’s anticipated new work Doctor Sleep is a sequel to one of his most disturbing novels, The Shining. It follows Dan Torrance, the little boy from the first novel, now grown up. Stephen Poole reviews the latest book from an author who has “grudgingly been admitted by lit-crit folk into the ranks of ‘actually good writers’ as opposed to mere megaselling dimestore artists.” (And if you missed the Guardian's interview with King, you can catch up here)

“The race is now on to write the Worst. Book. Ever. And this may be it.” Lucy Ellmann skewers Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland, a work with a “total immersion in the banality it purports to expose.” It may be a critique of mass culture, “but if this book is satirical, it hides it well. An ironic hamburger is still (usually) a hamburger.”

In a similarly “good bad review” in our non-fiction section, Geoff Dyer applies his biting tongue to The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong by Guido Mina di Sospiro: the story of a man's deepening love of ping-pong with philosophical ruminations about the nature of the game. “And remember the match-winning point of the book: what we discover about spin in ping-pong can be found in 'other fields too'. Not in Mina di Sospiro's writing though. His prose is so lacking in spin and bounce the half-awake reader can see where a sentence is headed before it's left the author's pen.”

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Malcolm Gladwell: 'If my books appear oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them'

Malcolm Gladwell at his home in New York. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian

Malcolm Gladwell is in his natural habitat – a cafe in New York's West Village, down the street from his apartment – engaged in a very Gladwellian task: defending Lance Armstrong. The bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Outliers, who despite all appearances just turned 50, has a tendency to hoist both arms aloft like a preacher when a topic inflames him. And the topic of doping in sports does. Why, he wants to know, is it OK to be born with an abnormality that gives you surplus red blood cells, like the Finnish Olympic skiing star Eero Mäntyranta, but not OK to reinfuse your own blood prior to competing, as Armstrong apparently did? Why are baseball players allowed performance-enhancing eye surgery, but not performance-enhancing drugs? "Imagine," Gladwell says, "if all the schools in England had a rule that you can't do homework, because homework is a way in which less able kids can close the gap that Nature said ought to exist. Basically, Armstrong did his homework and lied about it! Underneath the covers, with his flashlight on, he did his calculus! And I'm supposed to get upset about that?"

This argument enraged various sports pundits when Gladwell made it in The New Yorker, where he's been a fixture since 1996. But it will presumably only enrage them more to learn that he doesn't fully believe it himself. "When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief," he says. "Nothing is at stake. It's a bicycle race!" As a serious amateur runner himself (just the other day, he finished the Fifth Avenue Mile race, in Manhattan, in five minutes and three seconds) he's "totally anti-doping … But what I'm trying to say is, look, we have to come up with better reasons. Our reasons suck! And when the majority has taken a position that's ill thought-through, it's appropriate to make trouble." His expression settles into a characteristic half-smile that makes clear he'd relish it if you disagreed.

Gladwell has always excelled in this role as intellectual provocateur. At their best, which is often, his articles and books force you to reappraise assumptions so deeply held that you didn't realise you held them, and millions have found the experience intoxicating. What if the most successful entrepreneurs aren't the risk-takers, but the risk-averse? Might the world's intelligence agencies be better off firing all their spies? Is there a good reason why there are multiple kinds of mustard, but only one major brand of ketchup? The point isn't necessarily to accept his conclusions, but to be jolted – even if via the improbable medium of ketchup – into seeing the whole world afresh. This galls some critics, who'd prefer it if Gladwell made smaller, more cautious, less dazzling claims. ("The problem with the Malcolm Gladwell Piece," a New York Observer journalist once wrote, "is that it always seems to contain phrases like 'the problem with the Malcolm Gladwell Piece.'") But it's also what stimulates audiences in such vast numbers: Outliers reportedly commanded a $4m advance, and dominated bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic for months; while his live lecture events, which reliably sell out, have made him the only person about whom the labels "rock star" and "journalist" are both routinely used. He's also responsible more than anyone else for the birth of the modern pop-ideas genre, in publishing and beyond. "Without Gladwell," Ian Leslie wrote recently at Medium.com, "no Daniel Pink, no Steven Johnson … no Brainpicker, no TED. I exaggerate, but only slightly."

Gladwell in 2005. Photograph: Rex Features

Gladwell will perform four more such events, in London, Liverpool and Dublin, later this autumn. The occasion is the publication of his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, which is published in the UK on Thursday. There's a case to be made that it's his best yet: on the counterintuitiveness front, it's classic Gladwell, but it's also more socially and morally engaged than his previous work. That title might smack of how-to-get-ahead-in-business, but he's no longer focused on the secrets of marketing or corporate success. David and Goliath explores when, and why, apparent disadvantages – poverty, personal setbacks, military weakness – turn out to be advantages, and when advantages, like wealth or status, aren't what they seem. "The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate," Gladwell writes. "It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable."

The outcome of the original David-and-Goliath clash wasn't a miracle, he argues: it's just what happens when the weak refuse to play by rules laid down by the strong. (Sample sentence: "Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defence Force, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35m would have hit Goliath's head with a velocity of 34m per second – more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him dead or unconscious.")

"With each book that passes, I think my personal ideology becomes more explicit … and this one is a very Canadian sort of book," says Gladwell, who was born in Fareham, in Hampshire, but grew up in Ontario. "It's Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power. Someone told me – did you know that there's never been a luxury brand to come from Canada? That's never happened. That's such a great fact to have about your home country."

Difficulties and afflictions, the book shows, frequently foster creativity and resilience. Studies on "cognitive disfluency" have shown that people do better at problem-solving tasks when they're printed in a hard-to-read font: the extra challenge triggers more effortful engagement. We meet dyslexics whose reading problems forced them to find more efficient ways to master law and finance (one is now a celebrated trial lawyer, another the president of Goldman Sachs); we learn why losing a parent in childhood forges a resilience that frequently spurs achievement in later life, and why you shouldn't necessarily attend the best university that will have you. (The answer is "relative deprivation": the further you are from being the best at your institution, the more demotivating it is; middling talents perform better at middling establishments.) Conversely, having power can backfire, not least because it tricks the powerful into thinking they don't need the consent of those over whom they wield it. In a compelling account of the Troubles, Gladwell argues that the British were plagued by a simple error: the belief that their superior resources meant "it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them". More isn't always more.

There's a reactionary way to interpret all this: if the human spirit finds ways to triumph over adversity in the end, does that mean we needn't worry about poverty, prejudice, childhood traumas, and the rest? "In the 19th century, people like [the industrialist] Andrew Carnegie did talk about poverty being useful as a justification for doing nothing about it," Gladwell says. "But if this book's interpreted that way, that would be a disaster. I'm just trying to say that it should reassure us that the inevitable traumas of being human do end up producing some good. Otherwise, the human condition is overwhelmingly depressing." We used to be genetic determinists, he says. "We used to say poor people had lousy genes. Then we decided that wasn't OK, but we transferred the prejudice to upbringing. We said, 'You were neglected as a child, so you'll never make it.' That's just as pernicious. This book is anti-deterministic in that sense."

It is hard to resist trying to understand Gladwell's own life and background in terms of Gladwellian theories. Indeed, in 2008's Outliers he does so himself, explaining, in line with the book's thesis, how the right combination of effort and contextual factors – such as her light skin – enabled his Jamaican mother, Joyce, to end up at University College, London, where she met and married an Englishman, Graham Gladwell. (She became a therapist, he a maths professor.) When Malcolm was six, they moved to Canada, to a heavily Mennonite community; Gladwell imbibed that denomination's focus on social justice, while excelling as a runner at school. After a history degree in Canada, and a couple of years at conservative magazines, including the American Spectator, he joined the Washington Post in 1987 – where he spent a decade accumulating the 10,000 hours of practice which, according to Outliers, is they key to mastery in many fields. He joined the New Yorker in 1996, and published the original "Tipping Point" article that same year, analysing the plummetting Brooklyn murder rate through the lens of epidemiology. As has been frequently observed, the book, released four years later, was his professional tipping point, too. Blink, his 2005 book on the strengths and weaknesses of unconscious decision-making, consolidated his status.

He has continued to produce tirelessly since then, with little time, as far as one can tell, for much in the way of a personal life. ("He's dated a lot of women. He loves other people's kids. But he has work to do," his oldest friend, Bruce Headlam, told the Observer a few years ago. Gladwell charmingly but firmly rebuffs all questions in this vein.) He lives in a book-lined apartment on one of downtown Manhattan's loveliest streets, but has often described his preference for a "rotating" approach to writing, involving stints at several local cafes, in an effort to recreate the ambience of a newsroom.

We are now sufficiently far into the Gladwell era that the Gladwell backlash is well under way. He is routinely accused of oversimplifying his material, or attacking straw men: does anyone really believe that success is solely a matter of individual talent, the position that Outliers sets out to unseat? Or that the strong always vanquish the weak? "You're of necessity simplifying," says Gladwell. "If you're in the business of translating ideas in the academic realm to a general audience, you have to simplify … If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: you're not the audience!" (Another common complaint, that his well-paid speaking gigs represent a conflict of interest, is answered in a 6,500-word essay on Gladwell's website.)

A subtler criticism holds that there is something more fundamentally wrong with the Gladwellian project, and indeed with the many Gladwellesque tomes it's inspired. To some critics, usually those schooled in the methods of the natural sciences, it's flatly unacceptable to proceed by concocting hypotheses then amassing anecdotes to illustrate them. "In his pages, the underdogs win … of course they do," the author Tina Rosenberg wrote, in an early review of David and Goliath. "That's why Gladwell includes their stories. Yet you'll look in vain for reasons to believe that these exceptions prove any real-world rules about underdogs." The problem with this objection is not that it's wrong, exactly, but that it applies equally to almost all journalism, and vast swaths of respected work in the humanities and social sciences, too. You make your case, you illustrate it with statistics and storytelling, and you refrain from claiming that it's the absolute, objective truth. Gladwell calls his articles and books "conversation starters", and that's not false modesty; ultimately, perhaps that's all that even the best nonfiction writing can ever honestly aspire to be.

Gladwell once wrote an article defending a playwright who'd lifted material from one of Gladwell's own articles, so perhaps it's not surprising that he also defends his former New Yorker colleague Jonah Lehrer, who admitted fabricating quotes in his book Imagine. "In the classic sense of the word, it was a hysteria," Gladwell says of the anti-Lehrer uproar. "There was a kind of frenzy about it that was disproportionate to the crime. Jonah screwed up, and he's the first to say he screwed up, but I'm puzzled by how much vitriol was directed at him. If I was going to be psychoanalytic about it, I'd say it has to do with anxiety within the world of journalism, about its loss of authority: we think we're losing our place in the world, and so we're hypersensitive about those who undermine that place further." Then again, Lehrer recently obtained a new book deal: perhaps his new-found position as an underdog will benefit him yet.

The most powerful section of David and Goliath concerns the climactic battle of the civil rights movement in Alabama, in 1963. In public, Martin Luther King and his aides maintained a dignified facade, but behind the scenes, King's organiser in Birmingham, Wyatt Walker, used cunning to turn the movement's weaknesses into strengths. By delaying street protests until late afternoon, when Birmingham's black residents were walking home from work, he led authorities to believe that onlookers were actually protestors. ("They cannot distinguish even between Negro demonstrators and negro spectators," Walker later recalled. "All they know is negroes.") By luring police into arresting hundreds of children, they overwhelmed Birmingham's jails, turning police commissioner Bull Connor's eagerness to arrest black people against him. Perhaps it wasn't "right", by some definition of that word, to send children for arrest, or to engineer confrontations between passers-by and police dogs – but Gladwell argues: "We need to remember that our definitions of what is right are, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those at the bottom of the pile." Underdogs have to use whatever they've got. And in the end, "much of what is valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts … the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty."

Gladwell will be performing live at the Lyceum, London (Oct 28), Liverpool Philharmonic (Oct 30) & Dublin RDS (Nov 1) Details: malcolmgladwell-live.com

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Host of teen supernatural books bound for big screen

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The movie adaptation of 'The Host' by Stephenie Meyer comes out March 29.

Here come 'The Host,' 'Mortal Instruments,' 'Vampire Academy' ...Does having built-in teen readers guarantee box-office success?But "it's worth even a chance of creating a franchise like 'Twilight,' " says IMDb managing editor

Unleash the Twi-hards and may the odds be ever in your favor: With the success of young-adult book-to-movie adaptations such as Twilight and The Hunger Games, a swarm of similar teen supernatural novels is headed for the big screen.

Beautiful Creatures, based on Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's four-part series, kicked off the trend in February.

The Host, based on an adult best seller by Twilight creator Stephenie Meyer but likely to attract teen viewers with its young cast, arrives March 29. Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, adapted from young-adult author Cassandra Clare's popular series, hits screens Aug. 23.

MORE: 'Beautiful Creatures' authors talk about the movie

LIST: USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list

And that's only the beginning. Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead, Divergent by Veronica Roth and Legend by Marie Lu are all in the pipeline.

But does having a host of teen readers guarantee a box-office hit?

The movie adaptation of 'Beautiful Creatures' by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl was released in February.

"There's no rigid formula that works, or else they'd be minting them, printing these movies out every two weeks. It's really difficult to predict the next big thing," says Keith Simanton, managing editor of IMDb. "But it's worth even a chance of creating a franchise like Twilight."

IMDb tracks the popularity of its movie and actor pages. Before Twilight was even being promoted, Simanton says, there was buzz building around star Robert Pattinson.

This time around, there's no defined "it" factor to predict success. Beautiful Creatures grossed a disappointing $19 million, despite a large social media and advertising campaign. The following week, however, the books sold better than they ever have, claiming four of the top 10 spots on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list.

"It's imperative to have that core base fans to spread the word," Simanton says. "But even that is sometimes not enough. What was missing with Beautiful Creatures? Could have been the casting. The trailer."

Clare, whose novel Clockwork Princess arrives Tuesday, has her own theory on why all the current teen novels are movie-ready.

"When you write for teens, you know you have to grab their attention quickly," she says. "YA (young-adult) novels are plot-propelled. That makes them cinematic."

Contributing: Bob Minzesheimer

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Books: New and noteworthy

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'Lean In' by Sheryl Sandberg (Photo: None None)

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg on how women can succeed'Wool,' a self-published e-book hit, is released in printA graphic designer's illustrated memoir

We scope out the hottest books on sale the week of March 10.

1. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (Knopf, non-fiction, on sale March 11)
What it's about: The chief operating officer of Facebook explores how women can succeed in the corporate world.
The buzz: Sandberg, former vice president of Google, notes that 30 years after women became half of college graduates, few hold leadership positions in business and politics.

2. Wool by Hugh Howey (Simon & Schuster, fiction, on sale March 12)
What it's about: Science fiction set in a damaged world where a community lives under strict regulations in a giant underground silo.
The buzz: Originally a self-published series of short stories that sold more than 400,000 e-books, Wool is now being released in hardcover and paperback; Ridley Scott's production company bought the film rights.

3. Mumbai New York Scranton by Tamara Shopsin (Scribner, non-fiction, on sale March 12)
What it's about: Illustrated debut memoir by a graphic designer who recounts a year she and her husband split between living in India, New York and Pennsylvania.
The buzz: Gabrielle Hamilton (Blood, Bones and Butter) says, "Shopsin writes like she illustrates — wry and succinct, with judiciously placed punch."

4. Battle Ready by Mark L. Donald and Scott Mactavish (St. Martin's, non-fiction, on sale March 12)
What it's about: Memoir of a Navy SEAL who was one of the most decorated combat veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars.
The buzz: Howard Wasdin (SEAL Team Six) calls Donald "a true American hero," whose memoir is a "well-written journey from training to combat recovery."

5. Son of a Gambling Man: My Journey from a Casino Family to the Governor's Mansion by Bob Miller (Thomas Dunne, non-fiction, on sale March 12)
What it's about: Memoir by a former Nevada governor whose tough-guy father operated on both sides of the law.
The buzz: Bill Clinton writes in a foreword, "Bob's journey could only have happened in Nevada."

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Books about the power of alone time

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'Playing With Water' is a good alone time book.

Our world is a relentlessly social one: We are plugging in, signing on and checking in, it seems, at all times. With the marvels of digital life so close at hand, it's easy to lose sight of solitude's benefits. So, it's more crucial than ever to make time for peace and privacy. From Susain Cain's Quiet to Thoreau's Walden, these books reveal the many ways alone time can enrich.

1. Solitude by Anthony Storr

British psychiatrist Anthony Storr challenges the established notion that love and friendship are the "only source of human happiness." Pointing to several figures throughout history--from Beethoven and Beatrix Potter to Ann Sexton--whose greatest achievements came about in moments of solitude, he argues that taking alone time can lead to an enhanced understanding of oneself, as well as bouts of superior creativity.

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2. Quiet by Susan Cain

In her recent bestseller Quiet (now out in paperback), Susan Cain introduces readers to the inner lives of introverts (people for whom alone time is the norm). Drawing on her own experience as an introvert in the high-octane world of corporate law, she argues that our culture's bias towards outspokenness and charisma leads us to overlook shy people and often miss out on their acumen and potential.

3. Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

A classic of solitary literature if there ever was one, "Walden" is the story of Henry David Thoreau's two-year retreat in rural Massachusetts, where he went to live as simply and "deliberately" as he could. Holed up in a spartan cabin and subsisting solely off the land, he chronicles his rugged education in self-reliance and his meditations on God, nature and society. The experience leaves him with an irrefutable sense of self-sufficiency and a deep appreciation for aloneness. As he puts it, "I never found a companion so companionable as solitude."

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BOOKISH: Q&A with Eben Alexander on God, consciousness and his new life purpose

4. Celebrating Time Alone by Lionel Fisher

Six years of living alone on an island in the Pacific Northwest showed freelance writer Lionel Fisher both the bliss and treachery of extensive solitude. Fisher shares wisdom from his own experience and those of others, exploring the perils of alienation and the ways in which extensive alone time can bring happiness. "What is tragic, and so wasteful of the sanctity of life," he writes on his website, "is that we seek our happiness, our fulfillment, our answers, our very identity in others when first we must find it in ourselves."

5. Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson

In "Playing With Water," renowned British travel writer and novelist James Hamilton-Paterson describes his life on a remote island in the Philippines. With little to do beyond spearing his own fish, he looks back on his life thus far, observes the graces and pitfalls of island culture, and comes to discover the tenacity of his own self-reliance.

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This article was originally posted on Bookish.com.

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2 new books explore Charles Dickens' messy private life

'Charles Dickens in Love' by Robert Garnett

Charles Dickens (Photo: NONE AP)

The author's family life lacked the warmth of his 'A Christmas Carol'He was talented and energetic but secretive, complicated and conflictedThere are roots to the desire and longing as well as the misery and unhappiness found in Dickens' work

As we're reminded every year at the time, no other novel has been as widely adapted as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol — on stage, in film and TV, more than 250 versions and counting.

And no other author continues to fascinate other writers as much as the secretive Dickens, whose private life lacked the heartwarming, redemptive happy ending of his classic Christmas tale.

As part of the latest burst of books marking his bicentennial — Dickens was born in 1812 — are two books that explore not just his extraordinary talent and energy but also his complicated and conflicted personal life:

Charles Dickens in Love

Charles Dickens in Love ( * * ½ out of four) by Robert T. Garnett is the more ambitious and academic of the pair. It builds on Claire Tomalin's groundbreaking 1992 book, The Invisible Woman, which strongly made the case that actress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan was Dickens' mistress for the last 14 years of his life. (When they met, she was 18, he was 45. He died at 59.)

Garnett, an English professor at Gettysburg College who has written for The Dickens Quarterly, offers a detailed look at three women whom Dickens loved. Anyone who knows anything about Dickens will not be surprised that none of the three was Dickens wife, Catherine, who gave birth to their 10 children.

Yes, 10, plus at least two miscarriages. Dickens himself famously claimed to have raised "the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves."

Beyond Dickens' passionate romance with Ternan — and the circumstantial evidence they had a son who died within months — Garnett explores Dickens' infatuation with two other women.

First came Maria Beadnell — "no doubt vain and flirtatious," Garnett writes — who jilted Dickens two years before he met and married Catherine Hogarth. "With Maria, Dickens had known ecstasy and suffered despair; with Catherine, he avoided risk by lowering his expectations."

Garnett concludes that Dickens' unrequited love taught him crucial lessons: "how passionately he could love and how hard he could work."

Beadnell's rejection, Garnett writes, served as a painful lesson about love — "its devotion, desire, longing and absorption, as well as misery, unhappiness, and desire" — that would enrich Dickens' fiction.

The second woman was Mary Hogarth, his wife's younger sister, who died at 17 of a heart attack in Dickens' arms. All of Dickens fictional deathbeds, Garnett writes, "are indebted to the poignant memory of Mary quietly slipping away in his arms."

Garnett finds "no evidence of any dangerous attraction, much less impropriety" between Dickens and his sister-in-law. Instead, she served as his "virgin icon."

Garnett is an impressive literary detective who distinguishes between what's known and what's speculation. But as a writer, he's not the best stylist, unless you like flourishes such as "the river of life had carried Dickens far downstream" or references to "the labyrinth of Eros."

As a scholar, he's a bit of a showoff — which may work better in the classroom than writing for a general audience.

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens ( * * * ) by Robert Gottlieb is more accessible and conversational. It's an exploration of Dickens' tenuous role as a father and what happened to his children.

Not all were failures, although none lived up to their father's expectations (hence the title). Gottlieb, an accomplished book editor, is bemused by how Dickens not only held his wife solely responsible for what he perceived as his children's failings but also managed to ignore his own involvement in all her pregnancies.

"It's always she who's responsible — his sexual requirements seemed to have nothing to do with it; you would think he was a father only because she made him into one," Gottlieb writes.

A problem with the book is that none of Dickens' children — from Kate, a successful painter, to Plorn, a drunk and a gambler who died in debt in Australia — would merit much attention if it weren't for their father. That said, it's a pleasure to read Gottlieb even when he's merely musing.

Gottlieb finds "almost no overlap" between Dickens' fictional children — the orphaned Oliver Twist, the tragic Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, or the pathetic Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop — and his real kids.

Dickens' son Charley, who became a journalist, wrote that "the children of his brain were much more real to him at times than we were."

To which Gottlieb can add only questions: "Were his versions of his actual children — the feckless sons, the fond daughters — simply further inventions? To them he was compellingly real, but what were they to him?"

Bob Minzesheimer has written about books and authors since 1997 - as close to a dream job as any job can be for someone who loves to read. A former political reporter and editor, he was president of his local library board.

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