...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?

Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.

Recently abandoned women can be complicated.

Bulgarians eat tarator every single day in summer. They think of it as salad although we'd call it a soup. You can make it as thick or thin as you like depending on how much water you add. It's very practical in summer because yogurt cools the body faster than water, but the water hydrates you.

Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments.

I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.

No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.