Faber & Faber

The best thing about a new year? New books! Here are some of the books I am particularly looking forward to this year.The Secret Wives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin. Having made her name as a poet (her first book is called So All This Time I was Sitting on an Egg hee hee hee) Lola Shoneyin will publish her first novel, which is set in a Nigerian polygamous household. She has a way with titles, that Lola, ...

I love making new year's resolutions. Always have. I love reading my old journals and cracking up over what I wanted to achieve when I was 19 and 20. In 2008, I read that the resolutions that most people stick to are those that they announce publicly, so I put mine for 2008 on this blog. I soon deleted that post, because they seemed to be a little ambitious. The major resolution then was "to get a book deal". I ...

2009 was not the best year for Petina Gappah the person: I went through some rather horrible and painful stuff that is best forgotten. What I will focus on is 2009 as a terrific year for Petina Gappah the writer: it being, in case you missed it (and how could you, when I was shouting about it from every rooftop) the year that An Elegy for Easterly, my first book, was published. When the year began, I was nervous and ...

I am off to the mountains for Christmas, where I intend to do nothing but read and eat and read. I hope all my wonderful blog readers have happy happy holidays. I am back to Geneva on Monday, where I have a pile of work to go through before the year ends, so the break will be a short one. See you after Christmas, and remember, don't drink and drive, but smoke and fly!

I may have to wait until the new year to get what I want for Christmas because it is nowhere to be seen in Geneva: Too Much Money, the new novel by Dominick Dunne. His novels are a hoot, and this one is a treat. I read the first chapter in this month's Vanity Fair, he takes the roman a clef to new levels, he does, the disguises here are so thin he might as well have used the real ...

This year, I had the wonderful experience of meeting some of the writers whose books I read, and that invariably influenced how much I liked their books. So here they are, my books of 2009.1. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and Granta). I read a huge number of short story collections this year, and this has to be my favourite. I loved the wild inventiveness and the cracking humour in these sometimes risky stories ...

"When I saw her yesterday, Miss McConkey looked vital and frail at the same time, like a cross between Doris Lessing and poor, murdered Cora Lansquenet. She stood in the queue for the only cashier inside the OK supermarket that replaced the Bon Marché at Mabelreign shopping centre. She carried her head as she always had done, slightly tilted to the left, and her hair, all white now, was pinned into a large bun at the top of her head. ...

I admire greatly Laila Lalami's incisive and clear writing. Her blog is one of the best in the business, always up to date, and always interesting. She is a voracious, even gluttonous reader, and she is also a fellow Coetzeeirite, or should that be Coetzeenista? I must have read most of her essays by now, she writes particularly well of that liberal middle class prejudice that arises from the sometimes unconscious and occassionally racist assumptions of people who are otherwise ...

"The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice." As the Copenhagen summit on climate change begins, 56 newspapers around the world will, for the first time in history, publish the same editorial. Follow this link to read the full editorial as it ...

I woke up on the morning after the Big Night to find more than 150 notifications on my Facebook page. Thank you to all of you for almost crashing Facebook, and to the many people who have emailed, and who have left comments on this blog. I am happy and inspired and not a little dazed.I love the Guardian. No day has gone by in the last 15 years without me reading it. I have had one comment piece published ...