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For most of his career, Christopher Hitchens, who has died of oesophageal cancer aged 62, was the left’s biggest journalistic star, writing and broadcasting with wit, style and originality in a period when such qualities were in short supply among those of similar political persuasion. Nobody else spoke with such confidence and passion for what Americans called “liberalism” and Hitchens (regarding “liberal” as too “evasive”) called “socialism”.

His targets were the abusers of power, particularly Henry Kissinger (whom he tried to bring to trial for his role in bombing Cambodia and overthrowing the Allende regime in Chile) and Bill Clinton. He was unrelenting in his support for the Palestinian cause and his excoriation of America’s projections of power in Asia and Latin America. He was a polemicist rather than an analyst or political thinker – his headteacher at the Leys school in Cambridge presciently forecast a future as a pamphleteer – and, like all the best polemicists, brought to his work outstanding skills of reporting and observation.

To these, he added wide reading, not always worn lightly, an extraordinary memory – he seemed, his friend Ian McEwan observed, to enjoy “instant neurological recall” of anything he had ever read or heard – and a vigorous, if sometimes pompous writing style, heavily laden with adjectives, elegantly looping sub-clauses and archaic phrases such as “allow me to inform you”.

His socialism was always essentially internationalist, particularly since the British working classes responded sluggishly to literature he handed out at factory gates for the International Socialists, a Trotskyist group of which he was a member from 1966 to 1976. He had little interest in social or economic policy and, in later life, seemed somewhat bemused at questions about his three children being educated privately.

Hitchens travelled widely as a young man, often at his own expense, visiting, for example, Poland, Portugal, Czechoslovakia and Argentina at crucial moments in their anti-totalitarian struggles, offering fraternal solidarity and parcels of blue jeans. Later, he rarely wrote at length about any country without visiting it, sometimes at risk of arrest or physical attack. His loathing of tyranny was consistent: unlike many of the 1960s generation, he never harboured illusions about Mao or Castro. His concerns grew about the left’s selective tolerance for totalitarian regimes – as early as 1983, he ruffled “comrades” by supporting Margaret Thatcher’s war against General Leopoldo Galtieri’s Argentina – but they did not initially threaten a rupture in his political loyalties.

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, however, Hitchens announced he was no longer on the left – while denying he had become any kind of conservative – and “swore a sort of oath to remain coldly furious” until “fascism with an Islamic face” was “brought to a most strict and merciless account”.

To the horror of former allies, he accepted invitations to the George W Bush White House; embraced the deputy defence secretary and Iraq war hawk Paul Wolfowitz as a friend (“they were finishing each other’s sentences”, was one account of an early meeting); and resigned from the Nation, America’s foremost leftwing weekly. In 2007, after living in the US for more than 25 years, he took out American citizenship in a ceremony presided over by Bush’s head of homeland security. Long friendships with the aristocracy of the Anglo-American left – Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Alexander Cockburn, Edward Said – ended in harsh exchanges. Gore Vidal once named Hitchens as his inheritor or dauphin. The relevant quotation appeared on the dustjacket of Hitch-22, Hitchens’s memoir published in 2010, but was overlain by a red cross with “no, CH” inscribed beside it.

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth to parents of humble origins who progressed to the fringes of what George Orwell (a Hitchens role-model) would have termed the lower-upper-middle-classes. His father was a naval commander of “flinty and adamant” Tory views who became a school bursar. Father and son were never close; nor were Christopher and his younger brother, Peter. The first love of Hitchens’s life was his mother, “the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari”. She insisted (at least according to Hitchens) he should go to boarding school because “if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it”.

He was already a Labour supporter at school, organising the party’s “campaign” in a mock election, and joining a CND march from Aldermaston. At Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics, and economics, he “rehearsed”, as he put it, for 1968. But he led a curiously dualistic life. By day, “Chris” addressed car workers through a bullhorn on an upturned milk crate while by night “Christopher” wore a dinner jacket to address the Oxford Union or dine with the warden of All Souls. (He did not, in fact, like being called “Chris” – his mother would not, he explained, wish her firstborn to be addressed “as if he were a taxi-driver or pothole-filler” – and found “Hitch”, which most friends used, more acceptable.) While not exactly a social climber, Hitchens wished to be on intimate terms with important people.

Equally dualistic was his sex life. He was almost expelled from school for homosexuality and later boasted that at Oxford he slept with two future (male) Tory cabinet ministers. But also at Oxford, he lost his virginity to a girl who had pictures of him plastered over her bedroom wall and he eventually became a dedicated heterosexual because, he said, his looks deteriorated to the point where no man would have him.

The “double life”, as he called it, continued after he left university with a third-class degree – he was too busy with politics to bother much with studying – and found, partly through his Oxford friend James Fenton, a berth at the New Statesman. He supplemented his income by writing for several Fleet Street newspapers, but also contributed gratis to the Socialist Worker.

It was while working for the Statesman that he experienced a “howling, lacerating moment in my life”: the death of his adored mother in Athens, apparently in a suicide pact with her lover, a lapsed priest. Only years later did he learn what she never told him or perhaps anyone else: that she came from a family of east European Jews. Though his brother – who first discovered their mother’s origins – said this made them only one-32nd Jewish, Hitchens declared himself a Jew according to the custom of matrilineal descent.

Later in the 1970s, Hitchens became a familiar Fleet Street figure, disporting himself in bars and restaurants and settling into a literary set that included Fenton, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Clive James and others. It specialised in long lunches and what (to others) seemed puerile and frequently obscene word games. But he was hooked on America as a 21-year-old when he visited on a student visa and tried unsuccessfully to get a work permit. In October 1981, on a half-promise of work from the Nation, he left for the US. It was the making of his career: Americans have always had a weakness for plummy voiced, somewhat raffish Englishmen who pepper their writing and conversation with literary and historical allusions.

He became the Nation’s Washington correspondent, contributing editor of Vanity Fair from 1982, literary essayist for Atlantic Monthly, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and a talking head on innumerable cable TV shows. He authored 11 books, co-authored six more, and had five collections of essays published. The targets included Kissinger, Clinton and Mother Teresa (“a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf”); his books on Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were more positive, and less widely noticed. His most successful book, which brought him international fame beyond what Susan Sontag called “the small world of those who till the field of ideas”, was God Is Not Great, a mocking indictment of religion which put him alongside Richard Dawkins as a leading enemy of the devout.

Hitchens was also, to his great pleasure, a liberal studies professor at the New School in New York and, for a time, visiting professor at Berkeley in California, as well as a regular on the public lecture and debate circuit. Hitchens loved what he called “disputation” – there was little difference between his public and private speaking styles – and America, a more oral culture than Britain’s, offered ample opportunity. When his final break with the left came, it seemed to some as though the pope had announced he was no longer a Catholic. His support for Bush’s war in Iraq – which he never retracted – and his vote for the president in 2004, were even bigger shocks, and some suspected a psychological need, as the first male Hitchens never to wear uniform, to prove his manhood. But Hitchens, in many respects a traditionalist, was never a straightforward lefty. He abstained in the UK’s 1979 election, admitting he secretly favoured Thatcher and hoped for an end to “mediocrity and torpor”.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, issued in 1989 against his friend Salman Rushdie, was, in Hitchens’s mind, as important in exposing the left’s “bad faith” as 9/11. He supported, albeit belatedly, the first Gulf war, demanded Nato intervention in Bosnia, and refused to sign petitions against sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hitchens, though, did not deny he had changed. He became, if truth be told, a bit of a blimp and ruefully remarked – with the quiet self-irony that often underlay his bombastic style – that he sometimes felt he should carry “some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart”.

But, he insisted, he wasn’t making a complete about-turn. Though no longer a socialist, he was still a Marxist, and an admirer of Lenin, Trotsky and Che Guevera; capitalism, the transforming powers of which Marx recognised, had proved the more revolutionary economic system and, politically, the American revolution was the only one left in town. He remained committed to civil liberties. After voluntarily undergoing waterboarding, he denounced it as torture, and he was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Bush’s domestic spying programme. He never let up in his “cold, steady hatred … as sustaining to me as any love” of all religions.

Other things were unchanging. Hitchens’s life was full of feuds with old friends. He broke with the Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal who, before a congressional committee, denied spreading calumnies about Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens, earning himself the sobriquet “Snitchens”, signed affidavits testifying that Blumenthal had, in his hearing, indeed smeared the president’s lover. His rightwing brother, Peter, also a journalist, was put on non-speakers for several years after revealing a pro-red joke that Christopher once made in private. But his friendship with Amis never wavered. “Martin … means everything to me,” he once said, while “more or less” acquitting himself of carnal desire. Amis, in turn, spoke of “a love whose month is ever May” and described his friend as a rhetorician of such distinction that “in debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes”.

Hitchens’s love affairs with alcohol and tobacco were equally constant. He smoked heavily, even on public occasions and even on TV, long after the habit – for everyone else – became unacceptable. Despite reports in 2008 that he had given up, a reporter found him getting through two packets of cigarettes in a morning in May 2010. As for alcohol, he drank daily, on his own admission, enough “to kill or stun the average mule”. Technically, he was probably an alcoholic but, he pointed out, he never missed deadlines or appointments. Regardless of condition, he wrote fast and fluently, if with erratic punctuation. Only rarely did alcohol make him a bore, blunt his wit or cloud his arguments. The journalist Lynn Barber rated him “one of the greatest conversationalists of our age”. Inebriated or sober, he could charm almost anybody. He could also, with what the New Yorker’s Ian Parker called “the sudden, cutthroat withdrawal of charm”, wound deeply and unnecessarily.

In the summer of 2010, during a promotional tour for Hitch-22, he was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer, a disease that had killed his father at a much more advanced age. He inhabited “Tumourville”, as he called it, with rueful wit and little self-pity. “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be,” he wrote, “I have abruptly become a finalist.” In the same Vanity Fair article, he observed that “I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me”. But he never repented of his convivial lifestyle – on the contrary, he continued to take his beloved whisky, having received no medical instructions to the contrary – and nor did he turn his rhetorical skills to persuading others to eschew his example, confining himself, in a TV interview, to the observation that “if you can hold it down on the smokes and cocktails, you may be well advised to do so”.

He continued, as well as giving valedictory newspaper and magazine interviews, to write, broadcast and participate in public debates with no discernible diminution of vigour or passion. He confronted the Catholic convert Tony Blair before an audience of 2,700 in Toronto and, by general consent, won with ease. He gave early notice that there would be no deathbed conversion to religion. If we ever heard of such a thing, he advised, we should attribute it to sickness, dementia or drugs. When believers prayed for him, he politely declared himself touched, but resolute in his atheism. He was as severe with the conventional cliches of terminal illness as he was, throughout his life, with any other form of convention.

“To the dumb question ‘Why me?’,” he wrote, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’” All the same, his many friends and admirers, who do not, as one of them put it, “relish a world without Hitchens”, will be asking “why him?” today.

Hitchens was married, first, to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, and then, after they divorced, to Carol Blue, an American screenwriter. Both survive him, as do one son and two daughters.

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The annual Book Lounge selection of our favourite books of the year, as unveiled at our birthday party, is now here. Just click to enjoy!

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Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ‘remarkable and unusual’ study, The Emperor of All Maladies, beats four novels to the £10,000 prize.

An oncologist has won the Guardian First Book award for his “biography” of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, which traces the disease from the first recorded mastectomy in 500BC to today’s cutting edge research.

Siddhartha Mukherjee has called his book – a mix of history, memoir and biography, of science and the personal stories of cancer patients – “an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behaviour“.

The only non-fiction title on the shortlist, it beat four novels to win the £10,000 award, narrowly seeing off Amy Waldman’s The Submission, set in post-9/11 America. Stephen Kelman’s Booker-shortlisted novel Pigeon English was also in the running.

The chair of judges, Lisa Allardice, editor of Guardian Review, said Mukherjee’s “anthropomorphism of a disease” was a “remarkable and unusual achievement”.

“In the end it came down to a very difficult decision between a first novel [The Submission] and a first book of tremendous research,” she said. “They were so different – both incredibly impressive achievements in their own rights, but in the end the Mukherjee was felt to be the more original.

“He has managed to balance such a vast amount of information with lively narratives, combining complicated science with moving human stories. Far from being intimidating, it’s a compelling, accessible book, packed full of facts and anecdotes that you know you will remember and which you immediately want to pass on to someone else.”

Mukherjee, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, embarked on the book in 2004, when a sarcoma patient asked him to explain what she was fighting.

“Patients would come up and ask: ‘What is the story?’ They were looking for a much deeper story, not their own particular medical history, but the larger context – what the origins of the disease were, and what would happen next. What the future was,” he said. “It’s a question I find particularly haunting. It seems to me as a scientist that we can only understand the future by understanding the past.”

He began writing a journal in answer to his patients’ questions, but by 2005 it had become obvious it could not be a small journal, that for the question of origin to be answered he “had to go back to the real origin rather than cutting it off at an arbitrary point. It became bigger and bigger until it reached its current form.”

Sending it out to publishers, he received two types of response: either they said that no one would want to read about cancer or they got it immediately. “There was no grey area,” he said.

Greeted with rave reviews when it was published, The Emperor of Maladies has already picked up a Pulitzer prize, with judges for the prestigious American award calling it “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science”.

Author and academic Sarah Churchwell – who joined Allardice on the judging panel for the Guardian award along with the authors David Nicholls and Antonia Fraser, Stuart Broom of Waterstone’s and the Guardian’s deputy editor Katharine Viner – said Mukherjee had “marshalled an immense amount of material into a readable and inspiring story” and that the result is “a gripping, enlightening read about the nature of illness and our battle against what begins to look like mortality itself“.

Mukherjee, who is writing a second book, said it was “a great and distinct honour” to win the Guardian prize. “You never write books to win awards – they are immensely gratifying but unexpected,” he said. “In recognising The Emperor of All Maladies, the judges have also recognised the extraordinary courage and resilience of the men and women who struggle with illness, and the men and women who struggle to treat illnesses.

“I am delighted and honoured to join a formidable list of writers and scholars – Zadie Smith, Alexandra Harris, Petina Gappah, and Alex Ross among them.”

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Not only are books still the best gift for children, it has been a year of great books arriving on our shelves and we thought to give you a round-up of some of the favourites, there are just so many to choose from:

For the little ones

Fairytale Hairdresser by Abie Longstaff, is a brilliant story of  Kitty Lacey, the fairytale hairdresser, she tames the wildest of locks, deals with the most demanding and unusual of customers (whom you might recognise from other stories!) and ultimately foils the Witch’s evil plan, when she helps Rapunzel find her prince. A decent haircut really can work wonders!

Monster spends a day at work with his dad. He does everything (well all most) his Dad does, from wearing a tie to playing on the computer. He is having a great day and just assumes so does Dad. Monster Day at Work by Sarah Dyer is a great book for both parents and little ones as it looks at the work day in a new way.

Italian-born, Beatrice Alemagna, lives in Paris today and is well-known in Europe for her felted wool technique mixed with an amalgam of applique, fabrics and stitching. In her new Bugs in the Garden the little bugs have to learn to explore the world outside and how to accept creatures they are initially afraid of. A true gem.

Dinosaurs remain a favourite of many little people. Bernard Most has written the best story, If the Dinosaurs Came Back. Where would they live, what would they do if they were here now with us, maybe they could rescue the kites stuck in the very high trees, of they could help the firefighters put out the flames or scare away the robbers. A book that will make you wish you had a dinosaur!

We simply adore Splat the Cat by Rob Scotton. And for Christmas this year, Splat is loving us back with a great boxset of three titles, loads of stickers and a colouring-in poster with crayons. Splat and his friend the Mouse has caused some great hiccups in his poor teacher’s class.

Once upon a time there was a wolf called Rolf. He was a Good Little Wolf who liked baking cakes and was always kind to his friends. One day Rolf meets the big bad wolf and can’t help but wonder if he is also suppose to be bad. Nadia Shireen created a story which is meant to make us question our true selfs, and with a surprising ending, it certainly does!

A Place to Call Home by Alexis Deacon, is the story of a band of seven furry brothers who have outgrown their home and are forced out into the world. And so their adventure begins – a quest for a new place to call their own! This determined little unit tackle the elements: crossing the sea, climbing a mountain, trawling across the desert and surviving a labyrinth until, finally, they reach the edge of the world… What will they see here and will they ever find a place they can call home? One of the funniest laugh-out-loud stories this year!

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” said Jack.

“Let’s have a look in the patchwork sack.”

Jack and the Flumflum Tree beautifully illustrated by David Roberts is the best Julia Donaldson of the year. Gran packs them a patchwork bag full of goodies they might need as they journey to the Flumflum tree to help Gran get better. The rhyme is brilliant and along with Rose and Stu, Jack is in for a great adventure.

The cutest little zebra, Zou wants his parents to wake up so that he can snuggle in bed with them. He decides to make them breakfast. After many hiccups, he eventually gets his wish. With text and illustrations by Michel Gay, you will adore this little guy.

Look Mom! I’m reading!

Ian Fleming, who wrote all the James Bond novels, wrote one children’s book and this year, author Frank Cotterell Boyce, finally wrote the brilliant sequel. Chitty Chitty Bang Flies again tells the zany crazy story of the old magical engine now in a camper van which is the means of transport for poor Jemma’s family on what she hoped would have been an ordinary holiday, but no more….!

Have you read all the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books (even the latest one, Cabin Fever) and now don’t know what to read next? Have you tried the Dork Diaries by Rachel Reneé Russell? Meet Nikki Maxwell, self-proclaimed Queen Dork, who spills all the details of her “not-so-fabulous-life” through sketches, doodles and secret entries in her book. Have we not all had a bad hair day? Book 1-3 is now available in a great little boxset.

A treasure for time gone by, The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon is available in a beautiful paperback with the same magical stories that enchanted children decades ago. Eleanor Farjeon created a faraway place with princes and queens, giants and goldfish, where all can be possible within the pages of the story. Get carried away with this classic read.

There is a new favourite character on the scene. Meet Claude, dog extraordinaire, with his best friend, Mr Bobblysock (yes, a stripy sock) and all the crazy adventures they get up to, purely accidental of course! In Claude on Holiday they find pirates and accidental treasure instead of the peaceful days of leisure they were hoping for. Alex T. Smith has created magical drawings to capture Claude in our hearts forever.

Agatha Parrot is a brilliant character with a bright and witty voice. She narrates her own story, which is ‘typed out neatly by Kjartan Poskitt (author)’ Agatha’s class is going on a special trip as a reward for all having full attendance for the term. Agatha’s friend Martha has an incident with a crazy pizza (octopus paste…) and gets sick. Naturally, Agatha has to pretend that Martha is not sick and is at school, with the help of a balloon, Martha’s coat and some newspaper-stuffed trousers. Hilarity ensues as she battles to save the class trip. Agatha Parrot and the Floating Head is perfect for Mr Gum fans.

Meerkat Madness is the story of a burrow of meerkat pups and their eccentric babysitter, Uncle Fearless who once travelled to the Blah-Blah camp at the edge of the desert. Truth be told, Uncle is a bit of a show-off but the pups love his colourful stories even if they don’t really believe them. But then they find a mysterious object buried in the sand and it isn’t long before they are caught up in a daring adventure of their own! Told in Ian Whybrow’s unique style this hilarious animal adventure starring ever-popular meerkats is a funny, fast-paced, sure-fire hit.

Freya is an ordinary girl living in modern Britain, but with a twist: people still worship the Viking gods. She’s caught in her parents’ divorce, and shuttling between bickering adults is no fun. One evening, stuck with her dad on his night shift at the British Museum, she is drawn to the Lewis Chessmen and Heimdall’s Horn. Unable to resist, she blows the horn, waking three chess pieces from their enchantment; the slaves Roskva and Alfi, and Snot the Berserk. They are all summoned to Asgard, land of the Viking gods, and told they must go on a perilous journey to restore the gods to youth. If Freya refuses she will be turned into an ivory chess piece but, if she accepts her destiny and fails, the same terrible fate awaits her. Francesca Simon’s The Sleeping Army is brilliantly funny, original and a wholly new take on the Norse myths – and the travails of contemporary family life.

For those who just love children’s books

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remain one of the most loved Roald Dahl books and now for the first time it is available in a pop-up book which looks like a bar of Wonka chocolate. With these Quentin Blake illustrations in a new dimension, this feast of moving parts and paper crafting is a must-have for fans.

Bear has lost his hat. It is red and pointy. He asks various animals if they have seen it but they have not. Depressed, Bear despairs of ever seeing his beloved hat again until Deer asks him what it looked like. As he describes it both Bear and the astute reader will realize they have seen the hat before, atop the head of Rabbit who, when queried, was suspiciously nervous in his response. Bear retraces his steps back to Rabbit, calls him out as a liar and… With a surprising ending, this is a new favourite. I want my hat back by Jon Klassen, has on the New York Times list of Best Illustrated books for 2011.

Book Lounge hearts McSweeneys. They have started producing children’s books and with Amy Martin’s beautiful Symphony City we follow a little girl through a city as she discovers the music the city produces with all its noise. The more she hears the heartbeat of the city the brighter the illustrations. A beautiful book, you would want to frame every page.

A book that will make you ooh and aah, is the lastest offering of Stephen MacKey (from Miki), called Pushka. Pushka is fast asleep in his bed on the circus train. Little does he know that he is about to topple out… amongst the enchanted trees. Scared, Pushka runs away through the night until he spies the most beautiful dancing girl. She says not a word, but she beckons him to her, luring Pushka into the arms of a hungry giant! Will Pushka ever make it back to the circus? The illustrations are so dreamy and magical that you feel as if you could make believe anything.

The Crows of Pearblossom tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Crow, who live in a cotton-wood tree. Due to a hungry Rattlesnake living at the bottom of the tree, Mrs. Crow’s eggs disappear before they hatch. After catching the snake eating her 297th egg that year (she does not work on Sundays), Mrs. Crow tells Mr. Crow go and kill the snake. Thinking better of it, Mr. Crow confers with his wise friend, Old Man Owl. Owl bakes mud into two stone eggs and paints them to resemble Mrs. Crows eggs. These dummy eggs catches the Rattlesnake out and gives Mrs Crow the victory she desired. Written by the great Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) it is a keepsake.

YA Reads (teenager is so last year)

With the Chocolate Box girls, Cathy Cassidy has once again got a winning recipe. When two families merge, it leaves room for each girl to tell their story. In this, Marshmallow Skye, the 2^nd in the series, we meet Skye, one of the twins. Along with her sister Summer, they do everything together, although it seems that Summer is always just more in the spotlight. Skye wants to be her own person, will she ever step out of Summer’s shadow and find her own chance to shine?

When Amo is asked to run the agony column for her school newspaper, she is insulted. She is a serious journalist! She wants to be known as a newshound, not Aunt Lulu who gives out advice. But then an anonymous letter arrives from Hopelessly in Love and Amo is sure she knows who the writer is, and that he has written it about her. Suddenly the Aunt Lulu gigs might not be too bad. A hilarious school story by Botswanian author, Lauri Kubuitsile, perfect escapism.

Anger and pain consume Cora; they have since last year when her brother died. Now her family’s broken, barely speaking to each other and barely surviving. Nate’s the one who died, but Cora feels the brunt of her parent’s disappointment, sadness, and anger. She’s not allowed out after dark, she must come straight home from school, and she can’t get into a car without a parent’s approval.  All summer long, she’s spent the days inside her room imagining the places in the world she’d rather be, while drawing maps and pictures of her travels. Now she must face reality and start high school. She doesn’t enter as an unknown, but as the sister of her dead brother. Everyone knew Nate, but not everyone liked him. Cora’s just trying to survive, but along the way her heart opens. She talks to her brother’s best friend, who was in the car that night, and things change. He shows her a side of her brother she didn’t know.  Lisa Ann Sandell writes a breathtakingly beautiful and heart-wrenching novel, A Map of the Known World, that will haunt you long after you’re finished.

Celebrating the spree of dystopian novels currently seeing the light, Bumped by Megan McCafferty creates a world. A virus has swept the world, making everyone over the age of eighteen infertile. Teenagers are now the most prized members of society, and would-be parents desperately bid for ‘conception contracts’ with the prettiest, healthiest and cleverest girls. Sixteen-year-old Melody is gorgeous, athletic and has perfect grades, and has scored an amazing contract with a rich couple. And she’s been matched with one of the most desirable ‘bumping’ partners in the world – the incredibly hot, genetically flawless Jondoe. But Melody’s luck is about to run out. She discovers she has a sister – an identical twin, Harmony, who has grown up in a religious community opposed to the idea of ‘pregging’. Harmony believes her calling is to save Melody from her sinful plans. Melody doesn’t have time for this – she can’t wait to meet Jondoe and seal the deal. But when he arrives and mistakes Harmony for Melody, everyone’s carefully-laid plans are swept out of control – and Melody and Harmony are about to realise they have so much more than just DNA in common.  Sharp, original and sassy, this futuristic take on teen pregnancy is totally readable and scarily believable.

What would you sacrifice for someone you’ve loved forever – told in seven parts and spanning ten centuries, a cleverly constructed, beautifully crafted love story with elements of thriller and the supernatural. Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgewick proves once again that he is a literary master. It’s 2073 and Eric Seven is a journalist visiting the remote Swedish island of Blessed to investigate claims that no one there ages and the local population do not have children. He strikes up a friendship with a young local woman called Merle. Soon he becomes aware that there’s more to the island than meets the eye… The events encountered by Eric Seven are part of a cycle started a thousand years earlier when a king and queen were cruelly ripped apart by the demands of their society. Eric and Merle are trapped in a pattern that will be repeated for eternity unless Eric and Merle can find a way of breaking it

Celia Frost is a freak. At least that’s what everyone thinks. Her life is ruled by a rare disorder that means she could bleed to death from the slightest cut, confining her to a gloomy bubble of safety. No friends. No fun. No life. But when a knife attack on Celia has unexpected consequences, her mum reacts strangely. Suddenly they’re on the run. Why is her mum so scared? Someone out there knows – and when they find Celia, she’s going to wish the truth was a lie. A buried secret; a gripping manhunt; a dangerous deceit: what is the Truth about Celia Frost? A page-turning thriller by Paula Rawsthorne, that’s impossible to put down.

My name is Mina, I love the night. This novel is all about Mina, the girl who befriends Michael in one of David Almond’s previous novels, Skellig. It is a pre-quel; written after another story, but giving parallel events leading up to Mina and Michael meeting at the start of Skellig. This book is written as if it were Mina’s diary. In between stories and poems and ideas and Mina’s philosophy it tells the story of the events that have shaped Mina’s life up to this point. Her whole life is coloured by the loss of her father, and the book is an exercise in understanding and redemption. David Almond is a master storyteller who deserves a wide readership.

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson, is a thrilling ghost-hunting teen mystery, as modern-day London is plagued by a sudden outbreak of brutal murders that mimic the horrific crimes of Jack the Ripper. Sixteen-year-old American girl Rory has just arrived at boarding school in London when a Jack the Ripper copycat-killer begins terrorising the city. All the hallmarks of his infamous murders are frighteningly present, but there are few clues to the killer’s identity.“Rippermania” grabs hold of modern-day London, and the police are stumped with few leads and no witnesses. Except one. In an unknown city with few friends to turn to, Rory makes a chilling discovery…

“A gorgeously written, chilling, atmospheric thriller. The streets of London have never been so sinister or so romantic.” Cassandra Clare, author of THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS

Here’s the low-down on Ruby Redfort: she’s a genius code-cracker, a daring detective, and a gadget-laden special agent who just happens to be a thirteen-year-old girl. She and her slick side-kick butler, Hitch, foil crimes and get into loads of scrapes with evil villains, but they’re always ice-cool in a crisis.

In Ruby Redfort: Look Into My Eyes, we go right back to Ruby’s beginnings as an agent. When an anonymous caller sets Ruby a challenge, it’s not long before she finds her way into the HQ of the most secret of secret agencies, Spectrum. They need her help to crack a code but her desk job soon spirals into an all-out action adventure, as Ruby uncovers the dastardly plans of the formidable Fool’s Gold Gang.  This is the super-awesome new creation from multi-million-copy bestseller Lauren Child, ooh it seems there is a new Nancy Drew on the block.

This is just a small selection of a vast range of amazing books out this year, do pop in or mail us if you have a question about other children’s books. We are rather proud of our selection!

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The Man Booker Prize winning-novel The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is shortlisted for another literary prize.

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Congratulations to Julian Barnes finally won the literary prize that has eluded him on three previous occasions when he was tonight presented with the Man Booker prize for his short novel, The Sense of an Ending.

His victory came after one of the most bitter and vituperative run-ups to the prize in living memory – not among the shortlisted writers, but from dismayed and bemused commentators who accused judges of putting populism above genuine quality.

But few of those critics could claim Barnes’ novel is not of the highest quality. The chair of this year’s judges, former MI5 director general Stella Rimington, said it had “the markings of a classic of English Literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.”

Much of the row over the shortlist has stemmed from Rimington’s own prioritisation of “readability” in the judging criteria. But tonight, she said quality had always been just as important.

“It is a very readable book, if I may use that word, but readable not only once but twice and even three times,” she said. “It is incredibly concentrated. Crammed into this short space is a great deal of information which you don’t get out of a first read.”

Accepting the prize, Barnes thanked the judges for their wisdom and the sponsors for their cheque. He also offered some advice to publishers: “Those of you who have seen my book, whatever you think of its contents, will probably agree it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the ebook, it has to look like something worth buying, worth keeping.”

Afterwards Barnes admitted a sense of relief at finally winning. “I didn’t want to go to my grave and get a Beryl,” he said referring to Bainbridge, who was shortlisted five times, never won and received a posthumous Best of Beryl Booker prize.

He said the “readability” row had been “a false hare” to which he had paid little attention, adding: “Most great books are readable. Any shortlist of the last ten years that I’ve read has contained nothing but what you would call readable books.”

Barnes once called the prize “posh bingo” and he said he had not changed his view – it simply depended on who the judges were and what they liked. “The Booker prize has a tendency to drive people a bit mad,” he said, not least writers with “hope and lust and greed and expectation” so the best way to stay sane, he said, was by treating it as a lottery until you win “when you realise that the judges are the wisest heads in literary Christendom“. Asked what he would spend the £50,000 prize money on he said a new watch strap was first on his list. “I could buy a whole new watch.”

The book, at 150 pages, is undoubtedly short, but not the shortest to ever win the prize – that record belongs to Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which won in 1979 and is shorter by a few hundred words.

The Sense of an Ending, Barnes’ 11th novel, explores memory: how fuzzy it can be and how we amend the past to suit our own wellbeing. It tells the story through the apparently insignificant and dull life of arts administrator Tony Webster.

“One of the things that the book does is talk about the human kind,” said Rimington. “None of us really knows who we are. We present ourselves in all sorts of ways, but maybe the ways we present ourselves are not how we really are.”

Rimington said the question of whether Barnes was overdue to win the £50,000 prize never entered her mind or figured in the debate. “We really were, and I know you find it very boring of me to say so, looking at the books that we had in front of us,” she said.

Despite the sometimes hostile reaction to the shortlist, Rimington said she had enjoyed the process of judging. “I’ve been through many crises at one time or another in which this one pales, I must say. We’ve been very interested by the discussion. We’ve followed it sometimes with great glee and amusement. The fact that it has been in the headlines is very gratifying.”

It took the judges (Rimington, MP Chris Mullin, author Susan Hill, the Daily Telegraph’s head of books Gaby Wood and he Spectator editor Matthew d’Ancona) just 31 minutes to decide on the winner, after what Rimington called “an interesting debate.” They had been divided 3-2 at the beginning of the judging meeting, but were all agreed by the end.

“There was no blood on the carpet, nobody went off in a huff and we all ended up firm friends and happy with the result,” she said.

Barnes, 65, had been shortlisted for the prize three times previously; in 1984 with Flaubert’s Parrot, when he lost out to Anita Brookner; win 1998 with England, England, losing to Ian McEwan; and with Arthur & George in 2005, when he lost to John Banville.

What was particularly striking this year was that Barnes was the only seriously big hitter on the shortlist, and the only author to have been shortlisted previously.

The others on the shortlist were Carol Birch for her much-admired Jamrach’s Menagerie, a historical high seas adventure; two Canadian writers – Patrick deWitt for The Sisters Brothers, a picaresque western, and Esi Edugyan for Half Blood Blues, which mixes the raw beauty of jazz and the terror of Nazism; and two debut novels – Stephen Kelman for Pigeon English, which tells the story of a Ghanaian boy who turns detective on a south London housing estate; and AD Miller for Snowdrops, a Moscow-set tale of corruption and moral decline.

The shortlist undoubtedly prompted a livelier debate about what makes a great novel with many commentators annoyed by judge Chris Mullin’s belief that a book had to “zip along” to be worthy of being considered. Last year’s Booker chairman Andrew Motion also weighed in, accusing the judges of creating a “false divde” between what is high end and what is readable, and questioning the absence of authors such as Alan Hollinghurst, Edward St Aubyn and Ali Smith.

The row has also led to a group of writers, publishers and agents announcing plans to set up a rival literary prize that would reward the artistic achievement of a writer above ‘readability.’

Full details of the Literature Prize have yet to be announced but the agent Andrew Kidd said they felt “a space has opened for a new prize which is unequivocally about excellence.” However, not everyone condemned the shortlist. Book sellers, in particular, were happy with a list that resulted in record Booker sales. A spokesman for Waterstones, Jon Howell, called the critical reaction “ungracious sniping” and said Barnes was a worthy winner.

If anyone is upset at the win, it may well be the bookies. William Hill said more than half of all bets had been for Barnes, a 6/4 favourite.

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Following an auction for Southern African rights conducted by Beukes’s agent Oliver Munson of Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in London last week, Umuzi has announced that they have won the rights to publish the next 2 novels by home-grown literary star Lauren Beukes.

The rising trajectory of Cape Town-based authorLauren Beukes started with her first futuristic novel Moxyland (2008) and continued with Zoo City(2010), for which she received the internationally prestigious Arthur C ClarkeAward.

The first of the two novels that Umuzi will publishis entitled THE SHINING GIRLS. It is a high-concept story of a time-travellingserial killer pursued across time by a surviving victim working together with an ex-homicidereporter. Umuzi will publish the book in a simultaneous, world-wide release inMay 2013. The second novel, titled BROKEN MONSTERS, is due for release in2014.

Rights in the USAand Canadawere sold to Little, Brown. A five-house auction for UKand Commonwealth rights, excluding southern Africa,is being concluded. German, Dutch, Italian and Hebrew rights have also beensold so far.

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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

In 1886, a mysterious travelling circus becomes an international sensation. Open only at night, constructed entirely in black and white, Le Cirque des Rêves delights all who wander its circular paths and warm themselves at its bonfire. Although there are acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists, the Circus of Dreams is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice. The circus seems almost to cast a spell over its aficionados, who call themselves the rêveurs – the dreamers. At the heart of the story is the tangled relationship between two young magicians, Celia, the enchanter’s daughter, and Marco, the sorcerer’s apprentice. At the behest of their shadowy masters, they find themselves locked in a deadly contest, forced to test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love… 

A fabulous, fin-de-siècle feast for the senses and a life-affirming love story, The Night Circus is a beautifully crafted, lovingly told and imaginatively stunning novel!

The Drowning Pool by Syd Moore

After her world is shaken by a series of unexplained events, young widow Sarah Grey soon comes to realise that she is the victim of a terrifying haunting by her 19th century namesake…A classic ghost story with a modern twist by a talented new writer in the genre.

Relocated to a coastal town, widowed teacher Sarah Grey is slowly rebuilding her life, along with her young son Alfie. But after an inadvertent séance one drunken night, her world is shaken when she starts to experience frightening visions. She tries to explain them as But Alfie sees them too and Sarah believes that they have become the targets of a terrifying haunting.

Convinced that the ghost is that of a 19th Century local witch and namesake, Sarah delves into local folklore and learns that the witch was thought to have been evil incarnate. When a series of old letters surface, Sarah discovers that nothing and no-one is as it seems, maybe not even the ghost of Sarah Grey…

This is a brilliant old-fashioned ghost story with a modern twist, wonderfully written, pacy and extremely engaging. Highly recommended.

“a stunning reinvention of the ghost story and an exploration of a 19th-century Essex witch hunt.”     The Guardian

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