Henning Mankell wraps up the detective’s final case, plus new work from Ali Smith, Graham Swift, Joyce Carol Oates and a host of others looks set to make this a thrilling year for readers.
Tour de force: Kenneth Branagh as Wallander in the BBC's adaptation of the Swedish novels
Could 2011 be the year in which digital books finally take off? Waterstone’s MD Dominic Myers thinks it might be: in December, after blaming the weather for a worrying drop in pre-Christmas sales of what we must now call “paper books”, he unveiled, apparently without irony, the retailer’s new “cloud-based” solution, which will enable e-books to be accessed across different devices. He expected a spike in digital-book sales from Christmas morning, when eager young futurists opened the e-readers in their stockings. Rumours that Father Christmas is backing digital-book technology (thousands of pages in a device the weight of a reindeer sneeze) are unconfirmed….read more
