Books

With Ishiguro, Tyler and Franzen back with new fiction, this year will herald the return of the literary heavy hitters

Vladimir Mayakovsky hypnotized all who heard him read

Over history, chickens have become ‘the world’s most ubiquitous bird’ because of their usefulness

A new multimedia novel is tapping into students’ love of technology and film

Mother-daughter Alice in Wonderland-like exchanges underline this remarkable child-as-parental-caregiver memoir, writes Anne Kingston

The Paris Commune burned the city in 1871, after the massacre of 17,000 people by government troops for wearing workers’ clothes

Women writers turned an unfashionable genre into the publishing trend of 2014

The hottest titles in fiction and non-fiction

Although an undeniably dated film, Purple Rain retains the best thing it depicts: Prince’s status as one of the planet’s finest live acts

In what he has said will be his last novel, Faber has constructed a story that brims with suspense