Books

In a well-known spoof of a typical talk-radio exchange, two callers debate a fatuous point. The first says: "Right-thinking people in the US are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up with this country being sick and tired. I'm certainly not and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am." The second caller retorts, "Well, I meet a lot of people, and I'm convinced that the vast majority of wrong-thinking people are right." A conservative housewife, listening to the blather, snaps, "Liberal rubbish!" and turns the dial.

For every hour of the day and night there is a different way of being idle, which is why Tom Hodgkinson has written his book in 24 chapters. At 8am ('Waking Up Is Hard to Do'), true idlers turn off their alarms, flop over in bed and go back to sleep.

By recounting the basic tales of lives torn apart by the Holocaust but propelling them into a future of possible consequences, Hanna Krall risks blending fact and fiction to a degree where neither remain credible. By Elena Lappin

Luis Munoz endured a childhood filled with illness and pain which served in some ways as a preparation for the torture he would endure in a Chilean death camp in the 1970s. His fascinating memoirs offer an insight into an era blanked out of history books by 'official amnesia'. By Michael McCaughan

Grimstone's Ghost by Mary Arrigan. Twelve year old Cian O'Horgan arrives with his mother and sister Jo at the great, dark, depressing mansion that he has inherited from his great uncle, Cian O'Horgan.

 Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  The Althorp Literary Festival. Welsh fiction Richard Gwyn's The Colour of a Dog Running Away and finally A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Don't Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock     Paul McKenna's Change your Life in Seven Days    Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller. Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin.   Faulkner's three-book compendium The Sound & the Fury, Light in August and As I Lay Dying

The Bisto Book of the Year Awards

Terry Jones's Who Murdered Chaucer? and War on the War on Terror.  Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and the  Man Booker Prize winner Ismail Kadare

Culture, religion, language, welfare, sexuality and politics – the perfect ingredients for controversy, Irish-style. Catríona Crowe looks at a new book that focuses on five famous controversies at the birth of the State