The IFOA house was packed tonight by the time Maeve Binchy's voice came over the loudspeaker. Groups of booklovers mixed with local authors like Catherine Bush and Shyam Selvadurai. Novelist and poet Alison Pick was our gracious host, introducing award-winning poet Lorna Crozier who started off the night. 

Last night I attended a reading by the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize finalists, a diverse mix of writers. Some I'm just discovering, like the very witty Rivka Galchen, the prize-collecting Rawi Hage and cutie pie Lee Henderson.

What makes an authors festival party rock? Writers, of course. And they were out in full force at last night's International Festival of Authors gala.

I made a festival rule after IFOA 2007: to only attend panel discussions, parties and Q&A's where the social gaffes, heated debates, and interesting insights abound.

Amanda Boyden knows how to keep a narrative moving, but her quintet of New Orleans voices doesn’t quite harmonize.

David Benioff leads one of those charmed existences that seem to happen only in movies.

Polygamy voices

Junot Diaz teaches creative writing at MIT.

Novels like Atmospheric Disturbances don’t come around very often. It’s a book of ideas, yet it’s full of emotion. It’s got romance, science, mystery, speculation. The narrative is elliptical, but it’s got a very precise logic.

Market madness

Debut dazzles

Aslam ascends

Hail Humphreys

Billingham thrills

More scores

Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 has been compared to Gorky Park and 1984. But reading just a few pages of the British novelist’s unputdownable debut thriller convinces you that his voice is totally his own.