Olaf Olafsson's acclaimed first novel, published in English as Absolution, tells the story of an extremely rich but morally bankrupt Icelander called Peter Peterson. Living in self-imposed exile in Manhattan, Peterson keeps a regular diary, in which he guiltily returns, again and again, to the "little crime" he committed in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Olafsson's second novel, The Journey Home, became the bestselling novel in Icelandic history. Like Absolution, it is tainted [...]

As we approach the millennium, King Arthur is assured of his prominence as, just possibly, Britain's favourite monarch. The plethora of websites, books and TV programmes devoted to him all indicate that the "once and future king" and his court are alive and well and set to conquer the 21st century. There remains, however, the troubling question: did Arthur really exist? And, if so, who was this sixth-century military leader [...]

Melvyn Bragg's 17th novel begins, conventionally enough, with a soldier returning home from Burma. It is the summer of 1946, and he has not seen his wife, Ellen, and young son for four years. Home is Wigton in Cumbria, where Bragg grew up and which has become a haunting presence in his fiction. This is a return to the location of his debut novel, For Want of a Nail (1965), [...]

Can a master playwright and skilled columnist also produce a successful novel? Can the writer of the award-winning theatrical hits Noises Off and Copenhagen transfer his peculiar talents to another genre? Michael Frayn's first novel in seven years emphatically proves that he can.

Headlong is an intoxicating blend of farce and social comedy - a sustained history lesson on the Spanish conquest of the Netherlands and the 16th-century Dutch landscape [...]

The spell woven by Homer's account of the Trojan war has become part of our collective western mythology; its heroes are our heroes, its stories our stories. It was ever thus. Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar made pilgrimages to the site of ancient Troy; centuries later archaeologists argued about its very existence. Only visionaries and poets such as Byron believed in its reality, the ancient city brought magically to [...]