AS Byatt’s latest short story collection, the Little Black Book of Stories, has been getting good write-ups in the UK, after lukewarm reviews of her recent novels. But David Larsen is not wholly convinced: he reports in the Herald that:

Her last three novels were ho-hummed to death, both in New Zealand and internationally, though I would have been sorry to miss any of them. So it's annoying that I'm forced to add my own verse to the on-going hymn of mild critical disapproval, but there it is: this is not a completely successful collection. Still, it contains gems, and you should read it.

Peter Ackroyd’s London: Illustrated is a coffee-table follow-up to his best-selling London: the Biography of four years ago. Margie Thomson loves it:

With an immediacy that text can never match, it juxtaposes the riots, markets, theatres of drama and violence, generations of the poor, immigrants, and, ubiquitously, London's crowds … This is surely the coffee-table book of the year.