What is a Christian to make of Paulo Coelho? He is a former dark magician, now a practising Catholic, who writes books combining a veneer of Christianity with new age mysticism and occult practices.

There is a word for the philosophy that Philip Pullman is pushing in the second installment of the His Dark Materials series, and it’s not a pretty one…

Philip Pullman, the author of Northern Lights, may prove to be to children’s literature what Richard Dawkins is to science.

Sydney author Jo-Anne Berthelsen’s first novel takes us into the life of a young Czechoslovakian pianist just before the beginning of the Second World War and follows her for ten years.

Leela is a mathematical genius. She escaped a fundamentalist upbringing in South Carolina, and is now studying acoustics at MIT in Boston. The city is gripped by fear, with suicide bomb attacks a regular occurrence all across the US.

This beautifully presented book purports to be a ‘gospel’ written by Benjamin Iscariot, the son of Judas Iscariot, and seeks to set the record straight about Judas’ involvement with Jesus Christ.

One look at The Unhappy Goldfish told me that I had a winner on my hands when it came to my two young boys.

In Magic for Beginners Link writes ‘urban fantasy’, a genre which supposes that there is magic in the shadows and crevices of the everyday world.

What happens when an individual’s conscience clashes with loyalty to one’s country and its government’s policies? This is the ethical dilemma posed in The Song Before it is Sung.

The cover gushes that “Being inside Gideon’s mind is like reading the diary of a guy you have a huge crush on”. Seeking to explain how guys think is a bold task.

A serial killer is haunting the streets of Philadelphia. He is brutally creative, modelling his crimes after famous movie murder scenes. What is a Christian to make of novels such as this?

Michael Crichton achieved world-wide fame in 1990 with Jurassic Park. Crichton returns to the biological sciences with his latest book, Next, which explores the legal and moral issues encountered in the world of genetic research.

High profile Catholic nun Sister Wendy Beckett has published an anthology of classic poems which she claims as sources of inspiration and comfort.

Kiran Desai successfully weaves together the microcosm with the macrocosm in the 2006 Booker Prize-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss.