As revolution sweeps through Tunisia and Egypt, bringing conflict and confusion to Libya, the novelist Hisham Matar has been following events more closely than most. Matar, whose father was abducted by the Gaddafi regime in 1990, has found himself acting as a conduit for news from the troubled region, setting up an ad hoc newsroom in his London flat to bypass the wall of silence erected by the dictatorship.
But in a week when the Libyan uprising moved ever closer to civil war, Matar has also published a novel, whose narrator finds his father kidnapped by government agents. He came to the Guardian to talk about the risks and rewards for a novelist in such parallels between fact and fable, as well as how it feels for a writer when the world is transformed underneath his fiction.
Back in the UK, this week has seen a celebration of reading, with millions of books distributed to children on World Book Day. We caught up with Frank Cottrell Boyce, who took his latest novel, The Unforgotten Coat, on to the rails, with a reading to 25 children on the very train route where he started writing it.
World Book Day also saw the launch of our new Children's books site, designed and curated by children, for children. We'll be publishing reviews, features, discussions, videos and, yes, audio covering children's books from toddlers to teens.
The festivities of World Book Day tip over into the first World Book Night on Saturday, when over a million books – from Rachel's Holiday to The World's Wife – will be given away by enthusiastic readers. We asked our listeners which books they would choose to give away, and which books they've most enjoyed receiving themselves.
Reading List
Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar (Viking)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Penguin Modern Classics)
The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador)
New Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney (Faber)
Holes by Louis Sacher (Bloomsbury)
"Our Read: The Unforgotten Coat" is coordinated by The Reader Organisation: www.thereader.org.uk
