As his publishers, we wanted to use the opportunities for interaction and edutainment integral to Marcus’ writing and so, to celebrate Marcus du Sautoy’s book The Number Mysteries, we’re publishing an educational app, which includes extracts from the ‘game strategy’ chapter of the book,  fun videos and an interactive game, Moley.

Watch the video:

More about the app:

★ About Marcus du Sautoy’s Num8er My5teries ★

Want to know how to use math to ‘read your friends’ minds’? Or how math can help you always win at chocolate chilli roulette? Want to know who invented Sudoku or where is the best place to bet in a casino? Or just how to win at rock, paper, scissors?

Based on Marcus du Sautoy’s new book, The Num8er My5teries, this app focuses on the game strategy chapter, and how math can help you win. Jam-packed full of educational, entertaining information, the app contains three videos and four extracts of Marcus’ writing. It also includes a fun game, ‘Moley’, based on the famous ‘impossible’ math problem, ‘The Bridges of Königsberg.’

Race against the clock to help Marcus the Mole escape from his underground tunnels, using all the math, logic and strategy you have learnt from the rest of the app. You can even tweet your high score to friends from within the app.

More about Marcus:

• Rebooting Britain: Teach kids to see in four dimensions (Wired.co.uk)
• How will Marcus du Sautoy make maths fun? (The Independent)
• Without the big maths stories our numbers are plummeting (Guardian)
• How do you spark off an interest in maths when the curriculum seems dreary? (Guardian)
• Marcus du Sautoy to replace Richard Dawkins as chief evangelist for science (Guardian)

On Friday morning HarperCollins HQ was descended upon by a bunch of eager political bloggers who had been invited to a very special breakfast.

As well as getting to hear Lord Mandelson speak for near enough 90 minutes, the bloggers were also given copies of source material from 1987 – 1997 that was used in the process of writing the book.

The source material includes:

• A note from the General Secretary of the Labour Party to Mandelson regarding the 1987 election campaign
• A note to Blair following New Labour’s victory

(these uploads courtesy of Political Scrapbook.) Find links to the full set over at Political Scrapbook.

Anthony Painter provided a good overview of the discussion at his blog, and quotes Lord Mandelson as imploring people in Labour to ‘rock the f**king boat.’

Meanwhile, Brand Republic covered the event with the headline: Mandelson releases political papers to bloggers ahead of press . It went on to say:

The decision to release papers exclusively to bloggers is an emerging trend and a nod to the growing power of the world of blogs. The Times briefed bloggers ahead of press and before it launched its paywall last month.

Watch the T.V. advert for The Third Man:

Go to Amazon, to buy The Third Man, or buy the ebook from Apple’s iBooks.

Well, today is publication day for Marcus’ very exciting own enhanced book project The Number Mysteries.

‘Mind-bending, fascinating and useful too. Maths didn’t used to be this much fun.’
- Alan Davies

We are all taught how fundamental maths is to the world we live in. But did you know that Wayne Rooney solves a quadratic equation every time he connects with a cross to put the ball in the back of the net? That we use prime numbers when we shop on the Internet? Or that you can win $1 million just by solving one of the five puzzles in The Num8er My5teries?

As well as containing great writing from the holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, the book is sprinkled with QR codes that will send you to various online web pages chosen by the author, and references to downloadable additional material to further your understanding of the maths in the book.

Click here to continue reading about the book, as well as to learn more about the iPhone app especially created to accompany it, the QR codes contained within, and the maths puzzles you can download, print out and play with…

Anjali was recently chosen as one of the Telegraph’s Top 20 novelists under 40, a great accolade for a first time novelist.

The book takes place over the course of a year and tracks the city of Bombay through the changing seasons. In this podcast she is interviewed by Fourth Estate editor Mark Richards.

Click here to listen to Anjali Joseph.

Another Fourth Estate writer on the Telegraph list is Rana Dasgupta, author of Solo and Tokyo Cancelled.

Coming: October 2010

That is all.

The new book by Nicola Barker, author of the Booker short-listed Darkmans, was published last Thursday.  Burley Cross Postbox Theft, is brilliant, startlingly witty, and only occasionally disturbing:

Reading other people’s letters is always a guilty pleasure. But for two West Yorkshire policemen – contemplating a cache of 26 undelivered missives, retrieved from a back alley behind the hairdresser’s in Skipton – it’s also a job of work. The quaint moorside village of Burley Cross has been plunged into turmoil by the theft of the contents of its postbox, and when PC Roger Topping takes over the case, which his higher-ranking schoolmate Sergeant Laurence Everill has so far failed to crack, his expectations of success are not high.

We knew that this book was something very special, and so we wanted to do something special for it. Since the book is about a series of missing letters, we thought it’d be good if we could have fun with it, and serialise the letters in some way.

Launched today, the free sampler app is available on the iPhone App store.

Initially the app will contain only the first letter from the book, audio synced to the text.

However, as the week progresses, three new letters will be delivered to the in-app postbox, accessible from the table of contents. The user need only press the post-box button when a notification icon appears to read the new letter.

At the same time, we will also be putting the audio-book recordings of these letters up as a podcast, so if you’d prefer to listen to each as they arrive, you can do this instead. Links to these recordings will be provided within the letters themselves.

At the end of the serialisation, the user will be given links to where they can purchase the full app, containing all 26 missing letters and synchronised audio, or if they’d prefer, the hardback book.

Look out for it on the App store now!

This interview was conducted for the PS Section of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Everyone Getting Blindo
Travis Elborough talks to Alan Sillitoe

You’ve written that when you were in Majorca, reading the clear prose of De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium Eater aloud helped you to improve and refine your own style. What other works, do you feel, informed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning?
It was a clarity of English I was after. I read the Bible all the while I was writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but I was reading so much then. It’s very difficult to put your finger on it. Camus, Sartre, Salinger, of course, Mailer and all the great Americans, but one finally disregarded all that and found one’s own voice.

Sartre and Camus were the leading exponents of existentialism, which in turn was a great influence on American writers like Mailer and Salinger. Given your own reading at that time, I wonder, did you ever envisage Arthur Seaton as a kind of existential anti-hero?
No, I didn’t. The thing is I didn’t think of him in any terms at all. I just wrote the story. I don’t think I could retrospectively apply them to him, as it wouldn’t be valid. I was just interested in writing about characters that were independent-minded, people who aren’t that well known.

You’d written a few novels before Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Is it true that it was your friend Robert Graves who actually suggested you try writing a novel about Nottingham?

I think, in a way, it was. He said, ‘You know, why don’t you write something about where you come from, your past life,’ which is what most people do. In any case, I was already writing short stories which were set in that milieu with my own voice. It wasn’t a great leap forward, just a progression, which perhaps I should have taken sooner. But maybe it’s just as well I didn’t, because by the time I did I really knew what I wanted to do and how to do it.

Had you, do you think, consciously avoided it before then?
No, I don’t think I fought against it, as such. I think I just thought writing these dud novels was the way to do it. In any case what they did teach me was how to write. Not to indulge in purple passages and overwrite and use too many words meaning the same thing and all the rest of it. Not having had it all cleared from my head by university, I found my own way, which was probably just as well.

Did being in Spain make a difference? Could you have written the novel if you’d remained in England, for instance?
It gave me a greater sense of objectivity, so it really came out better. I think if I had written it while still in Nottingham, possibly while still working in a factory, it would have been three times as long and it wouldn’t have had that clarity and shape, if it had any shape at all.

I seem to recall that in your autobiography you mention trimming something like 50,000 words from the early draft of the novel. Was the original version radically different? Was revising it a painful process?
There were repetitions I cut. I didn’t leave anything vital out; by then I knew enough not to do so. It was another thing Graves used to say: ‘Always take out everything that’s unnecessary but be very careful not to take out what you want to say.’ Which I’d learnt, of course, by writing all these dud novels! The first chapter had been a short story, which I hadn’t been able to get published but it felt like a good thing to kick off with, and so it went from there. I don’t think I knew where I was going in the first draft, I just moved from chapter to chapter pulling things in – the odd story and a poem I’d written. Then after the first draft, when I’d typed it up, I began to chuck it around. Rather like carving a statue out of granite, you know, chipping away. As it went through draft after draft I added a little bit at the beginning, restructured it and so on, and then I was away.

Given the initial difficulty of getting it published, were you surprised by the reaction to the book when it appeared?
I am not sure ‘surprised’ is the word. It might be. I was pleased more than anything. And somehow I just took it as my due, as you do at that age.

How did you feel at the time about being bracketed with the Angry Young Men, people like John Wain and John Osborne? Did you feel any affinity with their work?
I’d seen Look Back in Anger, so there may have been a little influence of that, not too much. The kind of Jimmy Porter-ish stuff didn’t wash on me. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a great play, and I still do. But a lot of the supposedly more outré sayings in my novel were things I’d heard in the factory, and I just ploughed them in without any inhibitions.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was the first in a series of your novels about various members of the Seaton family, which you’ve described as a kind of Nottingham comédie humaine. But in 2001 you published Birthday, a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. What drew you back to Arthur? Had you always planned to write a sequel?
Yes, I had always wanted to do it. I’d even made an attempt only a few years after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. But at the time I didn’t really feel it was quite right. I started one and eventually it became The Death of William Posters, which was quite different. He was someone like Arthur, out of Nottingham, but I concocted this story and that then went into a trilogy. But the idea hung around. I really wanted to settle it once and for all, but of course decades go on and if you are a writer you just think you are going to live forever. And suddenly, after forty years, I had the idea to hang the story on, which was this woman’s birthday. So I started with that, and then it all fell into place. It was ready, and I never really do anything until it is ready.

Young people binge drinking at the weekend. For a book written nearly fifty years ago, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning feels remarkably contemporary in many ways, don’t you think?
I go back to Nottingham quite frequently to see my brothers, but I went back a few months ago and deliberately stayed in a hotel in the middle of town. It was a Friday night, and so I had a walk around after I’d had my dinner. It looked pretty much the same, everyone getting blindo, in quite a nice kind of way. It wasn’t dangerous, or perilous, in any way. I just walked around and watched people going from one pub to another, occasionally stopping off at the cash machine on the way. That’s the way it always has been. I remember, during the war and after war, when people got their wages they went and had a damned good time. The idiom too stays the same – despite everything else, the hip-hop language, in Nottingham a heavy strain of the old lingo goes on. That’s what I like, and I am glad it don’t change.

Incidentally, are there any contemporary writers whom you admire?
John King. His three or four football novels are wonderful. I think he does what people have said that I do, which is giving people a voice that don’t normally have one – which is wonderful. No doubt there are ‘better’ novelists out there, but no one is really doing that kind of thing.

How do you regard Saturday Night and Sunday Morning now?
I suppose if I had the opportunity I’d tighten it up a little, but … having said that, I don’t know if I would actually. I think it stands. I won’t comment on the quality of the writing, I think it just came out and it’s good enough to stand. I have re-read it since and I don’t think I would want to do anything basically with it at all. I don’t normally re-read my books, or else I’d start rewriting them. I do pick up a book now and again and read a page and think, Oh well, I could do better now … But Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was my bridgehead. It still keeps earning me a bit of money! Obviously I’ve advanced far beyond it but I still have a soft spot for it. It was my first published novel and, whether it had been successful or not, first novels are important because they are your launching pad.

On May 13th, Times+ and 5th Estate will join forces to present Matthew in conversation with Alyson Rudd, Times sportswriter and editor of The Times Book Club, at Waterstones Picadilly from 6.45-9pm. At the end of the evening, you will have the chance to buy the book and get it signed by Matthew.

Tickets for Times readers cost £7.50 and can be booked by calling 08444122953.

Tickets for Times+ members cost £5 and can be booked at http://www.mytimesplus.co.uk

Coming from a music industry background, Gary had some unusual, insightful views on digital content, and had much to say about the ritual, tactile nature of traditional content purchase.

Covering such topics as Stephen Fry’s forays into Twitter, whether writing pop songs are like writing books, and how his Kindle helped him as a judge of the Costa Prize earlier this year, this interview may reveal a side to Gary you haven’t seen before.

Among the questions, I asked him…

• How similar are writing books to writing songs?
• What is your favourite musical and what was your favourite chapter in the book?
• What is it like to judge the Costa Prize? And how do you find using an e-reader?
• What do you think the future of publishing looks like and how will it affect you as a writer?

Here are the results in handy podcast format:

[audio:http://fifthestate.co.uk/wp-content/garynew.mp3]

Gary’s autobiography I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau, is out in paperback next thursday. Pre-order your copy now from Amazon, for £6.29.

More about Gary Kemp:

• Watch Gary talking about writing the book
• Spandau’s arrival at Band Aid
• Gary Kemp launch party

This month is the paperback publication of Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World. In the following interview with Sarah O’ Reilly he talks about Malasia, mythology, and why he doesn’t consider himself an ‘historical’ novelist…

You were born in Malaysia, and now live in London. Where is home for you and why?

Malaysia is still my point of reference; I compare everything to it – ways of living, thinking, being. It’s where my family still live, and the emotional ties that this creates are impossible to escape. When anything happens there – a natural disaster, for example, or political turmoil, I feel it keenly. But the physical reality is that I am in London more than I am in any other place. I travel a lot, often spending long periods in other countries – France, for example, or China – but London is where I own a flat, and property ownership really ties you to a place. London is a place where I have my books, a few mugs, a table and a couple of pictures; it’s where I pay taxes and do my washing. The boring daily things create a sense of home, I guess. And above all, London is full of people like me, who have come here from other places, so it’s easy to blend in.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

A musician or a vet.

What, or who, made you a novelist?

It’s impossible for most novelists to say how they chose their profession – mostly because one just falls into it. There wasn’t a writerly figure in my family or education, no defined source of inspiration. But I grew up in an environment where books and stories were valued, and, because we moved around a lot in my early years, there was always a sense that novels were constant, whereas one’s habitat wasn’t. Being a novelist is such a tenuous thing – there isn’t a career path, no progression to follow. One can only keep writing and hope that it continues for as long as possible.

Map of the Invisible World is your second novel to be set in Southeast Asia. Does living in England enable, or inhibit, your ability to write about the area?

Without doubt, living in England enables me to write more clearly about Southeast Asia. Different writers work in different ways, but I need a certain amount of physical separation from my subject before I am able to render it with clarity and objectivity.

Both of your novels have been set in the recent past. Would you describe yourself as an historical novelist?

I’m definitely not an ‘historical’ novelist. Part of what I try to do is to update the notion of the Southeast Asian novel and ideas of history. I think it’s unhelpful to see novels in terms of ‘history’ or ‘contemporary’ – everything depends on the treatment of a novel.

In my case, I’ve been drawn to Southeast Asia in times of great change and upheaval – I’m interested in our recent past, how we have come to be what we are now, and what we might become. The 1940s and 1960s – which straddle the process of Independence – were extremely traumatic times which set the tone for today’s politics and society, so they have a direct bearing on the way we live now. We’re still trying to work out what happened. So my work doesn’t involve a dusty costume drama – it’s about looking at the way Southeast Asia has changed and is changing.

You’ve said that the character of Margaret is based upon Judith Sihombing. Can you tell me about her and how you came to know each other?  And is Margaret’s example typical of the way in which you find or create your characters?

Margaret isn’t based on Judith as such, though the stories that Judith told me about her life in Jakarta in the 60s helped form the idea of a character like Margaret. I’ve known Judith for years because she’s the mother of one of my best friends, but I hadn’t known about her times in Indonesia in the 60s until I came to write Map of the Invisible World.  This really isn’t typical of the way I write characters – I don’t like characters who are cardboard cutouts of real people, and the challenge for me was to use Judith’s inspirational stories to create a convincing character who wasn’t her.

Din wants to write a ‘secret history’ of the Indonesian islands east of Bali, a ‘lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners’.  What sort of a relationship do you feel you have with the country in which your narrative is set? Did you feel, at times, like a foreigner to it?

Yes, absolutely. But I often feel like a foreigner in virtually every country I’m in – even, at times, in England or Malaysia – so that’s not unusual!

Din’s project is a way of reclaiming his past. There’s a bit in the novel where he rails against the ignorance of young people who don’t know where they’ve come from, historically speaking – because in modern Southeast Asia, there’s often a blithe ignorance of modern history, which is often associated with hardship and humiliation. Colonial history isn’t ‘our’ history so it’s best not to celebrate it, so the thinking goes. Din wants to go beyond the formal recording of history by Westerners and look at folk history – he’s a dreamer, an idealist.

Margaret is an expert in non-verbal communication, claiming to understand the motives behind expression and gesture. As a novelist, are you in the same position? If so, how well do you understand your own characters and the actions they take?

I try to understand my characters as fully as possible – I’m in control, after all. But all good characters should surprise their creators; they have to take on a life of their own. There’s always a moment in the writing of a novel when it feels right to have your characters do things that you had not planned at the outset – and that’s when you know that you have a novel, not just a series of ideas.

Do you see yourself as a political writer?

No, I don’t, but it’s impossible to be a modern Southeast Asian writer without being aware of politics, and the way they impact on every aspect of society, so there’s always going to be a political element to my work.

Margaret thinks, about Indonesia, that ‘in this country you had to surrender to myths, to the uncertainty of stories, to the failure of logic’. How much of an inspiration are the places in which your stories are set?

A sense of place and the specifics of culture are hugely important to my novels. In Map of the Invisible World, for example, mythology and the appreciation of spirituality that exist in Java become key characters – the feeling that life is essentially uncontrollable (an anathema to a person like Margaret) becomes stronger as the novel goes on. People in Southeast Asia do attribute more importance to that which lies outside the empirical than people do in the West – but often, as is the case with Margaret – the ‘supernatural’ is merely a way to explain things that don’t work.

How did writing this book change you, if at all?

It changed me in too many ways to describe in the space of a short interview!

Why did you choose to end the novel with Johan setting off on a journey?

Because his life is a journey without end, a terrible circular thing without closure. Whereas Adam, Din, Margaret and Karl have all suffered in their own way, their lives have a path that will lead to some kind of conclusion, whether happy or sad. Johan is caught in an awful cycle of non-resolution, a life in which the only relief from pain comes from being in constant movement. So I wanted to end with him being in motion, wanting to seek an end but not certain that he will find it – and we are not sure where his journey will end, or how.

What are you working on at the moment?

A novel set in 2008. But I can’t really say more than that at the moment.