Hephzibah Anderson

Fixer-in-chief Thomas Cromwell is back with a new mission: to dispatch the queen he helped create.

John Lanchester’s banker father hated talking about money. His career advice? Do what you love while you’re young; worry about earning a living later. And so Lanchester junior became a writer -- a successful one.

Aifric Campbell is sipping coffee in a bar in London’s West End. Across the street are the former Morgan Stanley offices where she worked for 13 years, eventually running the international convertible-bond sales desk.

It’s shortly after 10 o’clock on a Monday morning, and banker-turned-novelist Alex Preston is sipping a latte in a London cafe, reflecting on how life has changed since he quit the City in May 2010.

Shortly after midnight on April 15, 1912, the owner of the RMS Titanic leaped into one of the last lifeboats to be launched from the ship’s flooded deck. In saving his skin while women and children drowned, he left his reputation to sink with the stricken liner.

Jane Austen famously refused to acknowledge the Napoleonic Wars in her books. The detective novelist P.D. James rectifies that in the first chapter of “Death Comes to Pemberley,” her follow-up to “Pride and Prejudice.” She even throws in a corpse.

Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s “Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty” won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Imagine the killing to be made right now if you could find a way to capitalize on fear. That’s precisely what Dr. Alexander Hoffman does in Robert Harris’s gothic new thriller, “The Fear Index.”

Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction last night for “The Sense of an Ending,” a slim novel whose narrator must grapple with the fallibility of his memory and sense of self when a friend’s long-ago suicide returns to haunt him.

Stella Rimington has stared down KGB operatives and outwitted IRA militants. As the former director general of MI5 -- where she was both the first female boss and the first to be publicly named -- she’s no stranger to media scrutiny, either. Yet as head judge of this year’s Man Booker Prize, she finds herself flummoxed by the vitriol of London’s literati.

Literature’s newest Nobel laureate is widely read, reviewed and respected. In Sweden, that is. Despite having been translated into more than 50 languages, poet Tomas Transtromer is best known internationally as one of those arcane names that draw perennial bets from Nobel-watchers fond of mocking the Swedish Academy.