Julian Assange memoir

It currently sits in 766th place overall on Amazon's bestseller charts, and in 70th position on the internet bookseller's biography list.Whether Assange will be pleased or disappointed by the numbers remains to be seen: although the Wikileaks founder said that Canongate's publication was "about old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity — screwing people over to make a buck", the publisher has promised to pay him royalties once it earns back its advance.Created with Assange's cooperation (according to its publisher Canongate the Wikileaks founder spent more than 50 hours being interviewed for it) but published against his wishes, the book went on sale last Thursday amid widespread coverage and serialisation in the Independent."There was no build-up for the trade, the media or with the reading public.

But we're proud of the way we handled what has been a difficult and unusual launch, and we are extremely proud of the book," he said. "Fortunately, the conversation now seems to be moving away from the 'publishing story' and focusing on the quality of the book itself. The early reviews – with the exception of a predictable whitewash in the Guardian – have been very positive, particularly in the Times and Independent with many more lead reviews lined up for this weekend. And the early customer reviews on Amazon are extremely positive too."

And in spite of the controversy surrounding the claims and counterclaims flung by Assange and his publisher, figures from book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan reveal that Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography sold just 644 copies in its first three days in shops."It was only the 50th bestselling hardback non-fiction book of the week, and only the 537th bestselling book overall, sitting directly behind Julia Donaldson's Freddie and the Fairy (Macmillan) and Sharon Kendrick's Satisfaction (Mills & Boon), a £6.99 collection of three short stories featuring 'three of her sexiest, most intense Greek heroes and glamorous heroines'," said Philip Stone, Charts editor at the Bookseller.

Canongate publishing director Nick Davies told the book trade magazine that the autobiography's performance was "a marathon and not a sprint", and that the publisher had "never made any big predictions about the sales of the Assange book – particularly on the first three days of sale"."So far the Assange autobiography has attracted two five-star reviews on Amazon, one saying that the book "was a long long way from the negative view of him presented by a media I now see have an agenda", the other that it painted "a vivid picture of a man on a mission to make the world a better – a more just – place".

Exciting events without the expanding newspaper industry

It was bad for those who joined the very long queues, especially in former mining villages or steel towns, but the majority went about their daily routines, finding themselves better off as the years went by, and would not have known they were living through exciting events without the expanding newspaper industry and increasing number of television channels.

"In the bookshops, you could find some very good books firmly located in the 1980s which dealt with topics like the rise of Thatcher or the causes of the Brixton riots, but equally there was escapist fiction or interesting non-fiction that took out of everyday life. Not a year passed without something new and memorable landing on the shelves."As well as journalistic career that has included spells as chief political correspondent for the Observer and Daily Telegraph and his current role as senior writer for the Independent.

Andy McSmith is the author of five books: biographies of John Smith and Kenneth Clarke, a collection of short biographies called Faces of Labour, and a novel, Innocent in the House. His latest book, just out in paperback from Constable, is No Such Thing as Society – a history of Britain in the 1980s.

"Each decade leaves its imprint on the memory. Images from the 1980s suggest a time of excitement and bustle – Live Aid, Princess Diana, the Falklands War, mass pickets outside Rupert Murdoch's new Wapping plant, testosterone-driven yuppies doing frenetic trade on the floor of a deregulated stock market, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall coming tumbling down, apartheid in its final throes. The western world saw more social change in those 10 years than in any other decade since the war. "But the much used cliché about the curse of interesting times did not apply to the average person.

Robert Harris

Harris was born in 1957 in Nottingham. His father was a printer and while he says "we had very little money, but I had no sense whatsoever of being poor and had an extremely happy and culturally rich childhood. My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter. The classic family story is us going to a school event when I was about six and all the other children reading out stories about what they did on their holidays, but mine was called 'Why me and my dad don't like Sir Alec Douglas-Home'.

There's a lot of moaning today about too many kids going to university, but my parents were bright people and I wish they had had that opportunity." Harris made his name as a novelist with Fatherland, his vaguely Orwellian, 1992 debut that posited a counter-factual history of Europe after Hitler had won the war. He followed it with bestsellers set among the second world war code-breakers of Bletchley Park (Enigma) and in the aftermath of Stalin's Russia (Archangel). He has transported contemporary political issues back to ancient Rome and, drawing on his close association with New Labour when a political journalist on the Observer and the Sunday Times, conjured a character very like the post-Iraq Tony Blair in The Ghost (2007).

The books have received warm reviews with a quote from Martha Gellhorn adorning the Fatherland jacket:"Powerful and chilling ... convincing in every detail". They have notched up even more impressive sales. Harris and his wife Gill, sister of Nick Hornby, and their four children live in a large old vicarage in Berkshire that was once visited by Jane Austen. It is usually described as "the house that Hitler built".
　　
In thinking about his latest book Harris's new wealth and his old politics came together. "When Lehman Bros went down people were saying AIG was going to be next. That rang a bell because almost all of my money was in some sort of AIG bond, but like most people I didn't understand the first thing about this world. When I looked into it a bit more it was terrifying and shocking. We're all like mountaineers on some rock face lashed together. We're clinging on for dear life. And at the same time there has been this alarming rise in the super-rich class, which has been somehow facilitated by new technology."
　　
Harris says he had little interest in writing about the new rich. "I have met some of them and they seem to me to be both boring and often themselves bored. But I was intrigued by these enormous amounts of money, all floating free of tax, which is profoundly undemocratic. We've all been like saps buying our pension funds and tracker whatevers, and while we've been left for dead, these people have cleaned up. Anger was not the least of my emotions in writing this book."
　　　　
Harris read English at Cambridge but spent most of his time editing the university newspaper. In 1978 he joined the BBC trainee programme "largely because at that time NUJ rules meant if you went into print journalism you had to start work in the provinces. I'd just come from the provinces and didn't particularly want to go back." While working on Newsnight and Panorama he co-authored a book with his friend Jeremy Paxman about the history of germ and gas warfare; he then wrote books about the media's handling of the Falklands war and an account of the forged Hitler diaries fiasco. By 1987 he was political editor of the Observer.

That you think of setting a book

A quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, itself written near Geneva, opens the book. While Harris points out that many hedge funds have relocated there for both tax reasons and to be near the large hadron collider at Cern, from where they might recruit the mathematicians and physicists needed to develop increasingly sophisticated computer models, "as soon as you think of setting a book in Geneva, then Frankenstein does loom large". It is not only a man-made monster running out of control that provides the literary and scientific underpinning to the novel: Darwin features prominently and the shade of Orwell hangs over the book, with its emphasis on surveillance, sinister corporations and an anti-democratic dystopia.

Set on British general election day 2010, Robert Harris's latest novel is a characteristic combination of ripping yarn, political and historical verisimilitude and diligent research into a hither-to closed world. The Fear Index is set within the mysterious opulence of a Geneva based algorithmic hedge fund. The company at the heart of his story has developed an artificially intelligent, "self-learning" computer model that trawls the world for information and allows its traders to anticipate market movements prompted, usually, by some disaster or failure. But having delivered this novel about predicting the future – it could be claimed as easily by the science fiction community as the thriller world – Harris was surprised to see on the BBC website a few weeks ago the headline "Supercomputer predicts revolution" and a story about how the Arab spring was foreshadowed via "automated sentiment mining" in which websites were searched for increased preponderance of words such as "terrible" and "horrific".It is a peculiarly apt concern.

"Orwell has always been a huge influence on me," he says. "He first came to mind regarding this project about 12 years ago when I read a book by Bill Gates in which he said one day the McDonald's headquarters in America would know when a Big Mac was sold in Newbury and then a computer algorithm would work out when the cattle had to be slaughtered in Chicago. I got very interested in these ideas but couldn't find a way to make them work in fiction. Then came the financial crash and I realised I could marry the two things. These algorithms that were driving companies were nowhere more dominant than in the City.

King Crow by Michael Stewart

There's a lot going on in Paul's world, and there's even more going on in his head. Paul's home life is distinctly suboptimal: he's bullied, his mother neglects him and her unsettled lifestyle sees him continually moving from house to house and school to school on the manky fringes of Manchester. As a result, he's retreated into ornithology and fantasy and we're treated to some fine nature writing and some fantastic riffs about the inherent stupidity of penguins, why giant pandas really don't deserve to be saved and the contribution vultures make to their eco-system. The direct staccato voice and no-nonsense language visible in that plot summary remain throughout.

Combined with Paul's frequently nonsensical world view they provide continual amusement and just the right level of bemusment. Paul may be troubled, and he may take us to some dark places, but King Crow remains a light, beguiling read."That doesn't really matter. Then we ran away, then we stole a car and knocked Andy down.

All I need to add for myself is that the narrator is called Paul Cooper and he's quite strange – but then you've probably guessed that.  Or at least it does for that first two-thirds of the book, until Paul offloads a very big surprise. I'm wary of saying more about this revelation, because to do so would be to spoil it. Suffice to say, it is a big one. It completely wrong-footed me. It made me go back to the beginning and entirely changed my view of what had been happening. Perhaps I'd been reading naively, but that shouldn't draw away any praise of Michael Stewart's skill. It was an unsettling and impressive moment.

The car really smashed into him and there was blood everywhere. I wouldn't say he was alright. I'd say he was dead. That would explain Dave's look. Then we had a car chase. I tried to shoot Dave. Then we walked into Kendal. Then we nicked a clown, went to a squat party, took lots of drugs and I ended up here and had sex for the first time ever with Becky, who is lovely."Later on, he gives an even more succinct version: "Apart from killing a man and one or two little hiccups, this has been a really successful trip."
The trouble is that, after dropping us over this steep edge, Stewart never quite manages to get back to the same heights. I still enjoyed the final third of the book. Paul remains amiable and intriguing and there's still plenty of the madcap action that makes the early pages so enjoyable. But the narrative disintegrates along with Paul's increasingly damaged psyche. It's looser and flatter and never quite as compelling. To go back to that original metaphor, it becomes Open Season rather than The Decline Of British Sea Power. Still good. Still wonderfully strange. But not a masterpiece.