US National Book Awards

With 40 years of novels, essays and journalism to her name, most of the critical reaction to Joan Didion's receipt of the National Book Award could have been summed up in four words: What took so long? The Year of Magical Thinking tells of the worst year in her life, which kicked off with the death of husband John Gregory Dunne from a heart attack while their daughter was dying in hospital with septic shock.

Didion and Dunne had collaborated on screenplays (A Star is Born, Up Close and Personal) and had been together for four decades. The book follows their relationship and details the agony and grief of its abrupt ending. This weekend's papers (3-4 December) ran their usual lists of "Books famous people read" and The Year of Magical Thinking cropped up repeatedly despite its downbeat themes. Also honoured at the US National Book Awards was Norman Mailer, who was awarded the distinguished contribution medal in recognition of his lifetime achievements, while the fiction prize was awarded to Europe Central by William T Vollman. Vollman's book is an ambitious series of intertwined, paired stories offering conflicting views of events that allegedly make the reader question his or her knowledge and interpretation of history.

A chronicle foretold

The "long awaited" (read: heavily hyped) film of CS Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe has just opened worldwide. Reviews will be irrelevant as holidaying children bay for their seasonal fix of Disney product. Our doubts about the filming of the greatest series of our childhood may shortly be justified – just how can a huge cast of anthropomorphic animals and mythical creatures be satisfyingly rendered? A similar worry affected the author himself almost 50 years ago, detailed in a letter from Lewis to the BBC. Published on website Nthpower, Lewis says he was "absolutely opposed" to the BBC's proposed live filming of the second book in the Narnia series. An almost psychic Lewis accused Disney of vulgarity. Make up your own minds.

Let's get Lost again

Watchers of ABC's Lost are on hiatus, just like their show, as they wait for the solution to what is happening on the most bizarre of mystery islands. Watched by 20 million weekly in the States and on a perpetual loop here on E4, it has caught the nation and Book Notes in its thrall. We told you how featuring Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman sent the book into the charts. Now the show is set to go one better with a book that technically doesn't even exist. The series has been stretched by showing the back stories of the passengers of the ill-fated flight before it crashed, marooning the survivors on a deserted island. One of the passengers was an aspirant author who had just sold his first murder mystery before boarding the flight. The manuscript is found in the wreckage where the stranded dispense with more pressing issues like unexplained weight gain and immaculate hair to wonder what bearing the plot of the book has on the crash. Back in the real world, publishers Hyperion have hired a writer (they say well-known, we say hard-up) to actually write the fictional book, named Bad Twin. Is this the most fantastic publicity wheeze ever? If they can keep flagging interest in the series raised, it might just work. The book is due for imminent publication.

Plowing his own Turow

Scott Turow has never followed the well-worn path of Grisham or Cornwell: find a template and then churn out a book once a year, hopefully close to the Christmas sales bonanza. Turow claims Dickens and Bellow as his influences and his high standards in character and plotting shine through initially familiar scenarios. He has plowed a more individual furrow, turning out quality thrillers at a less frenetic pace than his contemporaries. From his 1987 breakthrough Presumed Innocent to his most recent work Reversible Errors he has added depth to the thriller genre. In between, he has tested readers with large involved sprawling works like The Laws of Our Fathers. He refuses to use stock characters, letting both his themes and protagonists develop at a more convincing and natural pace. Three years on from his last work, he has again taken a side step with his new novel, Ordinary Heroes. Set in WWII, it was born of Turow's days listening to his father's stories of being a medic in Europe in the 1940s. The story is set around a man reading about his father's work as a military lawyer, defending a wrongly accused soldier. The father's and son's tales are told in parallel, allowing Turow another examination of familial relationships and the nature of history, truth and the narrator.