This fast-paced world continually throws up new dangers. However, very often we are confronted with the same old problems constructed in a different way. The latest technologies, in particular, have re-shaped the old debate between art and money.

“Don’t we breathe through what we speak? Don’t story-telling and singing blot out our pain?”

The Amazon River and rainforest have captivated, provoked, even frightened, since the earliest times of human habitation. In Orphans of Eldorado, Milton Hatoum evokes the legend of The Enchanted City - a shining city of gold at the bottom of the Amazon River where people live as enchanted beings.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and moved to Britain in 1968. He is a Professor of English at the University of Kent in Canterbury and is best known as a novelist. He won the Radio France International “Temoin du Monde” Prize (By The Sea) and has been short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction (Paradise), long-listed for the Booker Prize (By The Sea), the Whitbread Prize (Paradise), and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award (By The Sea).

Our world is becoming increasingly uncertain. There are transnational dangers. But Securing Africa asks its readers to rigorously question dominant discourses about terrorism since 9/11. The aim of the book is to do this with Africa as a case study.

Critical thinking after 9/11, the editor contends, was silenced or slandered as traitorous. Even the Dixie Chicks bore massive criticism for their anti-war comments in 2003.

The central figure, and narrator, of A Kind Of Intimacy is Annie Fairhurst. She has recently moved to a new estate but a mysterious past gradually unfolds. Her erratic behaviour is conveyed through a narrative style that often seems balanced and measured. She is the ultimate neighbour from hell. God help you if you live in the suburbs and she moves in next door. She roots through your trash, steals from your clothesline, accuses you of killing her cat, and much more.

Jenn Ashworth is a full-time writer and freelance literature development worker. She is currently working on her second novel and her first, A Kind of Intimacy, has just become available as a paperback. She also teaches creative writing and blogging workshops, organises literature events and projects and edits manuscripts. Her blog can be read at http://jennashworth.blogspot.com/

(Jenn Ashworth, photographed by Martin Figura)

Tom Hubbard’s first novel Marie B. is a meditation on art, life, death and the intersection of all three. It tells the true story of Mariya Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva, although truth as an objective reality becomes an unstable artefact in this moving work of fiction. By Shane Creevy.

Tom Hubbard was the first librarian for the Scottish Poetry Library (which marked its 25th anniversary in 2009) and has also worked on the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation. His foremost literary activity has been poetry, though he has taught literature throughout Europe for a quarter of a century. Marie B., his first novel, is available through www.midoil.co.uk