If you find the contenders for the 2006 Man Booker Prize unfamiliar, you are not alone. When the shortlist was announced, even Book Notes was alarmed that so few established writers had failed to make it to the final round.

Ostensibly a commercial gallery, Mother's Tankstation reinvests all its profits into either the gallery itself or into the promotion of Irish art. This approach gives it the freedom to choose shows based solely on the quality of art, as with current exhibitor Ciaran Murphy.
By Billy Leahy

Memory serves as a weapon and a shield for General Michael Jackson, one of the commanders at the Bloody Sunday shootings, writes Eamon McCann

In the first of two articles, Gerry Adams recounts his visit to Israel and Palestine, where he met with senior Palestinian officials, Israeli NGOs and laid a wreath at the grave of Yasser Arafat

Some time ago, even before Ireland began to become what we call a "multicultural society", a reader wrote to me describing his experience of being assaulted by a female colleague at work. The woman was black, my correspondent white, adult and male. The attack was unprovoked. He believes he was attacked because of his sex and colour. He told his colleagues, who urged him to be more sympathetic to his attacker on account of her history as a black female.

More than a decade after his death, the work of Nobel laureate William Golding has become unlikely hot property in Hollywood. Book Notes rejoices at the news that The Spire, Golding's sublime allegorical novel about a demented dean and his obsessional quest to complete his church, is to be filmed later this year. Golding, best known for that favourite of schoolteachers the world over, The Lord of the Flies, was regarded by many as the foremost British novelist of the Twentieth Century.

Kilkenny's getting swankier, according to RTÉ's new fly-on-the-wall series 5 Star, which charts the difficult run-up to the opening of a new hotel. Legend gets off to an equally slow start, but could be one to watch

After the first week of Dublin's Fringe Festival Colin Murphy hungers for some good,
old-fashioned drama

In the Sunday Independent on 10 September, Brendan O'Connor bravely took on "the media, who love a consensus" in support of Michael McDowell. He informed us that despite the consensus that "Liz O'Donnell will be Taoiseach", McDowell was the only "serious contender". O'Connor saw this as a "stark example of the media choosing what it wanted to believe over reality".

The following is an extract from Colum McCann's latest novel, Zoli. A story of betrayal and redemption, it begins in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s and traces the life of Zoli, a young Roma girl