Gabriel García Márquez, Maeve Brennan and Philip Pullman
Book Notes would like to publicly celebrate the penultimate series of promotional Harry Potter stories, leaked annually by JK Rowling's publishers to a press salivating for fresh HP news.
It has been a long Potter decade but we're nearly there with the imminent paperback publication of the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Rumours are again rife: Rowling is bombarded with paper after confessing she can no longer find the type she likes to use! Rowling hosts garden party with the Queen! Rowling has finished Harry Potter 7!
The latest revelation is that Harry Potter 7 will see the death of two major characters. Will it be Harry himself? We doubt it, but the smart money seems to be flowing towards Lord Voldemort, arch nemesis of our hero throughout the series. We feel avid fans may also be bidding farewell to Potter's ginger best mate Ron Weasley, but this is based on little more than fascination with the speculation. Although this is purported to be the last in the series, we would suggest that readers place their money on the return of Rowling to her beloved character once the literary dust has settled.
These are our lives
Book Notes lives on a Dublin cul de sac once home to celebrated New Yorker journalist Maeve Brennan. Inspiration has often been drawn from her spiritual proximity. A quote of hers – "These are our lives. I can't get over it" – provides the title for the Stinging Fly's new short-story collection; These are Our Lives, out now. The elegant, attractively packaged collection looks like an Irish Granta, but perhaps with less familiar contributors, the most famous being Toby Litt and Claire Keegan. Featuring 22 new short stories for €12, it offers superior value and grittier, more modern fare than Picador's recently published Shots collection.
A shining northern light
Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, the first book in his Dark Material series, has been cast as a film and is due to start filming this September. Certainly, it is more children's fantasy literature, but is nonetheless of a very high calibre. The third book in the series, The Amber Spyglass, won the overall Whitbread prize and the whole series came third in the BBC's poll of the best British books of all time. The usual cast of thousands assembled to vie for the part of heroine Lyra Belacque in the first of the proposed trilogy of movies. The role was given to the ridiculously named Dakota Blue Richards, who will no doubt be the basis of teenage fantasies for the rest of the decade. The film should be ready for Christmas 2007.
Marking marquez
Gabriel García Márquez's birthplace of Aracataca paid a double-edged compliment to its most famous son last week when over 90 per cent of voters were in favour of renaming the town "Macondo" in his honour. Macondo will be familiar to fans of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude as the name of the fictional town that was founded and populated by the Buendias. Sadly, the opportunity to create a hugely attractive tourist attraction on the Columbian coastline was missed when only half of the votes needed for the change were recorded. Although the author only lived there until the age of nine, he has credited the town as the inspiration for his book's setting. The Nobel Prize winner, now 79, has recently published his latest paperback Memories of my Melancholy Whores.