Rwanda genocide book takes award
December 3: We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families was described by the judges as "more than just a great piece of journalism, but a monument to events which defy comprehension".
God no longer wants you
Philip Gourevitch, the Guardian First Book Award winner, talks to Giles Foden
'You can't shoot the dogs,' the English woman told the soldiers
The nights were eerily quiet in Rwanda. After the birds fell silent, there were hardly even any animal sounds. I couldn't understand it. Then I noticed the absence of dogs. What kind of country has no dogs? I started to keep watch in the markets, in the streets, in the countryside...
Claire Armitstead on the First Book Award
I think it was in my second week as literary editor that I was summoned to a meeting with the marketing department. "I suppose you know that we are changing the fiction award?" I was told. Oh! "I expect you have thought about what the new award should be?" Uh-oh!
A share in the genocide
The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 changed the course of African history. Philip Gourevitch, a writer on the New Yorker with no previous experience in Africa, has written the book which is the key to these dramatic and terrifying events still being played out.
Readers pick top Guardian books
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, the most talked about young author since Alex Garland, is the early favourite for the new Guardian First Book Award after topping the polls of all our reading groups.
Ordinary readers have their say
Readers, who'd have 'em? If the four groups that have been sprinting through the longlist for the Guardian first book award are any measure, they are far too shrewd, too unpretentious and, at times, too downright cocky for anything as respectable as a literary prize.
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David Mitchell's debut novel, Ghostwritten, is a series of loosely interwoven stories: a novel in nine parts, as the title page describes it. Each of the chapters are named after different places, beginning with "Okinawa" and travelling Westwards via Mongolia and Ireland to New York.
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Robert Louis Stevenson's family built lighthouses. So why did he end up a writer, asks Richard Cook
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It does your head in but does wonders for the language. Nicholas Blincoe shares a high with the pill poppers.
The Blue Bedspread
Jha interviewed
The ink is barely dry on Raj Kamal Jha's first novel, yet already he is being hailed as an outstanding writer. Baret Magarian meets the author
On the freedom road
As a teenager in an English new town, Gary Younge felt an affinity with the Deep South of America and a fascination for the civil rights pioneers of the 60s. As a grown-up, he set off on a journey, following the wheeltracks of the freedom riders through the Dixie states, to explore the myth that had helped form him
Are my roots showing?
Am I from Barbados? Or am I from Stevenage? For much of his youth, Gary Younge wasn't sure. Here he reflects on the the dilemma of his double identity.
Judges poised as first-time authors excel
When we thought of introducing a First Book Award we were not anticipating the huge range of books that would be sent in - 140 of them, ranging from self-published autobiographies to a guide to practical mask-making.
See below for the rest of the longlist.
By the Shore
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Alex Clark watches a family drift towards the rocks
Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
The Nudist Colony
