ONE hundred years ago, on July 20 1923, the president of the Irish Free State executive council, WT Cosgrave, announced in Dáil Éireann that he had appointed Eoin MacNeill as the "best person to represent the Saorstát [Free State] as our Nominee on the Boundary Commission".

"WE'VE had big names before, like Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Steve Cavanagh," says Armagh author Stuart Neville of the top-drawer writers who have previously appeared at his annual Crime Special event,"but Lee is almost his own genre all by himself.

:: KILLING FLOOR (Reacher #1, 1997) WHERE better to begin than at the beginning? Six months out of the army and eager to see the America he missed out on while growing up on military bases around the world, Jack Reacher is footloose and responsibility free – until the towering ex-Military Policeman is wrongly accused of murder while visiting the seemingly unassuming town of Margrave.

Jenny Lee puts performers and artists on the spot about what really matters to them. This week, Derry author Neil Hegarty

INSPIRED by his own childhood memories, David Walliams's hit children's novel Demon Dentist clearly struck a nerve with readers who made the book a best-seller in 2013.

THERE's nothing like a little bit of introspection to help make sense of life's great imponderables and probably no-one better placed than a poet to help the rest of us arrive at some conclusions.

FICTION The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue is published in hardback by Virago, priced £16.

MOST people would agree that there will be a border poll in the not-too-distant future.

Joseph Connelly, Lee Child, Frank McGuinness and Stuart Neville are among the guests announced for the John Hewitt International Summer School 2023.

Northern Ireland’s hugely successful solar system trail Our Place in Space will land in Hanoi, Vietnam later this autumn. 

PEOPLE living along the border are already exploring what a new Ireland may mean to them, a community project has found.

Jenny Lee puts performers and artists on the spot about what really matters to them. This week, Belfast-based author Wendy Erskine

Climate change, masculinity, class, menopause, motherhood and the power of translation are just some of the many topics under discussion at this month’s Belfast Book Festival.