The Winds of March: the Anna Nicholson blog

March is a mean month: it's often windy, but with a really sneaky wind that persuades you to go out in a thin jacket and then freshens up as the morning progresses. The only good thing about it is that the clocks go forward at the end of the month.

Nothing mean about the March selection though...

World Book Day takes place every year on the first day of March. As well as a heap of events and happenings all over the place, all primary school children in the UK receive a £1 book token and they can either use it against a purchase of a normal price book or buy one of the specially-priced titles, published to promote the day.

I confess to being sceptical as to the effect World Book Day has: the book token idea is at least a practical one but I've a feeling that for the general public, the day doesn't generate much awareness except in a vague 'books-are-a-good-thing' way, too understated to be of much impact.

John Burnside's memoir, A Lie About My Father, was the winner of last year's Saltire Society Book of the Year. It was, in my humble opinion, one of the best books to come out of Scotland in recent years. Now, Burnside has a new novel out, The Devil's Footprints, set in a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. The man is amazingly prolific: ten books of poetry, and a new collection, Gift Songs, published on the same day as the novel; four previous novels and a book of short stories, as well as the memoir. Hilary Mantel calls him 'a master of language' and you can't say better than that.

Giraffe, a novel by J M Ledgard looks intriguing. The blurb runs: 'in 1975, on the eve of May Day, secret police sealed off a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town and ordered the destruction of the largest captive herd of giraffes in the world. Ledgard tells the story of the giraffes from the moment of their capture in Africa to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain. Giraffe is a story about strangeness, about creatures that are alien. It is also a story about captivity, about Czechoslovakia, a middling totalitarian state in the middle of Europe that is itself asleep, under a spell, a nation of sleepwalkers.'

One book I'm really looking forward to is Iain Banks' new novel, The Steep Approach to Garbadale. It sounds like he's back in Crow Road territory with dark family secrets and a long-lost love affair. Banks is one of those writers who manages to appeal to a wider range of readers than most writers of literary fiction. Not exactly sure why that is, but he conveys his intelligence through some very pacey writing.

For children, the engaging Katie Morag appears in a new adventure, Katie Morag and the Dancing Class. As usual, there is a clash between Grannie Island and Grannie Mainland and the big boy cousins make another appearance. One Grannie wants to see KM in a pretty dress and ballet pumps and the other is quite happy with her granddaughter in wellies: Go, the wellies, we say! (Too much pink around these days.)

Julia Donaldson, the Gruffalo author, has a new special hardback edition of Follow the Swallow. Apollo the Swallow and Chack the Blackbird meet in the garden as fledglings when they are both learning to fly. Apollo explains that he is practising flying to Africa - but Chack doesn't believe him. The indefatigable Ms Donaldson never stops, from writing to performing to touring to whatever: a national treasure indeed.