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Next week, one lucky author will get a cheque for £10 from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). Another, luckier, will get £36,000, out of more than £5 million distributed as fees for “secondary uses” of their work — photocopying, repeats of their screenplays on cable TV, and so on. The estates of Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton and Ian Fleming have done well, but there is no payment for those of non-UK authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose The Great Gatsby is, the ALCS says, Britain’s most photocopied novel.

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Irène Némirovsky’s rediscovered novel Suite Française, completed before she lost her life in Auschwitz, has been one of the successes of 2006. Now comes the backlash. A biography, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works by Jonathan Weiss (Stanford University Press), says that she contributed to an anti-Semitic newspaper and associated with Nazi sympathisers. Némirovsky felt a “discomfort with regard to her origins”, Weiss concludes.

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Joanne Harris is to bring back Vianne Rocher, the seductive chocolate-shop owner from her most famous novel, Chocolat. Rocher will reappear in The Lollipop Shoes, due next May.

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