Shelf life

• Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, has become Penguin's fastest selling hardback fiction title ever with 44,093 copies sold in just four days. The £100 special souvenir edition sold out in one morning while a £750 luxury edition designed by Bentley sold out in two hours. Talk of an author with gold fingers.

• John le Carré's 1974 thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is being adapted for the big screen. Another film adaptation is Martin Amis's 1989 novel London Fields. Amis himself is collaborating on the script, and may even take a small part in the film.

• A lock of light-brown hair believed to be Jane Austen's is expected to fetch more than £5,000 at auction. Comparison with the only other known lock of Austen's hair did not produce conclusive results, yet it is well documented that Jane Austen's sister Cassandra cut off several locks of hair before the burial. At another auction, an 800-word prequel to the Harry Potter series is expected to raise thousands for charity. Handwritten by JK Rowling, the prequel is also signed by the author. Still, Rowling is determined that this prequel will not be developed further.

• One of the pleasures of being invited to someone else's house - that of browsing through their bookshelves - is now online. www.bookrabbit.com is a new social network site that lets members look at other people's bookshelves. Of course, trashy thrillers can still be relegated to the back of the shelves.

• 34-year-old Joanna Kavenna has won the 2008 Orange award for new writers with Inglorious, the tale of a journalist's descent into nervous breakdown. Before Inglorious, Kavenna had written 13 novels, all of which were rejected by publishers.