It’s the weekend and spring is in the air, so here’s our selection of bookish and not-so-bookish marvels from our ranges across the internets this week.

The people at Ikea have made the world’s longest outdoor bookcase on Bondi Beach, Sydney. If you can bring yourself to see how tanned everyone is, check it out.

In this fascinating article, an archeological dig in Turkey is turning upside-down our ideas of how civilisation first came into being.

OK Go are making a habit out of having very cool music videos: their treadmill one a while back was the first. This one however, with a Rube Goldberg machine falling apart beautifully around them, is even better.

And if you haven’t listened already, our very own Kevin Dutton reveals the art of extreme persuasion through undercover SAS operatives, Monty Python, and Howard Marks. His very persuasive book Flipnosis is out in May.

Tim Pears’ new novel Landed is out now, and to mark the release we’re offering you the chance to win one of three copies of this already critically acclaimed book. We’ll even chuck in one of our lovely Windmill Books notepads and a set of bookish postcards. All you have to do is read the extract and answer the question below.

Q: What animal does Owen’s grandfather use the Tia Maria on?

a) Sheep

b) Pheasant

c) Fox

Send your answers by email to windmill@randomhouse.co.uk. Winners will be picked on Friday 5th March - good luck!

‘Reading Landed was a huge pleasure, since this novel really sang to me. I can think of nobody who writes with quite such searing beauty, honesty, authenticity and commitment about the British countryside and its small farmers. We are back to the Tim Pears who gave us the memorable In a Time of Fallen Leaves, only this time round we have a book more artfully sculpted, more layered, more powerfully elegiac. This is a really beautiful novel’ - Barbara Trapido

‘Landed is a bleak and brave novel … Like moments of sunshine on a Welsh hillside, shafts of brightness irradiate the gloom, passages of descriptive writing of such clarity that the scents and sounds of lost childhood assail the reader with deep, moving pungency. Pears is a remarkable prose stylist … Landed offers rich pickings’ - The Times

‘The story is powerful: it shows the grief that overwhelms a parent at the death of a child and … the darkness that lies beneath the surface of a superficially happy family; it is also a rhapsodic account of the pull of the land … There is no denying Pears’ achievement in the character of Owen, a raw, desperate man even before he is filled with grief, and his deeply poetic descriptions of an old-fashioned life on the land‘ - Daily Telegraph

‘Beautifully and evocatively written … the utterly different passages fit together … because the author has from the start a unity of vision, which he successfully conveys to the reader … Emotionally, the book rings true. Owen’s deepening isolation, and inability to understand why this should have happened to him, why a wretched accident (though it may have been his fault) should lead to the disintegration of what had been a happy marriage, and the loss of his children - these states of mind are rendered sympathetically and cogently … There is - can be - no happy ending to his story; yet Pears’s skill is to make us wish that there might be’ - Scotsman

Ever wondered how to make your friends fail at simple arithmetic? Or how to passify a violent criminal in a high security prison? Kevin Dutton, author of Flipnosis, shows you this and much more in his radio show ‘Extreme Persuasion’. Listen to it on the BBC iplayer here

Flipnosis is published in May.

Mike Thomas, author of Pocket Notebook, talks about the experience of doing a Masters in Creative Writing in the University of Glamorgan’s magazine Glamlife.

Mike is the latest success in a course that has taught writers as diverse as Dan Rhodes and Maria McCann, and is headed up by Philip Gross, this year’s winner of the T S Elliot prize for poetry.

Read the full article here

Author and historian Helen Rappaport will be touring around the country talking about her writing through 2010. For full details please visit Helen’s official site.