Salman Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is a highly imaginative, historical novel that spans Mughal India and Renaissance Florence. It's about the uses of power, both the wielding of banal political power and the seductive power of beauty and art. Rushdie is the author of nine other novels including the Man Booker winning Midnight's Children, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Satanic Verses. Stuart and Brendan Woods caught up with Rushdie this summer in Toronto.

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Stuart Woods is a journalist living in Toronto. Brendan Woods is a producer also living in Toronto. Yes, they are brothers, both in the biological and spiritual sense of the word.

It's really only in the last 20 years or so that China has opened its borders to Western tourists and even as thousands of people prepare to descend on Beijing this summer the fact is most of China is still untouched by mass tourism — that may be changing.

Stuart Woods gets the low down from Toronto food-writers and authors of Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, on culinary traditions beyond the urbanized eastern third of China.

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Stuart Woods is a journalist living in Toronto. Brendan Woods is a producer also living in Toronto. Yes, they are brothers, both in the biological and spiritual sense of the word.

Short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction, UK author, Sadie Jones' debut has been lauded for its "elegant and spare" prose and its "raw and explosive" plot. Set in 1950s London, The Outcast tells the story of ex-convict Lewis Aldridge on his way back from jail to face his family and middle-class community. What ensues is nothing less than dramatic!

Stuart Woods speaks with Jones in Toronto where she describes the inner workings of her first novel.

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Stuart Woods is a journalist living in Toronto. Brendan Woods is a producer also living in Toronto. Yes, they are brothers, both in the biological and spiritual sense of the word.