Cover Stories: Quercus; Alice Sebold; Lord Snowdon

Quercus, the new house founded by Anthony Cheetham powers on. Last year it took on Sue Freestone and Christopher MacLehose, two equally distinguished editors. Last week, it collected its first accolade, when Stef Penney's debut The Tenderness of Wolves took the Costa Book of the Year Award. And this week came news that it is to launch a children's list. The company's has lured Suzy Jenvey from Faber, where she has added such names as Paul McCartney and Ricky Gervais (above) to its list. Cheetham believes she is "a genuine entrepreneur who relishes the idea of starting with a blank sheet of paper". It takes one to know one.

* Picador has announced that the new book by Alice Sebold is to be published in October. The Almost Moon, her second novel, again "tackles challenging subjects with both daring and humanity", but there are no clues as to its story. Sebold's debut, The Lovely Bones, which won the Richard & Judy Book Club's first award for Best Read of the Year, has sold close to two million in the UK and Commonwealth alone.

* Antony Armstrong-Jones, better known as Lord Snowdon, has maintained a discreet silence about life with and without the late Princess Margaret. However, he has been spending hours each week chatting with the biographer Anne de Courcy. In 2008 Weidenfeld will publish the results in a study editor Ben Buchan promises will be "a proper biography". De Courcy has access to private papers, and to "friends, courtiers, servants, girlfriends and ex-mistresses". Her book promises new light on his childhood and marriage, and on a professional life at "the heart of glamour, royalty and fashion".