Cover stories: Virginia Woolf; Anna Stothard

*Interest in Virginia Woolf is now at a peak, thanks largely to The Hours. For aficionados, July promises a real treat: the release of a previously unpublished work by her. Carlyle's House and Other Sketches was written in 1909. The notebook containing it was given by her husband, Leonard Woolf, publisher of the Hogarth Press, to a typist. But Leonard died and the notebook was left in a drawer. Rediscovered, it will now be issued by Hesperus Press, the new publisher of forgotten classics. The Woolf project came to them via the Society of Authors, which handles her estate, because it likes Hesperus's style. Three cheers for independence and quality.

* The press release about a debut novel by 19-year-old Anna Stothard is remarkable for the names it drops: quotes from Helen Dunmore and Fay Weldon, comparisons with Ian McEwan. Finally come the names of her parents: Sir Peter, former-editor of The Times, and novelist mother Sally Emerson. However good Isabel and Rocco may be, its path was less rubble-strewn than most. Let's see how the TLS reviews it: Stothard is now its editor. Still, ordinary folks without connections can sometimes succeed. North London schoolteacher Sabrina Broadbent, who won the first W H Smith Raw Talent contest, has just sold her novel to Chatto. Descent is described by publisher Alison Samuel as the work of "an uncommonly talented and intelligent writer".