The new novel by literary superstar Haruki Murakami was Japan's biggest-selling book of 2013, the nation's largest distributor said.

The novel, about a man struggling to come to terms with events in his past, beat off competition from the flood of self-help books and how-to manuals published in Japan every year to come top of the list released Monday by Nippon Shuppan Hanbai.

French artist Laure Prouvost on Monday won Britain's Turner prize for contemporary art for her video installation set among a mock-tea party setting, it was announced at a ceremony in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

"The jury thought her work was outstanding for its complex and courageous combination of images and objects in a deeply atmospheric environment," said an official press release from Tate, the award's partners.

When Sian Davies died after mysteriously falling out of a window in a south London house 16 years ago, her family was stunned — they had not seen her for two decades.

Davies had moved to London as a young woman pursuing a master's degree, but soon she cut off virtually all contact with her family and disappeared from sight. Her relatives gathered that she had gotten tangled up with a cult — a secretive, closely-knit Maoist group whose members lived together in a communist collective. The family knew little else, and was none the wiser even after her death.

At this sprawling desert camp in Jordan, home to thousands of children who fled Syria's civil war, a few found a moment to smile Sunday watching a troop of clowns.

Five European comedians working for Mabsutins, a private circus and clown group in Spain affiliated with the U.S.-based group Clowns Without Borders, performed for some 60 children. More than 100,000 people live at the wind-swept camp, only 16 kilometers (10 miles) from the Syrian border, and for the children lucky enough to see the performance, it helped them forget about the challenges they face.

Dozens of couples were expected to tie the knot early Monday, moments after midnight, when a new law allowing same couples to marry takes effect in Hawaii.

A Waikiki resort was hosting mass ceremonies for anyone wanting to sign up, while a group of clergy who pushed for the new law planned to host a wedding for an openly gay Unitarian minister at a church near downtown Honolulu.

School files detailing the adolescent wrongdoings of "class-clown" John Lennon fetched nearly £8,500 each in an online auction on Sunday.

The pair of detention sheets revealed that the Beatle received punishment for "fighting in class", being a "nuisance", "shoving" and showing "no interest whatsoever" during his time at Quarry Bank High School for Boys in Liverpool, northwest England.

Morocco's indigenous Berber people, descendants of North Africa's pre-Arab inhabitants, are struggling to make their voices heard despite their ancient Amazigh-language winning official recognition in 2011 after decades of campaigning.

The sweeping Arab Spring protests that erupted that year brought hopes of empowerment for the region's traditionally marginalized Berber communities.

A large painting by the late Canadian artist Emily Carr has sold at auction for Can$3.39 million, breaking several records, Heffel Fine Art Auction House announced Friday.

The sale of "The Crazy Stair" by Carr, one of Canada's first modernist and post-impressionist painters, was the most ever paid at auction for one of her paintings and the fourth highest in Canadian art auction history.

Naked artists posing as cavorting nymphs and satyrs star in a new exhibition that opened in Italy this week which features adapted images of some of the eye-catching erotic frescoes from the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

Among images that leave little to the imagination are a man having sex with a goat, a transsexual posing and a naked woman straddling a supine Roman god.

A Belgian warship on Friday carried 70 bags of soil from World War I battlefields to London, where it will be laid in a memorial garden ahead of the 100th anniversary of the start of the conflict.

London's famous Tower Bridge lifted to allow the Belgian navy frigate Louisa Marie to sail up the River Thames and deliver the soil to the British warship HMS Belfast.