If the title of this post seems a bit strange to you, I think it perfectly encapsulates the type of weekend I’ve just had and, if you persevere and read on, all will become clear-er. I was in London again, thanks to my trusty steed, megabus.com. And it was a scorchingly hot and beautifully sunny couple of days but very much a weekend of two halves.
Wasted is the latest YA novel by author Nicola Morgan, who has around 90 books published. Nicola is on a a Blog Tour during May to promote Wasted and today she’s here at The Nut Press and was generous enough to answer some questions about the book and her writing process.
Chance. Luck. Fate. Destiny. Choices. Reactions. Timing. Much like Jack’s coin, my head is still spinning days after reading Nicola Morgan’s excellent Wasted. But this is a good thing. The book throws up a lot of questions and ideas and it’s made me look at some of these with fresh perspective.
I always thought one of the benefits of becoming proficient in a foreign language would be that I’d be able to read another country’s literature in the original language, rather than in translation. (In fact, if I chose the language wisely, I’d be able to read that of more than one country.) I never thought for a moment that it would enable me to read a novel set in England, originally written in English by an English author but which has, so far, only been published in translation.
Please see pic for Exhibit ‘A’ – Della Says: OMG! – a book that I would not normally pick up to read the blurb on the back cover, let alone buy and read cover-to-cover in one sitting. Why? We-ell, there’s shocking pink and fluorescent green on the front cover, for starters, the book title contains text speak (even though, yes, I use it myself. Guilty as charged) and it’s a book aimed at the teen market.
I’m hoping that Bernhard Schlink’s thought-provoking novel The Reader doesn’t become a footnote to Kate Winslet’s Oscar success in the film adaptation. It is a book that deserves far more that the sorry footnote of simply becoming the book of the film.
I don’t know about you but I’ve always wished there was a little bit more magic and some of that ever-so-helpful fairy dust in my life from time to time. But Catherine Ryan Howard had bigger dreams than this.
When the brochure for this year’s Hay Festival plopped onto the doormat, I immediately settled down to spend some time going through it. Living as I do within an hour’s drive of Hay-on-Wye, the book town has a special place in this book squirrel’s heart already. But, for one magical week of the year, it becomes everything that I enjoy…
When I lived in London for three years back in the late 90s, I reached a point where I spent most weekends trying to leave it.