From the moment I saw this wonderful squirrelly cover I knew that I wanted to read The Portable Veblen. Which probably comes as no surprise when I run a blog called the Nut Press, have a grey squirrel sidekick and take more photos of the squirrels in my garden than just about anything else. Going in, I had very little idea what…
Imagine if you were born and raised in a foreign country by your parents, picking up the native tongue and given a native name by which you were known until you were 6 years old. And then you are sent away to school on a remote mountain in a different part of that vast foreign country. This is what happens…
Ivor Punch is the (former) police sergeant of a small island off the west coast of Scotland. He’s a man of few (spoken) words but a prolific letter writer, which he liberally punctuates with the f-bomb. (Used more as an outburst than swearing, so it didn’t offend this reader.) His letters are funny, revealing, poignant, matter of fact and heartfelt…
With all the other demands on your time during this Festive Season, your reading time might be taking a hit. I know mine certainly is with friends unreasonably expecting me not to snuggle up on my sofa with a stack of books and chocolate but to be sociable and go out with them instead. One excellent way of ensuring that…
There are three things I look forward to at this time of year: the way blossom drifts like snow in kerbsides, that the Hay Festival is on later this month and that a new Liz Fenwick novel will be out. In fact, it is out. Today. Under a Cornish Sky is Liz’s fourth novel and I was fortunate enough to snag…
It’s a sad fact of life that sometimes we only get to know a person after their death. Funerals can be revelatory affairs. I’ve been to a fair few in the past year and have always come away knowing far more about the person whose life we were celebrating than I did when they were alive. Admittedly, those same funerals…
The Burning Man, the twelfth book in Christopher Fowler’s successful and highly popular Bryant & May series of detective novels came out yesterday. Although friends praise the series and recommend them to me, I’d never read one until this week. Here’s what the latest instalment in their case files is all about: London is under siege. A banking scandal has…
Today is the publication day for the second Curtis Brown book group choice, James Hannah’s debut novel, The A-Z of You and Me. Ivo fell for her. He fell for a girl he can’t get back. Now he’s hoping for something. While he waits he plays a game: He chooses a body part and tells us its link to the…
Antonia Honeywell’s debut novel The Ship was the first book chosen for the Curtis Brown book group, a new online book group I’m a member of this year. The Ship proved to be an excellent choice because it offered so many topics for discussion, not least what we would have done when faced with the same choices. Here’s what the book’s blurb…
Ten years ago this coming August, I went on a week’s Novel Writing course at Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre. It was a pretty magical week: both in terms of what it did for my writing and because of the fantastic group of writers I met while there. One of those was Helen Lederer whose first full-length novel, Losing It,…