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,…
Anna Hope’s debut novel, Wake, depicts a mere five days in 1920 Britain but it’s an important period in the post-First World War world, covering as it does the repatriation of the Unknown Soldier from the battlefields of France to his final resting place at Westminster Abbey, and what happens in the lives of three women in London. Remembrance Day 1920:…
I have to confess that I didn’t know much about the story told in Judy Chicurel’s debut novel before reading it. (It turns out that there are multiple stories, and as the novel’s set in a working class community, you get a real sense of that from the shifts in emphasis, with different characters coming to the fore while others…
Tom Vowler’s second novel, That Dark Remembered Day, opens with what could be a recurring nightmare: a boy on the cusp of young adulthood gets off the school bus in Spring 1983, full of hope and fuzzy expectations and, on his way home, walks into something that quickly shatters that child’s happy innocence forever. The book then fast-forwards to Autumn…
It’s Day Two of the GLAZE Blog Tour and I’m thrilled to be taking part by posting my review of Kim Curran’s latest book, GLAZE. Set in a slightly future London, GLAZE is a thrilling and thought-provoking read and one I’d recommend, especially if you’re a regular user of any social network. Why? Because GLAZE is a futuristic social network that everyone…
As darkness falls on the M25, the flow of traffic comes to a halt. Time passes. More time passes. Then more. Drivers switch off their engines, then get out of their cars. And so the story begins . . . In this bold, state-of-the-nation novel, Jake Wallis Simons brings together characters from all walks of life and explores what happens…
Last Thursday, Squizz and I boarded our trusty steed, megabus, and headed to London for our first book launch of 2014. It was for Liz de Jager’s debut YA novel, Banished, the first book in The Blackhart Legacy trilogy, and was held at one of our favourite bookshops, Foyles, on Charing Cross Road. I took full advantage of that and…
One of the best things about reading novels is how they can take you into new worlds. The world of any book is, of course, always its author’s creation, whether it be rooted in truth, or based on a skewed version of the world we know, or one entirely of the author’s own imagining but what I mean here is…
Any poem by Simon Armitage gets my attention (note to publishers?) and one opens this new short story collection. And what a wonderful poem about Emily Brontë it is, right from its opening lines of Too much rain in the blood, Too much cloud in the lungs to how, after having read Wuthering Heights for the first time, I had…
If books generally are hard to resist for this book squirrel, then you can only begin to imagine how excited I get about books featuring those treasure troves called bookshops (or bookstores, if you’re from across the Atlantic). I mean, what book lover doesn’t spend a lot of their time in them, browsing, and yes, okay, buying, when they’re not…