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…
It’s World Book Day today and there’s been a lot of bookish fun happening on Twitter and FB to celebrate. I’ve had some great booky conversations; I’ve also been to Cardiff libraries, in particular, Roath library, in order to find a copy of The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd – because the copy I have is missing some…
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…
Being a girl who reads, I can’t help but LOVE this! Written and performed by Mark Grist http://markgrist.com/ Directed by Guy Larsen http://guylarsen.com/ Produced by Or Something Similar http://orsomethingsimilar.com © The Producers and the Roundhouse, 2013.
After having enjoyed Jane Odiwe’s Searching for Captain Wentworth, I jumped at the chance to read Project Darcy even before knowing anything more about it other than the title and that the cover promised further Time Travels with Jane Austen. Happily, Project Darcy isn’t about the search for a present-day Darcy or the transformation of a modern-day man into someone’s romantic ideal of…
One of the most popular blog posts I’ve written to date was a post I wrote in 2010 asking Does Twitter sell books? I posted a picture of my Twitter Towers (all the books I’d heard about through the social networking site) and categorised them, and generally thought that Twitter was pretty good at selling books. To me, at any rate!…
When my family moved back to the UK from Germany, shortly before my baby brother was born, my Welsh father and Scottish mother couldn’t agree where to live, so they looked to England as a compromise solution. And (for any English people reading this) a very fine compromise it was, too! Dad had always loved Cornwall and would have loved to have…