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…
I lived in Roath when I was a student but haven’t spent much time there since moving back to Wales in 1999. Except for the past week when I’ve been there not once, but twice. The second time was on Thursday evening, when Squizzey and I went to an event with local author Kate Hamer at the wonderful Wellfield Bookshop…
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…
I’m really happy to welcome Rachael Richey to the Nut Press. Rachael is a member of an online writing group I belong to and her debut novel, Storm Rising, is out today! She’s very kindly agreed to give an author interview but first, here’s what Storm Rising is all about: Frontman of the grunge rock band NightHawk, Gideon Hawk has had…
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…
Welcome to the final stop on Helen Lederer’s Losing It Blog Tour! You’ve read the review, Losing It was launched last Thursday and is currently out in the world in a bookshop near you, so now it’s time to talk to its author. I’m thrilled to welcome the lovely Helen Lederer to the Nut Press today. I now know which Millie…
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,…
This year, I decided that my New Year was going to start in February, and not a month earlier with the rest of the Western World. No, I’m not Chinese and no, I haven’t changed my belief system. I just wanted to do the New Year, new start, new self, new words thing by stealth. No shouting about my resolutions at…
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:…