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…
On the day that Isabel Ashdown’s third and latest novel launched, London enjoyed the first real heat of the year. For a lot of people at the event, it seemed as if the weather had been specially ordered. There we all were, sweltering away, while celebrating the launch of Summer of ’76, a book set in the summer of record…
As unusual book titles go, Tony Hogan bought me an Ice Cream Float before he stole my Ma is right up there. Team that with a distinctive cover showing the silhouette of a jumping girl holding a red balloon on a blue background and I knew I wanted to read this debut novel even before its author, Kerry Hudson, dropped by here…
One of the fun things about being a reader today is sometimes getting the opportunity to meet a favourite author at a book event or getting to chat to them on their blog or through social networking sites. But if they’ve been dead for almost 200 years, this is sadly – and clearly! – no longer an option. You can only…