I’m rounding off this week’s McIlvanney Prize blog tour in the run up to Bloody Scotland, which begins today and runs over the weekend in a hybrid format. (You can buy a digital pass or tickets to individual events by clicking on the links.) The Scottish International Crime Writing Festival runs the McIlvanney Prize, awarded to the best Scottish Crime…
Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books is Cathy Rentzenbrink’s love letter to the books in her life, and how they’ve influenced and shaped her, while also providing a source of comfort and connection with others. For as long as she can remember, Cathy Rentzenbrink has lost and found herself in stories. Growing up she was rarely seen without…
I bought Julia Armfield’s much-anticipated debut story collection, Salt Slow, shortly after it came out in May this year. It’s since been shortlisted for the Sunday Times / Young Writer of the Year Award and, with the winner due to be announced on Thursday evening, I wanted to share my thoughts on it. In her brilliantly inventive and haunting debut…
Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier takes a young medical student far from Vienna and into the makeshift world of being a wartime medic in the Galician mountains on the Poland-Ukraine border. Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, only to find himself posted…
I always used to associate Miranda Dickinson with the run up to Christmas because that’s when her previous books have come out. But her latest novel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, bucked this trend, coming out earlier this summer, when it was an absolute joy to escape with her and her characters to the Cornish seaside resort of St Ives. Can…
Sometimes all I need to nudge me into reading a book I’ve been meaning to get to… is to discover that there’s a sequel coming out! Which is how I finally came to read Fiona Cummins’ Rattle and its sequel The Collector in such quick succession. Jakey escaped with his life and moved to a new town. His rescue was a miracle but…
Juliet West’s timely second novel The Faithful has Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts pitch their summer camp near a sidelined and restless teenager’s seaside home, forever changing her life, if not the course of history as is their wider intention. July 1935. In the village of Aldwick on the Sussex coast, sixteen-year-old Hazel faces a long, dull summer with just her self-centred mother Francine for…
Hausfrau is the German word for housewife so at first glance this isn’t a book likely to appeal to me. But it’s an English-language novel using the title and that piqued my interest. Besides, ever since almost missing out on Emma Chapman’s excellent How to Be a Good Wife, which is now a firm favourite, I’m wary of discounting wifey books….
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,…