May 12, 2020 On the origins of ‘Pomeranski’, by Gerald Jacobs Today we are delighted to be taking part in a short blog tour for the novel ‘Pomeranski’ by Gerald Jacobs, just published by Quartet…
April 11, 2017 Guest Post: Kit de Waal – on being mixed race Kit de Waal is the author of My Name is Leon which was published last year to great acclaim – see our review of the novel here. We…
February 16, 2017 ‘This is Brasil.’ Guest post by Joe Thomas São Paulo is the capital of South America. What a city: rich in culture, dripping with cash, undermined by political corruption, marked by a…
October 19, 2016 Secret Lives: Real Women in Fiction Written by Ann Kennedy Smith A Quiet Life by Natasha Walter (Borough Press, 2016), Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea (Scribe, 2016) I spend a lot of my…
August 9, 2016 An Ancient Permanence? Guest post by Rosy Thornton My Aunt Sybil (sadly not the figure in black bombazine and lorgnette her name might suggest – think Gore Tex® and stout hiking shoes)…
August 2, 2016 Love, or Nearest Offer, Guest Post by Adèle Geras The person who gave me the very first idea for this book was Sally Prue, a good writer and a good friend of mine….
January 22, 2016 The Last of the Bowmans and Black Humour by J Paul Henderson As he stops off at Shiny New Books on his book tour, we asked J Paul Henderson, author of The Last of the Bowmans (reviewed here), to explore…
January 21, 2016 What Reading Makes of Us – The Power of Stories to Shape our Realities: An Essay. By Mark Thornton (This is an adaptation of a talk I gave to sixth formers at Abingdon School last year.) This is my tenth year…
December 11, 2015 What Independent Theatre Taught me About Fiction Writing by Alexander Yates, author of The Winter Place. There is a famous (and sometimes overused) piece of advice that writers like to give each other. It comes from Chekhov, in the form…
October 7, 2015 An extract from the NHE Essay Prize winner From ‘A Eulogy for Nigger’ by David Bradley DETROIT. Hundreds of onlookers cheered . . . as the National Association for the Advancement of…
October 6, 2015 On Writing Places I’ve Never Been To by Hugo Wilcken As a teenager, I’d spend hours on my own wandering the stacks of Sydney’s State Library. Its vast, airy reading room mimics those of…
August 20, 2015 Great Sexpectations by Non Pratt Non is the author of two YA novels, the latest of which, Remix, is reviewed in our fiction section here. She recently took part in a…
July 30, 2015 Things in my book I don’t want others to know, by Katarina Bivald “Don’t write about what you know, write about what you don’t want others to know.” I don’t know who originally said it, but it…
July 9, 2015 Writing about secrets, the false self and insecure identities in my novel, Sugar and Snails, by Anne Goodwin Article by Anne Goodwin We all have secrets, things we’ve done or aspects of ourselves that we can reveal only to our nearest and…
July 9, 2015 Writing about Secrets, the False Self and Insecure Identities in my Novel, Sugar and Snails by Anne Goodwin We all have secrets, things we’ve done or aspects of ourselves that we can reveal only to our nearest and dearest, and sometimes not…
July 6, 2015 The Inspiration Behind ‘Hush’ Written by Sara Marshall-Ball Photography has always been a strong presence in my life. I put this mainly down to my mother, who has…
June 6, 2015 Song of the Sea Maid, Science and Setting by Rebecca Mascull Song of the Sea Maid, my second novel for Hodder and Stoughton, comes out on June 18th this year. Yet as with many novels,…
April 29, 2015 The Writing of Our Endless Numbered Days By Claire Fuller In 2011 a teenage boy turned up in Berlin claiming that he had been living in the German forests with his…
April 23, 2015 The Year of Reading Dangerously (and Seven Years of Living with the Consequences). By Andy Miller About ten years ago, I had a bright idea. It involved reading a baker’s dozen of books I had always meant…
April 14, 2015 On Writing ‘Three Strange Angels’ By Laura Kalpakian I often think of the novel, any novel, really, as a small boat, initially moored to a certain well known shore,…
April 9, 2015 Researching ‘A Curious Friendship, by Anna Thomasson I first came across Rex Whistler some years ago at Plas Newydd on Anglesey. There he had painted his largest and most famous mural,…
January 23, 2015 Michelle Bailat-Jones on writing Fog Island Mountains My novel Fog Island Mountains is about a mixed-culture family living in southern Japan. The novel centers on the father’s unexpected diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and…
October 9, 2014 Jen Campbell talks about Bookshops… “I like bookshops,” a little girl once said to me in the middle of our own bookshop – an organised chaos of antiquarian children’s…
October 7, 2014 Behind The Sea Garden by Deborah Lawrenson The heroine of the Resistance may have been rising ninety, but she was still wearing racy red shoes. “Not so many years,” she said,…
July 31, 2014 To Come Back Increased: Hild by Nicola Griffith Written by Nicola Griffith For me a good novel is one that draws me in and puts me right there, right then, with the…
