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…
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….
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…
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 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,…
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…
July 31, 2014 Nick Rennison talks about the Victorians… By Nick Rennison What is it about us and the Victorians? Here we are in 2014, in a world of smart phones, Twitter and…
July 24, 2014 ‘The Night Watchman’ and the Dilemma of Living in Portugal by Richard Zimler Imagine a country with the lowest salaries in Western Europe, where about 40 percent of young people are unemployed, and where 50,000 shops went…
July 17, 2014 Jonathan Smith on his book Wilfred and Eileen Written by Jonathan Smith Wilfred and Eileen was well received in the literary pages in 1976. The novel was dramatized on Radio 4 in 1983…
July 17, 2014 The Broken Landscape of Berlin by Ben Fergusson Written by Ben Fergusson Berlin is full of holes. Literally. The moment you notice them, you begin to see them everywhere. Deep starbursts in…
July 4, 2014 Philipp Meyer and Linda Spalding talk to Kirsty Wark at Hay By Linda Spalding The Hay Festival is mythic to Canadians. What I mean is that we all covet an invitation. Mine came by email…
April 30, 2014 On Sisters of Treason by Elizabeth Fremantle I have always been fascinated in the forgotten lives of women in history and Sisters of Treason (the second in my Tudor trilogy) exposes the lives…
April 29, 2014 On Translating Boel Westin’s Biography of Tove Jansson – by translator Silvester Mazzarella I am ashamed to admit that I lived in Helsinki (in Swedish Helsingfors), for more than twenty years during Tove Jansson’s lifetime without ever…
April 29, 2014 The Bookshop That Floated Away by Sarah Henshaw In early 2011 I realised the bookshop I’d been running for the last two years would probably have to close. It operated from a…
April 17, 2014 Why you should read The Runaways, by Adrienne Byrne Winner of the Hesperus ‘Uncover a Children’s Classic Competition’, 2013 I was about ten when I discovered this book in my local library. It…
April 8, 2014 The Genesis of ‘After Me Comes The Flood’, by Sarah Perry Sarah Perry has lived in Cambridge, Manila and London. A winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial prize and a Royal Holloway doctoral studentship, she…
