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 books in north London. “I like…
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, “but a time that marked us…
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 characters: I walk where they walk,…
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 Facebook, and yet, everywhere you look…
‘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 out of business in 2011 and…
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 and then serialized on BBC TV…
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 stonework, plaster and brick. They are…
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 a few months before the event…
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 of three such women. The novel…
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 meeting her or learning very much…
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 converted narrowboat permanently moored in a…
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 was the original title Linnets and Valerians that…
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 was Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone’s Library in…
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