‘Sense and Sensibility’ – by Joanna Trollope? Doesn’t sound right, does it? How about ‘Northanger Abbey’ – by Val McDermid? Meet The Austen Project: six well-known authors are ‘reworking’ Jane Austen’s six completed novels. Why? Erm…because they can? This isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, and there are still fewer rewrites of Austen than […]
Although watching my son explore our local SureStart Centre can be fun, there is definitely a finite amount of time I can bear to spend watching him play with cars. Recently, that time having long since expired, I found myself browsing the centre’s bookshelves and spotted Sally Goddard Blythe’s ‘What Babies and Children Rally Need’. […]
After spending a day at home with my eleven month old son, it’s very easy to look around me and wonder what I’ve achieved. So I’ve tidied away the toys that made the living room look like a branch of the Early Learning Centre, cleaned on, around and under the high chair for the third […]
Someone once told me I would look forward to returning to work when I had finished enjoying my “love affair with motherhood”. At the time, this simply irritated me, though I wasn’t sure why. Time has allowed me to articulate the sources of my irritation. 1. Explicit in this statement is the certainty that I […]
I like narratives with a distinctive voice. That said, I find narrators with a truly distinctive voice can take a bit of getting used to. My first perusal of the opening pages of Ken Bruen’s ‘Purgatory’ didn’t inspire me to read further and I let most of the month slip by, reading other things, until […]
I’m always interested in the reasons writers choose to adopt pseudonyms. Crime novelist Agatha Christie published six “romance” novels as Mary Westmacott; adult sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov wrote a series of YA novels as Paul French; and, of course, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling was recently unmasked as Robert Galbraith, author of ‘The Cuckoo’s […]
I have always maintained that it is impossible to own too many books. I still believe this. However, I have recently reached the stage where I can’t see all my books because they’re hidden by…another row of books, which is topped by…a further pile of books. Other books, despairing of ever reaching the precious shelves, […]
Until very recently, I refused to join Twitter; I didn’t understand the point of it but knew that I already lost enough precious time to the lure of the Internet. Now, I’m a convert. Not only is it a great source of book-related links, but it turns out that it can be a source of […]
Sometimes, I deliberately read books I suspect I will disagree with. Why would any sane person do this to themselves? Two reasons: it’s important to know what arguments the ‘other side’ are using and it’s important to check the validity of these arguments. After all, you could be wrong. If so, better to know it […]
When I learned that Maggie O’Farrell would be speaking at my local library I immediately resolved to reread her debut novel, ‘After You’d Gone’*. What’s it about? Alice Raikes randomly boards a train from London to Edinburgh, thinking she will visit her family. Almost as soon as she arrives, she sees something that stuns her […]