Blog Archives

Bite-size reviews and a frozen flash

27/2/2021

Much as I enjoy pontificating about books, there are times when I genuinely don't have much to say. It might be because I haven't connected strongly with the style or story. It might be that my mind is too busy elsewhere. But I do like using my blog and Goodreads as a kind of reading archive. This is my first experiment in using both for bite-size reviews.

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Black and gay in America: Memorial & The Prophets

23/2/2021

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It was good to read these two American novels about Black gay men, especially during LGBT history month: the second set in 19th-century Mississippi and an unnamed part of Africa; the first set in contemporary Texas and Japan.

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A woman of substance: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

19/2/2021

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Claudia Hampton is writing a history of the world, and of herself, but only in her head. Lying in a hospital bed, she is visited by memories of a rich and vivid life, beginning with scrambling up a cliff on a Dorset beach as a child in 1920. Narcissistic to the core, she seems to prefer her dreams to the flesh-and-blood characters who sit intermittently at her bedside: her daughter, Lisa; Jasper, her former partner and Lisa’s father; Laszlo, her semi-adopted Hungarian son. But the only two people she’s ever loved are dead: her brother, Gordon, and Tom, the soldier she met when she was a journalist in Cairo during the Second World War.

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Families under pressure: Kololo Hill & The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

18/2/2021

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Both these recent reads have complex family dynamics at the centre, while addressing wider political issues in very different ways. In the first, we follow a middle-class Asian family forced to migrate from Uganda to Britain on the whim of a tin-pot dictator; in the second, three siblings re-enact their childhood rivalries around their mother’s deathbed as bushfires envelop their country and the world colludes in its own extinction.

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Seems it’s Valentine’s Day in Sugar and Snails

13/2/2021

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I had no intention of posting anything relating to Valentine’s Day, until I read a piece in the Guardian on reclaiming the day from the clutches of capitalism and tat: Could lockdown relight our love for Valentine’s Day? While you won’t catch me singing cheesy love songs or searching the snow for a posy of snowdrops, the article did ignite a twinge of nostalgia for the Valentines of early adolescence when receiving a card – or more often not – could make or break my day (week, month). And a concomitant soupçon of nostalgia for the nostalgia that inspired a scene in my debut novel, Sugar and Snails. So here’s my fractious 1970s household, where one teenager gets more cards than he ever wanted while another, with higher expectations, gets none. The images below the extract link to related material: a seasonal guest blog post, an online event and an offer of a free copy of Sugar and Snails.

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On Beeley Moor

11/2/2021

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As you can see from the date, I'm tardy with my response to this extra flash fiction challenge. It might be that, my brain mired in promo land, I'm baffled by the prompt: life as a river of consciousness. It might be that it's meant to be a special tribute to Sue Vincent and I'm scared of messing up. I knew from the start where I wanted to set my 99-word story: although Sue and I have never met off-line, we've shared some physical territory. The problem is, although winter rain has flooded footpaths, there are no rivers up on the Derbyshire moors.

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London friends: A Net for Small Fishes & Open Water

3/2/2021

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What’s the impact of inequality and injustice on friendship? These two London-set novels might go some way to helping us understand. In the first, two women unite to claim a degree of personhood and agency within the culture of misogyny in the court of James I; in the second, a young Black man struggles to maintain a loving relationship within a contemporary climate of institutional racism.