Blog Archives

How my hometown feeds my writing

31/7/2021

I grew up in a small coastal town in north-west England, and left to go to university at eighteen. It wasn’t the prettiest of places, but we had the Lake District to the east of us, sandy beaches north and south and a view across the sea to Scotland.

I wrote in secret when I lived there, stories set in some undefined elsewhere. Fictional towns no more interesting than the one that made me, except that they gave my mind room to roam.

It felt significant that I began writing my first published novel, Sugar and Snails, on returning from a long-distance walk of almost 200 miles that began near my hometown. It cemented the idea of having to leave it behind to write.

8 Comments

The past lingers on: Ever Rest, Old Bones and This Other Island

18/7/2021

10 Comments

Three short reviews of novels about how the past keeps hold of us. The first two are connected by the discovery of a body and a sleepy Shropshire village; the third novel, This Other Island, is, like Ever Rest, mostly set in London and, like Old Bones, it’s about family secrets.

10 Comments

Love and loss: Empire of Wild, The Exile and the Mapmaker & Suiza

12/7/2021

10 Comments

Three short reviews of novels on the theme of love and loss: the first, set in Canada, about a woman whose husband disappears and turns up a year later with a new identity; the second, set in France, is about a man who yearns to be reunited with the lover from his youth before he loses himself to dementia; the third, a translated novel set in Spain, is about the tender relationship that develops between two brutalised people.

10 Comments

Four novels that inspired Annalisa Crawford’s Small Forgotten Moments

9/7/2021

11 Comments

Annalisa Crawford, author of Grace and Serenity, has a new novel out next month, and she’s kindly agreed to tell us about some of the fiction that inspired Small Forgotten Moments. Two of her chosen four are novels I’ve also read and enjoyed. I’ll hand over to Annalisa to introduce all four.

Thanks for inviting me onto your blog today, Anne. I thought I’d share some of the books which have inspired me while writing my new novel Small Forgotten Moments, and the months (even years!) which preceded it.

11 Comments

The camera never lies

4/7/2021

10 Comments

A black-and-white photograph links two of the three point-of-view characters in my new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home. In Henry’s interpretation, it shows a father, his glamorous teenage daughter and his young son on holiday at Blackpool, a popular English seaside resort. Matty’s version has a ragged edge and shows only two people: an unknown woman in a polka-dot dress holding the hand of a boy with the Eiffel Tower sprouting from his head. If these two renditions of the same events can be reconciled, perhaps brother and sister will be reunited. Perhaps Matilda Windsor will make it home.