Category: Friendship

A huge thank you, as a second novel is born!

25/5/2017

Happy publication day to me! I must admit it doesn’t feel the huge leap it did the first time round, but I’m still excited, albeit not breathlessly so. There’s a quieter satisfaction in having more than one of my own novels on the shelf, making the transition from writer to author to novelist. This post is to thank those who’ve helped me on my way. While writing is a solitary activity, no writer is an island. Our achievements arise through hard work, good luck and not a little help from our friends.

14 Comments

Blame by Paul Read

28/4/2017

6 Comments

Lucas is slightly inebriated when he calls in at a funeral parlour to discuss the disposal of his father’s remains. His intoxication might account for his making a pass at the mortician when it’s Mariana, the IT expert at the pharmaceutical company where he works as a researcher, he’s most keen to impress. But it’s hard to engage in romantic pursuits when everyone thinks he should be grieving. And so he is, although not for his father’s passing but for the terrible event he witnessed in the summer of 1989 that tore his family apart.

6 Comments

Amid the splendid scenery of Orkney and the Monros

10/4/2017

3 Comments

Let’s take a look at a couple of debut novels with some fine evocations of the natural world and a strong sense of place published by small independent presses based in Scotland.

3 Comments

High Tide, Low Tide: The story of a remarkable friendship

2/3/2017

10 Comments

In May 2011, Martin Baker posted what he hoped was an encouraging comment on the social media page of someone who was clearly struggling. A response came almost immediately from Fran Houston that challenged his thinking on how to support someone who is experiencing suicidal thoughts. That was the beginning of a remarkable friendship: remarkable in its intensity; remarkable in its focus; remarkable in that these best friends live three thousand miles apart. High Tide, Low Tide is the story of that friendship, told in the hope of inspiring others to try something remarkable too.

10 Comments

LGBT history: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

12/2/2017

4 Comments

Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, which won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Award announced last month, is a story of migration and massacre; of bravery and brutality; of family, friendship and gender fluidity told in the unique voice of an Irishman in 1850s America.

4 Comments

Beyond the slave plantations in novels by Colson Whitehead & Vamba Sherif

16/12/2016

4 Comments

As the first African-American president approaches the end of his two terms of office, the politics of the creature waiting to replace him send shivers down many a spine. So timely to remind ourselves how western wealth was built on the trade in human beings with two novels about the slave trade between Africa and America and its aftermath. It’s not an easy subject to write – or read – about and, although I’ve read a couple of good ones (Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo and Property by Valerie Martin come to mind, but there may be others), I believe these are the first I’ve reviewed.

4 Comments

If you’ve lived an interesting story, should you write about it?

12/12/2016

17 Comments

A few months ago I was talking about my reading to a friend who’d just published his first e-book. I thought he might enjoy Belonging which, I said, features aspects of recent Indian history that appear in fiction less often than Partition, the backdrop to Where the River Parts. Oh, I was there, said my friend – or more eloquent words to that effect. You were there during Partition? quoth I. You should write about it!

17 Comments

Two novels about “Everything”

27/11/2016

6 Comments

Not really, of course! But I thought it would be fun to combine my reviews of two novels with “Everything” in the title, especially when both explore the nature of memory and require the reader to work a little harder to figure out who is speaking sometimes. Oh, and they both have blue covers!

6 Comments

Music and movement: Swing Time by Zadie Smith

16/11/2016

6 Comments

In contrast to the three women who shape her through childhood to early middle age, the female narrator of Zadie Smith’s fifth novel is so insipid, she doesn’t even bother to tell us her name. Her mother, a beautiful Jamaican-born feminist, autodidact and activist who resembles Nefertiti, delegates parenting to her less ambitious husband while she plots her escape from the confines of gender, race and class. She barely tolerates our narrator’s intense friendship with Tracey, the only other brown-skinned girl at their North London dancing class. With her doting, but foul-mouthed white English mother and absent African Caribbean father (whom the little girl claims is on tour with Michael Jackson, when he’s actually in prison), Tracey’s allotment of advantage and disadvantage mirrors hers. Their relationship pirouettes around a shared passion and a suppressed mutual envy: while Tracey has the skill and talent to make it to the stage, the narrator’s relative stability with a loving father provide some compensation for her flat feet.

6 Comments

Country (dis)connections: The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop & His Whole Life by Elizabeth Hay

2/9/2016

6 Comments

For my first post of meteorological autumn, I bring you two novels with a strong sense of season and climate. But what particularly connects them is their explorations of how conflicting attachments to place risks fragmenting family life. The first takes us from England to Australia, with a brief visit to India, and the second back and forth between Canada and the USA, so between them these novels cover a large proportion of the English-speaking world.

6 Comments

Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore

13/8/2016

6 Comments

In her early twenties, after a gap year that turned into three, all spent under her parents’ roof, her mother had insisted that she go away to university, if she could still find one that would take her. And so she had gone to university, although it was not, as her father had pointed out, a proper university; it was not a good university. She majored in English, because it had always been her best subject and because she had managed to get a B at A level. It was also her native language.

6 Comments

My stop on the #devilautopsy #blogtour

12/8/2016

6 Comments

What would have to happen to drive an entire town insane? In Tiffany McDaniel’s unusual and gripping debut, all it takes for Breathed, Ohio, in the summer of 1984, is a heatwave and the suggestion that a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy is the incarnation of the devil.

6 Comments

Only connect? #amreading between baffled and bludgeoned

30/6/2016

4 Comments

As someone who’s drawn to subtle stories with complex characters and hates being bludgeoned with being told what to think and feel, I shouldn’t be surprised that there are times when my expectations aren’t met by the book in my hands and I’m tempted to give up. Usually I try to unravel why it didn’t work for me, with the aim of both getting a stronger sense of what I like and don’t like, and what I can learn from this for my own writing. But sometimes I feel quite disorientated by my bafflement, by my lack of connection with the author’s words. If I’ve been unlucky – or chosen unwisely – and experienced a string of disconnections, I can feel quite low. The activity that has always been my refuge becomes a claustrum. It’s like being internally homeless or losing a good friend. (Or finding your compatriots have voted overwhelmingly for xenophobia, which still has me reeling almost a week on.)

4 Comments

All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage

4/6/2016

4 Comments

Upstate New York in the early 1970s and George and Catherine Clare move into a farmhouse at the foot of the hill. Previously, the hub of a working dairy farm, the house feels haunted by the woman who held it all together and, unbeknown to Catherine, died along with her husband in the master bedroom. Because of this unhappy legacy, the Clares got it cheap, which causes some resentment in the close-knit community centred on Chosen, the nearby town. Yet George, a professor of art history at the local college, charms them initially, but it’s Catherine, a former artist and now stay-at-home mother of three-year-old Franny, whom they take into their hearts. So everyone is shocked and saddened when George comes home one evening to find her with an axe through her head.

4 Comments

Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew

2/6/2016

4 Comments

Provence, 1889, and there’s a new arrival at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, the former monastery at the foot of the mountains that’s now an asylum for those too troubled, eccentric or disturbing to survive outside. The Dutchman, known for his red hair as the fou roux, is the first new patient for years and, though this spells extra work by the already worn-out warden, Charles Trabuc, his wife, Jeanne, is curious, even excited at the prospect of someone new. Although, warned by her husband to stay away from the patients, she can only watch from the cottage overlooking the grounds, she’s eager for change.

4 Comments

Workington and Barrow: Small towns, great fiction?

15/5/2016

4 Comments

What does the working-class child aspire to? In my case, I couldn’t dream of joining a middle-class profession I’d never heard of. Nor, even though I was addicted to writing from the start, did I believe that someone like me could become an author. Books never seemed to be based in the places with which I was familiar: they were set in boarding schools rather than comprehensives; in country houses rather than a small semi-detached; in cities rather than small industrial towns. So how could I resist a novel set in my birthplace, the small northern town from which my odd accent derives? As if that weren’t enough, I’m offered a novel set where my parents grew up, a similar down-at-heel out-of-the-way place where I had my first restaurant meal. Sixty miles separates these two towns, as well as some breath-taking countryside, as depicted in The Wolf Border, one of my favourite reads from last year. But Workington and Barrow don’t have the beauty of the Lake District. Thanks to Vintage Books and Legend Press, I had the chance to discover whether they could nevertheless shine on the page. I’d be interested in your thoughts on using real places as fictional settings.

4 Comments

Fictional philosophising: Superabundance & Salinger's Letters

25/2/2016

4 Comments

I’m discussing two novels in translation about philosophy-obsessed / philosopher-obsessed men who travel from Europe to New York in pursuit of their interests. Yet, as is often the case when I partner one novel with another, they are very different books. Because of the mental-health slant, I also could have paired either with A Cure for Suicide, or, because of the identity issues, with The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty and/or The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.

4 Comments

Elemental by Amanda Curtin: Review and book giveaway

9/2/2016

17 Comments

In her declining years, as her memory for the past overtakes her connection to the present, Meggie Tulloch sets out to write her life story. Addressed (in the mid-1970s) to her hippyish granddaughter, and kept secret from her daughter, Kathryn, the girl’s mother (although, as time goes on, Meggie increasingly confuses the two), it’s a story of migration from north-east Scotland and the Shetlands to Fremantle, Australia, a journey through the elements of water, air and earth, and finally (in a contemporary strand picked up by the daughter herself) fire.

17 Comments

Identity and make-believe: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty & The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

4/2/2016

8 Comments

Lately, I’ve been contemplating my identity as a novelist: how, on the one hand, it’s a simple statement of fact while, on the other, it represents an existential anxiety about what I’d be if I couldn’t describe myself in terms of something that sounds like a job. So these two novels exploring identity and make-believe, albeit with reference to film rather than fiction, have come along at exactly the right time.

8 Comments

Woof, woof! Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume & Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

21/1/2016

8 Comments

The other week, as I was tramping across the soggy fields near my house, a woman stopped me and asked if I’d noticed a boxer on my travels. Although a big dog off the lead is as welcome to me as a rampaging lion, I managed to keep my voice and face sympathetic as she explained how her pet had darted out the front door. Apologies I can’t supply the ending of this real-life drama (memoir?), but I’m sharing to show I’m not a canine lover. I’ve steered away from doggy fiction since Waiting For Doggo, but, these two took my fancy, proving – as if I didn’t know – that, even narrated from the point of view of an earthworm, fiction is always about the human condition.

8 Comments

<<Previous

Forward>>

A huge thank you, as a second novel is born!

Blame by Paul Read

Amid the splendid scenery of Orkney and the Monros

High Tide, Low Tide: The story of a remarkable friendship

LGBT history: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Beyond the slave plantations in novels by Colson Whitehead & Vamba Sherif

If you’ve lived an interesting story, should you write about it?

Two novels about “Everything”

Music and movement: Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Country (dis)connections: The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop & His Whole Life by Elizabeth Hay

Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore

My stop on the #devilautopsy #blogtour

Only connect? #amreading between baffled and bludgeoned

All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage

Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew

Workington and Barrow: Small towns, great fiction?

Fictional philosophising: Superabundance & Salinger's Letters

Elemental by Amanda Curtin: Review and book giveaway

Identity and make-believe: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty & The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

Woof, woof! Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume & Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

2019 Reading Challenge

Popular posts

Categories/Tags

Archives