Hot coffee and no haiku
Mona Simpson is lauded as a sharp and infectious chronicler of American family life. Her latest novel, Casebook, is a coming-of-age story about two boys who unearth powerful secrets that threaten a family’s health and sanity. She invites us into her home and gives an insight into her literary habits. Where are you now? At...
Darkness and light
Where are you now? My parents’ house in Hampstead, north London. Where and when do you do most of your writing? At a desk or kitchen table wherever I am living. If you have one, what is your pre-writing ritual? I set the timer for 180 minutes on a program called SelfControl which blocks most...
Staying home
Joseph Connolly’s comic novels are always written as interior monologue, a writing technique he recently told the Guardian “just falls out of me… I sort of become the person when I am writing in their voice.” So how does he live from day to day deep within his writing chamber? Where are you now? At...
Climbing without a rope
The ‘temporary gentleman’ in the title of Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is an Irishman commissioned into the British Army during the Second World War who looks back on past demons and a tumultuous marriage to the enigmatic beauty who slipped from his grasp. Here’s a slice of his writing day. Where are you now? At...
Something brewing
Audrey Magee’s first novel The Undertaking is the story of a marriage of convenience between a German soldier on the Eastern Front and a woman he hadn’t previously met, whose attraction to each other deepens amid the agonies and depredations of war. We glimpse inside her writer’s den. Where are you now? In my study....
Waking up to Middlemarch
Pamela Erens’ new novel The Virgins is an unflinchingly unsettling fresh take on the traditions of the boarding-school novel, in which a repentant narrator looks back on his past actions as a titillated but embittered bystander observing and provoking the crumbling relationship of a co-ed academy’s golden couple. Where are you now? Sitting at my...
Between Nabokov and Fleming
Read more and buy the book David Gilbert’s archly entertaining and insightful novel & Sons, about a once-lauded novelist reaching out to his estranged family, was published in the US to rave reviews that variously compared his storytelling, mastery of language and observational skills to Dostoyevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Proust and Nabokov. As the book...
