Playing God
Nikita Lalwani’s latest novel You People poses the tantalising question: in a world where the law is against you, how far would you be willing to lie for a chance to live? Set in London pizzeria where half the kitchen staff are undocumented immigrants, it is a witty and humane snapshot of undervalued lives and...
Spirits and stimulations
Rosanna Amaka’s The Book of Echoes is a searing debut novel about hope, redemption and the scars of history, narrated by the spirit of an enslaved African who journeys to 1980s Brixton and a sun-baked village in Nigeria, drawing together and transforming the lives of two youngsters who are struggling to hold onto their dreams....
Learning from the masters
Forget thrillers. Forget horror. Forget (forgive me) crime, and historical novels, and all the rest. For me, if you want a page-turner, Icelandic sagas are where it’s at. Sagas are the novels of the medieval world. By which I mean, as prose narratives go, they’re miles ahead of anything else being written in medieval Europe:...
Morrissey built my bookshelf
I didn’t read a lot as a child and, to a certain extent, I still don’t. Time being the most valuable commodity there is, ideas for my own writing – and the things that inspire me creatively – usually come from other sources; from visual media and, above all, from music. I’m someone who gets...
Sophisticated murder
I was ten years old, living in England due to my father’s job transfer, when I first saw an Alfred Hitchcock film. That film was Dial M for Murder, Hitchcock’s 1954 adaptation of Frederick Knott’s stage play. If I were introducing the films of Alfred Hitchcock to a ten-year-old boy, Dial M for Murder would...
After dark
Chris Whitaker’s debut novel Tall Oaks is a suspenseful, sinister and hilarious story of a small town in the full glare of the world’s media after the mysterious disappearance of a young boy. He gives us the inside track on his writing and reading habits, big influences and favourite writers. Where are you now? At...
Imaginary friends
I’ve always surrounded myself with books. As a child they weren’t just my respite and my escape, they were larger than my reality and they fuelled my passion for, and the expectation of, the unlikely. Nor were their authors my heroes in the current understanding of the role. I didn’t expect to meet them in...
Ghosts of New York
I have an American heiress to thank for leading me to Edith Wharton. I was a teenager – lank-haired, history addict, eye for drama – and I was visiting Blenheim Palace with my parents when I caught sight of a creature from the Gilded Age. Consuelo Vanderbilt, wife of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, looked...
The tricycle man
I arrived at boarding school in England a few weeks short of my twelfth birthday. I’d spent my childhood switching friends, schools, houses, countries, continents (my father was a diplomat) and at some point all this had begun to pall. I wanted things to stay the same: the same faces every term, the same rooms...
Lawyers that thrill
Not too many years ago, an influential editor told me that the legal thriller was dead. Readers were bored. They wanted to read about ‘real people’, not a bunch of lawyers. Well, since then, readers have proven that editor wrong. They have fallen in love with Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller, watching the defense attorney struggle...
