"Memories are an illusion. They become more fixed the more you think of them, and each time you remember, you are recalling remembering the memory rather than the memory itself.” – Claire Fuller
Weaving fiction from the real and imagined

Weaving fiction from the real and imagined

Nearly fifteen years ago, a man was found dead on a beach in the northwest of Ireland. Nobody knew who he was or where he had come from. The man had taken steps to hide his identity by using a fake name, paying in cash, and disposing of his belongings...
A disunited kingdom

A disunited kingdom

Let me paint you a picture of an alternative Britain sadly not too far from our own… My debut novel Verge charts a journey – both literal and internal – of two very different young people across a Disunited Kingdom where the county borders have become hard borders with checkpoints,...
Megan McCubbin: Wild in heart and soul

Megan McCubbin: Wild in heart and soul

Megan McCubbin, a familiar face to viewers of the BBC’s Springwatch and Animal Park, is a passionate and eloquent champion of wildlife and one of Britain’s foremost young naturalists. Having grown up in and around the Isle of Wight Zoo, and travelled the world on assignment with step-dad and now...
My invisible friend

My invisible friend

At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ. It was a Saturday (of course). Some even...
Anita and happiness

Anita and happiness

Pablo detested Anita because he couldn’t prove what he’d suspected ever since they’d met: that she was an alien. He hated her name because it wasn’t Ana, plain and simple, Ana with real problems like cellulitis, unpaid bills or anxiety brought on by the knowledge that human beings are a...
Diary of a career

Diary of a career

When I was a young woman – young enough to think the menopause was a punctuation mark – I had the most extraordinary stroke of luck with my writing. I submitted an unsolicited article to The Sunday Times Magazine for the A Life In The Day page. That page was...
Claire Fuller: Polpo fiction

Claire Fuller: Polpo fiction

Claire Fuller’s latest novel The Memory of Animals imagines a near-future London paralysed by a devastating pandemic that has wiped out much of the world’s population. The narrator Neffy, a marine biologist with an obsessive interest in cephalopods, is among a band of young, healthy volunteers in a vaccine trial....
Orlando Ortega-Medina: Love without borders

Orlando Ortega-Medina: Love without borders

Orlando Ortega-Medina’s riveting novel The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants wears its politics on its sleeve. Beyond the inclusion of the perennially hot-button word Immigrants in its title, one needs only to peel back the front cover and read the dedication to find the first direct iteration of its author’s message:...
Kate Simants: Extreme reality

Kate Simants: Extreme reality

Reality TV is dead! Long live reality TV! And so it goes. Just when we think audiences have had enough, and production companies are scraping the barrel for ideas, along comes another surprise that grips the nation. This winter, it was The Traitors that got the whole nation talking – and not...
Lore Segal: A life in stories

Lore Segal: A life in stories

Lore Segal published her first Ladies’ Lunch story, ‘The Arbus Factor’ in The New Yorker in 2007, and the most recent, ‘Soft Sculpture’, in summer 2022. For her extraordinary new collection, published to coincide with her 95th birthday on 8 March 2023, she brings three new stories together into a sequence with earlier stories...
Latest entries
from A Change in the Air

from A Change in the Air

In Jane Clarke’s third poetry collection A Change in the Air, voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences, these intimate poems accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love...
Subverting the idea of The One That Got Away

Subverting the idea of The One That Got Away

Of all the great romance tropes – friends to lovers, forbidden romances and love triangles – there’s one that I’ve never been able to resist. From Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth in Persuasion to Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, the idea of The One That Got Away has always pulled at...
Out there and inside our heads

Out there and inside our heads

Truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to cults. They are fertile ground for endless documentaries, movies, TV shows, books, so much so that there seems to be a new Netflix show about one every month. But why? Our fascination with cults comes from the same place as our fascination with serial killers and...
Deliberate disorder and mixing it up

Deliberate disorder and mixing it up

Matt Lloyd-Rose’s timely and penetrating account of a year spent as a special constable Into the Night is as eye-opening as it is fascinating. Patrolling the streets of an area of South London, Matt spends his Friday nights with the Met Police witnessing the best and the worst of law enforcement and of society. He...
Familiar things

Familiar things

Aasmah Mir’s candid and eloquent memoir A Pebble in the Throat tells of her childhood in 1970s Glasgow, and traces in parallel the story of her mother Almas’ own life as a young woman in Pakistan in the 1950s before uprooting to Scotland. A love letter to Scotland, to heritage and to family, it doesn’t...
Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious

Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious

Nikhil Parmar’s acclaimed debut play Invisible returns to London’s Bush Theatre for a limited run before transferring to New York as part of the 2023 Brits Off Broadway festival. The provocative one-man show is a darkly comic tour-de-force in which an underemployed actor (and overemployed dealer) takes drastic steps to get noticed. I fire off...
Grief is the word

Grief is the word

Losing your mother and then a best friend to cancer within a short timeframe does strange things to you. Like motivate you to finally get round to writing the novel you’ve always wanted to write because – cliché alert – Life Is Short. So my debut novel Tell Me How This Ends was born of...
Veiled mysteries in an unsafe haven

Veiled mysteries in an unsafe haven

Natasha Calder’s solo debut novel Whether Violent or Natural imagines a near-future world where antibiotics have failed, wiping out most human life on earth. It follows the fortunes of mismatched couple Kit and Crevan, eking out a meagre existence on an isolated island, whose daily routines and darkest secrets are upended by a new arrival....
Special treatment for selected favourites

Special treatment for selected favourites

Michael Bond’s Fans is a fascinating exploration of what it is to be a fan, be it of a pop group, a celebrity or a football team. In each chapter the author delves into the psychological mindset of fandom to examine intrinsic truths about being human. Most of us have been a fan of something,...
Piled high in random places

Piled high in random places

Weak Teeth is a strong debut by Edinburgh author Lynsey May. Set in the Scottish capital, we follow Ellis as her life implodes. Her ten-year relationship has ended, her mother has started one with a much younger man, her job is insecure and her teeth are sore and in a mess. As she tries to...
Reading for joy

Reading for joy

Readers can hold complex thoughts, contradictions and moral oppositions in their minds, quite comfortably. It’s one of the skills that we learn from words on a page. You can root for Emma Bovary while at the same time seeing that she is selfish and unkind. And you probably shouted ‘no!’ at the novel in your...
The Book of Derek Parfit

The Book of Derek Parfit

Walk around Oxford on any reasonably warm and relatively sunny day and, as you inevitably reach the Radcliffe Camera, you will invariably witness a perennial phenomenon: along a high, practically unclimbable and unassailable, Headington-stone-yellow and castle-worthy wall, there will be an impressive line-up of young people sitting down restfully, or leaning languidly against that Corallian...