The causes of a life: Mary Shelley in Bath
STRICTLY SPEAKING, OF COURSE, it wasn’t Mary Shelley who arrived in Bath on 10 September 1816, but Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The nineteen-year-old who alighted in the city that Tuesday afternoon wasn’t yet the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the up-and-coming poet and heir to a baronetcy. Instead, she was his unmarried partner, as well as...
Truth, love and justice
A MISSING-PERSON THRILLER, a study in grief, and a courtroom drama is the easiest way to pitch Imran Mahmood’s latest novel, but it is so much more. A profoundly devastating love story emerges as parents find themselves trapped in no-man’s-land. Harry and Zara’s 18-year-old daughter has been missing for six weeks, and the police aren’t...
The heron and the snake
THERE WAS ONE DAY where we took a drive in Lee’s van, piling all in the back. We were all the same knees and elbows, like one of us had six instead of only two apiece. We were close with each other then like that. Then we didn’t have anywhere to go so Lee just...
Climate change: truth and fiction
DAVID BOWIE HAD A remarkable talent for writing songs that could conjure up a story. It is impossible to listen to ‘Space Oddity’ without imagining Major Tom sitting in a tin can, drifting forever into space. But the Bowie song that stays with me most is ‘Five Years’. It tells a very simple story. News...
That first day in Central Park
SOME DAYS, YOU WANT TO TELL ME everything that you remember. You remember when we met. Tavern on the Green, July 1967. You were waitressing to pay for books at Cooper Union. I had just graduated from Wharton and was taking my father’s clients to lunch. It was my era of “at least it’ll make...
How it goes
YOU ARE SITTING on the living room floor, spooning strawberry yoghurt onto the carpet. On the carpet, an insect crawls. Your mum asks what you’re doing even though it’s obvious what you’re doing – you’re spooning strawberry yoghurt onto the carpet where an insect crawls. ‘What are you doing?’ your mum asks. Her question is...
