"To write anything worth reading you have to put everything you have into every sentence. There can be no lazy thinking, no clichés, no borrowed tropes, no third-hand experience; there can be no hiding.” Miranda Darling
Trevor Wood: A race against time and memory

Trevor Wood: A race against time and memory

With The Silent Killer, acclaimed author Trevor Wood introduces a new series of gripping Newcastle-set police procedurals. Seasoned detective DCI Jack Parker is battling early-onset Alzheimer’s as he races against time to solve a string of revenge killings – while seeking to conceal his diagnosis from both family and colleagues....
BFI London Film Festival 2024 unveils star-studded line-up

BFI London Film Festival 2024 unveils star-studded line-up

Lights, camera, action! The 68th BFI London Film Festival is set to dazzle audiences for twelve days in October. From Steve McQueen’s Blitz to French auteur-provocateur François Ozon’s latest, to animated marvel Flow, the festival promises a cinematic feast spanning genres, generations, original features and literary adaptations in a rich...
Harriet Constable: The Instrumentalist

Harriet Constable: The Instrumentalist

In 1696 a baby was posted through the wall of the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage in Venice. She was named Anna Maria della Pietà and become one of the greatest violinists of the eighteenth century. Her teacher was Antonio Vivaldi… YET THIS EXTRAORDINARY MUSICIAN remains largely unknown today. Numerous...
The Komagata Maru incident

The Komagata Maru incident

The colorful history of the Western passport does not account entirely for passportism against Third World countries. For the crucial piece of subtext missing in this history, we have to read between the lines. In the nineteenth century, the British had made it a common practice to move around indentured...
Without a trace

Without a trace

Ariel dragged himself out of bed and went to the kitchen. He wanted to sleep some more, but couldn’t. Books and newspapers were scattered everywhere in the living room. He had to tidy up. It took seven steps to get to the little kitchen. He opened the big silver refrigerator...
Susan Muaddi Darraj: Origins and uncertainties

Susan Muaddi Darraj: Origins and uncertainties

Susan Muaddi Darraj began her debut novel Behind You Is the Sea six years ago, as a series of interlinked portraits of daily life among the Palestinian diaspora in Baltimore. The stories that make up the novel are centred on three Palestinian American families who are rooted in a common...
Holding on to the plot

Holding on to the plot

“My marriage ended because I was cruel. Or because I ate in bed. Or because he liked electronic music and difficult films about men in nature. Or because I did not. Or because I was anxious, and this made me controlling. Or because red wine makes me critical. Or because...
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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 fellow Springwatch presenter Chris Packham...
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 say Ussher gave a precise...
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 mere parenthesis between two unknowns....
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...
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 read by hundreds of thousands....
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...
Trees need cuddles too

Trees need cuddles too

5pm, Monday: “The permission has come through. Can we come and do it tomorrow, first thing?” During the pandemic, I’d sit out in the shade of the 150-year-old copper beech that dominates – defines – my back garden, and feel luckier than most, for the first time in years. I’ve never been a gardener, or...
My grandmother

My grandmother

With some frequency, we hear readers ask authors how much of their novels they’ve pulled from their own lives, assuming that some if not most of the content must be autobiographical. One of the fascinating things about this memoir by Xesús Fraga is that readers ask the same thing, because it seems simply impossible that...
About my Aunt Nené

About my Aunt Nené

She spent her life clinging to the skirts of the mother who was also my mother’s mother which is to say mine and Betina’s grandmother. My grandmother’s skirts were like a priest’s cassock and her shoes were sturdy like men’s shoes while her hair was tied up in a black bun because her mother 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. At the beginning of the...
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: “To the countless multinational same-sex...