In Manchuria, now north-east China, a large she-wolf and a girl just four years old squatted in a sorghum field. The wolf was sturdily built, but she was old and patches of her fur had fallen out and most of her teeth were missing. The little girl wore a white shirt with red baggy pantaloons,...
Chair of judges Bill Bryson has announced the shortlist for the Wellcome Book Prize, one of the quirkiest – and richest – literary awards in the UK. Open to both fiction and non-fiction, the prize was set up in 2009 to celebrate books that engage with any aspect of medicine, health or illness. Worth £30,000,...
One of Denmark’s most inventive and acclaimed contemporary writers, Dorthe Nors’ story collection Karate Chop and her novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space are now published together in a special back-to-back edition. Her spare, poetic, ominously disturbing stories present disconnected lives at critical moments of change – while the novella is a playful experiment in finding mood and...
When she goes to bed, which is earlier and earlier now, he stays up at the computer. He checks the weather, reads an online tabloid, and plays backgammon with someone who says he’s a retiree. Who wins is an open issue, and shortly after midnight the retiree logs off. So then he surfs around, visiting...
These books have nothing and everything in common. They come from different times, different genders. Their stories are as diverse as the way they are told. Some were written for adults, some for young people. The windows they provide into adolescence are varied, each refracting something distinct. But then: there are the first loves, the...
Lissa Evans’ riotously comic Crooked Heart tells the story of bright ten-year-old orphan Noel Bostock, who is evacuated to St Albans from London to escape the Blitz. He is taken under the wing of sharp, unscrupulous Vera Sedge who, as soon as she claps eyes on Noel, hits on a flagrant new way to make...
We catch up with the prolific and acclaimed Irish author on the launch of the paperback of Nora Webster, his part-autobiographical novel about grieving and renewal. The same week saw the Sundance premiere of John Cowley and Nick Hornby’s adaptation of his earlier novel Brooklyn. Brooklyn and Nora Webster both deal with characters from Enniscorthy, the town...
I was a slow learner; my primary school English teacher told me so and I almost believed her. She put me in remedial classes. I was taken off to another room away from the other children; but the support assistant let me sit and write stories, (I still have one of them, ‘Mrs Brambles’). After...
“Every crook in Greece is in the government,” the villager told the CBS correspondent. At first this declaration sounded extreme, but the man spoke with no emotion at all, a fact that impressed the foreigner. Barefoot, filthy, dressed in rags. Scratches on his ankles, dried blood, bruises everywhere. A man who took life as it...
The Girl in the Red Coat begins with that premise – a missing child – that strikes fear in the hearts of any parent. It’s not anything I particularly intended to write about at all. But once the story came to me I found it difficult to stop. The idea first came to me as...
I was strong and he was not, so it was me who went to war to defend the republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into Ohio. Twenty dollars, two salt-pork sandwiches, and I took beef jerky, biscuits, six old apples, fresh underthings, and a blanket too. There was heat in the air...
The first time I tried to install the star nut, I had no soft blocks to cushion the dropouts and no vice to steady the fork, so I rigged up the front end and straddled the wheel, squeezing with my knees. I placed the nut in the mouth of the steering tube and covered it...
