"As writers we have a responsibility, sometimes, to make the future seem real.” John Ironmonger
Welcome to the Green Zone

Welcome to the Green Zone

IT’S NOT LIKE I WAS EXPECTING STALINGRAD, but Baghdad took the piss. Arriving for the first time, tucked into a UN car, I watched as the city lights refracted through the bulletproof glass. Floodlights hovered over a pickup football game, square lamps uplit the National Museum, fairy lights dripped down...
She-devils and evil monsters

She-devils and evil monsters

IT IS TEMPTING, WHEN READING cases of historical murder, to find comfort in the knowledge that there lies a distance of hundreds of years between us and those dreadful events. We may look upon the laws and attitudes of the early moderns as relics of a bygone age, and perhaps...
Under the circumstances

Under the circumstances

SWEET AIR, DIVINE LIGHT! How long have we waited for this happy sight? This ancient city, its sun-baked streets, the Acropolis in the distance, raging with light. We are here, so it begins. The first night. Everybody orders wine. It comes in little jugs called carafes. Red or white, it...
The causes of a life: Mary Shelley in Bath

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...
Climate change: truth and fiction

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...
Friends and traitors

Friends and traitors

IMAGINE A GROUP OF BEST FRIENDS from university, now in their early forties, reuniting for a weekend to celebrate their enduring friendship. But this isn’t just any reunion – they’re about to open predictions they made about each other twenty years ago. This is the intriguing premise of Holly Watt’s...
Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

THE WAY PEOPLE TALK ABOUT short stories often inclines to silversmithing analogies: burnished, finely wrought, beautifully crafted. That, or Fabergé eggs. And we say short story collection rather than group. Collection suggests careful selection from an array of available possibilities, white daisies on a vast lawn. In the afterword of...
Latest entries
Yaddo, Yaddo

Yaddo, Yaddo

Even to me, it seems unlikely. A 50-year-old woman – with no writing history, no MFA, no closet of stories, no folder of poems – pens a novel that becomes a lead title for Simon & Schuster. I’ve been over it a few times in my head – the parts that were amazing, the parts...
Ignore silly rules

Ignore silly rules

Jill Dawson’s novels include Fred and Edie, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize, Watch Me Disappear, longlisted for the Orange Prize, The Great Lover, a Richard and Judy Summer Read, and The Tell-Tale Heart, about a recovering heart transplant patient transformed in unexpected ways. In addition she has edited...
Inside the marvellous city

Inside the marvellous city

Relationships of all kinds – intimate, casual, professional – are the subject here, the Rio de Janeiro way, meaning you and whoever or whatever you are dealing with also witness history in the making, the city’s singular curvaceous geography that can and does shape lives, the cross-cultural fun of flirting with traditions that don’t belong...
Not Etgar Keret

Not Etgar Keret

“We laughed so much we cried,” they said. The funniest guy ever, they said. You missed a great film, and watching it on DVD will only add to your misery. You missed the chance of a lifetime to visually assess his wife, to admire him, her, him, even from a distance. You could have felt...
Lawyers that thrill

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...
Unmentioned in dispatches

Unmentioned in dispatches

Some of them never come home to fanfares, they dump their kitbags down at the door, kiss their wives and let their children wrestle them down to the kitchen floor, switch the telly on, pour out a whiskey, search for the local football score. Some of them skip the quayside welcome, dodge the bunting and...
Akhil Sharma: Let it bleed

Akhil Sharma: Let it bleed

Akhil Sharma’s long-awaited second novel Family Life tells the story of an Indian immigrant family’s arrival in America – a mother, father and two sons: 8-year-old Ajay and the older Birju – and the terrible tragedy that befalls them when Birju hits his head on the bottom of a swimming pool, where he lies unconscious...
A passage to Forster

A passage to Forster

In contrast to his earlier novels, which he produced in a flurry between 1905 and 1910, E.M. Forster took eleven years to write A Passage to India. For nine of those years he was blocked, unable to move forward. He started it after his first visit to India in 1913 and was only able to...
Laline Paull's hive society

Laline Paull’s hive society

The literary world is buzzing over a remarkable debut novel featuring Flora 717, an unlikely heroine born into the lowest ranks of society and breaking free to achieve like no one of her kind before her. Flora happens to be a bee. Described in some quarters as Animal Farm meets The Handmaid’s Tale, Laline Paull’s...
Mariano takes stock

Mariano takes stock

There was no doubt when the Castro & Castro Industries shares skyrocketed on the Stock Market: the family had sold control of the company to the Bank of Massachusetts. The long transaction, involving much back and forth, dashed the hopes of many investors. Rumour had it that Castro Sr. broke down in tears and actually...
One lady owner

One lady owner

A provocative and darkly comic look at marital relations, pregnancy, romance and fantasy, Penelope Skinner’s The Village Bike premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London in June 2011, and now comes to the MCC Theater in New York in a new production directed by Sam Gold and starring Greta Gerwig. Here’s how it begins…  ...
Ricky Rouse Has a Gun

Ricky Rouse Has a Gun

Rick Rouse is a US Army deserter who, after running away to China, gets a job at Fengxian Amusement Park – a family destination ‘inspired’ by Western culture, featuring Rambi (the deer with a red headband), Ratman (the caped crusader with a rat’s tail), Bumbo (small ears and a big behind) and other original characters....