Lucie Whitehouse’s latest novel Before We Met is a suspenseful story with a chilling climax about a whirlwind romance that unravels and sours as information seeps from a hidden past. Here are her ten rules for keeping the creative juices flowing. 1. Observe Train yourself really to see things. A good way to do this...
Throughout history, rivers have been important to us. They were the original roads cutting through overgrown, impassable lands. Whether navigable or dangerously fast flowing, rivers have always attracted us. Ancient civilisations settled beside them and mapped out territories using them as boundaries. Villages, towns, cities and factories have sprung up alongside them. Rivers can represent...
This is the opening of ‘The Blue Cross’, Chesterton’s first Father Brown mystery, which is unique among the stories in that it does not follow Father Brown as the central character. First published in June 1910, as ‘Valentin Follows a Curious Trail’ in Philadelphia’s Saturday Evening Post, it was retitled as ‘The Blue Cross’ for...
The novel currently on my bookrest is 748 pages long, a new record for me. As I near the end, my left wrist is acting up. I am impressed as the approximately 235,000 words accumulate in my own Word document. It’s got me thinking about the translator as a conduit, both physical and otherwise. I’m...
My name is Adeliza Golding. I am born breech and nearly kill Mother. I hear her muffled screams from within the dark warmth of her belly and kick my feet to rid her of me. I enter the world in a flood of fluid and blood, pulled by the hands of Doctor. When I cry...
It is all carefully arranged. Everything is arranged. It is arranged that men should be broken and that they should be mended. Just as you send your clothes to the laundry and mend them when they come back, so we send our men to the trenches and mend them when they come back again. You...
Andrew Davidson’s Fred’s War tells the story of the 1st Cameronians, who achieved notoriety for selling the Great War’s earliest frontline photographs, and of the author’s grandfather, one of the first medical officers to win the Military Cross. He blends Fred’s photographs and those taken by his friend Lieutenant Robert Murray and others with contemporary...
Amy Tan’s latest novel, The Valley of Amazement, is a sweeping saga spanning fifty years and two continents, at its heart examining the inner workings of Shanghai’s courtesan houses in the aftermath of the collapse of China’s imperial dynasty when the New Republic opened the gates to international trade – and universal chicanery. In territory...
Anyone who doubts a short story’s capacity to pack a powerful punch hasn’t yet read the much anthologised and analysed short story by Joyce Carol Oates ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’. Set in the mid-1960s, it is a tale that can be read as a crime story, an allegory, a snapshot of...
“What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks...
I had worried that meeting Elizabeth Jane Howard might be a slightly melancholy experience. Whilst her novels have sold in their millions and she counts Hilary Mantel among her fans, she has never quite received the acclaim she deserves. In spite of this and the fact that at 90 she is now quite frail, there...
Suzanne Berne won the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut, A Crime in the Neighborhood, the shocking story of a young boy’s molestation and murder in a Washington suburb in the 1970s. With her latest novel, The Dogs of Littlefield, she’s back in the suburbs again, this time in Massachusetts. A poised study...
