Paula Lichtarowicz’s debut novel The First Book of Calamity Leek is an inventive, macabre and fantastical story about a young girl who compiles her own guide to life on escaping her cruel confinement in a secret garden where she and other girls have been kept brainwashed and misinformed, and where popular musicals are a sinister...
Read more and buy the book David Gilbert’s archly entertaining and insightful novel & Sons, about a once-lauded novelist reaching out to his estranged family, was published in the US to rave reviews that variously compared his storytelling, mastery of language and observational skills to Dostoyevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Proust and Nabokov. As the book...
Slowly, its vintage engine purring, the Plymouth stops at the gates of the Lund twins’ dreaded Hollywood Hills mansion. The Final Gates. The final stop on the Blood girls’ trip. Now that she’s right in front of them, Morgana can’t see anything about the gates that indicates they are the last gates she’s ever going...
One of the old roads leaving a well-known county town in the west of England climbs a long slope and finally reaches a kind of open plain, a windy spot from which a wide prospect of the countryside is available. Fields of corn occupy the near and middle distance, while the rolling downs further off...
The idea for The Pointless Leopard first came on a rainy weekend, as we were debating whether to set off to the countryside with the kids. A friend said not to worry as “all children love it in the country”, which immediately made me think: says who? I’m a city kid myself, and I know...
“Where did you get that?” Billy shrugs. “Shop.” He continues to suck on a rainbow lollipop, exposing new bizarrely coloured layers with each slurp – a Russian doll of illicit sugar. Laura has somehow failed to notice that her son departed for his weekend outdoor time with a low-sugar, high-fibre apple and returned with a...
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...
