To begin with, the legend goes something like this: a nation born from a shipful of convicts. A gaggle of criminals sentenced to transportation who washed up onshore, knowing neither how nor why, who settled largely hostile territories and wound up staying, all while disregarding the indigenous peoples there already. A bit vague as stories...
My novel Winter describes a domestic crisis in the life of Thomas Hardy. Hardy is among the greatest of English writers, famous not only for novels like Far From The Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles but also for many beautiful and haunting poems. He was a fascinating and complex man, full of paradoxes....
In the course of a life everything is forgotten. I’m certain (though completely unconcerned) that the suicide which took place last Tuesday the fourth of February at 10:23 pm on platform two of Charlottenplatz station in the Stuttgart metro was only investigated for a couple of days: one more number for the statistics and the...
“O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that.” King Lear As the dust settles on Nathan Filer’s Costa Book Awards win for The Shock of the Fall (The Borough Press), a frank account of schizophrenia and grief from a man who has worked as a mental health nurse, there are...
Elisabeth Russell Taylor’s latest story collection Belated examines unspoken yearnings within couples, the secret lives of the solitary and the menace that lurks in everyday exchanges, brilliantly capturing unnerving cruelties, compromises and contradictions in daily life. She shares her reading and writing routines and love of Proust. Where are you now? In my study Where...
When I was twelve, I killed a boy. We were on the fifth floor and messing around on the benches by the window. It could have been me that fell, just one of those things. It was ruled an accident, no charges were brought, but the Fates had a punishment for me. I grew up...
Fay Weldon was born in 1931 and published her first novel The Fat Woman’s Joke in 1967. She has since written over thirty novels, the autobiography Auto da Fay (2002), numerous TV dramas, several radio plays, five full-length stage plays (plus a few short ones), five collections of short stories and innumerable articles. She lives...
Pamela Erens’ new novel The Virgins is an unflinchingly unsettling fresh take on the traditions of the boarding-school novel, in which a repentant narrator looks back on his past actions as a titillated but embittered bystander observing and provoking the crumbling relationship of a co-ed academy’s golden couple. Where are you now? Sitting at my...
In collecting material for No Man’s Land, my first priority was to feature writing from as many of the countries that took part in World War One as possible. This not from some desire to be exhaustive but because I wanted to convey that the war truly was a world war – so there are...
Graeme Simsion’s debut novel The Rosie Project tells the story of Don Tillman, a genetics professor with undiagnosed Asperger’s, and his awkward attempts to find love via a highly personalised psychometric questionnaire. Mark Reynolds fires off some questions about his mid-life reinvention as an internationally bestselling novelist, a transition that began when he sold his...
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...
