The plane was held up in Lomé. Mona didn’t bother leaving the house. She checked that Miguel was sleeping. He was: the slow fan wheeled above him, his hand clenched a shroud of mosquito netting which she loosened and let drop. She went out to smoke on the terrace, the city air a giant belch...
With the arrival of the Talkies, numerous possibilities opened up for the film industry. The late thirties were, Wodehouse recalls, “an era when only a man of exceptional ability and determination could keep from getting signed up by a studio in some capacity or other”.1 As an Englishman in Beverly Hills, Wodehouse was not really...
Briony Hatch hates reality. She prefers the fantasy world of her favourite novels: The Starling Black Adventures, in which ghosts are real and you can cast magic spells to defeat your enemies. In her real life, Briony’s parents are getting divorced and her friends are preoccupied by losing weight and shagging boys. Briony has tried...
As Foster moved unconsciously across the room, bent towards the bookcase and stood leaning forward a little, choosing now one book, now another with his eye, his host, seeing the muscles of the back of his thin, scraggy neck stand out above his low flannel collar, thought of the ease with which he could squeeze...
In the work of Ioanna Karystiani, a meeting between worlds takes place. Thought and matter come clashingly together. The old and the new accuse and forego one another. Memory and facelessness stare haughtily at each other. Meaning and incomprehensibility stagger us with their urgency and despair. Dignity tries to speak. It stutters, fumbles for the...
Saturday 13 October 1660 To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently...
Hannah Kent’s dark and impressive debut novel Burial Rites picks at the bones of a 200-year-old Icelandic story of murder, mistrust and local intrigue. Determined to become a writer since long before she left high school, her journey to success might easily have taken a different turn, she tells Mark Reynolds. Although Iceland – and...
At the Hostal Punta Marina, in Tossa de Mar, I met a disturbing Japanese man who didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the idea I’d formed of the Japanese. At suppertime he took a seat at my table after asking my permission without much ceremony. I was struck that he didn’t have slanted eyes or...
In 1920, at the age of just twenty-seven, a young Italian named Dino Segre, writing under the pen name Pitigrilli, achieved overnight success and notoriety with a book of short stories called Luxurious Breasts, followed the next year by the novel Cocaine, and a second book of stories entitled The Chastity Belt. Although he was...
When I wrote my book The Twins, I was inspired by my own identical twin daughters, and the contradictions and complexities inside their intense and exclusive pairing. Wondering if the bonds between twins could ever be broken, I set out to explore the fictional possibilities inside that question, creating a premise where tragedy and guilt...
There was a bear. Life in the woods, where he lived with the other bears, had begun to sicken him. The bear would go to the edge of the forest and watch the people who lived in the small town below. The stature of the buildings, the play of light on glass, the swish of...
Matthew Crow was born in 1987 and raised in Newcastle. He has worked as a freelance journalist on publications including the Independent on Sunday and the Observer and has written two adult novels of which My Dearest Jonah was nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize. His latest book is the Young Adult novel In Bloom....
