We – writers, painters, sculptors, and architects, passionate devotees of Paris’ beauty which, for the moment at least, remains intact – protest with all our force, with all our indignation, in the name of that belittled French taste, of that French art and history which is currently under threat, against the construction, in the very...
In her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf explored the reasons why over the centuries women had written so little compared to men. “A woman must have money and a room of her own,” she famously pronounced, “if she is to write fiction.” In lectures originally given in 1928 at Newnham...
Our oldest memories are in stories. Our oldest memories are stories. To tell a story well is a skill: the sort that can be learned but cannot easily be taught. To be told a story is a pleasure and often a privilege. When I first picked at the thread of an idea for my debut...
The years of the military Junta cast a very long shadow in Argentina, and it’s thoroughly poignant that Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case appears in English just as the country has taken a swerve in a desperate new direction. I had never heard of Rodolfo Walsh. That was put right by Slava Faybysh when he brought...
It’s the middle of the night on a residential street. Rodolfo Walsh leaves his house and heads to a nearby bar located at the last stop of one of the city bus lines. At this hour, it’s full of regulars: cabbies and bus drivers. Since the payphone is all the way in back – right...
Kate Brody’s pacy debut thriller is a novel of our times. A missing woman, social media conspiracy theories, mental health issues, suspicion, trust, self-harm and family trauma are woven together to give us a troubling, riveting and sharply written noir set on America’s East Coast. What’s the worst that can happen when you’ve already lost...
My new psychological thriller What We Did in the Storm is set on the beautiful Isles of Scilly, pitching dark secrets and even darker deeds against stunning scenery. My lead character happens to be a barmaid working on the island, so I blithely suggested compiling a Top Ten list of fictional barmaids and landladies. Easy,...
On my desktop is an unfinished essay, a file called Greta Gerwig Won’t Win. I’ve been trying to write about Gerwig for some time, but I only started this version recently – post-Golden Globes, Oscars rumours simmering. I thought Gerwig would be nominated for directing but have no chance of winning, and I was frustrated...
I am always nervous about giving advice to aspiring novelists. My instinct is not to advise at all but to ask them, quite earnestly, if they are sure that this is what they want to do. If the answer is “I think so…” then I am tempted to steer them towards a different course. The...
Oblomov is the infamous anti-hero of the Russian writer Ivan Goncharov’s eponymous novel, published in 1859. He is best known for being an incorrigible slacker. We first encounter him wrapped in his threadbare Oriental dressing gown, refusing to get out of bed. His eyes glide wearily across the dusty objects in his derelict bedchamber. Around...
Back in the day, a ‘locked-room mystery’ meant exactly that – a murder behind not only closed, but locked doors, ostensibly impossible to commit, and thus a mechanical conundrum to unpick. Think Gaston Leroux’s Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907), or even Arthur Conan Doyle’s personal favourite of all his Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Adventure...
The glass door slid open without a hitch. That was only natural, the woman realized. They were automatic doors. She glanced around the main entrance. The building was immaculate, and looked to have been designed with considerable attention to architectural aesthetics. It reminded her of a hospital. Whiteness and curves. She wondered whether people associated...
