This dog’s life
It happened like this: after a walk in the park, Karl and I saw a young woman sitting in a car talking to a dog. Even from a distance, through the hard glass of the windshield, we could tell this was an exceptional animal. Karl, never shy, tapped on the window to ask her what...
A little bird…
At the height of his powers, Chairman Mao launched a war on sparrows. On a mission to turbocharge China’s productivity, the Communist leader decided that the birds were eating too much grain. One winter day in 1958, he mobilised the population of China to kill them off. The campaign was ruthlessly coordinated. At dawn on...
Harness the magic
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...
Living dangerously
Adriana Lisboa’s latest novel Crow Blue, her first to be published in the UK, is a lyrical and passionate account of a young girl on a roadtrip from Rio de Janeiro to Colorado in search of family ties. We catch up with her as the spirit of Carnaval sweeps the sleepy Suffolk coast. Author portrait...
Child narrators in adult fiction
Claire King’s haunting debut The Night Rainbow is a novel about innocence and experience, grief and compassion and the dangers of an overactive imagination, told from the viewpoint of five-year-old Pea, whose mother is wracked by grief over the recent death of her husband, Pea’s father. She picks out her favourite books for grown-ups with...
