![It started with a chair It started with a chair](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/afterwards-feature.jpg)
It started with a chair
I’d been swimming in the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath and was walking home along the lane, stomping colour back into my toes, when I bumped into a lifeguard friend who I hadn’t seen for a few weeks. When she isn’t at the pond, she’s usually making giant sculptures, weaving willow into stunning shapes. But...
![Christina Patterson: Five lives Christina Patterson: Five lives](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/christina-slider-290x290.jpg)
Christina Patterson: Five lives
When her brother Tom died suddenly at the age of 57, it fell to Christina Patterson, as the last surviving member of the immediate family, to clear out his house. She diligently sorted through the papers Tom had gathered, including all manner of diaries, letters and photographs left by their parents and older sister Caroline....
![Precious weirdness Precious weirdness](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/i-love-you-but-feature.jpg)
Precious weirdness
Claire Vaye Watkins’ I Love You, But I’ve Chosen Darkness, is an immersive, transgressive and darkly funny work of autofiction. Its narrator, a writer named Claire Vaye Watkins, leaves her husband and newborn baby daughter to go on a book tour, which transforms into a wild romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood,...
![Grandmother and get me out of here Grandmother and get me out of here](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/where-you-come-from-feature.jpg)
Grandmother and get me out of here
She wakes up. Where is she? The sheets feel damp. Wallpaper. Probably a bedroom. Her feet feel hot. Slippers on. She pushes them off. Carpet. Ugly, ugly carpet, she has the same one at home but it’s much nicer. Bookshelf. Brown and white, gilded spines. Books. Tito’s biography. Then Meša Selimović, Abdulah Sidran, Saša Stanišić,...
![Saša Stanišić: Alternative visions Saša Stanišić: Alternative visions](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/sasa-slider-290x290.jpg)
Saša Stanišić: Alternative visions
Saša Stanišić was born in former Yugoslavia in 1978 to a Bosnian Muslim mother and Serbian Orthodox father. Their flight into Germany at the outbreak of the Bosnian War in 1992 was fictionalised in his debut novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2006; Grove Atlantic/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008; Pushkin Press, 2015, translated...
![Elif Shafak: Time to reconnect Elif Shafak: Time to reconnect](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Elif_Shafak_slider-290x290.jpg)
Elif Shafak: Time to reconnect
Elif Shafak’s richly evocative, elegantly crafted novel The Island of Missing Trees transports readers between 1970s Cyprus and 21st–century London in a cross-generational saga of passion, trauma, memory and renewal. Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne fall in love as teenagers in the divided city of Nicosia in 1974, meeting undercover in the back...
![Ten things about writing Ten things about writing](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Black_Water_Sister_feature.jpg)
Ten things about writing
Any writer is prey to the temptation to hand out writing advice at the least provocation, but I try to refrain most of the time. There is sufficient writing and publishing advice on the internet to equal even the cat photos and pornography. But here are ten things I believe about writing: things I tell...
![Larkin, Sebald and the backs of envelopes Larkin, Sebald and the backs of envelopes](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/The_High_House_feature.jpg)
Larkin, Sebald and the backs of envelopes
Jessie Greengrass burst onto the literary scene in 2016 with her prize-winning story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, and her debut novel Sight (2018) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Her second novel The High House is a stunning investigation of the extraordinary and...
![Lisa Harding: Lost lives found Lisa Harding: Lost lives found](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Lisa_Harding_slider-290x290.jpg)
Lisa Harding: Lost lives found
Sonya, Tommy, Herbie and Marmie. These four characters have embedded themselves into my psyche. The last time I cared so deeply about the fate of fictional creations was with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Where Yanagihara’s doorstopper spanned decades in the lives of four men, Lisa Harding’s blisteringly brilliant novel Bright Burning Things takes place within...