Liminal spaces and impossible things
I’ve been obsessed with and seduced by the notion of liminal space since childhood. It began with The Chronicles of Narnia. As an eight-year-old I devoured The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and, long after the story started to fade the obsession with wardrobes remained. My paternal grandmother lived in a large, spooky Victorian...
Subverting the idea of The One That Got Away
Of all the great romance tropes – friends to lovers, forbidden romances and love triangles – there’s one that I’ve never been able to resist. From Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth in Persuasion to Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, the idea of The One That Got Away has always pulled at...
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...
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...
Deepa Anappara: Other realities
Deepa Anappara’s debut novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is an exuberant and captivating child’s-eye depiction of hand-to-mouth living in a sprawling, determinedly self-sustaining slum in an unnamed Indian city. Nine-year-old narrator Jai is a fan of reality cop shows beamed into his family’s one-room shack in a crowded basti surrounded by the high-rise...
A lie is saved by a lie
Once upon a time Don Quixote – that very well-known knight of the doleful countenance, the noblest of all the knights the world has ever seen, the simplest in soul and one of the greatest in heart – while wandering with his faithful attendant, Sancho, in search of adventure, was suddenly struck by a puzzle...
Testing a fantasy
We all have that magic place — the place where we get to be the we that we don’t at home, the place where we should have been born, or moved by our parents if only they had the right judgement. For my mother, that place is London. My best explanation is that, as a...
Different incredible things
The award-winning SF/Fantasy writer gives us a rundown of her current and preferred reading. What’s on your bedside table or e-reader? I’m reading Karl Schroeder’s Lockstep, a fascinating new science-fiction novel that takes the old idea of cold sleep and does something completely different with it – Schroeder uses it to show societies vast distances...
