Terra Australis
To begin with, the legend goes something like this: a nation born from a shipful of convicts. A gaggle of criminals sentenced to transportation who washed up onshore, knowing neither how nor why, who settled largely hostile territories and wound up staying, all while disregarding the indigenous peoples there already. A bit vague as stories...
The pointless leopard
The idea for The Pointless Leopard first came on a rainy weekend, as we were debating whether to set off to the countryside with the kids. A friend said not to worry as “all children love it in the country”, which immediately made me think: says who? I’m a city kid myself, and I know...
Coconuts and random acts
Albert Alla’s debut novel Black Chalk is an unsettling exploration of passion and modern morality in which the sole witness and survivor of a school shooting in the Oxfordshire countryside returns to the scene of the devastation after eight meandering years searching for meaning and reconciliation in big cities and on small islands. He was...
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...
Frédéric Beigbeder: A life in fiction
Frédéric Beigbeder’s fictionalised biography A French Novel is a meditation on family, memory, the writing process and criminal justice. Sparked by his arrest and confinement in 2008 for snorting cocaine from a car bonnet outside a Paris nightclub, it’s an engaging reflection on an advantaged but fragmented life on the Basque coast and in the...
