Anna Whitwham: Boxing clever
I’m late to meet Anna Whitwham, and as I rush into the appointed café, I spy a familiar-looking blonde woman tapping away at a laptop. We stare at each other. This must be Anna, I think. It’s actually Rachel Johnson who once wrote a book called Notting Hell, and Anna Whitwham is sat quietly behind...
Rebecca Mead’s book for life
Just like Rebecca Mead, I too first read George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a seventeen-year-old impatiently waiting for my life to begin in the small town in which I grew up. Unlike Mead, however, I struggled with the century-old study of provincial life. My resistance to the text exacerbated by the fact I was studying it...
Christos Tsiolkas: Privilege and shame
Christos Tsolkias’s follow-up to the international bestseller The Slap tells the story of a boy swimmer named Daniel Kelly who comes so close to glory then spirals into unbridled aggression and self-hatred. Where The Slap saw a single act of violence and its repercussions witnessed from eight distinct viewpoints in individual chapters, Barracuda opens with...
Deborah Levy finds her voice
Deborah Levy has been riding a wave since her novel Swimming Home was nominated for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Both the novel and her superlative collection of short stories Black Vodka were published by indie publisher And Other Stories, while bespoke house Notting Hill Editions picked up her essay on writing, memory and childhood...
The enthusiasms of Zoe Pilger
Between her day job as an art critic for the Independent, and completing her PhD on romantic love and sadomasochism in artist Sophie Calle’s work, the multi-talented Zoe Pilger has written Eat My Heart Out, a commanding post-post-feminist satire about modern romance, an anti-romance if you will. Pilger’s (anti-)heroine is 23-year-old Ann-Marie. She’s just failed...
Barbara Taylor: Out of the system
Barbara Taylor’s The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times is a refined and beautifully written scrapbook of a study of the mental health system in the UK. It’s also Taylor’s deeply personal account of her breakdown and, ultimately, after many years of work and therapeutic support, her triumph over severe emotional illness....
The author project
Graeme Simsion’s debut novel The Rosie Project tells the story of Don Tillman, a genetics professor with undiagnosed Asperger’s, and his awkward attempts to find love via a highly personalised psychometric questionnaire. Mark Reynolds fires off some questions about his mid-life reinvention as an internationally bestselling novelist, a transition that began when he sold his...
Suzanne Berne behind the picket fence
Suzanne Berne won the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut, A Crime in the Neighborhood, the shocking story of a young boy’s molestation and murder in a Washington suburb in the 1970s. With her latest novel, The Dogs of Littlefield, she’s back in the suburbs again, this time in Massachusetts. A poised study...
Sathnam Sanghera: Novelist on the corner
Marriage Material is the story of three generations of a Punjabi Sikh family, from the 1960s to the present day, set against the backdrop of their Wolverhampton corner shop. It sets the story of this one family, with its individual secrets and scandals, up against the broader political context of the period. From Conservative MP...
Ginny & Penelope Skinner channel their teens
Ginny and Penelope Skinner’s Briony Hatch is a warm and wickedly funny graphic novel about a (temporarily) displaced teen who tries to escape reality by immersing herself in fantasy fiction while her parents’ marriage crumbles and her so-called friends obsess about boys and self-image. Mark Reynolds fires off some questions about the book and the...
Hannah Kent: From Adelaide to Icelandic noir
Hannah Kent’s dark and impressive debut novel Burial Rites picks at the bones of a 200-year-old Icelandic story of murder, mistrust and local intrigue. Determined to become a writer since long before she left high school, her journey to success might easily have taken a different turn, she tells Mark Reynolds. Although Iceland – and...
Charlotte Mendelson: Invisible alien
When I arrive at the offices of Charlotte Mendelson’s publisher Pan Macmillan she is already there and is quite hard to miss, not least because she is wearing flat pointed shoes that are the exact shade of a yellow highlighter pen. People are clearly fond of her here and she’s so keen to chat to...
