We and our cats
I am writing this now in my home in rural Ibaraki, just north of Tokyo, which I share with my husband and our three cats. We bought this old house ten years ago, did a major renovation on it, and moved in just over eight years ago. As we were moving in, one of our...
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...
Connecting with lost souls
My third novel Hazardous Spirits is set in Edinburgh in 1923. The story follows Evelyn Hazard, whose husband Robert wakes up one day and announces that he can speak to the spirits of the dead. Like many strange tales, the idea for this novel originated during an unusual blind date. I arrived late to the...
Here or there
Dan proposed to me the evening of his mother’s funeral. After saying goodbye to the last of our friends at the end of the wake, he grabbed a half-consumed bottle of wine and led me to the back of his parents’ yard, down by the compost bin and dying vegetable garden, where we squatted beside...
Making sense of the past and present
Anjum Hasan’s latest novel History’s Angel is an intimate portrait of contemporary Delhi seen through the eyes of a timid schoolteacher who is struggling to square his love of history with the questionable values, indifference and rising hostility that surround him as a Muslim in Narendra Modi’s India. She tells us about her motivations and...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
I recently found myself on the horror side of BookTok, scrolling through video after video recommending “books that will rattle me to my core” and “scary fall reads” when something intrigued me enough to stop scrolling. A young man stared into the camera, carefully holding a book so that the viewer couldn’t immediately see the...
The man who spoke with butterflies
In the end, what does it matter who developed the photo? Why am I sifting through a time so far away, a moment that has already frozen and petrified, like a snail fossil in a stone among the billions of other stones that line the shore? I’d like to say a word in my defence,...
Something to dream about
The library at the end of the passageway is larger than I expected, with rows and rows of bookshelves lining the walls and central area. Apart from a girl in a navy-blue apron behind the counter, who is scanning barcodes on books, there is nobody else in there as far as I can tell. I...
Embracing the unknown
Gina Chung’s near-future debut novel Sea Change is narrated by 30-year-old Korean American aquarium worker Ro, whose menial job is uplifted by taking care of a magnificent, genetically mutated giant octopus called Dolores. Dolores was brought to the aquarium by Ro’s father two decades earlier, lifted from a highly polluted stretch of northern ocean known...
Getting on: Later-life female friendship
‘The first time I saw you, do you know what I thought?’ Janet steels herself. ‘I thought, that woman looks like she ploughs her own furrow. You stood out from everyone else – no one else in our street strides around with their pockets clanking with tools. I couldn’t take my eyes off you! I...
A time to write
It’s difficult to cast my mind back to the early days of the pandemic, even though it wasn’t so long ago. Maybe because it’s a stressful time that most of us would rather forget, or maybe since many of our deeply rooted memories have to do with human interaction, it is difficult to understand, to...
Weird and wonderful book dedications
Most authors dedicate their beloved books to their family. To partners. To children. To parents. But not all authors. I dedicated my first novel Virgin to anyone who knew the pain of a Brazilian wax. My second – Not That Easy – was for anyone who ever felt like their life was a mess. My...
