"Grief feels like love. Sometimes you press on that tender spot, because it’s as close as you can get to the person who is otherwise gone.” – Kate Brody
Posts tagged "Salt Publishing"
Going it alone

Going it alone

What springs to mind when you hear the term ‘single mother’? Despite the passage of time, the opening of minds and general social progression, the term still comes loaded with negative connotations. Around a quarter of UK families are headed by a lone parent, and 90% of them are women. If some headlines are to...
Lives in black and white

Lives in black and white

If we seek truths, we should look into fairy tales; at least this seems to be Meike Ziervogel’s advice, as she begins her novel with the all-familiar “Once upon a time…” It is still hard for Germany to search for truths, the many sore, dark, unspeakable looming truths behind the period of National Socialism, the...
Terrifying tales

Terrifying tales

Children are the lawless adventurers in our midst, semi-detached from adult society. Eventually – in most cases – they’ll be reined in and civilised. Until then these creatures are loose in the world – raw, unformed and vulnerable. All of which makes them an ideal focus for fiction. The books on this list are not...
Waiting for a story

Waiting for a story

In April 1999, my flatmates had scattered on extended holidays to the far reaches of the world and I stayed behind in the rancid maisonette flat we shared in a Newcastle suburb. During the day, I rattled around in my dressing gown and kept the curtains closed, resisting the temptation to go outside into what...
Marina Warner hits the high notes

Marina Warner hits the high notes

Marina Warner’s soaring new story collection Fly Away Home echoes with the author’s signature concerns about life’s mysteries, wonders and perplexities through myth, history and the present. Beginning with a tale you can read on these pages, I ask her about the gathering of these stories and their wider themes. MR: A version of the...
Sing for me

Sing for me

In those days the rumour started that there would be an inquiry. Full and frank disclosure, the government kept hinting. A tribunal of independent adjudicators and observers. Independent observers. They’d look into the events thoroughly. And into the sequence of events that led to them, into the decisions and actions that led to those particular...
All the wrong subjects

All the wrong subjects

I like to think I’m not one to hold a grudge, but listen to this: When I was at school, we had one meeting with a Careers Officer in year 10 (or, the fourth year, as we used to call it). As I remember it, she was a woman with big spectacles, a clipboard and...
Being both

Being both

I love learning and that’s why I write novels. I’m not talking about research. I’m talking about the process when I sit down to write and empty my mind of everything I’ve ever known in order to make space for stories to emerge from within me. That’s when the real learning happens. It’s at these...
Miracle at Hawk's Bay

Miracle at Hawk’s Bay

Matthew High. We knew it would be him. Even before Hannah turned him over, we just knew it. It was Annie who saw him from the road. “Look,” she said, and when she pointed at the dark shape out there in the shallow water, there was only one thought in all our heads – please...
Strays and loners

Strays and loners

The temple garden was beautiful, bright flowering trees and shrubs hidden from the noise of the traffic. We stood holding hands by a Buddhist statue while a local government official read something from a piece of paper. We promised to love one another, to live in harmony until death, caring for one another in times...
Going deeper

Going deeper

Digging a grave on a cold, rainy morning in winter certainly focuses the mind. Human beings tend to die in the winter. You learn this when you are a gravedigger and things have been picking up since the autumn. As with so many professions, there is more to do at Christmas. I was asked if...
So I'm a writer now?

So I’m a writer now?

Lots of writers seem to really hate writing. For them, sitting down in front of the computer or typewriter or notepad and forcing out their daily word count is like pulling teeth, except rather than simply pulling them out through their mouth, they’re having to pull them down, back through their gums, to be extracted...