Larkin, Sebald and the backs of envelopes
Jessie Greengrass burst onto the literary scene in 2016 with her prize-winning story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, and her debut novel Sight (2018) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Her second novel The High House is a stunning investigation of the extraordinary and...
from Museum of Ice Cream
Jenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream is part simulation, part internal monologue, part attempt to reach out. An uncanny examination of objects, scenes and flavours, these poems explore how food can connect and divide, can feel isolating and terrifying; also touching on television, childhood films and social media accounts, the collection investigates how to reveal...
from A God at the Door
Tishani Doshi’s latest poetry collection A God at the Door spans time and space, drawing on the minutiae of nature and humanity to elevate the marginalised. Taken together, playfully eclectic in form and metre, the poems traverse history, from the cosmic to the quotidian, taking inspiration from the world at large to bestow power on...
Lost souls
Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Sleeping Beauties (Picador) is utterly fascinating. It reminds us that the brain is a wonderful and powerful thing and we have a long way to go before understanding it fully. Suzanne, a consultant in neurology, delves into cases that doctors and scientists have struggled to explain. Why are refugee children in Sweden...
Liminal inspiration for Unsettled Ground
A bookseller who was interviewing me for an event once commented that the one thing that he could see which linked all my novels was that the main characters live in buildings which shouldn’t really be habitable. Unsettled Ground, my fourth novel, is no exception. I have always been fascinated by buildings that humans once...
Karla Neblett: Angry love
Karla Neblett’s hugely impressive debut novel King of Rabbits is a vividly realised story about a resourceful, sensitive and imaginative boy from a mixed-race, blended family on a Somerset council estate. Kai’s mum is transitioning from heavy drinking to addiction to crack cocaine, which she is led into by his father, who feeds his own...
My struggles with cultural appropriation
My debut novel Common Ground tells the story of a friendship between two boys from very different backgrounds. Stan is a child of suburbia, struggling with bullies as the new scholarship kid at a private school. Charlie is Romany, and lives on the Traveller site on the outskirts of town. My aim for Common Ground was...
Emma Stonex: Illuminating the dark
In 1900, three lighthouse keepers on a Hebridean island disappeared without a trace. The theories surrounding the bizarre and enduring mystery inspired Emma Stonex to reimagine their story with a fictional spin. The Lamplighters is a story of three lighthousemen and the women in their lives, told from the differing perspectives of each character. Arthur,...
Settlers and shenanigans
The nineteenth century was the century of cities. Across the planet, their number and size mushroomed in the biggest urban expansion in history. London’s population grew between 1800 and 1900 from one million to seven million, making it far and away the largest city in the world. Even so, it was in the USA where...
Thrills and chills at the summit
Sarah Pearse’s debut novel The Sanatorium, a Reese’s Book Club pick and an instant Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, is a gripping contemporary gothic thriller about a serial killer on the loose in the Swiss Alps. Detective Sergeant Elin Warner has taken time away from her job after a traumatic case has left...
The women who save you
The success of a journey depends on your fellow travellers. The poems in Night Feeds and Morning Songs remind me that we are not alone. Women walked and will walk this way, with their babies cocooned in their buggies or bound to their chests, hundreds of years ago, and yesterday, and tomorrow. They have wiped...
Starting over
Kololo Hill by Neema Shah (Picador, 18 February) starts with Idi Amin’s declaration that all Asians must leave Uganda within 90 days. What follows is one family’s fear, sadness and the uprooting of their whole life. Jaya and Motiband moved to Uganda from India and have built up a successful life and business along with...
