The short story vs. the novel
SOME WRITERS BELIEVE short stories are harder to write than novels. They may put this down to every word having to count in a short story, while in the novel the narrative is allowed to meander. Although this is true to an extent, it would be foolish to think the novel is the easy option,...
The causes of a life: Mary Shelley in Bath
STRICTLY SPEAKING, OF COURSE, it wasn’t Mary Shelley who arrived in Bath on 10 September 1816, but Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The nineteen-year-old who alighted in the city that Tuesday afternoon wasn’t yet the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the up-and-coming poet and heir to a baronetcy. Instead, she was his unmarried partner, as well as...
Truth, love and justice
A MISSING-PERSON THRILLER, a study in grief, and a courtroom drama is the easiest way to pitch Imran Mahmood’s latest novel, but it is so much more. A profoundly devastating love story emerges as parents find themselves trapped in no-man’s-land. Harry and Zara’s 18-year-old daughter has been missing for six weeks, and the police aren’t...
Climate change: truth and fiction
DAVID BOWIE HAD A remarkable talent for writing songs that could conjure up a story. It is impossible to listen to ‘Space Oddity’ without imagining Major Tom sitting in a tin can, drifting forever into space. But the Bowie song that stays with me most is ‘Five Years’. It tells a very simple story. News...
How it goes
YOU ARE SITTING on the living room floor, spooning strawberry yoghurt onto the carpet. On the carpet, an insect crawls. Your mum asks what you’re doing even though it’s obvious what you’re doing – you’re spooning strawberry yoghurt onto the carpet where an insect crawls. ‘What are you doing?’ your mum asks. Her question is...
At the funeral
‘WE THEREFORE COMMIT her body to the deep …’ Leyla Moradi started in surprise. Admittedly, she hadn’t attended many Anglican funeral services, but something about the wording seemed a bit off. ‘… to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead…’ She risked a...
Friends and traitors
IMAGINE A GROUP OF BEST FRIENDS from university, now in their early forties, reuniting for a weekend to celebrate their enduring friendship. But this isn’t just any reunion – they’re about to open predictions they made about each other twenty years ago. This is the intriguing premise of Holly Watt’s sophisticated crime thriller, a page-turner...
A perfect life
THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG with the garden. You couldn’t see it, nothing was obvious. There were no strange plants organised in certain shapes, or sinister looking growths and weeds; the paths were orderly, and the lawns. Roses grew, and pinks, in the places that had been set there for them, and in autumn, berries came...
Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn
THE WAY PEOPLE TALK ABOUT short stories often inclines to silversmithing analogies: burnished, finely wrought, beautifully crafted. That, or Fabergé eggs. And we say short story collection rather than group. Collection suggests careful selection from an array of available possibilities, white daisies on a vast lawn. In the afterword of Pretty Ugly, a collection of...
Hemingway in Havana
Ian Fleming, then Foreign Editor of The Sunday Times, sent Norman Lewis to Cuba in December 1957. Fleming had recently met Lewis, and became a fan of his writing. Having been sent a proof-copy of The Volcanoes Above Us, he wrote to Lewis’s editor, ‘Volcanoes is a wonderful book… showing a fascinating mind and really...
Black Country noir
WHEN I SIT DOWN TO WRITE, I always – and I mean always – wonder why it is that I sort of default to ‘the dark side’, and why said dark side always positions itself in my writing here, where I live – where I actually live – in the Black Country. You probably don’t...
Beauty out of grief
I began writing The White Flower after the loss of my mother. I needed to find a language for what I was feeling and to create something new – and beautiful – from the pain of her absence. It was a way of keeping her memory alive and honouring the incredible lifeforce she possessed. Around...
