"To write anything worth reading you have to put everything you have into every sentence. There can be no lazy thinking, no clichés, no borrowed tropes, no third-hand experience; there can be no hiding.” Miranda Darling
Posts tagged "UK"
Out there and inside our heads

Out there and inside our heads

Truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to cults. They are fertile ground for endless documentaries, movies, TV shows, books, so much so that there seems to be a new Netflix show about one every month. But why? Our fascination with cults comes from the same place as our fascination with serial killers and...
Deliberate disorder and mixing it up

Deliberate disorder and mixing it up

Matt Lloyd-Rose’s timely and penetrating account of a year spent as a special constable Into the Night is as eye-opening as it is fascinating. Patrolling the streets of an area of South London, Matt spends his Friday nights with the Met Police witnessing the best and the worst of law enforcement and of society. He...
Familiar things

Familiar things

Aasmah Mir’s candid and eloquent memoir A Pebble in the Throat tells of her childhood in 1970s Glasgow, and traces in parallel the story of her mother Almas’ own life as a young woman in Pakistan in the 1950s before uprooting to Scotland. A love letter to Scotland, to heritage and to family, it doesn’t...
Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious

Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious

Nikhil Parmar’s acclaimed debut play Invisible returns to London’s Bush Theatre for a limited run before transferring to New York as part of the 2023 Brits Off Broadway festival. The provocative one-man show is a darkly comic tour-de-force in which an underemployed actor (and overemployed dealer) takes drastic steps to get noticed. I fire off...
Veiled mysteries in an unsafe haven

Veiled mysteries in an unsafe haven

Natasha Calder’s solo debut novel Whether Violent or Natural imagines a near-future world where antibiotics have failed, wiping out most human life on earth. It follows the fortunes of mismatched couple Kit and Crevan, eking out a meagre existence on an isolated island, whose daily routines and darkest secrets are upended by a new arrival....
A disunited kingdom

A disunited kingdom

Let me paint you a picture of an alternative Britain sadly not too far from our own… My debut novel Verge charts a journey – both literal and internal – of two very different young people across a Disunited Kingdom where the county borders have become hard borders with checkpoints, processing units, guards and, occasionally,...
Special treatment for selected favourites

Special treatment for selected favourites

Michael Bond’s Fans is a fascinating exploration of what it is to be a fan, be it of a pop group, a celebrity or a football team. In each chapter the author delves into the psychological mindset of fandom to examine intrinsic truths about being human. Most of us have been a fan of something,...
Megan McCubbin: Wild in heart and soul

Megan McCubbin: Wild in heart and soul

Megan McCubbin, a familiar face to viewers of the BBC’s Springwatch and Animal Park, is a passionate and eloquent champion of wildlife and one of Britain’s foremost young naturalists. Having grown up in and around the Isle of Wight Zoo, and travelled the world on assignment with step-dad and now fellow Springwatch presenter Chris Packham...
Piled high in random places

Piled high in random places

Weak Teeth is a strong debut by Edinburgh author Lynsey May. Set in the Scottish capital, we follow Ellis as her life implodes. Her ten-year relationship has ended, her mother has started one with a much younger man, her job is insecure and her teeth are sore and in a mess. As she tries to...
Diary of a career

Diary of a career

When I was a young woman – young enough to think the menopause was a punctuation mark – I had the most extraordinary stroke of luck with my writing. I submitted an unsolicited article to The Sunday Times Magazine for the A Life In The Day page. That page was read by hundreds of thousands....
Reading for joy

Reading for joy

Readers can hold complex thoughts, contradictions and moral oppositions in their minds, quite comfortably. It’s one of the skills that we learn from words on a page. You can root for Emma Bovary while at the same time seeing that she is selfish and unkind. And you probably shouted ‘no!’ at the novel in your...
Trees need cuddles too

Trees need cuddles too

5pm, Monday: “The permission has come through. Can we come and do it tomorrow, first thing?” During the pandemic, I’d sit out in the shade of the 150-year-old copper beech that dominates – defines – my back garden, and feel luckier than most, for the first time in years. I’ve never been a gardener, or...