An Interview With … Birte Hosken

Today I'm chatting to Birte Hosken, author of Petroc's Church and Let Wild Waves Roar about her writing processes, her ideas, and her plans for the future. Hi Birte - let's kick off with where the first ideas for a new novel come from for you? My first ideas for new stories/novels come initially from …

The Tree of Heaven – May Sinclair (British Library Women Writers)

The Tree of Heaven, by May Sinclair, tells the story of a middle-class family caught up in the tumult of the early Twentieth Century. Frances Harrison is wife to Anthony and mother to three children, the latter role being an all-consuming concern as she watches them grow. We first find her sitting ‘under the tree …

In Darkling Wood – Emma Carroll

To be honest, Carroll had me at ‘darkling’. As Alice, her teenage heroine, says, there’s something spooky about it, ‘It’s a funny word. Old-sounding.’ And then it was the marvellous cover. Fortunately for my high expectations, the rest of the book was brilliant. Alice has come to stay with her spiky and solitary grandmother at …

Catching up with … Elisabeth Hobbes

I last interviewed Elisabeth after her sixth book; she's been busy writing in the mean time and I'm chatting to her this morning about her nineth book, The Merchant's Secret. Her tenth book is due out soon - see below for further details! Hi - thanks for giving up some time to chat! I loved …

An Interview with … Rachel Fearnley

Good morning! Today I'm heading back out on the interview trail after quite a long break. Chatting to me today is Rachel Fearnley, author of Our Family and IT, a very moving novel which explores the impact illness has on a family. Rachel, thanks very much for joining me. I very much enjoyed reading your …

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

I’m divided on this one, I have to confess. He’s one of my favourite writers, I was fairly gripped by the plot… but there’s also much about this novel I didn’t like. Beginning in the 1860s, the story follows two families new to the Salinas Valley, the Trasks and the Hamiltons. The latter have been …

70 Reviews: 10. A Taste of the Unexpected – Roald Dahl (Pocket Penguins)

This is the second set of short stories I’ve read from the pocket Penguin collection in a week, and I have to confess that, self-confessed literary snob though I am, I preferred the Dahl collection to the Borges. I’d taught The Landlady a couple of times, and so the construction felt more blatant – prior …

70 Reviews: 9. The Mirror of Ink – Jorge Luis Borges (Pocket Penguins)

This is, in my opinion at least, the best way to sample a spot of Borges - his writing is so rich that you only need a small amount in one go. I’ve read The Library of Babel before, but the rest were new to me. I wasn’t massively taken with the title story, The …

70 Reviews: 8. Nothing Bad Ever Happens in Tiffany’s – Marian Keyes (Pocket Penguins)

I'm a firm believer in every book having its day. I'd started this series of reviews back in June 2018, keen to work my way through Penguin's boxed 70th Birthday collection that doubles up as a doorstop. It's a brilliant set of reads, usually from longer books, that draws upon Penguin's long and varied history …

The Mirror and The Light – Hilary Mantel

I waited a long time to witness Thomas Cromwell’s death – after all, Mantel’s trilogy concerns a period in which such deaths were public spectacles – and when it finally came to it (that is surely not a spoiler), it was heart-wrenchingly tragic. I’m still experiencing that sense of loss that follows the end of …