Writing in lockdown, or Cassandra redux
Or should that be NOT writing, or at least, not writing a great detail. Last year’s tally included two short stories and a fair amount of work on a novel, including a lot of research and a synopis. However to date I have only written about 5,000 words of that novel. Not a lot to […]
Sue Hepworth is my guest
It’s a while since I had a guest on the blog and it’s lovely to be joined today by my friend, Sue Hepworth. Sue’s new book EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW YOU was published in May. It’s full of acutely observed detail, thoughtful, touching, funny and poignant. It’s been described by one reader on Amazon as “Celebrating friendship, nature, […]
Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse: funny AND scary
Mark Easterbrook goes to see his writer friend, Mrs Oliver, to ask her to open a church fête. Mrs Oliver “in a state apparently bordering on insanity, was prowling around the room, muttering to herself . . . ‘But why,’ demanded Mrs Oliver of the universe, ‘why doesn’t the idiot say at once that he saw the […]
Cookbooks
The point where comfort eating and comfort reading meet. A week or two ago I threw a big party for a special family birthday and did lunch for over thirty people. There was much list-making and anxious scanning of cookery books beforehand. This set me thinking about cookery books as a branch of literature. My […]
Disposing of a library
My mother loved classic crime fiction, especially by American writers: John MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, and less well known, the novels of Elizabeth Linington. Linington wrote a truly stupendous number of books, under a variety of names: Anne Blaisdell, Dell Shannon, Lesley Egan. They are all set in Los Angeles, mostly in the sixties and […]