The latest addition to my website is Evie Wyld‘s After the Fire, a Still Small Voice. Evie Wyld was one of the Granta’s Best Young British Novelists and this is her first novel. (her second novel will appear next month, i.e. June 2013). This novel, according to Wyld, tells the story of traumatised men, not … Read more
We spent the last week in Devon, on the edge of Dartmoor, including walking up to Black a Tor Copse (photo left), which we had seen in the BBC’s Secret Britain. Devon has various literary connections. Two novels that featured in the Dartmoor Information Centre were Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, partially set in the Dartmoor … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rupert Thomson‘s latest novel Secrecy. Unusually for Thomson, it is set in the past – seventeenth century Florence – and involves several real people, including the main character Gaetano Zummo, who made sculptures out of wax, particularly ones showing decomposing bodies. Zummo comes to work for Grand Duke … Read more
I shall not be shedding any tears for Margaret Thatcher. I think that she did untold harm to this country and the day she was kicked out by her own party, despite the fact that she had never lost an election, was a good day. A while ago, I compiled a a list of Thatcher … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kate Atkinson‘s Life After Life. This is a wonderful novel, a sort of cross between Ken Grimwood’s Replay and the film Groundhog Day. Ursula Todd is still-born, the umbilical cord strangling her. She is immediately born again and this time the umbilical cord does not strangle her. She … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rachel Joyce‘s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. This is one of those quirky English novels about a seemingly normal and boring Englishman, who suddenly does something unexpected. In this case, Harold Fry, who is retired from working for a brewery and is living with his wife Maureen, … Read more
In last Saturday’s Guardian, Rachel Cooke had an interesting article and/interview with Adam Thorpe. I read Ulverton about a year after it first came out, when it started to get some publicity, and was very impressed with it. Firstly there are very few worthwhile novels about the English Civil War (though lots about other civil … Read more
If I had to choose the countries that produced the best novels in the 19th century, the top three countries would undoubtedly be England, Russia and France in that order. Austen, Borrow, the Brontë sisters, Butler, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Thackeray and Trollope, to name only the best, produced some of the finest novels ever written, … Read more
I have just added a list of novels featuring Englishness to my site. I have been considering this for a long time but have hesitated for a number of reasons. Firstly, it smacks of jingoism and excess nationalism, which I am not too keen on. Secondly, it all looks a bit nostalgic and hearkening back … Read more