When Helen Carr of O’Brien Press approached me to write a book in a new children’s series called Great Irish Sports Stars, I was incredibly excited. It was to be …
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… and to be entirely appropriate, Manners Maketh the Woman too! No, I am not being supercilious or patronising, but I do bemoan the death of basic manners. In everyday …
Amid a certain amount of consternation, Bernardine Evaristo shared this year’s Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood. It’s the third time in its history that two authors have shared this most …
I have a friend who is originally from the States and I recently told her that, of all the places in the USA, I’d love to visit Maine first. She …
The London Review of Books turned forty this year. For some twenty of those forty years I have been a subscriber—not just a subscriber, but the kind of fanatic who …
When I read a review of Adam Mars-Jones’s novel Pilcrow in 2008, I was determined to buy it even though it was a big, expensive hardback. When the sequel, Cedilla, …
The nice thing about working in the same bookshop for a while is that you get to know your customers, especially your regular customers. You develop a good sense of …
The first thing to note about Coventry by Rachel Cusk is that it is not a sequel to her (brilliant) trilogy of novels, Outline, Transit, and Kudos. Faber do their …
Reading an easy book is like turning on the telly, regardless of what’s on, and letting it wash over you. Not that there’s nothing wrong with that when you need …
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