Sometime in the late 1990s, I read Herman Hesse’s 1927 novel Steppenwolf and was awed by a passage that prophesied the great destruction coming to Europe. Harry Haller, that book’s …
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In Tim Krabbé novel’s The Vanishing, Rex cannot move on after his partner, Saskia, disappears. He plays a mental game. What if he were offered two choices? One: he finds …
For a long time, the Dubray bookshop in Grafton Street, Dublin kept a copy of The Book of Lost Things on its shelf of booksellers’ recommendations, along with a handwritten …
For more than three decades I’ve been obsessed with Anne Lister, the gender-nonconforming Yorkshire landowner and entrepreneur who kept an extraordinarily interesting four-million-word diary with the private bits veiled in …
I have been telling myself, and anyone who asks, that I am writing The Light Thieves trilogy for my two girls, Jo and Bobbie. I’ve even dedicated the series to …
The Well of Saint Nobody is a haunting fairytale-like story of love, secrets and second chances, from award-winning film director and author Neil Jordan. I was haunted by two movies. …
My first inklings of the story which would become Ordinary Human Failings were from a non-fiction book by the great Scottish writer Gordon Burn. In his definitive account of Peter …
In April 2020, a few months after the publication of my novel Dear Edward, I started a new book. Part of the reason I write is to make sense of …
I was settling down to write my fifth novel – what would become The Lodgers – just as Russia was invading Ukraine. What was happening on the other side of …
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