Delving into Diary of a Murderer, one is filled with a curious sense of unease. Despite holding short stories of definite direction and plots, one wanders around inside them as if in a David Lynch movie. We have characters, progressions and plot twists, but they somehow the tone of these stories supersedes their storylines. There
About a year ago, I was at a book launch in Dublin and a card caught my eye as I was leaving. I had my newborn in the pram with me (I figured she wasn’t sleeping anyway, so she might as well come to a book launch). It was coming up to Mother’s Day, and
I first encountered Michael Nath’s work in my final year of university. A friend of mine suggested an impromptu trip to Leicester Literary Festival, and though we were both exhausted from cramming the night before, we summed up the courage to go. At a small stall, tucked away in a corner of the festival building,
Rym Kechacha worked as a professional ballet dancer with the Northern Ballet before becoming a teacher. She has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmith’s University and Dark River is her debut novel. Dark River entwines two parallel stories, both centring on a mother fighting to protect her family from the impact of
‘Consider This: Moments In My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different‘ (which from this moment on will be referred to as Consider This) is not just a book it is an investment. Chuck Palahniuk has produced a fabulous book about writing craft, which as a fan of Palahniuk I’m thrilled with, but as a
I picked up Grand Union in the hope that I would be blown away by the powerhouse that is Zadie Smith, and so I was very excited to learn that this was her first and much awaited short story collection. Zadie Smith is an astonishingly great writer, there is no shadow of doubt in that
A surprisingly exciting novel, Duncan M. Hamilton’s first instalment of the Dragonslayer trilogy is an enjoyable read, full of strong characters and a fully engaged plot. The reader is immediately sucked into the fantasy environment, in a world that isn’t too far removed from our own. Multiple plot-lines and viewpoints give the novel that added
Kirsty Logan has, with Things We Say In The Dark astutely given a voice to the fears, anxieties and troublesome ideas that we so often utter in the silence of the darkness, what we scream into the void when we believe no one is watching or listening (many of these stories focusing on women and their fears).
In the introduction of The Folio Society’s edition of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood writes… ‘Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction – in the line of descent from Orwell’s 1984 – not a traditional science fiction in the line of H.G Wells’s War of the Worlds.’ Her reasoning is that
