It’s been a few years since my husband first showed me this clip, but I still keep coming back for more. It’s like a carton of pistachio ice cream for the tortured writer’s self-doubting soul. Grab a spoon and feel the love.
When I started writing This He Did Without Remorse several people asked me why I’d chosen to set it in Paris. Since much of the plot turns on the fallout from events which happened in Bosnia, wouldn’t Sarajevo have been a more obvious choice of location? Perhaps. Except the book isn’t really about Bosnia, it’s […]
The Faithful Couple by A.D. Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you’ve read Snowdrops, then you already know A.D. Miller writes beautifully, and The Faithful Couple very much shines in this realm. However, while dazzling prose of this order is normally sufficient to please in itself, here it is the least interesting part of the book. Yes, it’s beautifully written, but what’s far more enjoyable it how exquisitely the whole thing has been thought out. Every page shows traces of big thinking, verbal fingerprints as it were, evidence of a genuine fascination with the questions being tackled which, in turn, makes for compelling reading.
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A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of hearing Elif Shafak speak at the Sunday Times Literary Festival in Oxford. When I booked the ticket, I had never actually heard of her. In general, I try to book a few events a year of things I’ve never heard of or would normally not […]
The other day, while trying to find my way out of the labyrinth of a mixed metaphor I’d been torturing, I turned, as one does, to Google to stock up on more paraffin to throw on the fire. A few clicks later and I was reading about Beethoven’s Konversationshefte, or conversation notebooks, which are said […]
One way of saying photo, or snap, in French, is cliché. Can there be a more apt Paris cliché than taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower? Even though the tower hardly appears in the novel, I couldn’t help myself. It just had to be done. Writing a novel is all about choices. What to […]
I’ve posted another version of this in the mists of time, but I’m such a sucker for lovely type, that I couldn’t stop myself from reposting this now. Also, I just never grow tired of hearing the strains of this call-to-arms through life’s dense fog.
Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent My rating: 5 of 5 stars I was hugely impressed by this. Hard to believe it’s a first novel. If you’d asked me before I started whether I thought a novel with ten different first person points of view was a good idea I would have said no. But Liz […]
In January, I decided that 2013 should be my year of thinking about creativity. What inspires it? What drives it? How can we tap in and harness it to enrich our lives? So I was very grateful when the producer Roland Holmes got in touch offering to let me have a Behind the Scenes chat […]
Warning: If you watch this, you will feel a deep need to fly to Dublin to have your portrait taken…