Novel Review: The Mistress of Nothing Kate Pullinger’s novel, The Mistress of Nothing, is an historical work that has a number of layers. First there’s some historiography – the characters in the novel, by and large, were real people with a well-catalogued reality, like Lucie Duff Gordon, darling of Victorian intellectual society. Second, there’s an […]

This week I’m interviewing Michael Kimball as part of his blog tour for Dear Everybody, a novel with a fascinating structure. I’m not actually going to talk much about the novel, because Michael’s answers to my questions illuminate so much of the work, and the way that he created it, that I don’t think you […]

Novel review – Living with the Truth There’s a terrible problem that strikes any writer who tries to convey their reality to others, it’s the dilemma of qualia, or – to be less philosophical about it – the ‘thingness’ of things. Can I tell what you taste when you eat buttered toast? No. Can I […]

Charles Lambert with Little Monsters I have a particular yen for reading books about one place when I’m in another, very different one. I read The God of Small Things in Rekjavik, and The Bear Comes Home in Kerala (I refused to read Roy’s book while I was in her home state and it was […]

Talking to Sally Hinchcliffe Today is a rare experience – I’ve interviewed an author whom I actually have met! Sally Hinchliffe, who used to work at Kew Botanic Gardens(one of my favourite places) turned up at a reading – not to see me particularly, but we got to talking, found we had much in common, […]