#13 How to create a New Vegetable Garden by Charles Dowding
Charles Dowding is arguably the leading proponent of the ‘no dig’ method of vegetable gardening. As an ardent digger (I’ve only ever had allotments on clay – it’s dig or get kicked off if you want to make headway on a clay allotment in my experience) I have been sceptical. As a horticulturalist, I’m also […]
#12 Istemi by Alexei Nikitin
I bought Istemi because it was translated by somebody I know. That’s ‘know’ in the internet sense, rather than the gnostic or biblical senses. I’ve never actually met Anne Marie Jackson but in the way that writers get to know other writers partly by their words and partly by their works, I was interested to […]
#11 The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
A reader recently compared my writing in Gatekeeper to Kingsolver’s. My agent was thrilled (what agent wouldn’t be?) while I am less convinced. I think it’s subject matter (Prodigal Summer) that prompted that linkage, rather than anything else. What strikes me most about Kingsolver’s work is the warmth – many characters start out less than […]
#10 Life In, Life Out by Avital Gad-Cykman
As I was working on this review, I took a break to share a YouTube video of Lars Andersen demolishing Hollywood archery myths. I love that kind of thing – the nerd in me is enchanted by primary research, by monastic dedication to debunking falsehood and destroying comfort zones. I love ‘guy’ things like pull […]
#9 The Dark Valley by Valerio Varesi
I’m somewhat a fan of literature set in Italy (as opposed to Italian writers writing about their own country) as in, for example Michael Dibden and Charles Lambert. In fact, my own newly released novel, Gatekeeper, is set partly in Rome, so any book set in the country is likely to interest me. I’m also […]
#8 As You Wish by Cary Elwes
When I was a child I would wake up on Christmas morning, unwrap my Christmas stocking like an anteater attacking an anthill and when that was done, locate the Toblerone bar (just one, and not a family size one either) and whichever Biggles book had been delivered that year. It was an indulgence that shaped […]
Review #7 The Daylight Gate by Jeannette Winterson
This is a brief book, slender even, and much the better for it. Winterson excels in revealing tiny detail and huge panorama in similarly incisive prose and in this novel, almost a novella, she manages to delineate the horrors of a country in the grip of a despot with an obsession as clearly and sparingly […]
#6 The Wall Between Us: Notes from the Holy Land by Matthew Small
My soon-to-be-husband had been working in South Africa before I met him in 1982. The apartheid laws were in full swing and he recounted how a black man had stepped off the pavement into the road to let him pass. I had no conception of this and then … ‘The only time I’d do that,’ […]
Book Review #5 – Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake
There are few trilogies more uneven, more challenging and frustrating than the Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake. Three books, clearly linked by a single character, but as different in nature and tone as chalk from cheese from Chablis, this massive master-work has suffered, in part, from the demands it makes on its readers, and that […]
#4 Millennium by John Varley, multiple editions
Multiple spoiler alert – just don’t read on if you plan to read this book yourself. And I would recommend that you do – it’s a good read. Some science fiction stands the test of time. Some doesn’t. I remember reading Millennium in 1985, two years after it was published, and being blown away by […]
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