http://www.amandacraig.com/ Amanda Craig, journalist and author en-uk Copyright 2010 Amanda Craig Wed, 8 Sep 2010 -1:30:47 GMT I do not know Candia McWilliam, though because her second husband was a neighbour of my parents in Italy, they went to her wedding and she came to mine. Yet we never met or talked, There is a story behind it which isn't mine to tell, but even if you knew none of the people in her memoir it's still one of the strangest and saddest autobiographies by an author I've ever read. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=124 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=125 Fri, 27 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized The Gothic school of fiction has been enjoying a huge revival thanks in part to the success of Twilight. Here are a couple of alternatives, by authors who can actually write. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=123 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized This feature was published in The Times on 11 August 2010. Because of the paywall, wou can't view it on-line unless you subscribe, so here it is. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=122 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized Allison Pearson's second novel took almost as long as my sixth to write, due to her own medical problems. She's someone I admire, and know very slightly, though not enough to feel embarrassed by her also apparently enjoying my own work. I never experienced the kind of hero-worship she describes for anyone (at least not anyone living) but it strikes me as an interesting and original theme. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=121 Mon, 5 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=120 Tue, 22 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized I'm fond of King Arthur stories, particularly the sort the have less magic and more anthropological content - like Rosemary Sutcliffe's. I'm hoping the much-awaited film of The Eagle of the Ninth will reawaken interest in Roman Britain, and stories about it. Anyone who travels around Britain is likely to feel, as I do, that we are still a mass of tribes uneasily yoked together. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=118 Mon, 7 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Features I can only review a fraction of what I read, especeially in children's fiction, but often I track an author's work for a long time before finding something really special. As an author myself, I know how frustrating that can be, because every book is a huge struggle which (if good) needs to be recognised and sold. Anyway, a breakthrough novel such as this is an incredibly exciting find. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=119 Mon, 7 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized I am a great fan of Helen Simpson. arguably Britain's best short story writer, not least because I share some fictional territory with her in being interested in the compromises still being forced on modern women once they become mothers. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=117 Fri, 7 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=116 Thu, 6 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized William Nicholson is perhaps best-known as one of the scriptwriters on 'Gladiator' and the author of 'Shadowlands' the BBC play about CS Lewis that then became a film. He's authored two YA trilogies for young adults. A consistently interesting, bold, philsophical writer with a lot of warmth and charm, he tackles first love and first sex here. I'm interviewing him on April 22 at the Groucho Club. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=115 Tue, 20 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=113 Wed, 14 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized Every three months or so I try to do a round-up of good books that would otherwise fall under the radar for one reason or another. I don't get enoguh space to cover many picture books, and often thrillers like the Young Samurai series are not "literary" enough despite their enthusiastic following. Just because these get only a couple of sentences each doesn't mean they're less fun than the ones that get a whole column. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=114 Wed, 14 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=112 Wed, 17 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized I appeared at the Jewish Book Festival on March 7, and was asked to write something for the JC to advertise this. Despite having a smallish audience - there I'm sure for Morris Fahri and Michael Arditti, both of whome were splendidly thoughtful on subjects such as faith vs religion, and pacifism vs anger, we all had a ball. Many people came up afterwards to say it was the best talk they'd ever heard there. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=111 Mon, 8 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized This was written for the Birkbeck Creative Writing website, at the request of the novelist and professor Julia Bell. For those suffering from writer's block, I also recommend this post from Lucy Coats's blog: http://scribblecitycentral.blogspot.com/ http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=110 Wed, 24 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Features I love this, and not just because it's by a good friend. Any story that draws on the fantasy of what boarding school life is like - rather than the grim Lord of the Flies reality - gets my vote. Just as long as children understand that it IS all made up. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=109 Mon, 1 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized I was one of the judges who awarded Andrea Levy the Whitbread (now Costa) Prize for Small Island, so I was very pleased to be asked to review this for the Daily Telegraph. The editor who commissioned it had no idea of this link, only of my abiding interest in literature about racism. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=108 Mon, 1 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=107 Thu, 7 Jan 2010 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=106 Fri, 18 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=103 Fri, 27 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=105 Fri, 27 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized This piece was published in The Independent (and rather chopped about due to the rush.) My predicitons about the Booker list alas all too accurate given that even single novel on its shortlist was historical - hardly surprising given that most of the judges are historians or biographers. Obviously, I did not at the time know that both Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd were also publishing their own London novels, A Week in December and Ordinary Thunderstorms, later in the year. Those who have read the Faulks may be struck by the similarity of many of the themes of his novel to Hearts and Minds, though there are also many differences especially in our respective attitudes to Muslims. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=104 Fri, 27 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=102 Mon, 9 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=101 Mon, 28 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=100 Mon, 7 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=98 Tue, 4 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=99 Tue, 4 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Uncategorized http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=97 Thu, 2 Jul 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Features Ever since the end of Empire, novelists have been attempting to write the global novel - something that dramatises the apprehension we have that our daily life no longer consists of Home and Abroad, but is inextricably linked to peoples half-way across the world. 'Only connect!' as Forster said; but whether it is possible for people to truly do so after 9/11 remains the great moral question of our time. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=92 Sun, 1 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Naked we come into the world, and naked we leave it. Linda Grant, whose career spans writing both prize-winning fiction and journalism about fashion, has written a novel about the way clothes can offer a new beginning, even in the face of bereavement. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=93 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews For ancient tragedians the family and politics were always intertwined, but when modern politicians leave their jobs to spend more time with their families it is usually a result of risible, Conway-style corruption. In consequence, perhaps, political novels are far and few. Melissa Benn's second novel, One of Us, brings a new seriousness back to a genre that, since the days of Trollope, has always bordered on the purely satirical. It does so, most intelligently, by looking at the consequences that vaulting ambition has on a politician's family. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=91 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews 'Lord what fools these mortals be!' Anyone familiar with Shakespeare's immortal comedy about love A Midsummer Night's Dream will have found these words rising to their lips on hearing the news that some psychologists have discovered that rom-coms are bad for our emotional health. The Hollywood ideal of perfect romance, with its unlikely happy endings and unrealistic expectations has instilled the idea in us that real-life sex is always perfect, and that 'if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it,' according to Bjarne Holnes, who conducted the research at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=94 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Features 'I'm very alarmed,' says the famous woman sitting next to me at the Covent Garden Hotel. 'The bullying, the distressing roles, the crying, all makes you so anxious for those children. It's compulsive, but very disturbing.' Jacqueline Wilson could almost be talking about her own fiction but she is in fact considering the Channel Four programme Boys and Girls Alone which has been causing so much controversy this month. Wilson, who is referred to, hurtfully, in some middle-class households as 'the devil woman' has published the second part of her autobiography, My Secret Diary. It sounds more suggestive to the adult ear than it is; like her books, it contains an utterly unpretentious story about a young girl, born the year after the War ended, and her problems with dating, dancing, dreams and friends. Her passion for writing has made her Britain's best-selling children's author, with over 90 novels to her name, and our former Children's Laureate . A heroine to a generation of children between 8 and 13, she is also almost as reviled by some parents as another popular British author, Enid Blyton http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=96 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews In these uncertain times, our yearning for the supernatural has never been stronger. From Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite to Rick Riordan's children's series about the demi-god Percy Jackson, we long to lay our woes on gods behaving badly. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=90 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews If you were to ask a boy aged between eight and twelve who his greatest fictional hero is, the answer wouldn't be Harry Potter, but Alex Rider. The reluctant teenaged spy, blackmailed into working for MI6 has now saved the world four times, and is back in Scorpia, published this month to a fanfare of publicity that is, for once, completely deserved. For Anthony Horowitz, who published his first children's novel at 23 and has written over 23 books while simultaneously becoming one of Britain's leading TV scriptwriters, is himself something of a hero. His struggle to break through a mountain of indifference was so monumental that he twice gave up - once after being told by his ex-publisher that 'you might as well stop.' That was before JK Rowling galvanised the children's market, and before Alex entered the picture in Stormbreaker, the novel that, according to The Ultimate Book Guide, children want to see filmed more than any other - and a series that, as one critic put it, 'reads like every bored schoolboy's fantasy, only a thousand times slicker and more exciting.' http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=87 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews Fungus the Bogeyman exploded into childhoods thirty years ago with the disgusting thrill of a boil bursting. He was green! He was slimey! He loved eating dead snails, smelling farts and wearing filthy clothes. His entire life consisted of doing and promoting all the things that children are forbidden to do or even think about. Perhaps more surprisingly, he was the work of Raymond Briggs, now better-known for his pristine fantasies The Snowman, The Bear and Father Christmas - all favourite Yuletide TV fare... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=89 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews I'm here today to tell you about being a novelist, and especially about being a woman novelist, but what I'm going to tell you isn't about the romantic side - like discovering you love reading so much that you want to write books of your own. I'm going to tell you about the business of being a novelist, which is the nasty side. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=58 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Lectures Flight of the Falcon was published in 1965, coincidentally the year my own family moved to Italy, to the very city where the novel opens: Rome. The shadows of the Second World War, and the appalling poverty that made Italy so vulnerable to Fascism, were on the wane. Rome was incomparably lovely, a place where artists still came to learn from antiquity, where the privileged enjoyed the 'dolce vita' celebrated by Fellini's film of that name, and the less privileged were desperate for American dollars. Mass tourism was in its infancy then, and the kind of tours that du Maurier's hero, Fabbio, takes around Italy were more innocent, less commonplace and less world-weary than one suspects they are now. Those were the days in which the waspish whine of a Vespa in the Eternal City carried young couples as beautiful as Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, not a pair of muggers out to rob the unwary walker. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=70 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Ever since the discovery of chaos theory, novelists have been preoccupied with happenstance, and it's no surprise that one of Canada's finest practitioners should have chosen LUCK for the title of her latest novel. As Joan Barfoot remarks, 'Everybody's got a story...Experiences and trajectories ricochet off each other, they take slow curves and sharp turns, they wreak confusion here, salvation there and - this is the hardest thing - there's no way to predict which detail or tiny decision may grow huge in consequence.' http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=71 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews It's not often that you can point to a single book or film or TV series and say that it changed your life forever, but that's what happened to me thirty years ago when I saw Kenneth Clarke's series, Civilisation. I was about ten, and much of what he described in his strangulated upper-class voice, was way over my head. Yet getting some dim idea about how precious art, architecture, music, literature and philosophy all were, how they fitted into each other and developed single-handedly inspired a thirst for scholarship, and a passion for the arts that got me into Cambridge and eventually turned me into a novelist and a critic... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=25 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Features The surly security trolls at Bournemouth were patrolling the front gate to the Ministry of Magic's annual Party Conference this week, checking for dungbombs as Ben Liar got to his feet, flanked by Dementors. Ignoring cries of 'Shame! What about the goblin war?' his magically modified voice scattered charm on the assembled witches and wizards beneath... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=39 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Features Around the time that most of the women I know suddenly sprouted a luxuriant moustache, exotic tales of what our husbands and partners were getting up to began to circulate. One friend, whose husband is probably the most successful writer of my generation, has had an annual summer party packed out with film stars, Booker winners and assorted intellectuals. These now found themselves dragooned into listening to our host's prolonged rendition of 1970s rock-music on his new electric guitar. The sight of seeing a highly intelligent and gifted man make a prat of himself was too much even for those envious of his success; and the party has now been cancelled... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=42 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Features My husband was once rung up by the Daily Telegraph, and asked what it was like to live with a novelist. ' Like being the back end of a pantomime horse', he said. I have always thought this a perfect metaphor for the absurdity of living with a writer. Your partner is invisible, apart from maintaining the illusion the this strange, cavorting parody of a horse has a pair of hind legs. Yet unlike the back end, you can at least see where you're going. Your partner, your back end, can push blindly but receives neither applause nor credit... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=49 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Features Modern satire is the kind of subject which ought to be easy enough to address. Hardly a week goes by in which some new play or film or novel is called satirical. In the past year we have had Election, about political corruption as filtered through an American high school, and Pleasantville, a satire on the idealisation of 1950s family life. The Channel Four programme on paedophilia for Brasseye aroused huge controversy this summer. Satirical magazines like Private Eye are national institutions. We even have a children's novel I was a Rat by Philip Pullman, using the fairy-tale of Cinderella to probe at the relationship between Royalty and the Press. Satire has never seemed so healthy. Laughter, as Nabokov observed, is the best pesticide. Modern life scarcely lacks pests. The modern satirist can find him or her self surveying the world around and thinking like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry "Ask yourself - do you feel lucky, punk?" http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=56 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Lectures Are you tense, irritable and ashamed of your domestic life? Do you wonder whether your children are hideous, your partner lazy and your house a mess? Fear not: like five million people every week you can find real people whose lives, tastes and behaviour can console you by being far, far worse. Rod Williams's pioneering documentary series for ITV, Neighbours From Hell, and the increasingly deplorable reality TV shows such as Big Brother have mutated into Wife Swap and Life Swap programmes currently taking Britain, Germany and now America by storm. It formula is simple and contrived: take two people from widely contrasting backgrounds and ask them to live in each other's shoes for a week or two... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=33 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Features The news that more and more families are choosing to buy organic food will have raised a cheer in many quarters. Surely it's good news to think that so many of us have put our money where are hearts are, rejecting cheap dairy products with their nasty hormones, over-crowded livestock and vile chemicals? Surely we can be proud that the British, more than any country in Europe, have rejected GM foods and encouraged the Old Macdonald style of farming, not the new? Yet as you click on 'O' marked organic milk when internet shopping, or fill your basket with knobbly, pesticide-free vegetables, pause and ask yourself: why are we so proud of filling our children's bodies with good food when so many of us are simultaneously filling their minds with junk? http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=35 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Features The true identity of Lian Hearn was until recently one of the most closely guarded secrets of children's literature. Who was the author of the best-selling novel Across the Nightingale Floor, an adventure set in medieval Japan which readers from 8 to 80 became passionate about in the space of a single chapter? Was it a man or a woman? Was the author Japanese or European? Where had this passionate, ferocious, magical tale of revenge and love sprung from? Snapped up by Universal Studios and the producer of Indiana Jones, it is one of many crossover fantasies progressing, in the wake of Harry Potter's success, to a cinema near you. Yet for three years, nobody knew who the author was. Eventually the word spread that Lian Hearn was Gillian Rubinstein, an English-born Australian writer of teenage fantasy. The rangy, white-haired, white-skinned woman sitting opposite me does not look remotely Japanese; only her extreme stillness and reserve suggests something that isn't Western. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=82 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews My family is unusually jumpy at present. Short of sleep, short-tempered and prone to mild hysteria, our quartet has been joined by a discordant fifth, an invisible player who pops into our minds at any given moment - particularly, it must be said, between 3 and 5 in the morning. He is the burglar whom we found, and fought, in our house... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=21 Sat, 1 Sep 2007 -1:00:00 GMT Features If, as many believe, all fiction is a form of thinly-veiled autobiography, novelists ought to be expert at it. The scarcity of good ones, even by great writers, should prove that, it is anything but. Michele Roberts's Paper Houses deserves particular praise as a consistently fascinating portrait of both a woman's artistic life and the 1970s. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=63 Thu, 1 Mar 2007 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Somehow, I don't know how, I stopped reading William Boyd over the past decade. Was it the unappealing Armadillo, or the tedious Nat Tate, or the self indulgent essays in Bamboo? At any rate, Boyd is back with a new publisher, and new novel and his old form... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=62 Fri, 1 Sep 2006 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Michelle Paver is showing me how to make friends with a wolf. 'If you give it a hard stare' - her eyes suddenly drill into mine like agates - 'it'll get upset. Whereas if you look at it with an open attitude and a soft, grazing look in your eyes'- her large eyes melt into something between toffee and chocolate - 'it knows not to be scared.' http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=81 Fri, 1 Sep 2006 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews All the way to leafy Twickenham to meet Ian Beck, I keep seeing the London suburbs as if they were drawn by his graceful, quirky pen. The blossoming cherry trees, the Georgian elegance of Richmond, and even the birds in the sky could have come straight out of his classic book of nursery rhymes, Lavender's Blue. For over twenty years, Beck has saturated modern children's earliest memories with arrestingly beautiful graphics for books such as Five Little Ducklings, Peter & the Wolf and The Nutcracker. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=83 Thu, 1 Jun 2006 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews Monica Ali enjoyed considerable success with her debut, Brick Lane, which rode high on the current interest in discovering more about the private life of recent British immigrants - specifically those from Bangladesh. Publishers looking for the next Zadie Smith hyped it to the skies, and many found the story of Nazneen, brought to live in Tower Hamlets as the dependent wife of a fat, ugly man, from whom she eventually escapes in a torrid love affair to be, in the words of one critic, 'written with a wisdom and skill that few authors attain in a lifetime.' Others found the complete opposite. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=64 Thu, 1 Jun 2006 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Novels by women featuring a male narrator tend to be rare, and most share an odd trait: the man usually has something wrong with him, mentally or physically. Perhaps women can't fully imagine themselves into what it must be like to inhabit a body without a womb, or perhaps we believe men to be less evolved beings. At any rate, it's strange how often these male narrators tend to be dwarves. A year ago, Debbie Taylor published an excellent erotic novel, The Fourth Queen, narrated by a dwarf; now we have Sarah Dunant's tale about Fiammetta Bianchini, a sixteenth century Italian courtesan, also narrated by the vertically challenged Bucino. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=65 Sat, 1 Apr 2006 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews To many readers, the domestic novel might appear to need no defence. Earlier this year, however, two well-known young novelists, Ali Smith and Toby Litt, claimed that the submissions they received for an anthology of new writing were dull, depressed and domestic - as if, they said, 'too many women writers had been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape and depressed as hell.' Predictably, a number of women novelists were contacted by newspapers to ask for their response, and all were very indignant. Some cited the names of woman writers whose chosen subjects were the opposite of domestic; others described how the domestic could be sexed-up by making it part of a genre such as the gothic or the detective story... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=54 Thu, 1 Sep 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Lectures Eight years ago, I published a novel called A Vicious Circle satirising the corruption of the literary world. It caused a scandal which, perhaps naively, I had not anticipated, and even received a libel threat from one critic, that got it dropped by Penguin. Yet there was not a single thing that my imaginary critic, the louche and cynical Ivo Sponge, told his protégée about how to review that had not been said to me in real life, by a variety of critics and editors. When I first became a published novelist in 1990, I had not realised just how mired with politics and corruption the reviewing business is, but, like many readers I had often been puzzled by the way unreadable books were made wildly fashionable, while good books discovered browsing in bookshops were neglected or misrepresented. It was only when I began to review myself, and read proofs before the critics got hold of them, that I became incensed... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=55 Thu, 30 Jun 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Lectures Eight years ago, I published a novel called A Vicious Circle satirising the corruption of the literary world. It caused a scandal which, perhaps naively, I had not anticipated, and even received a libel threat from one critic, that got it dropped by Penguin. Yet there was not a single thing that my imaginary critic, the louche and cynical Ivo Sponge, told his protégée about how to review that had not been said to me in real life, by a variety of critics and editors. When I first became a published novelist in 1990, I had not realised just how mired with politics and corruption the reviewing business is, but, like many readers I had often been puzzled by the way unreadable books were made wildly fashionable, while good books discovered browsing in bookshops were neglected or misrepresented. It was only when I began to review myself, and read proofs before the critics got hold of them, that I became incensed... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=53 Thu, 30 Jun 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Features A father lies seriously injured in hospital after chasing a gang of youths who threw a stone at his car and getting beaten up by them; his local police chief describes how the streets of suburban Manchester are in the grip of 'feral' youths with 'no parental control or respect for anybody.' A funeral car full of mourners has missiles hurled at it in what Cheshire police call 'the ultimate disrespect for human dignity.' The semi-final of a boys' football tournament has to be abandoned when parents brawl on the touchline, severely cutting and bruising the club manager. All of these incidents happened last week, giving us a picture of an embattled society under siege from yob behaviour, in which lack of mutual respect plays a key role... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=22 Wed, 18 May 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Features When the Orange Prize was set up, ten years ago, I remember being called up by some newspaper and asked to attack it. I was tempted. Why, after all, should novels be treated as a special case if their author possesses a vagina? Isn't the creation of fiction above matters of gender? Since then, my own views have changed, as has the literary scene. I no longer believe that women's fiction is reviewed fairly - where it is reviewed at all - and the Orange has persistently picked out serious women writers of real quality who would never get short-listed for the Booker or Whitbread due to the endemic shortcomings of how those prizes get judged... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=68 Sun, 1 May 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews There's something about Britain just now. Why are so many writers looking at it through the lens of fantasy - either in children's literature or science fiction? Could it be that we can only bear to look at the reality of what New Labour has brought about through the dystopian vision set down by Orwell in 1984? Hot on the heels of Kazuo Ishiguro's strange fable about clones comes Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom. Here, the eight-year-old hero has been forcibly separated from his parents because of a ''rearrangement'' of Britain according to the Hippocratic concept of the four humours... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=66 Fri, 1 Apr 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Two women, yoked together by professional need and personal weakness, are driving round London's orbital motorway, a modern version of Hell. They once liked and trusted each other, but now the tiniest flaws make them mad. Fat, timid Al is a medium; thin, flint-eyed Colette is her 'manager', attending to her every practical need from VAT returns to breakfast. Quite apart from their disintegrating relationship, they have a serious problem: Alison isn't a fake. Not only can she genuinely converse with ghosts, but she has a deeply unpleasant 'guide', a former clown called Morris, The kind of spirit who follows you into the lavatory, he is searching for his equally sinister old mates. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=80 Tue, 1 Mar 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews It's not often that you find yourself in a city which resembles the world of somebody's imagination, but as my taxi got lost on the slopes of Clifton in Bristol, searching for Diana Wynne-Jones's home it felt just like slipping into one of her fantasies. With the Severn estuary gliding dreamily on one side and a patchwork of delicate, brightly coloured Regency houses and eclectic gardens tumbling down the hill on the other, I expected to see her god-like magician, Chrestomanci, striding along a narrow lane and disappearing into a parallel universe... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=85 Tue, 1 Mar 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews Reading aloud to family and friends was once an integral part of social life. Sadly, even for children, it has become a lot less common. Yet as Margaret Attwood observed in Negotiating with the Dead, taking in a story through the eyes rather than the ears is a very recent thing. If the earliest stories were oral, told round a fire or by a travelling bard, Biblical tales were read by preacher or pastor to a congregation, and by the head of the family at home... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=24 Tue, 1 Feb 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Features Eoin Colfer's meteoric rise in the world of children's fiction since the publication of the first best-selling Artemis Fowl adventure was published in 2001 surprises few who have read his work. The former primary school teacher from Wexford, Ireland combines the kind of high-concept ideas that are a staple of Hollywood thrillers with immense charm, talent and wit. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=84 Sat, 1 Jan 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews Of all the manifold kinds of novel an author can write, the hardest is probably what looks like the most simple: the portrait. The life of an individual man or woman is a formidable artistic challenge if it is not to mimic biography. How to convey a sense of both utter uniqueness and universal humanity? How to describe the inner life of a mind, or soul, over a life-time? Very few modern novelists have the skill or the ambition to carry it off... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=67 Sat, 1 Jan 2005 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews 'I am the living proof that it is possible to profit from being a high school freak.' Sporting a bright pink sweater trimmed with fake osprey feathers, a glittering tiara on her dark locks and a huge grin on her pretty, pointed face, Meg Cabot does not look remotely like a freak. The author of the famous Princess Diaries series in fact resembles her heroine Princess Mia's big sister, as played by Anne Hathaway in the second Disney film to be released later this month. Yet Cabot, who began her career as an impoverished illustrator, earning her bed and board as a lowly assistant manager of an undergraduate dormitory in New York University, is now one of the most popular modern authors in the world. Her sales regularly overtake those of JK Rowling, she has just had queues round the block at Harrods for a special Princess Day, and with two more Disney films of her novels in the pipeline, you can bet that the diamond studs in her ears are real. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=86 Fri, 1 Oct 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews Susanna Clarke's debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has been bruited abroad for over a year since it was bought by Bloomsbury; reputedly ten years in the writing, it has so far garnered its author a million pounds in advances... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=72 Fri, 1 Oct 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews When I was a teenager, domestic science was what you learnt if you were too dim even to flip burgers. Now, it seems, we have been missing out on one of the greatest pleasures known to womankind. According to last week's Good Housekeeping survey, 40% of women under 35 find housework more pleasurable than sex. With upmarket designer companies like Cath Kidston making even the humble ironing board a thing of beauty, it's easy to see how women are being seduced back into discovering their inner housewife, but now along comes Dr. Laura Schlessinger's provocative new book, Woman Power, a companion to The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, published by Harpercollins next month to add her voice to those who believe women need to cultivate the domestic arts... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=26 Wed, 1 Sep 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Features Fear of, and anxiety for teenagers reached a political peak last week, with both Tony Blair and David Blunkett condemning violence and truancy. With £12.5m lottery funding driving an expansion of summer camps, the new court orders known as ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) parents feel increasingly unequal to the struggle of keeping children of all ages safe and off the streets during the long summer holidays may feel the solution is to use US-style institutions to sort out problems with discipline, drunkenness and drug abuse... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=27 Sun, 1 Aug 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Features Some time in the next month, I am going to become a cretin. My future has already been vividly described by the detective writer Dorothy L. Sayers in The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey. A beautiful, intelligent woman marries her loathsome doctor, and one day her broken-hearted former lover finds her living like an animal in the remote Basque mountains, 'the face white and puffy, the eyes vacant, the mouth drooled open...a dry fringe of rusty hair [clinging] to the half-bald scalp.' From his description, Lord Peter Wimsey recognises the symptoms of thyroid deficiency, or hypothyroidism. He travels to Spain, secretly feeds the woman thyroxine, and she is restored to her former self... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=28 Thu, 1 Jul 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Features 'Why are they always men?' my 11-year old daughter asked disgustedly, emerging from Spiderman 2 last week. Many feminists have repeatedly asked the same question, but it seems that once again, Hollywood is embracing the idea of the action heroine. A slew of them is about to high-kick their way across the big screen this summer, from the adorable teen-queen Keira Knightley in King Arthur, to Halle Berry in Catwoman, who is transformed from an 'incompetent', powerless woman to one who lives without fear and refuses to play by the rules - other than those that demand action heroines leap about scantily-dressed as a dominatrix... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=29 Thu, 1 Jul 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Features Novels about British or American women finding love in the Tuscan hills can seem like a cliché. Henry James wrote one, E.M.Forster wrote two and I must confess to a couple of them myself. It's asking for trouble to publish another. Men hate the idea that Italian men really are divine in bed, women hate the idea of other women enjoying themselves and everybody except John Mortimer and this magazine's esteemed proprietor goes a bilious shade of green at the very word Tuscany... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=73 Thu, 1 Jul 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews A man is digging a grave at midnight. His shirt is stained with blood, and what he is burying alive is a new-born baby. Against all odds, his secret will come to light through the agency of a nurse, the monstrous yet courageous Betty Potts, who now runs an old people's home in what was once a grand old house... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=69 Tue, 1 Jun 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Any modern parent knows that, if you avoid smacking, argument is the only way to maintain discipline. Quiet words and sweet reason are supposed to do the trick when confronted with a tantruming toddler or angry adolescent. Of course, it doesn't always work out like that. You can find yourself screeching like one of Roald Dahl's witches, or just abjectly begging for mercy. Yet your voice is there as your prime means of keeping your children obedient, entertained, consoled and safe. Whether you use it like a whip-lash, or roar as gently as any sucking dove, it is the tool of first choice... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=30 Sat, 1 May 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Features It's not often in the normal course of things that you find yourself sitting in a traffic jam crying your eyes out, but it happened to me last week listening to a nun, Sister Frances Dominica, describing the dying children at her Helen House hospice on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Even if you don't have children of your own, most of us feel a visceral horror at the idea of a young life cut off. Hollywood constantly reassures us that children will always be saved - that all it takes is one hero, or one invention, and nobody will die again, ever. Where Dickens's audience knew only too well that Little Nell would snuff it, we pretend that a child's death, and indeed that of adults, can be avoided... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=23 Thu, 12 Feb 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Features There is no envelope you open with quite so much apprehension as the one bearing your jacket-design. Most of the writers I know do so gingerly, at arm's length, pull the contents out with shaking hands, look at it for a single second then fall shrieking to the floor... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=32 Mon, 9 Feb 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Features When I was growing up, intelligent women were still expected to become secretaries before they could get anywhere interesting. You could have a first-class degree from Oxbridge and still be told you would be unemployable without learning touch-typing. Naturally, some of us chose this path, and though most went on to become illustrious publishers, lawyers, journalists, film-directors and BBC executives enough experienced the brain-numbing tedium and weird humiliations of the job to feel a pang of sympathy with Joyti De-Laurey, the 35-year-old secretary at Goldman-Sachs currently on trial for stealing £4.3 million from her boss. Ms. De Laurey is of course innocent unless proved otherwise, but the relationship between boos and secretary is perennially fraught. You don't have to have seen Steven Soderburgh's film, Secretary, to know that there are some utterly despicable bosses out there, even if their sadism is indirect. I've never forgotten how the late Marc Boxer, a man of irresistible charm to the posh and lush, reduced his lovely, gentle secretary to tears every single lunch-time when I worked for him on Tatler... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=31 Sun, 1 Feb 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Features Every so often, it happens that David really does beat Goliath. Last week Mark Haddon completed his rise from being an obscure children's writer to winning the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The novel, about a teenager with Asperger's syndrome who is as brilliant at maths as he is clueless at understanding other people is at once a detective story, a literary triumph and a commercial success that has grown by word of mouth to beat David Beckham's autobiography, Harry Potter and the Atkins Diet. When it first came out in May last year, it gained rapturous reviews, but little fame until John Carey, last year's Booker Chairman, lamented his fellow-judges' refusal in these pages to put it onto the short-list. Then, its sales just mushroomed. People are passionate about its wit, its brilliance and its humane insight into the milder forms of autism. News of Haddon's win was greeted with universal joy and approval, and it currently has an exceptional 163 reader's reviews on amazon.com. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=61 Sun, 1 Feb 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews Imagine a world just like ours, but in photographic negative. Black people are the educated elite, the dominant ruling class. White people are the minority, employed only in menial jobs, without legal rights or representation. This is the world that Malorie Blackman, one of Britain's leading children's writers, has imagined in all its details, after needing a plaster one day and being struck that the only ones available were pink, and designed to blend with a white person's skin. It's something she would never have noticed but for the fact that she is black - the only black writer to have got into the top 100 of the nation's favourite books in the BBC's The Big Read with Noughts & Crosses, the novel that describes this inverted world, and the doomed love between a black 'Cross' girl, Sephy and a white 'Nought' boy, Callum. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=88 Thu, 1 Jan 2004 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews Monica Ali is angry. Praised to the skies for her first novel, Brick Lane, an international best-seller and this year's literary sensation, she has just discovered the flip side to fame and fortune. An 18-page letter from a committee called the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council, which claims to represent 500,000 Bangladeshi people in this country, has demanded her portrayal of the Bangladeshi community be withdrawn from circulation for 'corrections'; and last week The Guardian newspaper repeated, without comment, parallels between Ali's supposed offence with that of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. A clutch of literary luminaries from this year's Booker Prize judges to Oxford professors have been wheeled out to draw the distinction between fiction and fact, but the damage is done. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=59 Mon, 1 Dec 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews I never thought that falling in love with my children would also mean falling in love with a dog. Dogs were, if anything, even weirder to me than babies. One of the first thing Health visitors warn you against when pregnant are pets; and being allergic to the cats I grew up with predisposed me to avoid animals anyway. But, 'Men love women, women love children and children love hamsters,' as Alice Thomas Ellis once observed; in the case of my children, it's not just hamsters but every animal from the Jurassic period onwards. At the top of their wish-list was a dog. 'Dog' was my daughter's first word, and from then on it never stopped. A relentless campaign was underway, in which stuffed toys, other people's pets, goldfish and even a gerbil was no substitution... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=34 Sat, 1 Nov 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features If you were to ask most people what impression they have of Doris Lessing, our only serious contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, they would probably tell you she is the firebrand Communist author of The Golden Notebook, one of the great feminist novels of our times. Her novels - over 50 of them - repeatedly attacked the behaviour of white people towards black, challenged sexual stereotypes and, at the end of the Golden Notebook, seemed to suggest that joining the Labour Party was the solution to public and private woes. Yet like Paul Johnson and numerous other former luminaries of the Left she is now a Telegraph-reading thorn in the side of New Labour. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=60 Sat, 1 Nov 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Interviews 'All great novels are also great fairy-tales,' said Nabokov, the author of Lolita. Many critics and academics usually ignore this observation. For the past hundred years, ever since EM Forster's sneer that 'Yes, alas, the novel, tells a story,' telling a story, let alone a fairy story is still seen as something fit only for children. Although you may, as readers, value novels such as Jane Eyre, Mansfield Park and Great Expectations partly because of the wonderful tales they tell, as intelligent readers you are only supposed to praise their author's style, or their characterisation, or their use of symbols. Style is an art: plot, or storytelling, only a craft. To call someone a storyteller has become tantamount to saying they are the sort of low-brow writer sold with gold foil on the cover at airports... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=57 Wed, 1 Oct 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Lectures It goes without saying that it helps to be crazy if you're a critic. Who but a blockhead would write for so little money? You can't live off cheques for £25, or even £100. Unless you've got your eye on a literary editor's seat or are deluded into thinking that reviewing gives you power, you do it out of love, and nuttiness. There are, however, any number of things publishers do that actually drive you crazy... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=40 Wed, 1 Oct 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features As every little girl knows, pink is her colour. The modern mother who reads Demond Morris's Babywatching and discovers that the blue of baby boys' clothes symbolises heavenly good fortune whereas the pink of girls merely represents flesh may reject it, but it remains obstinately there as the Essence of Feminity. Nowhere is this more evident than in bookshops. Walk into any Waterstones, Books Etc. or Ottakars and what do you see? Row upon row of chick-lit books, glowing pinkly in shades from icing-sugar to raspberry. From Jane Green to Sophie Kinsella, from Isabel Wolff to Adele Parks, if you're a woman reader in search of an entertaining read, you can have any colour as long as it's pink... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=41 Mon, 1 Sep 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features Hallelujah. Bridget Jones, the original chick-lit heroine who has dominated popular fiction for the past decade is gone. In place of the neurotic, incompetent, chain-smoking singleton desperately searching for her Mr. Right, Bridget's creator, Helen Fielding has come up with a new creation. Olivia Joules, her female spy is, according to Fielding's publicist, an all-action arse-kicking, man-chewing heroine... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=36 Mon, 1 Sep 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features Long before Harry Potter came along, Ursula le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea imagined what a school for wizards would be like. Ged, its hero, will become the Archmage of a world in which magic is as common as electricity but this is a tale from before that time. Ged, a poor smith's son, is born with huge talent that he uses to save his village from invaders, but his gifts make him arrogant and impatient. At wizard- school he makes one friend and one enemy, and in a duel summons a monster that scars him and sends him on a deadly quest across the lonely seas full of peril. With the moral, intellectual and supernatural power to outwit dragons, resist evil, change weather and transform himself into a hawk, he is apparently defenceless against an enemy who increasingly takes on his appearance to trick or kill him. How he defeats his enemy is wholly unexpected, yet completely right because like all great quests it involves confronting the dark side of the hero's nature. 'Only in silence the word,/Only in dark the light.' Throughout my life, I have drawn on this, particularly when suffering from depression. I think many children suffer much more than has been generally recognised, but if you're given a story in which you're made to see that you can only find light in the heart of darkness, you find hope and healing... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=38 Mon, 1 Sep 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features There's only one author that people who love reading are packing this summer. He is Alexander McCall Smith, an eccentric Scottish Law Professor whose 'No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency' series, just published by Abacus, has sold over a million copies in America entirely by word-of-mouth recommendations. Featuring an African woman detective in the old-fashioned, poor yet flourishing Botswana they are wise, funny, intelligent, gripping and so beautifully-written that readers reviewing it on amazon.com are comparing him to Dickens... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=44 Fri, 1 Aug 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features Everyone who loves reading probably has their own favourite fictional characters, of which a disproportionate number are likely to come from children's books. One may fall in love with Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice or Vronsky in Anna Karenina, but for most of us the characters we encounter some three to five years after we have learnt to read remain lasting presences in our imagination for the rest of our lives. Peter Rabbit, Tintin, Harry Potter, Aslan, Sherlock Holmes - the list is immense. http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=37 Fri, 1 Aug 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features Every so often an author appears who makes you believe in the power of talent over hype. Both JK Rowling and Philip Pullman grew this way, passed from reader to reader without a penny spent on advertising. In the adult world, the strangely captivating fictions of an Edinburgh medical law professor, Alexander McCall Smith, featuring the Botswanan detective, Precious Ramotswe have now sold over a million copies in America, and have become the essential British summer read of 2003 - also by word of mouth. First published in 1998 by Polygon, a small Scottish house, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, five in all, are now being cheaply published by Abacus this month. You may be as dubious as I was: how can a white man write about a black woman without being patronising or racist? Then you read the novels... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=74 Fri, 1 Aug 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews It sounds such a good idea, doesn't it? There you are, gazing longingly at the villas, farmhouses, castles and cottages you could rent for your summer holiday, but they're too large and too expensive. You can only afford half the price - or a third. Asking another couple, or a brace of pals along seems like a perfect way to lessen the financial burden, strengthen the friendship and ensure a constant flow of entertainment during waking hours... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=43 Tue, 1 Jul 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features So here I am again, driving down the Route de Soleil, trying to map-read in the boiling heat while behind me, screams and yells of head-splitting volume and frequency are gaining in intensity. 'I'm bored!' 'He hit me!' 'You hit me first, snotface!' mingle with the unctuous tones of Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter. We've had this bloody tape on a loop for the past six hours, and I long to stop it just to get the volume down but even in full cry my children shriek even louder the moment it's switched off. The back seat is an ash-tip of discarded crisp packets, empty water bottles, sweet-wrappers and sun block lotion... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=45 Tue, 1 Jul 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features The scene last week at my son's birthday party gets repeated all over the country, and drives parents into agonies of apprehension. Nuts, kiwi fruit, strawberry jam, dairy, chocolate, wheat - the list of forbidden foods grows and grows. I know what it's like, not only as a mother but as a child, because my own life was crippled by an allergy that gave me asthma... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=46 Tue, 1 Jul 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features Updating Shakespeare has recently become a mini-industry. With the current production of Henry V at the National equipped with flak jackets ands video screens, and The Comedy (or 'Bombitty') of Errors finishing its run as a wildly successful rap comedy in the West End, Shakespeare has never seemed more accessible. Yesterday, BBC2 began a series by the historian Michael Wood exploring the life of our greatest writer - following hard on the heels of Anthony Holden's popular biography of him. Last year we had an Othello as a police officer in a TV drama. The Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park currently has punk fairies and a Bottom complete with mobile telephones in its production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. However little we really know about the man, the works are undergoing a Renaissance, dressed up and skewed round to fit modern needs and questions... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=47 Tue, 1 Jul 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features Anyone who has seen Titian's sumptuous painting of The Worship of Venus might well think that it is the ultimate expression of the Italian love for children. We are so used to tender Italian Renaissance images of infants - their tiny, chubby hands grasping a maternal breast, their dimpled pearly limbs - that we tend to think that it has remained a constant. Visitors to Italy, charmed by the ease with which small children are accommodated and tolerated in restaurants tend to believe the same thing. Surely this is the best country in the world to have a child, or be one? http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=51 Sat, 31 May 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features A controversial new children's novel is causing consternation in literary circles. This May, Andersen Press, the hardback children's imprint of Random Century, and Penguin, are publishing 'Doing It' by Melvyn Burgess, an explicit account of four teenagers having sex. It has provoked the Children's Laureate, Anne Fine, into unprecedented public criticism of another author's work. She is of the view that it is 'pornographic and misogynistic' and should be withdrawn before publication... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=48 Tue, 1 Apr 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features Two years ago, while preparing to go on holiday, I encountered a problem many of you are going to face this summer. I was in an airport book-shop, hunting for something new to read. Like a lot of readers, I'm an omnivore. I read literary fiction, detective novels, thrillers, SF, children's novels, biographies, science books and romances. However, as I browsed through the shelves with their wares displayed in tasteful sepia, boiled-sweet pink and embossed foil lettering, I realised with horror that there was nothing there that I either hadn't read already or wanted to read... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=50 Tue, 1 Apr 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Features The Mistressclass is, as you might guess, about the relationship between love and art. Vinny and Catherine, sisters and writers, are both in love with Adam, the son of a powerful older painter, Robert. Vinny is the first to become Adam's lover, and even in her fifties remains heartbroken at his defection to Catherine in the 1970s while all four were on holiday in France. Catherine and Adam have just inherited Robert's Holloway house and are holding a party to celebrate their possession of it. Inevitably, the party leads to a confrontation between the sisters. Out of this love triangle, Michele Roberts has created a powerful, sensual novel as redolent of death as of life... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=75 Tue, 1 Apr 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews The characteristic of a Rose Tremain novel is obsession. Sometimes, as in The Way I Found Her and The Swimming-Pool Season, this takes the predictable form (unpredictably expressed) of a love story. Sometimes the yearning is for stranger matters: a transsexual operation (Sacred Country) music (Music & Silence) or the King's favour (Restoration). The Colour, concerning the effects of New Zealand's mid-nineteenth century gold rush seems almost mundane. We all understand greed for gold, or think we do. Yet nothing in Tremain's world is simple, and here the alchemy of her imagination has turned gold into something more precious... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=76 Tue, 1 Apr 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Readers of TransAtlantic fiction often feel uneasy. Critics love to tell us how much bigger, better and bolder American novelists are than British ones. Our small, delicate, class-obsessed fictions do not measure up to the vitamin-enriched super-prose of Bellow, DeLillo or Updike, the big swinging dicks of American fiction. Yet what exactly is the British reader supposed to get out of Joyce Carol Oates's 'I'll Take You There'? http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=77 Sat, 1 Mar 2003 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Of all novels, Great Expectations strikes me as the greatest, partly because it changes so much when you re-read it. You can read it as, or to, a child (I'm reading it at present to my 9-year-old daughter) and thrill to the plot, not least because any book that starts with its protagonist as a child offers something of the child's eye view. Like a detective story, which it also is, it has a dramatic opening, with the 'small bundle of shivers' that is Pip being terrified by an escaped convict, Magwitch, into stealing food for him. From time to time, I tell my children the plots of classic novels on walks, and the power of this one was unmistakable, because even the 6-year-old was asking, What happens next? http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=79 Sun, 1 Dec 2002 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews The closest we may ever come to learning how another human being thinks is reading novels. Despite all the ingenious suppositions of science fiction, and the technical advances that could eventually assist us to penetrate the mystery of another person's consciousness, what will always remain is the old-fashioned method of putting black marks down on some sort of surface. Whether this is an accurate version - when philosophers such as Daniel Dennett insist that the metaphor for the brain is Pandemonium - is something novelists have been debating ever since Joyce and Woolf. However, there should be no doubt that by being given a fictional version of how imaginary beings see, feel and think, our own lives are rendered richer, more human and possibly more humane. As Ian McEwan wrote after September 11, 'If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed...Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality.' http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=78 Tue, 1 Oct 2002 -1:00:00 GMT Book Reviews Gender bending is all the rage this year. With Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks and even the poet and scholar John Fuller choosing to write from the female viewpoint, the modern novel has entered the sex-war as never before. Cynics may wonder whether this isn't due to the simple fact that women buy far more fiction than men: according to the agent Giles Gordon, publishers aren't interested in books about men any longer because these sell so badly. Yet at some point, any serious novelist is going to try to write from the perspective of the opposite sex, because the joy of writing fiction, as of reading it, is about getting outside your own head and into someone else's. Stepping beyond your own gender takes that process further. It's an irresistible challenge, but as I discovered last year, a very real one... http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=52 Sat, 30 Jun 2001 -1:00:00 GMT Features