Long before publishing dreamt up the category of Young Adult fiction to try and persuade adult children and childish adults to keep reading, there used to be novels that described what it felt like to be young. Catcher In the...
Most readers, myself included, are sick of “fan fiction”, depending as it does on hijacking classic literature for its own feebler energies, but Vesna Goldsworthy’s is a shining exception. Having successfully recast The Great Gatsby as a Russian oligarch in...
Nine million adults in Britain are functionally illiterate, estimated to the British economy £37 billion. The suffering of the people who are more likely to struggle finding employment is one reason to deplore the closure of libraries. The other is...
This is an edited version of the lecture given on 27 October 2022 at the AGM of the Trollope Society in the Reform Club. One hundred and forty years ago this December, the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope died laughing over...
I am Amanda Craig, I am the author of nine novels and have been a member for over thirty years. In September 2021 the late, great Carmen Callil resigned as a member of this society, saying: “It is the job...
Ruth struggles in vain to rescue her daughter from heroin, so tries to save her baby granddaughter instead — or is little Lily saving her?
The Harry Potter author gives us her Christmas Carol, and it’s a triumph
First published inThe Independent on 24/06/2015. The first book I read to myself was Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat – something I still recommend to learners – and the Cat’s wild anarchic humour has always struck me as...
As the time of coronavirus isolation began, some of my friends swore that this was the moment they would finally read all of Proust, or Dickens, or Finnegans Wake. Others have turned to Boccacio’s The Decameron, and Camus’s The Plague. But what most...
Introduction for the 2020 reissue by Abacus. The novels of Beryl Bainbridge are remarkable for many things but the feature that stuck in public memory is that, while five were short-listed for the Booker Prize, none won. Three of these...