Kate Saunders: Female Friendship and a Good Death
How would you like to die? Some of us, if we think about this, would choose to die on a beach or a bluebell wood, perhaps, and some when asleep. Some would choose the calm of a hospice. I’ve been...
The Best Children’s Books for Spring 2023
Find animal magic and globe-trotting thrills in new books for young readers.
Friends Like These by Meg Rosoff
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...
Iron Curtain by Vesna Goldsworthy
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...
Best Children’s Books 2022
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...
Trollope: Love for Sale
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...
Speech to the Society of Authors AGM concerning free speech
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...
Lost to addiction: Loved and Missed, by Susie Boyt, reviewed
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 Christmas Pig by JK Rowling review: her best book since Azkaban
The Harry Potter author gives us her Christmas Carol, and it’s a triumph
Why this is a golden age for children’s literature: ‘Children’s books are one of the most important forms of writing we have’
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...