Money in Fiction
“There is no money, and the Bredins can’t afford to divorce.” The first four words opening my new novel, The Lie of the Land, come from a famous note left by a Minister in the last Labour government to the...
Norse Myth by Kevin Crossley-Holland and Jeffrey Alan
Until quite recently, the myths that a Western child would encounter for education or entertainment tended to be those of either Classical antiquity or the Bible. Perhaps it is this that gave Norse myth, with its tales of ice, ravens,...
Prizeitis
“All must have prizes” declare those who watch the annual round of prizes – but while this seems true for some, it certainly isn’t that case for most. Prizes are the signs by which an outstanding author is supposed to...
Amanda Craig picks the best books about modern married life
Ever since Ibsen’s Nora walked out of the “doll’s house”, literature has been questioning marriage and patriarchy. Many of the greatest novels, plays and films we have revolve around the consequences of wives choosing adultery over convention. The price for 19th-century heroines,...
Booker Prize: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan — a novel to make you fall in love with reading again
One thing that many adult readers find when we encounter modern literature is how seldom it gives us the momentum and sense of wonder we found in books when we were children. Where are the vivid characters, the adventures, the...
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, review: Behind every great god is a woman
The phenomenon by which groups of animals all suddenly begin to copy a new behaviour – like blue-tits learning to open milk bottle tops – has been termed morphic resonance. Something very similar to the blue-tits’ discovery has recently been...
Devon is a heaven of beauty and a hell of dullness
If you were to ask what place in Britain has inspired most writers, you would probably guess London; Devon comes a close second. So many authors past and present have been drawn to (and have drawn on) the county that...
From Atonement to The Go-Between: why British novelists love a heatwave
“I love England in a heat-wave” says Leon Tallis in Ian McEwan;’s Atonement, “It’s a different country. All the rules change.” As the summer of 2018 continues to break records for its prolonged absence of rain (last month was the...
New Statesman 2018 Children’s Books Picks
Cold, magic, adventure, family, comedy, fires in the dark – we all know what makes for a wonderful Christmas story. The bulging sack of children’s books could cause Santa’s sleigh to sink. Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton’s deliciously droll Emily...
Dear Mrs Bird: the new generation of novels putting women back into the story of World War Two
If you have seen recent films Dunkirk or Darkest Hour, you’d be forgiven for thinking that World War Two was a struggle in which half the human race was missing. Its soldiers and strategists, politicians and prisoners, workers and wounded are all men,...