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...
There are not many authors whom readers wish had written more, rather than fewer, novels but Eva Ibbotson is among them. Like Jane Austen, she wrote just six completed books: A Countess Below Stairs (1981), Magic Flutes (1982), Company of...
Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs is one of the great works of comic fiction; it is also a profound meditation on being plain. This might seem a large claim to make given that no less a novelist than George Eliot addressed...
Amanda Craig's recommendations for children's books in 2020.
From hugless friends to heroic mice, these are the best stories to get your kids through the pandemic.
I respect and understand what it is that cleaners do. I know mine is honest, reliable and too bright for this work. The people who go into battle against dirt, germs and chaos are essential, and heroic. If they’re not...
“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...
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,...