‘Daemon Voices’ by Philip Pullman
“Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story.” If I had to trace the death of the novel – or at least a prolonged attempt to kill it – to a single phrase, this is it. EM Forster wrote...
New Statesman 2017 Children’s Books picks
Few readers will fail to spot this has been a golden year for children’s books. With Philip Pullman’s magisterial return to the world of His Dark Materials in La Belle Sauvage, and Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s rapturously received nature-fest The Lost...
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...
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...
Helen Dunmore
A celebration of the life and work of acclaimed novelist Helen Dunmore. A wonderful friend and literary inspiration.
I fought off a burglar in my own home – but he inspired my new novel
Stories have the power, which Dickens above all used, to make the haves see the have-nots as people. My burglar was not a beast, but a person.
New Statesman 2016 Xmas Children’s Books Picks
If keeping your spirits up in the past month has been difficult, then the best children’s books may be a present to yourself. I am emerging from the duvet much as Moses came down from the mountain, to say there...
The Hunger Games and the teenage craze for dystopian fiction
Wizards and vampires are out. The market in teen fiction is dominated now by societies in breakdown. And it’s girls who are lapping them up.
What Language Do I Dream In? by Elena Lappin
Lappin's account of her life as a mulitple émigré is shot through with sadness and euphoria.