I was on a panel recently at Whitechapel Idea Store with Alex Wheatle and Mark Piggott, discussing “London: fact and fiction”. When I heard a week in advance what the topic was going to be, I thought about all the famous London books I hadn’t read, starting with Alex Wheatle’s and taking in other big [...]
Archive | November, 2010
“Ashes” by Matthew Crow
The opening image of Ashes is a powerful one – a group of kids trying to stone a cat to death. The reason? “Something to do”. The tone is set for the rest of the novel. Bleakness, lack of hope, pointless violence, misdirected anger, innocent victims. The setting is Meadow Well council estate in North-East [...]
“The Dark Child” by Camara Laye
This is a fairly short and simple autobiographical account of a boy growing up in Guinea in the 1930s and 40s. Camara Laye wrote it in 1954 while studying in France, and you can feel the nostalgia for his homeland. Although the writing style is quite understated, the emotion is communicated quite effectively, and it’s [...]
“The Sea” by John Banville
John Banville is a magnificent prose writer. I loved his earlier book Birchwood, so thought I would try out The Sea, which won him the Booker Prize in 2005. I liked it, but did feel a little bit disappointed. The writing was still beautiful. The blurb on the cover from the Daily Telegraph was not [...]
“Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman” by Friedrich Christian Delius
A novel in a single sentence. That was what intrigued me about this book. To be honest I generally avoid World War Two books – not because I don’t think it’s important, but just because I feel as if I have already overdosed on books, films, TV programmes etc etc exploring every angle of the [...]
Buy Bitmead Books
As regular readers will know, my novel On the Holloway Road was published as a result of winning the Luke Bitmead Writers’ Bursary, an award set up by the family of Luke Bitmead, a writer who died tragically young. My publisher, Legend Press, is doing a special offer at the moment, comprising both of Luke’s [...]
