Why I like independent bookshops
You often hear people talking about supporting independent bookshops as if they’re some charity case. I don’t agree with this – they have real advantages. One of them…
London rioting
I live in Haringay, the same borough as Tottenham, where the riots started that have since spread across London. If you take…
“Book of Clouds” by Chloe Aridjis
A very quiet, meditative book about a Mexican woman adrift in Berlin. Tatiana is alienated from her family and her friends, cut…
“Brenton Brown” by Alex Wheatle
Brenton Brown is a follow-up to Alex Wheatle’s famous debut Brixton Rock, which was set in the early 1980s. We catch up…
Booker longlist
Here are the 13 longlisted books for this year’s Man Booker Prize: Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape –…
Apocalypse
I like it when fiction writers have something to say about the world. I mean the real world, beyond the world of books. Junot Diaz, author of The…
The ingredients of fiction
Writing fiction is not really about making stuff up. It’s more about making sense of what you already have stored somewhere in…
“Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia is many books in one. It is a piece of journalism – Orwell initially went to Spain in the…
Giveaway: “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy
I picked up a free copy of this in New Beacon Books – there was a stack of them left over from…