Reading binge
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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
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…
How not to check email
I use Gmail for my personal email, and recently installed a new feature called “Priority Inbox”, which automatically sorts out your important…
Monday morning inspiration
“The author’s task is to synchronize thoughts, images, raw creative material in a meaningful way, a task as difficult and frantic and…