“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…
“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’…
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 email and puts it at the…
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…
Monday morning inspiration
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” —Georgia O’Keefe…
Monday morning inspiration
“Everything I learned about human nature I learned from me.” —Chekhov (via Crazyhorse Journal)