Blogs

David Szalay (2025) Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. That puts David Szalay into the stratosphere of book sellers. Last year’s winner, Orbit , Samantha Harvey’s quote on the cover is ‘Brilliance on every page’. ‘When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making new friends. After a while...

Posted by airyfairy. To start February off, and following on from Soulfire77's wonderful Frankenplot competition, GlosKat has also generously promised to make a donation to ABCTales if people take up her challenge to write an Alphabet story or poem. Details are here: Alphabet You Can’t | ABCtales and the deadline is 18 February. Thank you to GlosKat for such a lovely idea! Story of the Week is Part 1 of drew_gummerson's 'Minority Report'. As...

‘Can we enter heaven with one leg?’ The little girl named Saja in Jabela, who lost her leg in an Israeli airstrike on her house before entering an eternal sleep due to the destruction of all hospital in Gaza had asked I think she entered with two.

Leonardo Da Vinci (2024), BBC iPlayer, Written by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, narrator Keith David, Director Ken Burns. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m00264cj/leonardo-da-vinci https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0026ch9/leonardo-da-vinci-series-1-2-part-two-paintergod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(2024_film) Ken Burns that heavyweight of public service films and whose documentary films have attempted to explain...

Our Man in Moscow – Panorama. BBC iPlayer My son worked in Moscow a few years ago. He liked it there. He always said that Muscovites are more open than you would imagine and that the streets felt safe unlike cities such as London. He returned to the UK after the start of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine which saw tanks roll in from February 2022. The company he worked for was London-based and had decided to withdraw all of its...

I'd like to say a very big thank you to everyone who's given money to ABCTales recently. All donations are very much appreciated and go towards the running of our site I'd also like to remind you that if you prefer to do a bank transfer rather than use JustGiving please email me ( claudine@abctales.com ) for our bank details

SIGNAL / INTERFERENCE: A Collaborative Chapbook Project

I had to check Allan Bennett is still alive. He’s 91 now. Books don’t have to be new to be read. His diary entries and moral outrage with Tony Blair as he cosied up to George Bush (junior) over the invasion of Iraq over dumbed up files that never existed…well, with the moron’s moron Trump treating the Doomsday Clock as a pinball machine that spits out Nobel Peace Prizes we’re beyond satire, but not common sense. Bennett has got more than a wee...

Alphabet You Can’t Inspired by Soulfire77’s Frankenplot competition (and beholden to him for the title above) I thought I would offer to donate £25 to ABC to see what anyone can come up with for ‘an Alphabet story’. This means a coherent story where every word starts with the next letter of the alphabet eg “A bear called David eats figs greedily ..“ type thing. It doesn’t have to be a story, it could be a poem or a non-fiction prose piece, any...