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It's the last day of February, and we're already sliding into something like spring - although it's still wetter and colder and darker than any kind of spring I want any part of. But it keeps bringing us stories and poems, more and more of them. There's enough good writing on ABCtales, I realise, to keep a man happily reading all day every day, like old Prince Carlos of Viana. We have some good news, as ABCer Akanbi - Samuel Aina - publishes his...

The problem with autobiographical books is the writer appears before the procurator fiscal of memory and cheerfully admits to everything. Oh, that was me. Oh, that was me too. Yep, I was guilty of that. Convenient fictions become facts. Galloway uses old photos to ground her memories. She grew up in postwar Saltcoats a seaside town popular with holidaymakers in 1950s Scotland. Her mother thought it was the menopause, but it was Janice. Her...

Well we have some fantastic picks for you this week! Our story of the week is an ABC debut, from new author TFH. ‘The Late Bus’ is a sophisticated and psychologically charged story about a middle-aged autistic man taking his aging mother on a trip to Lancaster. When she dies he is unable to feel any emotion – and the work that results is a fascinated window into a different kind of mind. An outstanding debut and the first, I hope of many: http...

Kate Millett wrote The Loony Bin Trip at the rue de Seine between 1982 and 1985. She questioned whether ‘they were right after all. My own mind was too dangerous.’ They are the medical establishment, the pharmaceutical companies, the police, the government, all the outsiders. But what makes it tragic was the collusion of all the insiders too. She follows in the path of R.D Laing Madness comes from the family and Thomas Szasz, madness is...

Exciting news this week, as another ABCtales member publishes her work! Christine Hamill's 'B is for Breast Cancer' is now out with Hachette - have a look, like the page, share it with your friends and buy a copy: https://www.hachette.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9780349401348 Christine's promised to share her story in a special guest blog that won't be long in coming - so watch this space for more about her work. But for now I'll turn to picks...

Away from Her (2006) on BBC iPlayer, written and directed by Sarah Polley, based on the short story by Alice Munro ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’. As a writing exercise we were once asked to think about adapting a short story into a potential script. I chose a little known Turgnev story as a jumping off point. You could say if it was a currant bun it still had half of a currant in it. Polley keeps most of the currants and most of the bun. She...

Brooklyn’s Finest are, of course, all cops. When I see a film like this I always thing of The Wire, multiple storylines, flawed human, no discernible difference between cops, drug dealers or robbers. They’re all just trying to get by, flawed human beings, making mistakes. I don’t know if thats’ like The Wire , cause I’ve never seen The Wire , only read about it. In the opening shots, for example, the camera tracks through a car window. Sal(...

The picture on the cover of this book is a beautiful young girl, a cygnet, before becoming a swan. Below the author’s name, a gushing endorsement from the Sunday Times : ‘The year’s most talked about novel...extraordinary’. The ordinariness of the extraordinary has become something difficult to live down. Here we have a sixteen-year old adolescent with leukaemia. She knows she is dying and there is nothing anyone can do about it, but in a way...

February's off to a sharp start. Flooding and tube strikes, gloomy weather and the controversial opening of the Winter Olympics in Russia, not to mention the death of the incredible Philip Seymour Hoffman. And some of it must be inspiring, as this has been one of the hardest weeks to make a pick of the week in a long long time. Please, for your own benefit, have a look at the cherry-page and make your way through some of the incredible poems and...

Putin’s Russia welcomes athletes and spectators to the Sochi Winter Olympics. According to news reports they haven’t enough snow and have to use machines to create the necessary runways and conditions for it to go ahead, making it the most expensive Olympics ever. There will be no protests in Putin’s Russia, as there are in Brazil for that great media bauble called the World Cup. The notion of perestroika and glasnost are from a different...