Blogs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0018364/lullaby Leila Slimani brings the screen her international bestselling novel Lullaby , directed by Lucie Borleteau. Another case of preferring the film to the novel. I read about half the book, or more, before I stopped reading. I knew what was going to happen and didn’t particularly like any of the characters. I’ve nothing against books about nannies. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a classic, none...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03n1svn/midnights-children I like films, but I love books, but I don’t love Salman Rushdie’s books. I read about the first fifty pages of Midnight’s Children and didn’t go any further. But I enjoyed the film. It’s a simplified version of the book, and being quite simple that’s the version for me. I get the same kind of thing with Shakespeare. It’s not something I’d read for pleasure. And when you get to a...

The same, but different. Most writers write the same book again and again. (I do that too). Publishers like that. It’s an easy sell, especially if your debut novel won the Booker Prize. Different characters, different haircuts, the same predicaments, with much the same outcomes. Write what you know. Young Mungo (Hamilton-Buchanan) is Shuggie Bain . A rundown housing estate in the Dennistoun, East End of Glasgow (of course) after Thatcher...

I am the moonlight on the land – the smack of glitter on the lake the beam for nightly shapes that whisper in the wind. Soon I will be a slice of sunshine.

‘We elected a meme.’ Conspiracy beliefs eat you from the inside. I know this having been brought up a Roman Catholic. Guardian journalist Van Badham tells the reader her book is about two things, i) the internet, ii) belief. It was personal for her. ‘My interest in the internet’s extremist underworld resulted from my experience of its attacks…I found myself on the very public online radar of misogynists, racists, homophobes and outright fascists...

Too much time on my hands and not prime time I’m afraid. Recovering from Covid, which I’d managed to avoid getting for nearly two and half years and ticked that it found a chink in my defenses now for it is not a party, far from it. The first days of it, I didn’t know I had it; thought it was a virus, a cold or my general allergies acting up but fast forward a couple of days, and I’m thinking maybe a test might be in order. And then…”voila”...

This is a big book in lots of ways. 720 pages. There’s nothing little about A Little Life . I’d picked up hints about this book in my reading. The Great American Novel. It made it a must read. Yanagihara’s second novel won acclaim from all the major players in literary fiction. The Wall Street Journal , for example, ‘Announces [on the flyleaf] Yanagihara as a major American novelist. The New York Times bestseller. A panegyric from Edmund White...