The Quiet Government Men. Chris Cauwood 98,000 words 300pp Taylor, member of a failed disaster team, flees the rising sea flooding a panic stricken England. Hurricanes, a super storm christened Noah, cause huge disruption and destruction. He is rescued and recruited by a mysterious organisation, ESO, the so-called Earth Survival Organisation. ESO is prepared, has been preparing for years, and moves in to oversee the rescue and recovery. Taylor...

This week I thought I’d share an addictive little competition being hosted by The César Egido Serrano Foundation. The Spanish Museum of Words is offering 20,000$ to the best 100 word story on any subject. The best part is there’s no fee to enter – so if you took a cue from last week and have been practicing writing cell phone novels, this should be no problem. Have a look and give it a shot! I also stumbled upon the British Library’s new online...

For me the gold standard of war novels remains All Quiet on the Western Front . We are the first generation not to be involved in a World War (if you exclude global warming, a war we’ve already lost). Klay reminds us the job of soldiers, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is to kill people. He gets inside the character’s heads. That everything in Iraq is fucked up is given. That the infantrymen (and is largely working-class men) doing the fucking up are...

Books I’ve been unable or unwilling to finish recently. This is a big step for me. I used to think I owed the book, the author and the universe the obligation of finishing a book when I started it. Rather like hatching a chick, when the eggs broke you’ve got to watch it grow, even if it’s brain-muddled with only one eye. So here goes, a list of books that are unputdownable, only I did. Tom Rob Smith (2009) Child 44 . I got to page 13 on this one...

Blood, revenge, slaughter. Hack their heads off with swords, display their severed limbs as trophies. Men feasting together in the meadhall, men fighting the enemy that springs at their back when they sleep. Bards,ballads, monsters, heroes. Women, proud tribal queens who worship the courage of their men. These are no pagan barbarians, they are Christians, God is in their hearts and fights beside them as they spit the enemy on swords so much a...

I have been on our planet for over 3 decades now and I have heard of “jihad”, I have read of women being put to death, I have also studied a course with an Islamist woman who even in her tone was always forceful and pushy and made my anger levels rise with her unwavering voice of ‘or else’. I have never read a positive story about Islamists. I have not read of them starting orphanages or putting value on human life. I have not read of them...

So now we have Mustaffa Brother and his brother! Derek at the top of his game when he worked in menswear!

I came across a few interesting things in my reading this week – not least of which was an article in the Huffington post this week exploring a new reading phenomenon in Japan – Cell Phone Novels . Sound weird? They certainly are – they sit somewhere between the poetic concision of a haiku and the manic social gracelessness of a tweet – but that said the most popular text novel, It's Your Fault ( Kimi no Sei ) by Sakura Imo, has been read 17...

Last week I had the good fortune to speak with Julian Jordan, the co-founder of Write Out Loud , a grassroots organisation dedicated to encouraging poetry in the UK – mainly through a very extensive and very user-friendly gig guide, though they also host their own events and feature reviews, poet profiles and literary news. They’re the UK’s largest live poetry resource, and if you’ve any interest in poetry at all, the site is very worth...

The cover of Death and the Penguin has the outline of a penguin in black, one wing is the barrell of a gun and the other a handle, the trigger is superimposed on the white bib of the penguin. It’s ingenious. I was halfway through the book before I noticed. The book is genius. Set in the Ukraine, after the fall of Communism, Viktor Alekseyvich Zolotoroyov is a writer that can only manage to write the occasional short story that no one wants to...