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...

‘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...

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...

We might try to get right with God by obeying his commands. This would prove difficult. No human being has ever gone through the whole of their lives without breaking any of God's commands. If you break only one of them, you have become a law breaker. If you don't commit murder but do commit adultery, you have broken God's laws. James 2:9,10. We think that God's laws are right in our minds but putting them into practice is another matter. We...

I am pleased to report that two individuals were able to figure out which three novels created my Frankenplot ! I have donated $25 in your honor to ABCtales using the "Donate with JustGiving" button at the bottom of the page. I invite anyone who enjoys this website to contribute to ABCtales if they can. The two people will remain anonymous but I invite you to comment on your submission, if you wish. This was my Frankenplot (did you figure it out...

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at eighteen - a novel about a man who couldn't let the dead stay dead. Her husband Percy drowned six years into their marriage, off the Italian coast. His friends burned the body on the beach, but his heart wouldn't take the flame. Physicians theorize it had calcified from tuberculosis. Turned to stone. There was a fight over it. Another poet claimed it, insisted his love outranked a widow's. Mary got it back. She...