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...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0019n5y/the-mule Based on a true story (kinda, but not really). An article in The New York Times reported that Earl Stone, aged 90, had been convicted for transporting drugs for a Mexican cartel. If Earl Stone had been aged 30 or 40, or even 50, there’d be no story. The story is in his age. He was just doing what a man gotta do. You have, for example, Brian Cox leaving the Scottish islands and chasing...

Mes amie, By posting regular reports of life during two years of Corona, I was able to compile a book about the subject. It is now available at Amazon.com Thanks, as always, for the support from y'all. JXM Available Now, July 2022 (at Amazon.com in hard copy or kindle version) “Living in the time of Corona Virus” -Joseph Xavier Martin 371 pages- available in hard copy and Kindle form at Amazon.com Preface In early March of 2020, we were visiting...

The Slowworm’s Song begins with ‘Start,’ and ends with ‘Start’, and in between there is a ‘Stop’. I guess that’s true of most of life, although there might be a lot of hanging about in between. Ex-soldier Stephen Rose lives in Somerset, which is home of sorts. It was where he was brought up by his father. Quakers don’t join the army, but Stephen went against the grain of his father’s pacifist beliefs and that decision defined his adult life. He...

The weeks seem to be flying by. I hope you all survived the heat. No moaning about today’s rain, please. Story of the Week Story of the Week this week goes to not-so-cosy Cotswolds-set “The Bounds” by Charlie77. The start of something longer, this first part is gripping, chilling and blessed with a narrative voice that is very strong indeed. Do check out Rosalie Kempthorne’s latest, too. Discovery is as off-kilter and unsettling as all her work...

If as some people believe, Russia was behind the Brexit vote, might it be possible they have been influencing social media to turn the population against Johnson? It is not as though everyone was not aware he found truth dull at best, to be glossed over with mockery or buried in fluff of Latin quotes. I don't see why, just now, everyone has suddenly noticed the emperor has no clothes? If Putin were responsible for Johnson becoming PM, as he was...