This book has not been officially release yet. I was lucky enough to buy a copy at West Dunbartonshire Festival of Words at Parkhall library on Monday night. Gail Honeyman was doing her first gig. Ahhhh, that’s nice. She seemed very nice and self-assured. It was the usual format of someone asking her questions about the book and Gail reading two short excerpts from the book. And later questions from the audience. She read, first page, first...

This is the penultimate book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It picks up where it left off in the second book, with ‘Middle Time’ and Elena Greco narrating what happened to her and her brilliant friend Lila Cerrulo after her disappearance in the winter of 2005. As the storyteller Elena has access to Lila’s motives and actions because her friend had given her diaries to her –asking her not to read them. She did, of course. There’s no...

It takes a war, a Great War, a Second World War to teach us values. It’s crude but effective. Thatcher before the Falkland’s War, behind in the polls, goes on to win in a landslide. The problem with the dead is they don’t stay dead. The Somme, six-million Jews, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The dead stay frozen, when homes fit for heroes remain unmade, and resurface minutes, hours, days, years, decades later as a soundbite to be counted off, or a source...

Mother's day and August month is certainly a month in which woman plays a vital role it's the one month where we as woman are being celebrated and past transgressions remembered. Are woman being valued for who they are sadly when measured towards standards we have failed once again. As usual the argument would be a lot is being done. Now to those people I'd like to say come out of your perfect houses with your perfect circumstances and you'll...

This Boy is a prequel to Alan Johnson’s Please Mr Postman , set before he started his working life spent, mostly, in the Post Office and via his union involvement access to the Labour Party, becoming an MP and becoming Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s government. Our current Prime Minster Teresa May, was, of course, a former Home Secretary. Her father was a vicar. Alan Johnson’s father was an arsehole. In the prologue we’re shown a black and white...

Come on people, we’re half way through this month’s Poetry Monthly and the posts are not exactly flooding in. You lovely, creative lot on ABCtales need to get your blue sky thinking on and get responding to ‘into the blue’. Make of it what you want, do what you need to, but come on – get writing! I look forward to reading some more poems over the next couple of weeks. Noo

I think this was the first William McIlvanney novel I read. It won the Whitbread Award for Fiction. When McIlvanney was writing the book there were still such a thing as a coalminer. There’s probably a picture of one in the Daily Mail hate archives, the equivalent of a Lascaux cave drawing to remind them what these men that held the country to ransom, the aristocracy of the working-class, trade-union movement, looked like. Coal powered the...

Posted by airyfairy on Fri, 12 May 2017 In a very strong week for poetry, Ralph's 'Addict' really stood out for me. It's a barnstorming performance piece, but even reading it on the page is a visceral experience. Please have a look now if you haven't managed to read it yet: https://www.abctales.com/story/ralph/addict Story of the Week is Rosalie Kempthorne's dreamlike, poignant, wistful 'Dead Men Tell No Tales', one of a field of very strong...

In a very strong week for poetry, Ralph's 'Addict' really stood out for me. It's a barnstorming performance piece, but even reading it on the page is a visceral experience. Please have a look now if you haven't managed to read it yet: https://www.abctales.com/story/ralph/addict Story of the Week is Rosalie Kempthorne's dreamlike, poignant, wistful 'Dead Men Tell No Tales', one of a field of very strong Inspiration Point entries this week. Again...

Huge thanks to everyone who came to our reading night yesterday in London, it was so lovely to see you all, and there were many fabulous performances, some of which we managed to film, and we will hopefully be sharing those with you soon. Special thanks to Mark Say for the organisation and for being a brilliant MC, and to Richard (blightersrock) for the auction which raised a very tidy amount to help keep us going (and I have now got some great...