Ruth Ozeki, on the book’s cover, describes, There are Rivers in the Sky as ‘A Masterpiece’. Elif Shafak’s novel was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. She is a wonderful writer who imparts words of wisdom, and I’ll be reading more of her work. Shafak plays on words. She tells the reader ‘this is the work of a junior scribe’. Her theme is the interconnectedness of being. Water remembers. Water has consciousness. It is involved in the life...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0024z1n/wolf-hall-the-mirror-and-the-light-1-wreckage Reading is what I do. Strange as it seems, I couldn’t get into Hilary Mantel’s trilogies about the Tudor dynasty. No surprise there. I’m no royalist. Henry VIII is distant to me as the current monarch, King Charles. I can’t bear to watch programmes such as Downton Abbey , which I refer to as ‘the parasites’. Yet, I binge-watched all six episodes of Wolf...

Chapter Four – If you don’t have children, how has your single status affected you socially? Respondent 1: Donna, Except for the mentioned “episode”, I have not really been affected as I have single friends. (Response to Q3 was: Yes, I had a hysterectomy at 36, and got a bit emotional at a church camp when I saw all the kids with their families.) Respondent 2: Alyss, I find myself in the social circles of friends and their children’s birthday...

Atypical Love is an anthology. Nine writers. Nine stories from Alice Riley, Echo Darling, Carole Kenrick, Miriam Lohr, Kevin Marman, Zara Relphman, Elinor Rowlands, Lennie Varvarides, Emma Robdale. What makes it different or atypical is the nine writers identify as neurodivergent. I’m not sure what that means. ‘We use the term neurodivergent + (ND+) to encompass neurodvelopemental variations such autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, but add the...

Hex is a novella. To be read comfortably in one sitting. The premise is history that resonates. Jenni Fagin chose the North Berwick Witch trials. She has twin narrators in different centuries meeting in a cell three levels below the current city of Edinburgh on the 4 th December 1591. Gellis Duncan, a fifteen-year-old girl, is to be executed that morning for being a witch. Iris, via a séance, comes to offer comfort. Iris: ‘I was out in the Null...

I wore my drinking like a badge of honour. Somehow, the fact that I could keep it together—without my wife or kids ever really knowing—felt like an achievement. This was mine. My secret. I hid bottles everywhere: in coat pockets, hanging shopping bags, the tops of kitchen cabinets, under the car seat, even in the bushes by our gate. I was an adult, yet I treated this like some kind of game. Could I make it through a conversation without slurring...

Notes on nostalgia. Adolescence, when neurons exploded and rearranged themselves into them or us. Your senses discombobulated by girls. Everything tasted better. We scattered ourselves on a sea of faces. Some familiar. Some not familiar enough. Our voices thin as scratch-marks. Snod’s hair, flame-red as the hottest summer of 1976, but soon to be eclipsed and forgotten. We knew we were indestructible. All answers copied from the back of an old...

Every Friday, I try to publish another episode in my 'Dead Reckoning' series about my two Undertakers, Josiah and Archibald. There are always weeks when I'm not in the right frame of mind or events overtake me and make it difficult. And then, there's this week... I hope there will be a new episode, tomorrow, but right now, I'm not so sure.

Given the date, I thought it would be appropriate to revive this short story: https://www.abctales.com/story/philwhiteland/trick-or-treat

How to encapsulate that feeling? Like loss, bereavement, a tender crushing feeling that you want to push you to tears but they just won't come. Like seeing beauty and feeling a kind of ache knowing that even as you experience it and it's there right now, you know that it's dying, that it's lost, that even as you're feeling it you can't quite touch it. Somehow like trying to draw a perfect circle freehand and searing it, slicing it, so balanced,...