Pelt
Hannah has been in bed for a week. She knows the different textures and pressures and eccentric lumps of her bed like the back of her hand. Better. She does not know the back of her hand very well at all.
Fiction
‘Older black women, who writes about that?’
Bernardine Evaristo is the award-winning author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction. Her other writing includes...
‘Gayness, queerness, gender plurality, plural pronouns – Africa got there two millennia ago.’
'War is complicated. Revenge is complicated. These things carry costs. It was very important for me, even though I was writing a fantasy novel, to make it a very grown up book.'
‘How could this possibly be mysterious? Where could this take us?’
'I’ve looked at criminal investigations through a detective’s eyes six times. But there are a lot of other people involved. There are witnesses, there are victims, there are suspects, there are perpetrators...'
The Body-Text Speaks
What are the parts of a book? There is a front and a back, there are the pages: not much to name. Let’s make the attempt though.
Shakespeare would have done well in any generation
‘I don’t know why the hell I write so many letters,’ Raymond Chandler once wrote, in a letter....
Oblivion
The man’s voice dropped, sounding conspiratorial; Caroline squeezed shut both her eyes, opened them, and nodded soundlessly. After a moment she said, OK. We will wait.
Scene Two
Scene two: Hugo’s office (HUGO is at his desk, on the phone.) Hugo This is Professor Hugo Fox....
In the Arms of Morpheus
Insomnia has a boomerang effect. You can never fling your thoughts far enough. Before night is over, they have...
Dr Lustucru
Dr Lustucru’s wife was not particularly talkative. But he beheaded her anyway, thinking to himself that he could...
‘I was astonished by that silence. The eloquence of the men, the absolute silence of the women.’
In The Silence of the Girls, Booker prizewinning author Pat Barker gives voice to the voiceless characters of...
The Language of Dreams
To write a novel is to inhabit a dream. A dream that can last months or years, that...