Lindsay Hawdon (http://lhawdon.co.uk/www.lhawdon.co.uk/Home.html) is a writer of travel, adventure and fiction. She began travelling at the age of eighteen. After leaving school, she spent three years roaming around Europe, Africa and India. Her travel column, An Englishwoman Abroad, began in The Sunday Telegraph in 2000 and ran for seven years. Jakob’s Colours is her latest […]
Sometimes you just want to slough off the old world and dance around the bluebell wood in gay abandon. Anything new, anything fresh will do. Why not give Kirsty Logan (http://www.kirstylogan.com/) a go? The summary of her fantasy is as follows. As a ‘Gracekeeper’, Callanish administers shoreside burials, sending the dead to their final resting place in the
David Baldacci (http://davidbaldacci.com/) began writing stories as a child, when his mother gave him a notebook in which to record them. He wrote for more than two decades, penning short stories and later screenplays without much success. While practicing law, he turned to novel writing, taking three years to write Absolute Power. Published in 1996,
So here we are on the 2nd May 2015. Witness the ludicrous pantomime surrounding the ‘royal’ family. The establishment, and their fawning sycophants, the London media, are in a frenzy. Continuous breathless commentary oozes around a flipping hospital doorway! What has happened? A woman has given birth. It does tend to happen. Over 350,000 babies will
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Norwegian crime and thriller writer Jo Nesbo (http://jonesbo.com/) will need no introduction to his legions of devoted readers. In this latest thriller, Blood on Snow, we read the tender story of Olav. He is known as an extremely talented “fixer” to a handful of Oslo’s most powerful crime bosses. But Olav is also an unusually complicated fixer. He has
Educated at Edinburgh and Oxford, Kate Clanchy (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/kate-clanchy) lived in London’s East End for several years, before moving to Oxfordshire where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer. Her 2013 novel has a summary as follows. It’s in response to an advertisement that Struan Robertson, a bright orphan, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native
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Patrick Gale (http://galewarning.org/about-patrick/) based himself in London after graduating from Oxford in 1983, starting out in a bedsit in Notting Hill. Though his website proudly reports that he “has never had a grown-up job”, Gale supported himself while writing his first novels – The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985), Ease (1985) and Kansas in August (1987) –
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How well can you really know another person? And how far would you go to find out the truth about him or her? S.J. Watson’s (http://www.sjwatson-books.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._Watson) successor to his super-selling debut novel Before I Go To Sleep (2011) turns on a girl who is gone. A young woman called Kate Plummer has been murdered in Paris in
Glass is the first novel of London based writer Alex Christofi (http://alexchristofi.com/) The outline is as follows. Günter Glass, ex-milkman and aspiring window-cleaner, is certainly pure. And he’s pretty transparent. But the jury’s still out on how sharp he is. What naïve young Günter does have is a head for heights and, ever since he
