Perhaps it says something about modern sensibilities or modern culture that the reading public likes its thriller fiction ultra hard boiled. This is proven by the phenomenal success of Martina Cole (she has sold more than 8 million copies)(http://www.martinacole.co.uk/) who delivers gut churning tales from the London underworld. 19 of these gritty novels from the pen of all people – […]
Jeffery Deaver (http://www.jefferydeaver.com/) practiced law before embarking on a successful career as a best-selling novelist. He has been awarded the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Nero Wolfe Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year
Robert Harris’s million-selling alternative history first novel Fatherland (1992) has as its setting a world where Germany has won World War II. Publication enabled Harris to become a full-time novelist. HBO made a film based on the novel in 1994. Harris stated that the proceeds from the book enabled him to buy a house in the
An Officer and a Spy Read More »
Roberta Kray was born in Southport in 1959. She worked in publishing and media research in London for fifteen years. In early 1996 she met Reggie Kray and they married the following year. Her first book, A MAN APART, was a biography of her husband. Through her marriage to Reggie Roberta has a unique insight
Mandasue Heller was born in Warrington, and became heavily involved in am-dram as a child, and appeared in many plays and pantomimes. She carried her love of the stage through to adulthood, when she toured the working men’s clubs with her country & western band, Missouri Sunshine. She joined Equity during that time, and regularly appeared in
James Wood’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wood_(critic)) call for a comedic moral seriousness in fiction is handsomely reviewed here http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview6 The depth and brilliance of Wood’s insights left me amazed, and I hope they will have the same effect on you. The Irresponsible Self was first published in 2004. 320 pages in Jonathan Cape ISBN 978-0224064507 James Wood
The Irresponsible Self by James Wood Read More »
In an age when relativism of judgement is hardly ever questioned it’s a rare experience to go back to a confident assertion that there is such a thing as literary taste, and that this can be cultivated. Arnold Bennett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Bennett) offers a literary canon here. First published 1909. Does it match your expectations? 94 pages in Create
Literary Taste by Arnold Bennett Read More »
What happens when we accept that everything we feel, think, and experience stems not from an immaterial soul but from electrical and chemical activity in our brains? That is the question at the heart of this 2013 book by Patricia Churchland (http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/index_hires.html), one of the pioneers of neurophilosophy. In a narrative detailing her own personal and
Touching a Nerve by Patricia Churchland Read More »
European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking,the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life, is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Snell) writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and
The Discovery of the Mind by Bruno Snell Read More »
