Hannah Kent: Burial Rites
The latest addition to my website is Hannah Kent's Burial Rites. Though Kent is Australian, this novel is set entirely in Iceland, where Kent spent some time. It tells the…
Audrey Magee: The Undertaking
The latest addition to my website is Audrey Magee's The Undertaking, one of the books on the shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction. This is Magee's first novel and…
Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction #ThisBook
The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction have launched #ThisBook, where they have asked nineteen well-known (in the UK but probably not elsewhere) women to nominate the novel written by a…
On not being good enough
My bath-time reading of the Guardian Literary Review recently involved reading D J Taylor's interesting article, rather badly titled Literary hero to zero (I am guessing that the title is…
#readwomen2014
I have been following with some interest the #readwomen2014 proposal made by writer/illustrator/blogger Joanna Walsh. (She also wrote an article in The Guardian). It has attracted a lot of interest…
A Reading List for David Gilmour
As has been extensively reported Canadian writer and professor David Gilmour (no, not that David Gilmour) has made a bit of fool of himself, basically saying that there are no…
A. M. Homes: May We Be Forgiven
The latest addition to my website is A. M. Homes' May We Be Forgiven, the winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction. Most people, including me, thought that Bring…
Women’s Prize for Fiction
The shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction was announced and nearly got lost in the shuffle, as it was announced the day after Granta’s Best Young British Novelists list.…
Women writers Part 3
After promising in both the first part and then second part of this topic, here is my mea culpa as to why I have so few women writers on my…
Women writers Part 2
In my previous post on this topic, I said that I would say more in a subsequent post about my own failings in this area. However, I first want to…