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I follow a lot of novelists online these days, via Twitter and RSS, and one of the novelists I started digitally stalking this year was Katie Ward. I don’t know how I discovered her, but I followed her, she followed me back, she did a few #FFs with me in them, which was nice, particularly [...]

I was surprised and very honoured to be asked by the esteemed Norman Geras to contribute to his Writer’s Choice series, in which writers share some thoughts on a book which means something to them. Coincidentally, when Norman asked me I was approaching the end of a rereading of Henry James’ The Portrait of a [...]

I tried. I really tried. For the fourth time in my life, this week I gave up on Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s gigantic novel about – well, what, exactly? I’m not at all sure I could tell you. I got to almost page 200 in the Viking/Penguin edition this time, accompanied by a reader’s guide [...]

Confession time – I don’t read a lot of historical fiction (so why did you write a book set in 1811? Because it was there.). A couple of Patrick O’Brians and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque trilogy are the only ones I can most distinctly remember, and more recently The Quickening Maze. But these are all books [...]

This was one of those books that came out of nowhere. I am by no means a “literary” person – I don’t take the LRB, I only skim the Saturday Review in the Guardian, there’s no real rhyme or reason to why I choose to read a particular book at a particular time. I can’t [...]

Louise, myself and our two best friends go on holiday together pretty much every year, and for a long time these holidays involved elaborate, dancing book swaps. Perhaps ten books would travel with us, and we’d pass them from one to the other, and it was almost an unwritten law that these books had to [...]

Sometimes you love books because of what’s in them. Sometimes you love books because of stuff entirely unrelated to them – a memory, a place or, most particularly, the thought of a loved one. For me, The Book Thief is both, because it’s the first book my daughter read and then recommended to me. That [...]

Celebrated International Workers Day with a crowd of other well-meaning white middle-class couples worried about their pensions. We came together to watch the sainted Billy Bragg and to remember when there was fire in our bellies instead of a worrying amount of fat. Billy himself, bless ‘im, continues to blend relentless positivity with a clearsighted [...]

I finished this a week ago, and since then it’s been bedding down in my head. I’ve thought about it every day since. The oddest manifestation of this book’s grip on me has been the way I see “EDO” every time I play Words With Friends. This is one of those books which is at [...]

Sometimes, all you need is a great cover. When I first saw the cover to Justin Cronin’s The Passage, I knew I was going to read it. That monochrome girl staring out at me with too much knowledge in her eyes – it reminded me of U2′s Boy, which disturbed me in the same way. [...]