I must begin with a confession.
Despite the fact that I write (among other things) books for children, I hardly ever read youth literature. That’s not to say that the market isn’t brimming with talent and choice; but when I read for pleasure, my first instinct is to make a dent in the teetering tower of [...]
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Posted in Entries by Emma, Fiction: children's, Fiction: general, Fiction: historical, Fiction: literary, Fiction: young adult, Uncategorized, tagged Emma Darwin, Antonia Forest, children's fiction, young adult fiction on July 10, 2008 | 22 Comments »
Perhaps it was inevitable that Antonia Forest should go out of fashion for a while. When you were born in 1915, put life on hold for war work, have your first novel published in 1948, and take the rest of a long life to write eight books about the same family, two books about their [...]
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Posted in Entries by Jackie, Fiction: historical, Fiction: romance, Fiction: women's, tagged families, American revolution, George washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, First Ladies on July 4, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Celebrating America’s national holiday. Happy 4th of July!
On Independence Day, we hear a lot about the Founding Fathers, those who used their brilliance and talents to forge thirteen rebellious colonies into the United States, but we hear very little about the women behind them. In recent years, a number of [...]
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Anyone picking up Bernhard Schlink’s novel, as I did, planning on being titillated by the older woman-younger man romance will be blind-sided by the moral complexities of the book. What was I expecting, Nora Roberts does post-war Germany?
The story centers on Hanna, a woman in her thirties, who [...]
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The Austen sequel seems to be a genre of its own nowadays, and surely a tricky one to pull off. A sequel is likely to have little appeal outside the fan community, on the one hand; and to cause disgust and outrage within it, on the other. As a rabid Austenite myself, I was profoundly traumatised by one [...]
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The premise of The Paradise Will is really a very charming one. A young lady is compelled by her eccentric uncle’s will to dine with a brusque, but ultimately fascinating nobleman once a week for six months; she has a rather cold-fish suitor, he has a scheming hussy of a would-be fiancee. It would make [...]
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Whenever I read a Peter Carey novel, I know there’s going to be unusual characters, whose quirks can be aggravating or endearing. And all of those uncomfortable moments in life will be scrutinized and reverberate. There will be metaphors,too, at once amusing and poetic. This time it’s: the crushed-glass stars spilling across the cooling [...]
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It is impossible to read Suite Française without being strongly influenced by the context in which it was written and by the subsequent fate of its author.
Irène Némirovsky was from a wealthy Russian Jewish family who fled Russia to escape the Bolshevik revolution. (Interesting that Kirsty’s piece yesterday dealt with the other side of [...]
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Posted in Entries by Mary, Fiction: historical, Fiction: literary, tagged Add new tag, Edward P. Jones, American Civil War, The Known World, slavery, Beloved, Toni Morrisson on May 6, 2008 | 4 Comments »
The Known World opens in the years before the American Civil War with the death of Henry Townsend, a freed slave who, at the time of his death at 31 years of age, was the owner of a significant landholding and 33 slaves. Henry is probably the book’s central character although the narrative rambles across [...]
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Today we’re lucky enough to have an interview with Susan Barrett - a very talented writer of historical fiction. I first discovered Fixing Shadows on Leena’s recommendation and was very taken with its deft plotting, interesting characterisation and the impressive dreamlike quality of the narrative. Needless to say we are very excited to have Susan [...]
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