Life and death decisions
Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry…
Telling tall tales
‘I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first…
The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…
Ali Smith’s Winter is calm, cool and consoling
In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge…
Torn between envy and contempt
Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s…
Out of the depths
‘This happens to other people.’ The Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead says she had heard the phrase countless times, interviewing the…
Sick transit
Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed…
A legend in her own time
I usually dread the final 15 minutes of a celebrity interview: the awkward section during which the writer must steer…
Patti Smith grows old too gracefully
‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins/ but not mine’: the opening lines of Patti Smith’s 1975 debut album, Horses, find a…
Punk in a funk
Look up Tracey Thorn’s live performances with Everything But The Girl or Massive Attack on You Tube and you’ll find…
Fifty shades of grey wolf
Locate. Stalk. Encounter. Rush. Chase. The pace of Sarah Hall’s fifth novel follows the five stages of a wolf hunt…
