‘with fiction, you are making the world’

Novels, for me, have come from somewhere I wasn’t looking. In my twenties I was carrying an idea about a woman wandering around Ireland on a quest she didn’t understand and I sat in the Reading Room o

Ian McEwan is strolling through the garden of his Cotswolds manor house. Bees waft drowsily between wildflowers. Plump apples, pears and walnuts bauble the trees. Vibrant cerulean-blue damselflies hov

L If they’re ever looking to recruit spies, forget handsome, fit, blue-eyed Bonds. Forget gym-buffed Daniel, impossibly good-looking Tom and danger magnet Matt. Look instead for a middle-aged woman in

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was my recent holiday read, and I loved it. It tells the story of lonely widow Tova, whose teenage son vanished 30 years ago. She works at a small aquari

Thanks for coming in today, Bea,” said Jason, the commissioning editor at Bluestone Press, where Bea was interviewing for yet another assistant job. “We’ll be in touch.” “Okay, great,” replied Bea, fo

Life has a bad habit of mirroring art. Sometimes, this can be in a deeply sad way. A while after I wrote about the assumption of guilt in a traumatised young woman with poor social skills, I watched a