My earliest reading memory I have a very clear memory of reading Fun With Dick and Jane. I was four years old, and my dad wrote each word on a chalkboard. I memorised them,... Read more »
T-O-M. The initials of Tomas Olsen Myrbråten, the narrator in Thure Erik Lund’s The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch, spell out the Norwegian word for “empty”. Approaching 38, he’s already... Read more »
I run a reading workshop which begins with a little shelf assessment. Participants bring a stack of books that have shaped who they are: childhood treasures; new revelations; comfort reads. Books they... Read more »
At the end of a night in a London pub, after last orders have been called, three friends are joking about what role they’d serve on a remote desert island, with no... Read more »
If you have been into a bookshop since 2022, or perhaps even just breathed in and out, you could not have failed to clock the phenomenon that was Lessons in Chemistry. Bonnie... Read more »
My earliest reading memoryLynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy – where an assortment of differently shaped dogs go on a walk – wormed its way into my subconscious when I was very young. The... Read more »
Sir Ian Rankin rarely watches television. Certainly, there’s no gleaming flatscreen in the corner of the apartment in Edinburgh where he writes, listens to music and constructs elaborate Lego models (all four... Read more »
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (Penguin, £9.99)This short novel won almost every genre award following its 2016 US publication. As a Black writer, LaValle had a conflicted relationship with... Read more »
The novel is set in an America partitioned into two factions: the Dakota Membership, presumably made up of North and South Dakota, and Still United, an agglomeration of other states of the... Read more »