I am in rural Yorkshire, a few miles outside Harrogate, staying at The Granary, a delightful first floor loft conversion, where I am working flat out on The Northern Elements. This is a novel set on the other side of the Pennines in my native Blackburn and set in 1890, 1960 and 2015. That very fact… CONTINUE READING

Baby, you can drive my car… This is Simon Dell’s first foray into publishing fiction – he has already published on marketing – and it is already imaginative and assured writing. If science fiction is your bag then this is for you. It takes the topical issue of anxiety about Artificial Intelligence (and specifically driverless… CONTINUE READING

📽 If you have not seen this film, drop whatever you are doing and book tickets now. It has been nominated for ten Oscars and if it doesn’t sweep the board, call me Jemima and paint me cerise. It is quite extraordinary: classy, funny, bawdy, violent, heartbreaking – and very very strange. Deadly Rivals It… CONTINUE READING

Before I became a full time writer I taught at Lincoln Minster School for many years. Just before Christmas I went back to see a scintillating performance of a favourite play of mine. Here is my review: Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, is a pyrotechnic affair, exploding everywhere with wit, wordplay, [s]wordplay, fencing with foils… CONTINUE READING

During the course of the year, I have, from time to time, offered up my opinions on Facebook and other social media about books, films and plays which I’ve enjoyed – or not. I find these swift thumbnails helpful in keeping my own critical faculties sharp, but I also hope they offer suggestions to friends… CONTINUE READING

  I don’t know what other writers feel when they are asked this perfectly fair and reasonable question. I tend to have a version of the blurb available in my mind when I try to reply, a bit about how the book came about, and whether its genre is ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, historical-pastoral, etc, etc.’, to abbreviate… CONTINUE READING

My collection of short stories, Cherries, is making its way into the world. Humphrey and Jack, my second novel, will be launched in the New Year. Time for some reading and a couple of reviews. Today, it is the turn of the notorious emperor, Caligula by the prolific Simon Turney.

My current work in progress is a selection of short stories to be called simply Cherries. I am busy curating these tales (as the current fashionable jargon has it – though ‘curate’ is the mot juste here) whilst my second novel, Humphrey & Jack, is with my editor. Which will appear first is anybody’s guess… CONTINUE READING

“Who is ‘The Countess’?” is the novel’s smouldering conundrum and it is never fully answered until the surprising and delightful last pages, and perhaps not even then. The fact that she is an enigma until almost the end is what propels the action – though, when I say ‘action’, there are periods of seeming inertia… CONTINUE READING