The Literary Sofa
Isabel Costello
Guest Post – Voula Grand on The next GONE GIRL (The spells stories cast – or don’t)
Today I’m joined by a friend, the author and psychologist Voula Grand. Voula and I met soon after I joined Twitter and started the Literary Sofa blog. She has been an early reader of the two novels I’ve written and her generous feedback, giving me the benefit of her professional perspective, has been fascinating and immensely … Continue reading
Guest Author – Danny Scheinmann on Crowd-funding his second novel
Welcome to today’s guest Danny Scheinmann, author of international bestseller Random Acts of Heroic Love, a book I really enjoyed a few years back. It came as a surprise to see that Danny’s second novel (which has a great premise, by the way) is being crowd-funded on Unbound. I had a feeling there might be … Continue reading
My Writing Room
In case any of my followers who aren’t on social media are interested, this week I had the pleasure of being Avril Joy’s guest in her Writers’ Rooms series and you can read the post here. If you’d like to see yours featured, Avril welcomes everybody and makes the very important point (I believe) that a … Continue reading
Guest Author – Paul McVeigh on Writing a Difficult Setting
It is a huge personal thrill to have Paul McVeigh visit the Literary Sofa. There’s a reason I’ll never forget the night Paul first crossed my radar in 2012. We were both in the line-up for one of Rattle Tales’ fantastic spoken word events in Brighton. It was my first public reading and it went much … Continue reading
Writers on Location – Christopher Bollen on Long Island
I’m sure you know the immense satisfaction that comes from thinking a book sounds right up your street and finding that is indeed the case. That happened to me with Christopher Bollen’s second novel Orient, a sophisticated murder mystery set on Long Island. It has everything I most enjoy about contemporary American fiction and is … Continue reading
Writers on Location – Jill Alexander Essbaum on Zürich
Hausfrau is the first novel by acclaimed American poet Jill Alexander Essbaum and I was fortunate enough to read it six months ago, knowing only that its UK publishers at Mantel were very excited about it. As anyone who runs a literary blog knows, it’s a publisher’s job to be excited about the titles they release – … Continue reading
Guest Author – Patrick Gale on Writing A Place Called Winter
It is a huge pleasure to welcome prolific bestselling author Patrick Gale to the Literary Sofa today. Patrick’s long and successful literary career had an unusual beginning back in 1986 when his first two novels were published on the same day. He has since written over a dozen more as well as two short story collections … Continue reading
Writers on Location – Eve Makis on Cyprus
These days e-mails and text messages frequently appear in novels but there’s nothing like an old-fashioned hand-written letter and I am drawn to books with any kind of epistolary connection. Things were literally looking good for The Spice Box Letters before I even started reading – it also has the most beautiful enticing cover. I’m … Continue reading
Writers on Location – Melanie Finn on Tanzania
The list of places which have featured in Writers on Location is varied – Cuba, Arctic Norway, Mallorca, Las Vegas, to name but a few – but it is also pleasingly random. There’s no plan: each post starts with me reading a novel with a brilliantly handled setting and I enjoy fiction set all over … Continue reading
Book Review – Submission (Soumission) by Michel Houellebecq
*UPDATE – SEPTEMBER 2015: THIS REVIEW IS OF THE ORIGINAL TEXT – THE NOVEL IS NOW AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH, TRANSLATED BY LORIN STEIN* Reviewing a novel not yet available in English isn’t something I would normally do but the intense energy surrounding Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (Submission) got the better of me when I was in Paris. … Continue reading
My new novel SCENT – out in paperback on 19 May 2022
The Literary Sofa 