The Literary Sofa
Guest Authors
Writers on Location – Philip Teir on Helsinki
Over the next few months I’ll be featuring some of the titles from my Hot Picks 2015 selection on the Literary Sofa, starting with a Writers on Location post about Helsinki by Finnish author Philip Teir, dubbed #Scanzen by his UK publishers Serpent’s Tail. I’m often sceptical about such tags but with his debut novel … Continue reading
Guest Post – Ben Blackman on the Christmassy Sofa
I am not a Christmas person but now December is here I am a willing participant in the bit I do like – the social gatherings. My ideal Christmas consists of escaping somewhere hot and far away with my husband and kids and luckily that’s just what we have planned this year. Today’s silly season blog guest … Continue reading
Guest Author – Charles Lambert on Writing a Novel in Fragments
Today’s featured title With a Zero at its Heart was released in May 2014 but I only read it recently, on the recommendation of several friends who predicted I would love it. They were right. My keen interest in narrative structure dates back to my student days, and although this novel in fragments has many … Continue reading
Guest Author – Alice Jolly on Crowdfunding – How to make new friends (and lose old ones)
*PUBLICATION UPDATE – JULY 2015* **CONGRATULATIONS to Alice Jolly and to her publishers Unbound on the publication of Dead Babies and Seaside Towns. The hardback edition (see the cover below) is a thing of beauty as befits this extraordinary true story and it is rightfully receiving a great deal of media attention.** As with many … Continue reading
Guest Author – Emily St John Mandel on Setting a Novel in the Future
By happy coincidence, the autumn season on the Literary Sofa has started with two truly outstanding books. When Kate Mayfield joined me last week, I mentioned my new love of memoirs. My taste is pretty broad and always evolving, often to include genres and subjects which didn’t previously attract me, in today’s case, dystopian fiction. Since … Continue reading
Guest Author – Kate Mayfield on Writing about Life and Death
In this week’s holiday reading round-up I mentioned my new love of reading memoirs, but my enthusiasm for Kate Mayfield’s The Undertaker’s Daughter dates back even further, to the first time we met almost two years ago. When Kate told me her book was about growing up in a funeral home in rural Kentucky I couldn’t … Continue reading
Writers on Location – Kerry Hudson on Siberia
It is a huge pleasure to have Kerry Hudson join me on the Literary Sofa today. She burst onto the scene in 2012 with her debut Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, which won the Scottish First Book Award and was nominated for five more. She was recently named … Continue reading
Writers on Location – Laura McBride on Las Vegas
The Writers on Location slot returns today and I’m delighted to welcome Laura McBride, debut author of We Are Called to Rise, which is one of my Summer Reads 2014 and the current Radio 2 Book Club choice. Like many readers I love to discover new places through fiction and also to revisit familiar ones – as a … Continue reading
Guest Author – Linda Grant on The Self in Fiction
Linda Grant is one of the UK’s leading literary novelists and writers of non-fiction. She has been awarded many prizes including the Orange Prize for her second novel When I Lived in Modern Times, 2000. As I’ve mentioned before, her novel The Clothes on their Backs, short-listed for the 2008 Booker Prize, was the book which … Continue reading
Guest Author – Carys Bray on Writing about Mormonism
The reasons we read fiction and what we get out of it are numerous and complex. Two things which crop up over and over when discussing books are a need to try to make sense of our own lives, especially the difficult parts, and the opportunity fiction gives to experience other lives which may be … Continue reading
My new novel SCENT – out in paperback on 19 May 2022
The Literary Sofa 