The Salt Path - Raynor Winn

Amazon link

The Write Club and a little bit of Witherstone

What an honour to have been invited to read an extract from Witherstone for the Write Club discussion this evening!

The podcast was, as ever, a wonderfully diverse discussion, including the writers' favourite books as younger readers, and although it's hard to choose just one from all the fabulous alternative universes I inhabited every day of my childhood (and still do, ha ha), my favourite was probably Tom's Midnight Garden - I loved it so much I read it into adulthood... and those who know me well know just how much I love the story of Tom and Hatty in that magical garden....

Write Club said some very kind things about Witherstone, and discussed the importance of not talking down to children when writing, discussed the wonderful Narnia books, and also discussed another inviting pile of new things to read over Christmas. It's a great group, easy-going and full of enthusiasm for writing and for reading, their podcasts are time delightfully well spent for readers and writers. 

Jakob's Colours by Lindsay Hawdon

Amazon link

I'm finding some absolutely beautiful and also absolutely heartbreaking books in the library at the moment - this one, Jakob's Colours, was recommended by a friend, and is right up there with the best of them.

I am conscious that I've been using the word "beautiful" quite a lot in recent reviews, but just switching the word does not alter the fact that sometimes it is the best description. Jakob's Colours is beautifully written, and I adore the characters who inhabit its pages and the tiny cupboards within its walls. The Roma Holocaust - the Porajmos - is little-visited in literature, and rarely does any book telling the untellable do it with such devastating beauty.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Amazon link

And the Mountains Echoed is a beautifully written, intense, and accomplished novel, as you'd expect from the author of The Kite Runner and the even more splendid A Thousand Splendid Suns.

I did feel that I'd have liked to have spent more time with some of the characters at the heart of the novel, followed them in more detail over all the years they travelled in search of what was lost, but that's a testament to Hosseini's engagingly human characters and powerful storytelling in what is both a heartbreaking and an uplifting journey.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

Amazon link

The Miniaturist is a wonderfully inventive and sensuous novel with fantastic characters - both human sized and miniature! - and a deeply engrossing plot. The sights and sounds and smells and claustrophobic politics of 17th century Amsterdam infuse this intelligent novel, and the plot has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing - even if you might have seen some of them coming! 

The key to the sheer delight of this novel is the core thread of the relationship between the central character, Nella, and the mysterious miniaturist, which is nicely poised between the beneficent and the sinister and keeps you reading avidly to the end of this excellent book.

Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale

Amazon link

This is another beautifully written book: Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale, is a wonderfully eloquent and genuinely disturbing contemporary fairy tale which is also as old and as wide as the forest into which we venture, fearing the wolves in men's clothing; the wolves in all of us, even those we love and trust the most.

This is an often heart-rending story about trauma and love, about memory and forgetting, about the past and the present, about trying to keep impossible promises, and is above all a wonderfully-written, frequently nightmarish story, as well as a thoroughly gripping read.

At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison

Amazon link

This book caught my eye while I was browsing the library shelves because I'd previously read - and absolutely loved - Melissa Harrison's previous novel, Clay.

At Hawthorn Time did not disappoint: whilst, in some respects, Jack and Jamie reminded me of the central two characters in Clay, it was the style of her writing as much as the theme of the misunderstood which echoes through both novels here, and the intense and believable truth she evokes in her characters.
Harrison steeps her stories in nature in both novels, and it is in At Hawthorn Time that this is more explicit and intimately, outstandingly successful.  Another beautiful, beautiful novel, evocative, intense, and deeply moving.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Amazon link

Anything I try to write about this novel will fail to do it justice.

It's a story about a blind French girl, her father, her uncle and his housekeeper; it's also a story about a German boy, his sister, and his friend; it's about miniature hand-carved houses which hold secrets, it's about snails, and it's about a blue diamond with a swirl of fire at its heart.

All The Light We Cannot See is a novel about light, and radio waves, and trying to be true to yourself and others, and keeping promises. It's also one of the most beautiful and devastating books I have ever read. I have swept all other books off my shelves and replaced them with this one.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers - an unforgettable journey

Amazon link

The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers. This book. This book. I have never taken so long to read such a short book. Not because it was one of those books not worth the time, but because this book is worth the time.

Not a page went by I didn’t take in a breath and go back and read it again, even more slowly, sometimes many times before I could move on. It is a beautifully written, mesmerising book. It is also utterly devastating. It should be essential reading for anyone responsible for starting a war, and for anyone thinking of starting one, and for everyone in between. It is about the intimate experience of war, about the failure of memory to make sense of it, and about the necessity of trying to do just that. It is a psychological journey and is also a philosophical one – about choice, about memory, about trying to live and live on, but most of all it is about the disintegration war reaps at every level.

While there may be some faces missing from the last pages which I felt should have also been present in the shadows beneath the trees or traced along the lines of a map, this book leads you on an unforgettable journey, along a path of fires burning in the dust.

The Confabulist - Steven Galloway

I've been reading a lot of fabulous books just lately, so I thought I'd pass it on... 

Amazon link

The Confabulist – Steven Galloway

I’m not sure what I expected from this book having read and loved Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo a few years ago. What I got with The Confabulist is a haunting tale of memory and loss, of the impossibility of living outside of the past we tell ourselves and the future we try but fail to mould. The Confabulist is a re-telling of Houdini and the man who killed him, Martin Strauss, but it's much more than that: the tale entraps you, weaving its bonds, and even if you can see it coming this compelling novel is particularly haunting because, in the end, in the gut-punch end, you know it’s your story that Martin Strauss is telling, and your time is up. 

Which Book has Saved Your Life?

Today's The Guardian Childrens' Books is asking authors and teenagers to share the books that saved their lives for Blue Monday #Gdnbluemonday. I tweeted a quick reply - my choice being instantaneous - but it got me thinking about how a book can do that. Save your life.

We talk about the vital importance of reading, of libraries, and we know reading is absolutely vital for literacy (of course), but also for economics, for emotional and physical well-being, and so on, yet sometimes it hits home, you feel it, and you remember that reading really can save your life.

Here's why my choice is Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. 

Amazon link

As a child, Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce was the first book I'd ever read which gave me a very real escape into another world: the loneliness of both Tom and Hatty, the sense that neither home nor adults were a safe or trustworthy place for either of them; the deep need for a place they were free to be themselves in, and where they could find true friendship – to the extent that time and reality itself could somehow be changed by desire, by love - were not things I could articulate at the time I first read it. But that book offered me a deep and meaningful escape into what felt on a subliminal level to be a very real and accessible place where I felt safe, where new possibilities existed, where time and space and reality could change. This book saved my life.

I continued to read it right through my teens too, and its impact on my early life not only directly influenced my lifelong avid reading but led into my urge to write too.

Which book saved your life?

~

And the winners are...

The deadline for submissions to the Lytham Lives Anthology has been and gone, and we’ve had the difficult task of selecting the successful submissions for inclusion in the book.

We’ve had a fascinatingly eclectic pile of submissions to read through and consider, both in form and subject matter.  Life writing and poetry made up the vast majority of the entries, with some short stories also in the mix, and we’ve had great fun reading through them all.  It was particularly pleasing to see several entries which began during the writing and conversations in the community workshops we delivered in Lytham. 
Subject matter has ranged through stories of Lytham childhoods, school days and festival days, to tales of ordinary folk and their lives in Lytham, past and present, eulogies to mothers, eulogies to knickers (!!!), days spent wandering through Lytham – whether on foot or on bicycle, in rain, wind or glorious sunshine, and whether loved or hated! – and the endlessly fascinating ecological landscape of Lytham, which has been a recurring theme, along with dreams and memories of things past, and future possibilities, and a scattering of ghosts, geese, and of course, windmills.

Making the final decisions were difficult, and to some extent informed by the desire to create a book which has diverse themes and voices but which hang together to create a coherent whole, and with a fantastic selection of photographs old and new – some specially commissioned from a local photographer – the Lytham Lives Anthology will be a great memento of Lytham’s unique character, in both landscape and people.  A real festival of stories. 
Letters and emails are winging their way to the successful entrants, but we would like to heartily thank everyone who submitted their poems, life writing, and short stories to us as it has been a privilege to read all of your work – so thank you.

The successful entrants are H. A. Pearson, Doreen Riley, John Hobson, Robert Michael Boddy, Jean Cunliffe, Sarah Simpson-Bostock, Fay M. Ford, David Forshaw, David Williams, Joyce Warwick, Janet Lees, J. E. Cartmell, and ‘The Lytham Ghost’, Sir Cuthbert Clifton.

The Lytham Lives Anthology is part of the forthcoming Lytham Festival of Stories, due to take place over a 4 day festival weekend next May. It's going to be brilliant. You can keep track of what's happening on the Festival of Stories blog. I'll keep you posted on when the Lytham Lives Anthology is published.

rather thrilled

Indeed I am rather thrilled to have been asked to run a Shared Reading "Get into Reading" style group in a Lancashire Library I'm rather familiar with. Can't wait, and am ordering myself a copy of A Little, Aloud to share stories and poems with the group.

Love reading, me, and shared reading is a subtle but surprisingly profound way for people to find inspiration, support, and a little bit of themselves along the way, just through listening to someone telling them a story and then talking about it as a group. Amazing.

FREE Writing Workshops @LythamStories & Flash Fire Live Lit & Journeys with the Ghosts of Pendle Witches

Busy week coming up!

Really looking forward to the FREE creative writing workshop I'm running for the Lytham Festival of Stories on Monday!

It's at ParkView4U Community Cafe on 26th November 6.30pm to 8.30pm. I'll be using photographs and artefacts to help you write about family, history and memory, to get your creative ideas flowing. Places are going fast, so booking is essential. Please call Cath or Julie at ParKView4U to reserve a place: 01253 741955.

And I'm really looking forward to spouting my stuff at the Flash Fire Live Lit event in Lancaster on Thursday 29th!

It's at The Park Hotel Lancaster, 8pm start, and I'm well chuffed to be performing my work alongside the fab talents of David Gaffney, Zoe Lambert, Jeanette Greaves, Rob Wood, Peter Smith, and Ros Ballinger - AND there are open mic slots, plus comedy and poetry.

And all for a mere £3.
What more could you want?

~

Well, MORE it seems - I'm thrilled to have been invited to join Lancashire Libraries and author of Lancashire Reads 2012 Malkin Child, Livi Michael, on a journey through Pendle Witch country on Lancashire Day Tuesday 27th!

We'll be starting at Colne Library in the morning, and journeying to Lancaster, roughly following the geographic route that the witches took prior to their trial in 1612.

In Lancaster Library we will be joined by guests from Lancaster district for a light lunch and the opportunity to walk key points in Lancaster associated with the trials. Author Livi Michael will be on the bus for the duration of the journey and will speak at brief celebration events at each venue along the way – including at Clitheroe, Garstang and Lancaster Libraries.

The bus will stop at libraries in the places listed below plus culturally significant points such as the statue of Alice Nutter in Roughlee.




Full timetable:
Colne Library – 9.15 a.m.
Travel via Roughlee to Clitheroe Library – 10.20 a.m.
Garstang Library 11.20 a.m.
Arrive Lancaster Library 12.45 p.m.
Light lunch at Lancaster Library and Tour of Lancaster castle
Leave Lancaster 2.30 p.m.
Arrive Clitheroe 3.30 p.m.
Arrive Colne 4.30 p.m.

If you've taken part in Lancashire Reads or have read Livi Michael's Malkin Child and would like to join this fantastic event, click the Lancashire Reads link here.

Friday 30th? Might spend the day in a library for a break!