I love setting myself a small, intense reading mission: seven days, one region, a handful of midlist British novels that never quite hit the mass-market headlines but glow when you sit with them. Over the years I’ve built weeklong discovery routes that feel part literary pilgrimage, part...
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Reading Guides
I often find that the first barrier to reading translated poetry is not the...
New Voices
I often find the most thrilling reading discoveries not on bestseller lists but...
Reading Guides
I build reading lists the way I pack a small bag for a trip: with attention to...
Reading Guides
When I think about building a reading guide, I usually start with a single...
I build reading lists the way I pack a small bag for a trip: with attention to mood, a hunger for surprise and a soft refusal to overplan. Rainy weekends and quiet afternoons call for lists that feel like companions—books that suit the rhythm of...
When I think about building a reading guide, I usually start with a single stubborn image or idea that keeps returning to me long after I close a book. A motif — an object, a colour, a weather pattern, a mode of speech — can be a far richer...
When I sit down to interview a writer, I’m not only listening for a soundbite or a publicity quote; I’m tracing a map. That map shows the routes between books, the hidden corners of a writer’s bookshelf, the older texts that taught them craft...
When I first started rooting through the secondhand shelves of a tiny bookshop in Brighton, I kept finding the same thing: novels with dust jackets browned at the edges, author names I recognised from footnotes or literary histories, and blurbs that...
There are books that show you a historical date, a set of facts and figures. Then there are novels that make history feel like a living room you can enter — the creak of a floorboard, the smell of cooking, the small, embarrassing, humane gestures...
I remember the first time I opened a restored edition of a book I had already read in a cheaper paperback: the pages felt like someone had taken a curtain aside and shown me a room I thought I’d known. Restored and annotated editions do something...
I love the little thrill that comes when a book you thought you knew finds a surprising echo in something new. Pairing a neglected classic with a contemporary counterpart is one of my favourite reading games: it sharpens attention, reveals...
I remember the first time a debut novel by a writer from an underrepresented background stopped me mid-page and made me reorder my reading list. It wasn’t just the novelty of a voice I hadn’t heard before; it was the way the book treated time,...
I still remember the thrill of opening a novelist’s backlist for the first time—the sense that a whole world of books had been waiting, quietly, behind the one everyone had been talking about. Backlists are where you find the brittle early...
I confess: serialized Victorian novels used to intimidate me. The idea of starting a book that sprawled across months (or years) of instalments felt like opening a ledger rather than sinking into a story. Then I started treating these works as...