Essays, book news and events — a single feed, filterable by type.
Apr 2020 · Blog
Out on the beach, I threw handfuls of bread and expected gulls to swoop. The gulls weren’t interested. This is Britain’s eastern tip, in Lowestoft, and the gulls are the fifteen inch long kittiwakes.…
Read more →Mar 2019 · Blog
I ask myself a couple of questions about The Cellist of Dachau. And answer them … another day would bring other answers, but these are also true. What does The Cellist of Dachau want to achieve?…
Read more →Feb 2019 · Books
The Cellist of Dachau takes music and the Holocaust as its theme. In 1938, Otto Schalmik, a 19-year-old musician from a Jewish family in Vienna, is arrested by Nazi police. Transported to Dachau, he…
Read more →Feb 2019 · Blog
My window faces north. On winter mornings, the house’s shadow draws close as the low sun lights up the neighbours’ gardens. On the fence close by a wood pigeon has been keeping me company…
Read more →Jul 2018 · Blog
In Hobart in August, Winter was just pushing into Spring. An imported daffodil bloomed in the park. A forest raven cawed a spectacularly mournful song from the eucalyptus trees beside Seven Mile Beach. Mount…
Read more →Jul 2018 · Blog
Telling a friend about my upcoming novel J SS Bach, he suggested I read Daniel Barenboim and Edward W.Said’s Parallels and Paradoxes: Exploration in Music and Society. These are deep, intelligent conversations. I’m learning about…
Read more →Dec 2017 · Blog
I’m set to take the dawn train down to our goathouse in a Pyrenean village for a week’s writing retreat. I’m crazy, I’m told, for this seems foolhardy in winter; when I seek a…
Read more →Nov 2017 · Books
‘A Powerful & Disturbing Experience‘ – Ramsey Campbell One night in Hull, I woke from a dream of being a vampire. A later vision of a woman standing on the beach at Zeebrugge, staring out…
Read more →Nov 2017 · Books
Client Earth, written with my husband James Thornton, tells the tale of ecolawyers out to save the planet. Lawyers are great strategic thinkers. Back in 1970, when the Nixon administration brought in a raft…
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