For Book Lovers

There's a kind of book you shouldn't take into a doctor's waiting room. You sit there in the medicated hush, minding your blood pressure, and then a line ambushes you.  Out comes a noise no grown adult should make in a room full of strangers. To be clear, that noise is a snort of laughter, not sudden flatulence, and Nick Spalding writes that kind of book. Spalding was born on the Isle of Wight in 1974 and spent most of his working life in media and marketing before he sat down and wrote a … continue reading

It doesn't take long, reading Caimh McDonnell, to work out that his detective intends to settle things with a hurling stick. Not as a figure of speech, but an actual ash hurley. Simple. Effective. Brilliant. McDonnell spent years handing gags to other people, writing for Have I Got News for You and Mock the Week and a fair amount of children's TV. He created an animated series about a squad of crime-fighting pets and picked up a children's BAFTA nomination for it. Then, in 2016, he decided to … continue reading

Starting over is sold to us as a clean sheet of A4. Fresh, white, and untarnished. In practice, that page is bound to hundreds of others, and most of them are covered with scrawled handwriting on both sides and stained with multiple coffee rings. You don't inherit a blank page. You inherit a wad of scrappy, dog-eared pages. Which is exactly why novels about starting over land so hard. Somewhere in a drawer, most of us keep a spare version of ourselves we fully intended to become: fluent in … continue reading

"What are the best British time travel books to read?" It is a question readers of my sort of fiction ask a lot, and I understand the pull completely. There is something very British about the whole genre. We rarely need a gleaming aluminium car or a laboratory full of blinking dials. Our lot tend to wake up in the wrong decade with a sense of disbelief and a haircut they've spent a lifetime trying to forget. As a card-carrying member of the British time travel trade, I have opinions on this, … continue reading

Adrian Cousins writes the sort of time travel where nobody builds a machine or explains the physics. A grumpy fortysomething divorcee simply wakes up in the sweltering summer of 1976, six months before the day he was born, wearing somebody else's skin and carrying forty years of hindsight he has no earthly idea what to do with. That is Jason Apsley's Second Chance, and if you've already read it, you understand the appeal: standpipes in the road, a heatwave that refuses to break, and an ordinary … continue reading

There is a very particular reader who finishes Oona Out of Order at some ungodly hour, sits in the dark for a bit, and then immediately wants the same feeling delivered by a different book. If that is you, hello. I write time-slip novels for a living, so I take a professional interest in the trick Margarita Montimore pulls off, and I keep a shelf of suggestions for the withdrawal. Quick refresher, in case you came here off the back of a recommendation rather than the book itself. On the … continue reading

Ask a novelist which sentence in a book costs them the most sleep, and a fair number will point straight at the final one. Opening lines take all the glory. Most people know, "Call me Ishmael," but ask a hundred people to recite the last words of Moby Dick, and you'll receive nothing but blank stares for your trouble. The last line does the quiet, thankless graft of making sure everything before it meant something, then it walks off stage without a bow. I think about last lines too much. When … continue reading

There's a very particular kind of book that ruins you for a week. You finish it at one in the morning, sit in the dark, and quietly rearrange your entire life around the question it just asked: what would I do if I woke up tomorrow in my sixteen-year-old body, knowing everything I know now? Shawn Inmon has built a whole town out of that question, plus eighteen-odd books. If you've torn through the Middle Falls Time Travel series and you're now staring at your Kindle with the specific grief of … continue reading

Some novels you finish and set down. Others you finish, sit very still with for a moment, and then find yourself trawling the internet at eleven at night for a book that might scratch the same itch. Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August belongs firmly in the second camp. I say that as a man who has written more than twenty books about ordinary people falling through time, and who still felt a small, professional pang of envy the first time I read it. The setup does something … continue reading

Every so often, a novelist returns to a story they walked away from decades ago. They reanimate the characters and send them off to meet readers who have long since grown up, moved house a couple of times, and started taking a keen interest in gardening and guttering. The long-delayed sequel. The follow-up that arrives so late that the original fans now need glasses to read the bloody thing. As someone who writes in series myself, I find the whole business fascinating and faintly terrifying. … continue reading

Matt Haig's The Humans begins with an alien arriving naked on a road outside Cambridge, appalled by more or less everything. Clothes baffle him. Noses baffle him. Our habit of covering food in other food baffles him most of all. A few hundred pages later, the same creature has fallen hopelessly for a wife, a teenage son, a scruffy dog and a jar of peanut butter, and concluded that our daft little species might be worth the bother after all. I spend my working life sending ordinary people into … continue reading