For Book Lovers

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

Ask a British man of a certain age how he's doing, and you'll receive one of three answers: "fine," "not too bad," or "mustn't grumble." All three mean the same thing, which is nothing, which is rather the point. We come from a long tradition of treating the content of our minds like the cupboard under the stairs. Shut the door. Lean on it if you must. Never, under any circumstances, let a visitor see what's actually in there. Fiction sneaks past that door. A man who would sooner chew a … continue reading

Every so often, a book comes along that persuades millions of readers to fall head over heels for a man they would usually cross the road to avoid in real life. Fredrik Backman managed it in 2012 with A Man Called Ove, the story of a fifty-nine-year-old Swede who inspects his neighbourhood every morning with the joyless precision of a militant traffic warden. Ove has recently lost his wife, Sonja. He has decided, quietly and methodically, that he would rather join her than carry on without her. … continue reading

There's a particular kind of novel that hands you a hero who cannot read a room to save his or her life. The Rosie Project is the gold standard. Don Tillman, a genetics professor who runs his meals on a fixed weekly rotation and treats finding a wife as a data problem, remains one of the most loveable narrators in modern fiction, largely because he has no idea he's funny. Graeme Simsion's 2013 comedy sold over three and a half million copies and spawned two sequels, The Rosie Effect and The … continue reading

Every author fields the same question sooner or later, usually from someone leaning in slightly as if requesting classified information: "Are your characters based on real people?" The honest reply comes out as yes, no, and it's complicated, often in the same breath. We borrow a laugh here, a walk there, an aunt's talent for narrating her own indigestion. Most characters end up a patchwork of a dozen people who'd never spot themselves in the stitching. Now and then, though, a real person … continue reading

Harold Fry, sixty-five and freshly retired, opens a letter one ordinary morning from Queenie Hennessy, a colleague he last saw twenty years earlier. She's dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He scribbles a reply, ambles to the postbox, then walks straight past it. And the next one. By the time he reaches the garage forecourt he's decided, on the strength of a few kind words from a girl selling burgers, to walk the entire length of England: 627 miles, in the yachting shoes he … continue reading

Kate Atkinson's Ursula Todd dies in the first chapter. A blizzard, 1910, the cord round her neck, and that, you'd think, settles the matter. Then the page resets and she arrives again, same blizzard, same year, only this time the doctor makes it through the snow and she lives a little longer. Dies a little later. Arrives again. On it goes, life after life, each version steered by a faint prickle of déjà vu Ursula never quite manages to name. I read it and felt that very specific authorly mix … continue reading

One Day plays a cruel little trick on you. It picks a single date, 15th of  July, and checks in on the same two people once a year for two decades, until you know Emma and Dexter better than you know some of your own relatives. Then it does the thing it does, and you sit on the sofa making a noise you would rather no one heard. David Nicholls published it in 2009. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet on the night of their graduation from Edinburgh in 1988, fail to fall into bed in any tidy way, … continue reading

There exists no lonelier document than a rejection letter. It's essentially a receipt for something you never bought. I know this not from receiving them, oddly enough, but from receiving nothing at all; when I posted my first novel to the literary agents of London in 2016, most couldn't rouse themselves to say no. More on that shortly. First, some comfort for anyone whose manuscript keeps boomeranging home: a tour of the famous books publishers turned down, confidently, repeatedly and, in … continue reading