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The TV Adverts Every 80s Child Can Still Recite
I cannot reliably remember where I left my keys an hour ago. I have stood in a supermarket aisle, blindly staring at a shelf with no memory of the items I mentally listed on the drive to said…
Continue reading →Why Do Authors Use Pen Names?
My name, when it appears on the cover of a book, contains my middle initial. The ‘A’ is there purely so readers don’t confuse me with the other Keith Pearsons cluttering up…
Continue reading →Is It Time to Quit Being an Author? (One Writer’s Plea, and My Honest Answer)
Every so often, someone in an author group posts something so raw and so familiar that I want to put the kettle on, reach through the screen, and talk it through properly. This is the first of…
Continue reading →Sequels That Took Decades to Arrive
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…
Continue reading →Can You Ever Really Start Over?
I have started over more than once, and never with any kind of grand plan. In 2004 I stepped down from a directorship at a property company, mostly to spend more time with two small humans…
Continue reading →Books Like The Humans by Matt Haig
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…
Continue reading →What a Night Out Cost in 1992
In 1992, I turned twenty-one. I had a wage packet, a suit that I sincerely believed made me look like a man of the world, and the bulletproof confidence of a young man who believed he was a bona…
Continue reading →British Novels About Men’s Mental Health in Middle Age
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.”…
Continue reading →The Longest Anyone Ever Took to Write a Single Novel
Somewhere out there sits a writer who has spent longer on their manuscript than most marriages last. Not longer than a mobile phone contract. Longer than an actual human relationship. They will…
Continue reading →The Roads Not Taken (and Why the Other One Probably Led to a Cul-de-Sac)
Everyone keeps a private museum of the lives they never lived. Mine has an entire wing devoted to the version of me who stayed in the property business, drives something German and expensive, and…
Continue reading →Books Like A Man Called Ove
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…
Continue reading →Holidays Before easyJet (When a Fortnight in the Sun Meant Sleeping in a Tent)
There is a whole generation of British adults who genuinely believe a holiday has always meant tapping a phone, paying £34 to a Hungarian airline and standing in a queue at Luton at half four in…
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