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Books Like Oona Out of Order
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…
Continue reading →Do Authors Base Their Characters on Real People?
There is a question every novelist fields sooner or later, usually from someone leaning in slightly too close over a cup of tea. “Am I in one of your books?” They ask it hoping the…
Continue reading →Famous Last Lines in Fiction
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…
Continue reading →Authors Like Shawn Inmon (If You Loved Middle Falls, Read These Next)
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…
Continue reading →Books Like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
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…
Continue reading →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…
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