The Blog
The latest witterings
Second Chances: Do People Really Turn Things Around
I have built most of a career on a single, faintly ridiculous premise: what if you could go back and do it all again, only properly this time? My characters are forever being handed a fresh crack…
Continue reading →Books Like The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
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…
Continue reading →Sweets and Crisps the 80s Quietly Killed Off
There’s a very specific flavour of grief reserved for snacks. Not the loud, public sort, but the quiet kind that ambushes you in a corner shop four decades after the fact. Your hand…
Continue reading →What Does a Writer’s Working Day Actually Look Like? (Mostly, I Stare at a Wall)
People imagine the writing life involves a leather armchair, a glass of something amber, and sentences arriving like Amazon packages. The reality, in my sleepy corner of Surrey, leans rather…
Continue reading →Authors Who Came to Hate Their Own Most Famous Book
Every author starts out wishing for the same modest thing: a book that people actually read. You picture the kind reviews, the sales chart doing something other than impersonating a heart monitor…
Continue reading →The Midlife Wake-Up Call
Somewhere around your mid-forties, a small voice pipes up while you stand at the bathroom mirror, studying a man who appears to have borrowed your face and aged it without asking. The voice puts…
Continue reading →Books Like Life After Life: Novels About Living It All Again
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…
Continue reading →A Week of 1988 Telly (All Four Channels of It)
I left school in the summer of 1988 with a handful of GCSEs and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the TV listings, only one of which has earned me a penny since. Telly mattered in 1988 in a way it…
Continue reading →Where Do Authors Get Their Ideas?
Ask any novelist what readers most want to know at a book signing, and the answer never varies. Not “how do you structure a plot,” not “how do you find an agent,” and…
Continue reading →The Biggest Book Advances Ever Paid (and the Spectacular Art of Not Earning Them Back)
I have never had a book advance. Not a penny, not a fiver, not so much as a book token. I publish through my own imprint, Inchgate, which means my advance negotiations consist of me asking myself…
Continue reading →What Would You Change About Your Life If You Could?
I write novels about ordinary people who reach back and change their lives, so this question trails me about like a faithful Labrador. People assume I keep an answer ready… a tidy…
Continue reading →Books Like One Day by David Nicholls
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…
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