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Jane Austen and who? You may not be familiar with the eighteenth-century Chinese master, but if you are intrigued by adolescents striving to discover their emotional and sexual affinities in a society which aims to marry them off before they learn too much about themselves or one another, then I recommend you spend May and June reading Mansfield Park and Dream of the Red Chamber. Continue reading »
As an unpublished writer, one of my biggest fears was that I’d never get a novel published. Then, once I knew I was getting a novel published, one of my biggest fears was that my first novel would be published without anyone actually realising it was out there.
This is why I was so keen for Broken to be involved in Amazon’s Project Vine, a scheme where pre-publication copies of selected novels are made available to Amazon’s most consistent reviewers in the hope they’ll post positive reviews and create a word of mouth buzz. Continue reading »
Despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, the Great Bard’s life is still a dense thicket of myths and traditions.
Even Bill Bryson - travel writer, polymath and a master of research - found the world’s most famous writer a rather slippery character: in his new biography Shakespeare: The World as a Stage he declares him at once “the best known and least known of figures”. Continue reading »
“Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife…”
So begins Rivka Galchen’s funny, moving and mind-bending new book Atmospheric Disturbances. The story of Doppler radar, doppelgangers, climate manipulation and secret organisations that control the weather, the book centres around Leo, a psychiatrist who believes his wife Rema has been replaced with a identical replica. Continue reading »
Last week I rounded off my visit to the Oxford Literary Festival (more pics here) with a talk given by Richard Fortey about the story behind the work of the Natural History Museum. Continue reading »
“There aren’t many novels about people simply growing old” declares novelist, columnist and critic Philip Hensher in an upper room off Christ Church Quad. Continue reading »
Every good schoolboy knows that the indominatable British mainland has only been conquered twice - first by the noble Julius Caesar; secondly by those perfidious French. Lisa Jardine wants us to call it three.
As Tom Tower rang it’s 101 chimes, Jardine explored the conclusions of her book, Going Dutch for a curious Oxford Festival audience - making the case for 1688’s Glorious Revolution as “the invasion we’ve chosen to forget”. Continue reading »
‘Climate Xchange – Re:versing the Damage – Notes from the Climate Journey’ was described in the OLF programme guide as a ‘creative journey through climate change’. This lead me to suspect an audio/visual aspect to the event. To some extent this was true. Continue reading »
In the impressive surroundings of Christ Church’s Great Hall, bestselling historian Max Hastings admits to feeling a great sense of privilege that he’s able to “spend hours on end in the four corners of the Earth” listening to the personal testimonies of history’s survivors.
While there’s clearly enormous amounts of library work compacted into his comprehensive histories, vivid eyewitness accounts have always been central to Hasting’s books - and latest title Nemesis is no different, attempting to recreate the experiences of civilians and soldiers of all the sides entwined in World War II’s pacific battlefields. Continue reading »
I was pretty surprised to run into Dragon’s Den winner (and forthcoming Collins author) Levi Roots at an event with Dragon Peter Jones - and even more surprised to find them deep in conversation with legendary four-minute-miler Sir Roger Bannister. Things have clearly moved quickly for the musician, entrepreneur and now celebrity chef since the dragons bought into his Reggae Reggae Sauce…
While Roger disappeared (at speed) I dragged Levi into the Green Room for a chat about his million selling sauce, his new book and the forthcoming Reggae Reggae Car - click the button to listen in. Rastafari Bless!
100 books, 15 minutes and an eager Oxford crowd: today the Fifth Estate Estate rolled onto the Literary Festival Site to give away a boot-full of the finest literature - and the good people of Oxford turned out to cheer us on.
Lit fans old and young scooped up modern classics from our beautiful new Perennial Collection, leaving our alarmingly yellow vehicle considerably lighter within a speedy quarter hour. Our JG Ballard, William Burroughs, Carole Shields and quite a lot more disappeared rather swiftly into the throng outside Christ Church college, and even The Times turned up for a gander… Continue reading »
I always thought I had the measure of symmetry. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve never been a fan of algebra, and I’m regularly stumped by long division, but symmetry? Shapes and mirrors, right? I think I even know what tessellate means.
And yet part way through his enthralling lecture on the history (and future) of symmetry, mathmetician and author Marcus de Sautoy asks how many symmetries a Rubik’s cube has - and not only do I not have an answer, I don’t even understand the question. It’s 2.1×1024, by the way, and I couldn’t have been more confused if he’d told me the answer was brown. Continue reading »
Lionel Shriver loves snooker. Apparently she’s been a fan for fifteen or twenty years. In her new book The Post-Birthday World Shriver makes one her main characters a snooker player. For her lead character, children’s illustrator Irena, this man represents the exotic.
“I’ve come to read smut!” Shriver announced to the audience sat in the stately Upper Library of Christ Church. Eyebrows were raised. This would be exotic. Shriver began with a tally of how many people had read new book: a few. How many had read her most famous book We Need To Talk About Kevin? Almost everyone. Continue reading »
The Fifth Estate Estate is finally here - and it’s got its own page. Click over for more pictures - and find out what all those scribbles are…
We’ve loaded her up with a boot-full of books, and we’re in a generous mood. Over the next few days we’ll be cruising the mean streets of Oxford with our windows down and our system on, well, medium, blessing the city with the gift of free literature. So if you spot us around give us a wave - you might just get a book out of it.
“So you’ve come to the funny one?” said the girl taking my ticket to the talk led by the team behind TV’s trivia riot,Q.I.
While John sat through the horrors of rising tides and shrinking lakes on “a creative journey through climate change” just the other side of a creakingly timbered ceiling, I took the chance to hear QI creator John Mitchinson’s tour through the weird and wonderful of the animal kingdom, from pigs that glow in the dark to woodpeckers with ears on their tounges. I think I picked the right one. Continue reading »
Charlie Higson, still perhaps best known to adults for his comedy, has for the past three years been responsible for the Young James Bond series of novels and judging by the number of children who arrived to see him speak yesterday, it would seem Higson has found himself a whole new audience. Continue reading »
An interesting morning down here at the Oxford Literary Festival. Dreaming Spires sit gloomily beneath leaden skies, it’s grey and peaceful. The streets bustle in an orderly fashion, birds sing. Right now the only thing upsetting me is a rogue car alarm, set off at the smallest provocation. But that didn’t stop some half-decent history… Continue reading »
If you’ve had time during March to start reading Lions and Shadows by Christopher Isherwood or The Group by Mary McCarthy, you will have noticed that psychology and psychiatry feature in both.
Collective ideologies like Marxism and Fascism shaped the political understanding of Isherwood’s and McCarthy’s generation; Freud, Jung and the like shaped their understanding of the mind. In characterizing a group of people, a generation, a clique, Lions and Shadows and The Group both evoke the possibility of a norm, a type, and so they raise the question, What is normal? What is healthy?
Is it me, or has a strange thing happened to literary festivals?
Led by the relentless expansion of the legendary Hay, the last few years have seen the British lit fest leap out of its intellectual niche - and into the true mainstream of press, radio and television. Many of the country’s major music festivals now proudly boast their own literary tents; and with broadsheet sponsors, even television rights, a new audience seems to be discovering the nation’s foremost literary events.
So here I was at the Adelaide Literary Festival along with fifteen international writers, hand picked, cellophane wrapped and air-freighted half way around the world. Ready to frolic in the South Pacific Sea. Well… almost. Flying that 747 more or less single-handedly had not been easy.
“Well done,” texted the family. “Another triumph!”
Continue reading »
Lucy Lum was only a small girl when the Japanese invaded Singapore in the early forties, and already a victim of violence within her own home. Born into a matriarchal Chinese immigrant family, Lucy suffered for years at the hands of her fearsome and superstitious grandmother - a firm believer in the old ways, in stomach-churning herbalist remedies, in the dubious fortune-telling of mystics…and in mischievous little girls like Lucy knowing their place.
Originally self-published by her family, Lucy’s memoir The Thorn of Lion City, is out in paperback next month - we asked her a few questions about her incredible experiences…
Daniel’s debut novel, Broken, chronicles the havoc wrought on one British housing estate by a single uncontrollable family. Narrated by eleven year old Skunk Cunningham - trapped deep inside a coma - Daniel’s tragic comedy follows one community’s reaction to the neighbours from hell…
But how exactly can you pull off a novel that dares to cross the humour of Shameless with the emotion of To Kill a Mockingbird? Daniel’s been posting regularly on Fifth Estate in the run up to Broken’s release this month - last week I dragged him into the Filing Cupboard for a rather cramped discussion about the book, and about his own decade-long path to publication…
Apparently there’s a bit of Climate Change going around - so say our friends at Provokateur.
As an editor, you can shout your passion for a book from the rooftops and sometimes it just gets caught up in the cacophony of the hundreds of thousands of other wonderful books out there waiting to be read.
We try to come up with new ideas to make sure that each new book reaches a reader who’ll love it and so, when The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal landed on desks at HC HQ, we were inspired to launch it as creatively as we could in the hope of making it stand out from the crowd.
