Category: A Mild Suicide

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Revisiting your life in fiction

On 13 March 2012 by

It’s twenty years since my first novel, A Mild Suicide, was published – years which have seen the most radical changes in publishing since the invention of the printing press. The rise – and fall – of the bookstore chains, the decline of mainstream publishing, the massive expansion of digital media, and the invention of Read More

A Mild Suicide . Literature . Novels . Undiscovered Country . Venezuela . Writing

Living Your Life In Fiction

On 22 October 2010 by

Novels don’t always stay within their pages. The revelation, last week, that the Swedish novelist and campaigning leftwing journalist Stieg Larsson, author of the best-selling Millennium trilogy, was instrumental in training Eritrean women fighters during that country’s civil war, might have come straight from one of his own novels. Nor are Larsson’s the only works Read More

A Mild Suicide . Historical Fiction . Literature . Novels . Research . The Dark Tower . Undiscovered Country . Variable Stars . Writing

Writing Historical Fiction

On 1 September 2010 by

‘I don’t like historical fiction,’ a friend said recently and, until a few years ago, I might well have agreed with him. I mean – what’s the point of setting your story in the past, when there’s so much about the present that’s worth describing? Of having to go to all the trouble of recreating Read More

A Mild Suicide . Literature . Novels . Sex . The Dark Tower . Undiscovered Country . Writing

Writing about Sex

On 2 August 2010 by

Writing about sex is hard, as everybody knows. Unless you’re as breezily unafraid of double entendre as Kathy Lette, or as secure in the knowledge of your own literary genius as Philip Roth – whose depictions, in successive novels, of liaisons between septuagenarian men and thirty-something women, are offered without a trace of humour – Read More