“Laurence Sterne wouldn’t have written this novel. He’d have probably read it in the dark, and then not admitted to reading it. The 18th century couldn’t have published this, unless ...
Anyone who thinks that the crime novel is a boring, repetitive genre would do well to read Belinda Bauer’s Rubbernecker. Set in the coma ward of a Cardiff hospital, Rubbernecker ...
The details of Fanny and Stella’s story will completely destroy all your presumptions about Victorian attitudes to sexuality. They and their circle of friends regularly dressed in elaborate drag and ...
It’s London, 1850, and private detective Charles Maddox has just been given a new case. Sir Percy Shelley and his wife are being harassed by someone threatening to make ...
I’ve got details in the sense that I can kind of see the novels in my head, but I don’t really write outlines down — I’m not very good at ...
I’m a serious reader. My addiction is incurable. The walls of my flat are lined with books, so many of them that they have overflowed their shelves and now stand ...
Still at a loss for what to read next? The Litro team and some of the country’s best book reviewers give you their picks of 2012.
was saving the earnings from my paper round to buy hardback volumes of The Lord of the Rings. They’d changed the jackets by the ...
Myths have an explanatory purpose. They explain why the rainbow is there, for example, or why we have the seasons, or why we die—big questions. Fairytales are not like that. ...
There’s more than a whiff of insanity to the proceedings, but it’s the kind of insanity that’s so enjoyable to watch that it makes you want to be part of ...
Robin Stevens, who finished a dissertation on crime fiction recently, went to a debate at Kings Place on Monday to listen to John Banville, Sophie Hannah, Peter James and Lee ...
As a writer, it’s your job to mess with the plot of your story, to test out what does and doesn’t work. Writing is—or at least, it is for me—like ...
Really good endings—as opposed to simply nice ones—should live with you. They should bother you, confuse you, even upset you. There are certain endings which, when I first read them, ...
Art—or at least, a certain kind of art—tells us that drugs unlock the mind, unleash the imagination and lead to prose both groovy and deathless. Whether it’s French bohemians sipping ...
While many horror writers imagine ghosts along distinctly sympathetic Freudian lines—there’s something in their past that’s making them behave in such wicked ways, and if they can just work through ...
One of Dickens’ favourite topics was the Family, and so it’s not surprising to hear that he had a very large one himself. It might surprise you though, to hear ...
Very few pieces of writing have entered our cultural consciousness like Pride and Prejudice, and deservedly. For who can forget that heartwarming scene where Elizabeth rides over the crest of the ...
Written in the eighteenth century by Oliver Goldsmith, it’s the story of upper-class twit Marlowe, a man who’s spent all his life being educated and has consequently never learnt how ...
Last week, I wrote about Culture, something that has an almost unique ability to make most of the population very nervous, as though it were a test they were bound ...
In the first scene of The Pitmen Painters, set in the coal-mining town of Ashington in the 1930s, a group of miners have organised an after-work art appreciation class. The ...
