CLARE Mackintosh warns that there will be tears – and there are. How could there not be as I am asking the bestselling, award-winning novelist to relive the moment when she and her husband made the agonising decision whether to keep their gravely ill son alive, or remove his life support and let him die.
BRAM Stoker, the Irish author of Dracula, has been with Joseph O’Connor almost all his life.
ON the final page of her new novel, Linda Grant acknowledges that the origins of A Stranger City go back many years, to 1992 when she stood at the grave of an unknown woman who had drowned herself in the Thames. The woman was the subject of a TV documentary about paupers’ funerals and Grant, then a freelance journalist, was writing about it for The Times.
WILL Eric L Motley become the second black President of the US? Will the Republicans bring on the Motley? These are only two of many questions I have for the 46-year-old, who grew up in a largely poor, freed slaves’ town in Alabama and rose to become a special assistant to George W Bush.
SO, you work at the Institute for Imagination and Ideas, family and friends in Malaysia say to award-winning storyteller Tash Aw. “‘But what do you do every day?’ they ask. They know I write novels but that name is so incredibly lofty,” he says.
THERE IS SOMETHING pleasing about the title of Tessa Hadley’s brilliant new novel – an event that always sparks joy to borrow a phrase from the Japanese tidying-up expert who wants us to throw away most of our books. Late in the Day is Hadley’s seventh novel and I am thrilled to add it to the clutter of joyous books with which I share my home.
WHEN HELENA KENNEDY was eight-years-old, she recalls her mother bringing a young woman from their close into the family’s southside Glasgow tenement. “I have such a strong memory of this,” says the distinguished human rights lawyer, champion of civil liberties and peer of the realm. “The girl was married to a neighbour’s son and she had a baby. She also had a black eye.
MEG WOLITZER’S TWELFTH NOVEL has come out with exquisite timing in this post-Weinstein #Me Too era. Which means that The Female Persuasion, which unfolds after its clever, shy heroine – Greer – is horrifically groped by a freshman at a mediocre Connecticut college frat party, is being hailed as having presciently nailed the feminist zeitgeist.
WHILE we talk, novelist Richard Powers is gazing out at his “backyard,” which is larger than your average, white picket-fenced suburban plot since “it covers 800 square miles and a half-a-million acres of forest”.
WHEN ALISON WHITE climbed onto the plastic bath in her Glasgow home pointing her camera straight down at her two-year-old son, Louis, lying flat in shallow water, she had no idea that the photograph would become an iconic image of her severely mentally and physically disabled child.
