“When I was crazy and the winds of the world blew in my head, I lived in the basement of our old house, Drum Tower.” For me, the first line of a book has always held a certain fascination. It is here that the writer offers the reader the first indication of the journey upon Read More
In her debut novel, Beauty Tips for Girls, Margaret Montgomery satirises the beauty industry and the social pressures put on women in modern Western culture with wry humour. Montgomery illuminates some of the absurdities of popular culture through an interesting narrative style compiled of letters, newspaper and magazine excerpts, as well as the personal narratives Read More
“The Fireman’s Wife”, a short story by Richard Bausch, is, to my mind, one of the best short stories written in English. It’s up there for me along with Joyce’s “The Dead”, Mansfield’s “At the Bay” Carver’s “Blackbird Pie” and all the stories I value that, in a few pages, have brought a whole world, Read More
White Lies, a debut novel, contends with the darker side of family life, focusing on deceit in particular, while also delving into the difficulties of mental illness in a plot that oscillates from the predictable to occasionally surprising. Peter is a dementia sufferer that has recently been relocated into a care facility where he spends Read More
Born in Ukraine in 1984, Yelena Moskovich moved to the US with her family at the age of seven, and later trained as a playwright in Boston. She settled in Paris, studying physical theatre at the Lecoq School, and completing a Masters in Art, Philosophy and Aesthetics. The Natashas, her first novel, is as conceptually Read More
Amy Mason’s The Other Ida, winner of the 2014 Dundee International Book Prize, is a story steeped both in the reckless reality and the dramatic imagination of its protagonist, Ida Irons. Turning thirty and entirely irresponsible, Ida is returning to a musty house by the sea that she never felt at home in, reuniting with Read More
Picture, if you will, the tropical growth of a Caribbean island: where venomous snakes writhe among a multitude of indigenous fruits and flowers; where mothers make everything from guava jelly to poultices designed either to ward off evil spirits or attract good ones; where farm boys work hard to sustain their families but squander their Read More
The Land Agent is the third novel in The Glasgow to Galilee trilogy, and is a fictional narrative set within an historical context. Each of the books in The Glasgow to Galilee trilogy – The Credit Draper, The Liberation of Celia Khan and The Land Agent – can be read either in sequence or as Read More
Dante drives the borrowed squad car direct. He’s an accident of flesh and blunt bones Shaped human, ugly and mostly scowling, Made bitter by the job and the city. A 2013 graduate of Dundee University’s MLitt in Writing Practice and Study, Ollie Langmead’s first publication is a sci-fi neo-noir murder-mystery, told entirely in Miltonesque decasyllabic Read More
Rosemary Goring’s sequel to her debut novel After Flodden is set ten years later in 1523, but begins with a brief prologue immediately following the battle in 1513 which sets the scene for Dacre’s War and connects the main protagonist, Lord Thomas Dacre, to both storylines. Set in the border country which continues to be Read More