The story so far… Spring 2014: Twenty-year-old Agnes Bee has received notification that her husband, Dougie, has started divorce proceedings. (They married because Agnes was pregnant, but the baby died late in the pregnancy.) Agnes is chronically depressed. She wants to change her life but doesn’t know where to begin. Her best friend, Kath suggests they Read More
“You’re spot on time. Isn’t that good?” Fiona Kidman is warm and merry, bright as a button. She takes me through her kitchen and into the dining room, stopping to point out the view from her window. “Can you see the lights? That’s the airport above the sea, Wellington.” In Wellington, New Zealand, it’s 9.00 Read More
Award-winning novelist Dame Fiona Kidman published her tenth novel in New Zealand in 2016. All Day at the Movies took the New Zealand Heritage Prize for Fiction in 2016 and is now published in the UK in a new imprint for Gallic Books. Set in New Zealand, the novel begins in 1952, as war widow Read More
“The day before the murder, George Bull tried to poison me with a cheese sandwich.” With this hook, Maria Donovan opens her debut novel, The Chicken Soup Murder. The narrator is eleven-year-old Michael Davies, battling lactose intolerance alongside the perplexities of impending adolescence in a small coastal town in Dorset. Michael lives with his Nan Read More
Sara Baume’s second novel, A Line Made by Walking, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2017. The nomination acknowledges its distinctiveness, for this prize celebrates writing which extends the boundaries of the novel form. Following on from her highly acclaimed debut, Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was Read More
In her last published novel, The Finishing School, Muriel Spark throws open the doors of College Sunrise, a “mobile” finishing school run by aspiring novelist Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina Parker, near Lausanne in Switzerland. Alongside Nina’s comme il faut etiquette tuition, the young men and women are taught a number of artistic subjects Read More
