Category: Books

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Books

2014 A to Z Challenge: C

AuthorsPeter Carey

Wikipedia says,

Peter Philip CareyAO (born 7 May 1943) is an Australian novelist, known primarily for being one of only three writers to have won the Booker Prize twice—the others being J. M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won for the second time in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang. In May 2008 he was nominated for the Best of the Booker Prize.

Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times and is frequently named as Australia’s next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In addition to writing fiction, he collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders and is executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.

Vanessa Couchman

Vanessa Couchman has lived in southwest France since 1997. She works as a freelance writer, offers copywriting services to international clients and writes magazine articles on French life and the art of writing. She is a member of the online, ex-pat writing group Writers Abroad. She has also been a Writers Bureau tutor.

Vanessa is passionate about French and Corsican history and culture, from which she draws inspiration for much of her fiction. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and on websites. She has also won and been placed, shortlisted and long listed in creative writing competitions. The House at Zaronza is her debut novel, to be published by Crooked Cat Publishing.

Apart from her writing site, linked above, Vanessa has a blog about French life: Life on La Lune.

The Link

They both write historical fiction.

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Books

2014 A to Z Challenge: B

AuthorsPair 1

Bill Bryson

Wikipedia says,

William McGuire “Bill” Bryson, OBE, FRS (born December 8, 1951) is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and science. Born in America, he was a resident of Britain for most of his adult life before returning to the U.S. in 1995. In 2003 Bryson moved back to Britain, living in the old rectory of Wramplingham, Norfolk, and served as chancellor of Durham University from 2005 through 2011.

Bryson shot to prominence in the United Kingdom with the publication of Notes from a Small Island (1995), an exploration of Britain, and its accompanying television series. He received widespread recognition again with the publication of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), a book widely acclaimed for its accessible communication of science.

Sue Barnard

Crooked Cat says,

Sue Barnard lives by the principle that an immaculate house is a sign of a wasted life. Hence, her house is chaotic but her life is very fulfilled.

Sue BarnardAfter graduating from Durham University with a degree in French, Sue had a variety of office jobs before becoming a full-time parent. If she had her way, the phrase “non-working mother” would be banned from the English language.

Since then she has had a series of part-time jobs, including some work as a freelance copywriter. In parallel with this she took several courses in Creative Writing. Her writing achievements include winning the Writing Magazine New Subscribers Poetry Competition for 2013.  She is also very interested in Family History. Her own background is stranger than fiction; she’d write a book about it if she thought anybody would believe her.

The Ghostly Father was published by Crooked Cat Publishing on 14th February, 2014.

The Link

BillBrysonBookYou may have noticed from the above that the link is Durham University. Sue studied there from 1974 to 1977. Bill Bryson was its Chancellor from 2005 to 2011. In addition, Sue has a signed copy of one of his books and she sent me a photo of it.

Thank you, Sue. Some time in the future you should write a memoir and people will have to believe you.

Pair 2

Enid Bagnold

Wikipedia says,

Enid Algerine Bagnold, Lady Jones, CBE (27 October 1889 – 31 March 1981), known by her maiden name as Enid Bagnold, was a British author and playwright, best known for the 1935 story National Velvet which was filmed in 1944 with Elizabeth Taylor.

She was born in Rochester, Kent, daughter of Colonel Arthur Henry Bagnold and his wife Ethel Alger, and brought up mostly in Jamaica. She went to art school at the school of Walter Sickert in London, and then worked for Frank Harris, who was also her first lover.

She was a nurse during World War I, writing critically of the hospital administration and being dismissed as a result. She was a driver in France for the remainder of the war years. She wrote of her hospital experiences in A Diary Without Dates and her driving experiences in The Happy Foreigner.

Her brother Ralph Bagnold founded the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) during World War II, a precursor of the SAS.

In 1920, she married Sir Roderick Jones (Chairman of Reuters) but continued to use her maiden name for her writing. They lived at North End House in Rottingdean, near Brighton, Sussex, (previously the home of Sir Edward Burne-Jones), the garden of which inspired her play The Chalk Garden. They had four children. Their great-granddaughter is Samantha Cameron, wife of the United Kingdom’s current Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader David Cameron.

Jane Bwye

Crooked Cat says,

Jane Bwye has been a businesswoman and intermittent freelance journalist for fifty years, mostly in Kenya. She cut short an Oxford career to get married, was widowed in her early twenties, and left with three small children – but was lucky enough to remarry. Now her six children and seven grandkids are scattered over three continents, so she’s developed a taste for travel. She has “walked” round the world, buying a bird book in every country she visited.

She has edited a cookbook, “Museum Mixtures”, in aid of the Kenya Museum Society, and is working on a short History of her local church. Her first novel, Breath of Africa, which is dedicated to the youth of Kenya, had a gestation period of thirty years. The plot and characters are fictitious, but the story draws on Jane’s experiences in a country going through the throes of re-birth.

The Link

Jane says of Enid Bagnold, “She lived just up the beach, in my county, East Sussex, and we share a love of horses: her novel ‘National Velvet’ was a favourite of mine as a child.”

Thank you, Jane.

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Books

2014 A to Z Challenge: A

AuthorsDouglas Adams

Douglas Adams was an English writer, humourist and dramatist. Wikipedia says,

Adams is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a “trilogy” of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams’s contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy’s Hall of Fame.

DouglasAdamsAdams also wrote Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990), Last Chance to See (1990), and three stories for the television series Doctor Who. A posthumous collection of his work, including an unfinished novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.

Ailsa Abraham

Ailsa Abraham is the first of several Crooked Cat authors who will be featured in these posts. From the Crooked Cat website,

AilsaAbrahamWriting under two pen-names, Ailsa Abraham is now the author of five novels. Scots/Irish in ancestry, she has lived in France since 1990. Her life revolves around her chaotic farmhouse, nicknamed “The Bingergread Cottage” as it is an upside-down witch’s home. Passionate about animal welfare, motorbikes and crafting in yarn, she is also fascinated by all religions, having been trained in Wicca to the rank of High Priestess but now follows a solitary shamanic path although she is also a member of the local Roman Catholic rosary team who are glad of her healing skills.

The Link

Ailsa says,

When Miriam Drori invited her fellow Crooked Cat authors to find another writer with the same initial I wanted (no, I desperately wanted) to find that I shared something with one of my all-time favourites.

Douglas Adams author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy amongst other work has been a personal hero of mine ever since I discovered that reading his work aloud to my dyslexic ex-husband (including all the voices of course) was a way of getting him interested in books. By the time we reached So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, he was reading it himself. This was way after I became a fan of the radio series that was broadcast late at night.

It turns out we do share some attributes although he had “a brain the size of a planet” and I don’t.

What we share is depression. I’m Bipolar and Douglas regularly suffered from long downers. I imagine Marvin the Paranoid Android was drawn from his own experience. There is a memorable quotation from Adams: “I have terrible periods of lack of confidence [..] I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it was like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.”

One other coincidence I discovered was that Douglas Adams and I shared a love of wildlife conservation. He was brought up in an RSPCA refuge run by his grandparents. I worked for years as a volunteer with the French equivalent, the SPA.

Oh – and I also get these terrible pains in the diodes all down my left side!

Thank you, Ailsa, for starting off my author posts in such an interesting way!

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Books

A to Z 2014

That month is almost here again and I have to admit to not being completely ready and being involved in several other things. But I’ll manage somehow, as always.

This is my fourth A to Z year.

In 2011, I didn’t have a theme.

In 2012, my theme was Jerusalem. I showed you places in my home town and we learned about them together.

In 2013, I highlighted features of memoir writing and learned so much from your comments. One day, I will write a memoir.

This year, to celebrate becoming a published author (almost), and to learn more about the people behind the books, I’ve decided to write about…

Drum roll…

Authors

See you on Tuesday!

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Books Bullying

Blurred Vision

I remember three books I’ve read about bullying in the past. In all three, the victims were boys.

In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Piggy is an obvious victim. He’s obese, he wears thick glasses and he says all the wrong things. He remains that way to the bitter end.

Marcus, in Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, is a bit strange. I loved this book but was disappointed in the end when Marcus stopped being strange with no transition from one state to the other.

In Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult does a great job of portraying Peter, the boy who has taken as much as he can and gets his revenge by going on a shooting spree. (I’m not giving anything away because this happens right at the beginning.) When it comes to Josie, the plot becomes unbelievable, in my view, but that’s another topic.

Jeff Gardiner‘s Myopia, which I read recently, has a much more believable plot. It’s aimed at young adults, and so I had to get used to the style, but it works very well and definitely held my interest.

And yet I was disappointed when I finished it. Jerry, the victim, seemed too normal. The bullying eventually turned him into a hero. It all seemed too easy.

Then my vision cleared as I realised what my problem was. This story isn’t my story. It’s very different. But that doesn’t make it any less valid. In fact, it’s probably more typical than mine. And all stories about bullying serve a useful purpose in helping readers to understand what bullying does.

Well done, Jeff, for tackling this difficult topic in such a sensitive way.

***

Writing the above list made me realise that I’ve never read a book about a girl who is bullied. Have you? Can you recommend one?

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Books

The View from Heaven

If you follow my blog, you will have seen this story when I posted it last year, but I’m delighted that Morgen Bailey has now posted it on her blog, here.

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Books

I Am Fearless!

Jodie Llewellyn asks this question today:

As a writer, what do you fear the most?

Fifty-three writers, so far, have responded with their fears. Clearly writers fear a lot and want to express those fears.

I could have responded, too. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to talk about fears and I don’t want to think about them.

It’s not that I think I’m a perfect writer. Far from it. I know I have plenty to learn; probably always will.

But if I concentrate on fears, I will never succeed. If I don’t believe in my ability to reach my goals, then I won’t reach them.

I felt this way even before I knew I was going to be published. I saw all those posts by writers in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group!, in which they list all their insecurities, every month. And I thought, surely by doing this they are perpetuating the fears. Because no one replies, “You’re doing fine; don’t worry about it.” The respondents write, “Me, too.”

And I still feel that way. I know that getting published is only a first step and I need to stay positive if I want to advance along the writing path. Which I do.

So I’m not going to join that support group or think about fears. I’m going to plod on, because I’m determined to get there.

Hands up those who want to banish fears and believe in themselves.

HandUp

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Books Bullying

Igboland

I have another visitor, today. Jeff Gardiner has dropped in while on his blog tour. It’s just as well you didn’t arrive in Jerusalem yesterday, Jeff, or you might have found yourself drowning in a sea of black hats!

I’ve just started reading Jeff’s previous novel, Myopia. I was attracted to that one, of course, because the main character is a boy who is bullied.

Igboland cover5

Igboland is a very different sort of novel, as Jeff’s description shows.

Igboland is a novel of passion and conflict set in Nigeria during the late 1960s Biafran War. Lydia is a young English girl, recently married to Clem, a Methodist Missionary. Their first home together as a couple is in the West African bush, thousands of miles away from her beloved family. Lydia and Clem arrive in Nigeria just as civil war breaks out and the extract below is of their first sight of their new home. The novel is inspired by the diaries and photos of my own parents, who lived out in West Africa for six years. They travelled to Nigeria on a ship, The Apapa, and then travelled hundreds of miles on a train into the foreign bushland.

Box 1001 Apapa

Here is an extract from Chapter 2 of Igboland:

***

That evening the train came to a sudden, jerking halt.

‘Here we are, my love,’ Clem said with a nudge. ‘This must be Enugu. Look lively.’

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m so tired. I don’t feel very well.’

With little sympathy, Clem pulled me up and tucked his arm into mine. We stopped by the door and I wondered why he didn’t open it straight away. Instead, he stepped back and I heard a harsh but muffled voice shout from below us.

‘Why’s there no platform?’ Clem asked aloud. ‘What’s going on?’

I looked out the window and noticed a soldier outside on a raised hillock, waving two hands above his head at us. In one hand he held a gun.

‘Stay behind me,’ Clem ordered.

The soldier was gesticulating for us to exit the train.

Clem opened the train door and stood in front of me with his hands up.

‘Come down from the train!’ the soldier beckoned furiously again; his face impenetrably dark under his peaked cap. I had no idea which side he was on – or even which side might show us the greater sympathy. Thus my ignorance enhanced my fear.

box 1066 Zonkwa station

The soldier came closer, placing his gun in his holster.

‘Quickly. The line ahead has been bombed. Enemy soldiers are patrolling and all ways into the city are blocked.’ His English was excellent; clearly the product of a good education. With there being no platform, the drop down to the floor was considerable. Clem jumped for it but tumbled over and turned his ankle. The soldier reached up and signalled for me to jump onto him. He easily caught me. I wrapped my arms round his neck and my legs round his waist, and then he lowered me gently to the ground.

Behind me, I became aware of the other passengers jumping down, the driver and stewards amongst them. They stood in large groups chattering excitedly amongst themselves.

‘You must turn back. Go back North. Perhaps we could drive you north to a safer place like Jos.’

Clem shook his head. ‘We’re going to Ngkaluku.’

‘This is not a good idea.’

But Clem insisted and nearly came to blows with the soldier.

He asked to see our passports.

‘Mr and Mrs Davie.’ He enunciated each sound very deliberately.

‘Reverend Davie,’ Clem replied pedantically.

When he saw he was getting nowhere with my stubborn husband, the soldier whistled behind him and a group of about a dozen similarly dressed soldiers appeared. They talked to each other in their own tongue. A few of them gave us dirty looks and began to argue amongst themselves. Eventually the first soldier, presumably their leader, returned accompanied by another.

‘Corporal Nwoko here will drive you to your destination and leave you there. Are you sure this is what you want?’

Clem stood firm and the soldier in charge shook his head. He obviously had a more important mission to complete and was keen to get us out of the way. Giving up on us as a lost cause, he went to talk sense into the other passengers.

Corporal Nwoko pulled the limping Clem towards a clump of trees away from the stationary train and I followed behind like a puppy. It occurred to me just then that he might be preparing to shoot us and a rising sense of panic struck me. The relief was palpable when I saw an open-top Jeep parked under a mahogany tree.

‘I will drive you now,’ said Corporal Nwoko, leaping into the driver’s seat and jerking his thumb behind him.

Clem got in the back with me and we sped off down a red dirt track pocked with potholes. The bumps only worsened my headache.

‘You come here at very bad time,’ our driver shouted over his shoulder, ominously.

For the rest of the car journey I phased in and out of the intermittent conversation. I remember very little about the last part of our long and tortuous trek. My only recollections are short flashes of being bumped around, with my head on Clem’s lap; having flushes of being freezing cold and then sweating profusely; the voices of the two men chatting between long silences as I drifted in and out in waves, feeling horribly claustrophobic. A new warmth embraced me as I allowed my entire being to be engulfed by the looming jaws of darkness.

box 1015 Iga village

‘Lydia? We’re here!’

‘What, home?’ I said, filled with happiness.

I was going to see Mum’s dimpled smile and her mischievous eyes; Dad’s strong arms would welcome me back and Oliver would proudly call me his ‘favourite sister’. I even saw Frisky bouncing up on his back paws, tongue out, tail wagging–—

‘Welcome to Ngkaluku.’

The dream crumbled.

My life crashed about me as my head swam in a panic. I wanted to scream and thrash about but my whole body felt drained of all energy. All my limbs were paralysed.

This wasn’t home. Home was thousands of miles away.

Clem helped me out. We stood alone in the West African bush.

Corporal Nwoko revved his engine noisily and turned his vehicle round. On the way past he slowed down and leaned over towards us.

‘We try to warn you,’ he sneered in a chilling tone, before accelerating away.

The sight awaiting us was horrific.

Ngkaluku had been recently bombed.

The devastation shocked us. Bodies and limbs lay piled up. Dead faces stared out with eyes burnt from their sockets. Many of the corpses had been smashed beyond recognition, or possessed gashes of bloodless open flesh exposing rotten innards. Swarms of flies flickered around the heaps. Dogs and other small scavengers made dashes past the children instructed to keep them off. Vultures hopped about sullenly only a short distance away. Grotesque as it was, the sight continued to entice me to look. After a while, I could no longer return the gaze of these death masks. Without a second thought, Clem went to help the locals in their search under debris for further bodies, which were then carried over to a hut now designated a makeshift medical centre. A local doctor had already assembled a team of helpers and was doing what he could with very few resources.

***

Wow – exciting stuff! Thank you for that excerpt, Jeff, and good luck with your new novel.

Igboland is available as a paperback or e-book (Kindle, Epub or PDF) from Amazon US, Amazon UK or Crooked Cat Books.

You can visit Jeff Gardiner at his website or his blog.

Igboland cover6

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Books

Writing the Book You Want to Read

I’m delighted to welcome Sue Barnard to my blog today. Sue and I first met about two years ago at an online workshop run by Sally Quilford. Since then we have met twice face-to-face and helped each other with our writing.

Sue4Sue’s recently published debut novel was not one of those I saw in the draft stage, and so I was able to read it simply for enjoyment, and enjoyment describes my reading experience very well. The appealing idea of changing the most famous of love stories is very cleverly handled in The Ghostly Father. Sue doesn’t say that Shakespeare’s version was wrong. She makes both versions right, depending on who is telling the story. And she writes it all so well.

But that’s enough from me. I’ll let Sue take over now.

I love books.  My house is full of them, my Kindle is full of them, and I’m irresistibly drawn to places which sell them.  So much so, in fact, that I spent more than twenty years of my adult life working in a bookshop.  The sheer diversity of subjects, genres and content of books still never fails to amaze me.

Sue1Those who claim to know about such things reckon that everyone has at least one book in them.  Be that as it may, until a few years ago I never imagined that I had a book in me, much less that this book, if it even existed, would ever get any further than the concept stage.  The point at which that situation changed was when, a few years ago, I came across one of those lists of Things You Must Do Before You Die.  The one which leapt off the page and grabbed me by the throat was Write the book you want to read. 

Fast-rewind thirty-odd years, to when I first saw Franco Zeffirelli’s wonderful film of Romeo & Juliet.  At the end there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, and I came away from the cinema thinking: “Why does the world’s greatest love story have to end in such appalling tragedy?”  Ever since then, that question has lurked, dozing, at the back of my mind.  The exhortation to Write the book you want to read woke up that question, kicked it out of bed, opened the shutters and forced it out into the blinding light of day.  This was when it finally dawned on me that the book I’ve always wanted to read was the version of Romeo & Juliet which has a satisfactory outcome.  If, at any time during those decades of browsing in bookshops, I had ever come across such a book, I would have snapped it up, rushed home and read it in one sitting.

Why, I asked myself, shouldn’t there be such a book? 

And the answer came straight back: Why not indeed? And if that book doesn’t exist, you need to write it yourself.

Even then, it took me a while to get going.  Although I’d dabbled with Creative Writing in the past, and had taken a few courses on the subject, I’d never attempted anything longer than poems or short stories.  The thought of tackling a full-length novel, even one on a subject about which I felt so strongly, was, to say the least of it, a daunting prospect.  I’d been mulling over the idea for a while, but without any concrete results, when fate took a hand.  Back in 2010, whilst on holiday in France, I was (yes, you’ve guessed) browsing in a bookshop, when I chanced upon a novel in the style of the lost diary of a woman who had been the secret lover of Count Dracula.  This, I realised, was the format I needed: a lost manuscript which tells a previously-unknown story.

Back at home, I powered up the laptop and started writing.  Because this was the book I’ve always wanted to read, I was, at that point, writing it mainly for myself.  I wanted to be able to read this version of the story in private, and think, “Well, perhaps this, rather than the ‘lamentable tragedy’ as told by Shakespeare, is what might have happened.”  At this stage, going public with it couldn’t have been further from my thoughts.

After I’d finished the first draft (which took about six months), I mentioned it to a couple of close friends who are both avid readers.  They both asked to see it.  On handing it back, one of them said, “I know what I like, and I like this.”  The other said, “You really ought to take it further.  I think it could even be a best-seller.”

Sue3Even so, despite these votes of confidence, it was another year or two (during which time the manuscript underwent several revisions) before I plucked up the courage to send the manuscript to Crooked Cat Publishing, an independent publisher whom I’d found on Facebook, and for whom I’d recently started doing editing work.  I wasn’t very hopeful, so when I received the email from them telling me they wanted to publish it, I had to print it out and re-read it four times before I was able to convince myself that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

The book’s title, The Ghostly Father, is based on a quotation from the play (it’s how Romeo addresses the character of Friar Lawrence), and the story (which is a sort of part-prequel, part-sequel to the original tale) is told from the Friar’s point of view.  I’ve often wondered why, in the play, he behaved as he did – and by giving him what I hope is an interesting and thought-provoking backstory, I’ve tried to offer some possible answers.  Plus, of course, I wanted to reduce the overall body-count, and give the lovers themselves a rather less tragic ending.  I hope I’ve succeeded.

The book which re-tells the world’s most famous love story was officially released, very appropriately, on St Valentine’s Day 2014.  If the early sales figures are anything to go by, it looks as though I’m not by any means the only person who wants to read it.  And for that, I am very grateful.

Sue Barnard, February 2014

In the UK, The Ghostly Father is available from Amazon as a paperback or ebook.

Outside the UK, it’s also available from Amazon as a paperback or ebook.

Thank you, Sue, for visiting me and for writing about this interesting topic.

The novel I’m working on now hasn’t been evolving for quite that long, but it’s one I wish I’d read a long time ago, and one I’ve wanted to write it for several years. Only now have I found a way to do it that I believe works.

I know, I promised a different post this time. Maybe next time… no promises….

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100-word stories Books

100 Word Challenge – Week #122

Click on the image to join the challenge

The challenge: 105 words including:

… the blackness just enveloped me…

A New Reality

I woke to total darkness. The blackness just enveloped me. I checked that my eyes were really open. They were. Only one explanation then. I must have gone blind overnight. I would have to get used to a new reality without sight.

I thought of all the things I would never see again except in my mind’s eye. The view from the window. The sunset over the sea. My children’s changing faces as they grew up. Then I heard something. At least my hearing was all right.

First whispering, then giggling. I reached up and pulled something down.

“Who put this blackout sheet over me?”