The life of Greta Garbo, the Swedish-American actress, is a rags to riches story. Born in Stockholm in 1905 as Greta Gustafsson, she earned her living as a ‘lather girl’ in a barber shop before becoming a fashion model, and then an accomplished actress who graduated from the Royal Dramatic Training Academy. ‘Discovered’ in Sweden…
I love birds and have lived within chirping distance of Blackfriars Bridge for two decades. Yet I only quite recently realized that it’s a twitcher’s paradise. From the road, you’d never suspect it. You have to lean over the parapet to see the full, strange spectacle. Each column, east and west, is adorned with life-size…
I first read The Whalebone Theatre a couple of years ago. Lots of people had enjoyed it, and I did too, but it probably suffered a bit from something akin to ‘tall poppy syndrome’: do you know what I mean? It’s when you hear so many good things about a book/film/place that when you…
This is the cover of my ninth novel, When I Was, which has just been published by Barbican Press. I wrote this novel about growing up in London in the 1950s from memory. Strangely, I found myself unable to write about myself in the first person, although I’ve written about other people – the artists Richard…
I am a week away from publication of my latest novel, ONE SUMMER IN PROVENCE. 3rd July 2025. It is always an exciting as well as a nerve-racking time. A broad synopsis of what the novel is about: a British couple, Celia and Dominic, are living on a vineyard in the south of France….
St Andrews in Scotland is known worldwide as the home of golf as well as for its famous university where Prince William met Catherine – but it’s also a town with a lot of history. My first historical novel, The Castilians, closely follows the long and dramatic siege of St Andrews Castle in 1546-7. Since…
The literary world has been having a long-overdue conversation about the practice of blurbing, that is, writers providing promotional endorsements for each other’s books. This was spurred by Sean Manning, publisher at Simon & Schuster’s imprint of the same name, who wrote an essay for Publishers Weekly explaining why they’d no longer expect their writers…
Thanks to author Stephanie Carpenter for contributing a post about crafting characters within the setting for her debut novel. Her essay makes for a good start to both Women’s History Month as well as Small Press Month this March (and look for more small press-focused posts in the coming weeks). Moral Treatment was published by Central…
I’m very happy to have Alix Christie here on the blog with her essay about the family history behind her latest book, a family saga set in the Rocky Mountain West. Her debut, Gutenberg’s Apprentice, was one of my favorite novels of 2014, and her second, The Shining Mountains, was just released in paperback by…
Continuing with the Small Press Month focus, I’m pleased to welcome Lorraine Norwood to Reading the Past with an essay about her long journey to publishing her debut novel. What do you do when you’ve chosen a compelling subject and have developed your fiction writing craft but find it impossible to break into the trend-focused…
