Elizabeth Baines

One reason I haven't blogged since I supposedly started again is that I came down with a horrendous fluey-type cold. (There have been ...

Doug suggested this book - all 400-and-something packed and small-print pages of it - since we were having a long summer break, and becaus...

So, picking up on the thoughts of A L Kennedy referred to in my last post , and the question of 'writing what you know' and research...

* I recently came across writing advice from A L Kennedy (I'm sorry, I can't find it on the web just now to provide a link) in which...

Well - if anyone is out there reading this - I can't tell you how strange it is to be writing this blog again today. Apart from the mont...

Some plot spoilers. Clare suggested this historical novel about a rural English community that has been peaceably conducting subsistence...

Neither John nor I had ever had any inclination to read this famous book - voted one of the 'All-Time 100 Novels' by Time magazine -...

Mark is the member of our group who has always been the most adamant about resisting hype when considering novels, and I might have expecte...

Well, here was a novel that everyone present thought 'wonderful' - that was the word people used. It opens at New Year when the pe...

There were only four of us to discuss this, Arundhati Roy's 1996 Booker-winning debut - Ann, Jenny, John and me. It's now two months...

Reading Ali Smith's early short stories made me a great admirer, and I was bowled over by her novel Hotel World (published as a debut,...

We approached Han Kang's The Vegetarian, suggested by Doug, with interest and even excitement. In translation it won the South Korean au...