Susan Hill’s latest novel is A Change of Circumstance.
From our UK edition
Don’t you just love garden centres? You have to be mad to go on a sunny Sunday morning in the full bedding-out season but all human life is there, enjoying the full English breakfast or even kippers. They sell everything — sofas, lamps, barbecues, waterfalls, bread, toys, meat, mountaineering gear. Oh, and plants and Growmore
From our UK edition
Benjamin Britten was adamant that he did not want any memorial sculpture of himself in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk coastal town where he lived for 30 years. He died in 1976 and he is remembered there by the Britten-Pears music school and Snape Maltings concert hall, by John Piper’s magnificent window in the church, and at
From our UK edition
‘Wake up, boy! Wake up…’ My father was shaking me and I was confused because it seemed that I had only just gone to sleep. ‘Get dressed. Hurry.’ The lamps were not lit and the house was silent. Outside, the night sky glittered with stars and silken moonlight shone across the sand. My father was
From our UK edition
‘What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk out on the river.’ The first reason to read Sarah Perry is right there. She was born and bred a writer and without that, a novelist is worth little.
From our UK edition
The swifts had not arrived by June, nary a one, though a Yorkshire Dales friend reported their return, and there were masses in France. I read that there was a national shortage, bird people were doing surveys and panicking. In the 1970s and 1980s, swifts wheeled round every church tower, dashed through the streets screaming.
From our UK edition
A friend bought a new small terraced house of late Victorian origin in a northern city. She liked it; it had no bad vibes (and houses sometimes do) but she had to do work: knocking down a couple of walls, damp-proofing, rewiring and so on. She was tight on budget so decided to do as
From our UK edition
Now, the government seems entirely focused on Brexit, and of course it is important, but there are many other matters to sort out and I don’t mean internecine squabbles. Poverty. Housing. Schools. Holes in the road. I understand why many young people are turning away from us. But not why some older ones who should
From our UK edition
I don’t know why party conferences no longer take place in Scarborough. As a child, I saw many an important politician strolling to the Spa Hall, including Winston Churchill. I am a Conservative party member but I have never been to conference. What would I do? Standing ovate, I suppose. But this year? Hm. Theresa
From our UK edition
Of course I began with pen and ink and paper, and paper was expensive in terms of pocket money, so I asked for W.H. Smith tokens for Christmas. Then a neighbour brought up a stash of assorted old office notebooks from hiding somewhere, so the first novel was written in ‘Ledger’ and ‘Salaries’. I wrote
From our UK edition
A trip to the supermarché at the beginning of our French month yielded many of the necessary things one also buys at home, but even washing powder acquires romance when sporting a French label, and the fresh fish, meat, veg and wine sections are far bigger than ours, with mountains of lettuce and seven different
From our UK edition
Go inside the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, preferably when it is empty. Look round. Look up. And there it is, with its elegant decorated and gilded curves, rising to the ornate cupola, panelled in duck-egg blue. Look at the proscenium arch, the swagged red curtains with seats to match. The chandelier above the stalls. It is
From our UK edition
For 23 years I lived in the North Cotswolds, heart of National Hunt racing country, where March comes round with a quickening of hearts. From Monday night of Gold Cup Week, helicopters bringing racegoers clattered over my chimney pots, en route to the hotel on the hill. Those were the days when the independent bookie,
From our UK edition
To my mind, a bookshop is like a library — the only difference is that you buy the books, you don’t borrow them. But both have a duty to provide books (space and budgets allowing) reflecting a wide range — as wide as possible — of interests, reading tastes, subjects and points of view. Walk
From our UK edition
To my mind, a bookshop is like a library — the only difference is that you buy the books, you don’t borrow them. But both have a duty to provide books (space and budgets allowing) reflecting a wide range — as wide as possible — of interests, reading tastes, subjects and points of view. Walk
From our UK edition
Brexit has been as bad as any surge in washing away hitherto strong foundations. I am talking about friendships. I have never known the like. To be called a racist, a ‘little Englander’ and worse was bad enough, but to have people one has long known and liked say they could no longer be friends
From our UK edition
When President Obama left office, he confided that he had got through the eight years of stress by reading. He named some titles. I was surprised he chose V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival over his masterpiece, A House for Mr Biswas, which I count as the best novel written in the 20th century, if
From our UK edition
February Fill-Dyke. But north Norfolk is dry, at least in terms of rain. Instead we have coastal flooding. Three years ago, a tidal surge caused major damage and destruction to sea defences, wildlife habitats, paths and buildings. Another surge last month was less dramatic but still reached the gate of a friend’s house, set well
From our UK edition
If you are 70-plus, the shadow of TB will have hung over your childhood and youth, as it did mine, and Linda Grant’s new novel strikes many a chord. My maternal aunt had the disease, and spent months in a sanatorium like the one described in The Dark Circle, but finally had a thoracotomy (removal
From our UK edition
‘Farm cottage available, Dorset. Long or short let. £5 per week.’ I was looking for a writing bolthole, so I rang. ‘Bit off the beaten track but it’s quiet all right,’ said the owner. It was also unfurnished. ‘We can get some basics together for you.’ So, in the summer of 1968, I drove down
From our UK edition
Have you ever set your face against a book? This year sees Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary and the novelist Tracy Chevalier has edited a short-story anthology each based on the climactic line of Jane Eyre — ‘Reader, I married him.’ Everyone knows it. I agreed like a shot because the brief fitted something I had been
