We were introduced in 2001, when an English reading friend recommended her novel Angel to me, which I read in a single day. It immediately seemed like one of those books with which I'd always been familiar. And its author was secured on my Must Read Everything list. Inside my
Last year, I rekindled my affair with the city that I live in. (As other aspects of life got busier, I had started to take it for granted.) But books and exploring? They don't always mix. While I was doing a lot of walking and riding and commuting from one side
Striking cover, no? Alice Sebold's novel was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2003, the year that Valerie Martin's Property won the prize. A friend of mine was so excited about The Lovely Bones, that she bought it as soon as it was available in paperback, and I've
The Love Letter was longlisted in 1996, the year that Helen Dunmore's The Spell of Winter won the Orange Prize. The idea intrigued me straight away, even before I saw the 1999 film of the same name: a love letter addressed and signed ambiguously, discovered by a 42-year-old
If I could add up all the hours that I spend deciding what to read, I'd've read through Proust and Ulysses and Melville and Barshetshire and Les Mis a million times. At least. So you can see why I've spent an untoward amount of time thinking about what
