Sometimes that happens. You have a late-night moment of insight and you write something on whatever’s available. For me, by morning, what I thought was a brilliant moment of insight usually looks more like a moment of delusion. Strike it! Cross it out! Not useful in the least!
But that next morning, when I read the sentence I had written, it wasn’t…bad. It was even kind-of good. In fact, it was the first kind-of good thing I had written in months.
Instantly I decided: The notebook was magic.
It’s a midweek morning and I’ve just woken up in a hotel room in Madrid on the first day of a minibreak. The day stretches deliciously ahead: shall I go first to the Prado, or the Reina Sofía museum? Shall I have brunch and a late-afternoon main meal, or tapas here and there? The Gran Via is just up the street; I fancy a wander around the shops, but I’ll probably leave that till later in the day.
The fact is, I can do exactly what I want, when I want, because I’m holidaying alone. Like an increasing number of older women in the UK and across the world (I’m 61), I’ve discovered the huge benefits solo travel has to offer. It helps me to recharge my batteries, it’s empowering and it doesn’t have to be horribly expensive (I generally travel off-season and midweek). It takes me out of my comfort zone in just the right way, allowing me to have the experiences, the food and the fun that I want.
A story of betrayal and unlikely friendships filled with reflective tidbits of wisdom, the novel blends WWII fiction with idyllic romance drama and a touch of macabre thriller for a polished addition to Brooks’ works.
The mood is dark, the tension is thick, and the stakes are high. And as usual, in a Tana French novel, the characters are well-drawn, the dialogue is superb, the settings are vivid, and the tight prose is often lyrical.
Robbie Coburn’s latest collection, Ghost Poetry is split into three parts and addresses with unwavering honesty what makes us human, shining a light on themes such as trauma, grief and suicide. What is remarkable about this collection is that, alongside these raw emotions, there is a message of hope. Coburn’s collection is masterful and breathtaking, against stark imagery that will burn into the reader’s memory.
Lo’s voice adds to the chorus of writers who, since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, have been writing about and recasting their roles as mothers and creatives. In Lo’s work she examines the life of the mother and creative artist ‘when my poetry practice was the five minutes I had to spare between folding the laundry and falling asleep’. Through lyric, narrative and ekphrastic free-verse poetry Lo examines these topics in ways that invite the reader into her world through intimate moments of motherhood and domesticity.
The Freaks Came Out To Write captures the elements that made a great American newspaper and the forces that killed it: the internet, the loss of advertising revenue, corporate greed, a changed New York City. There's still a monthly online version of the Voice, but as Romano says in her "Afterword" "The Voice ... is missing its mirror, New York, in its role as the center of the political and cultural universe. The internet has dispersed the culture."
The Voice was the living center of the marginal, the weird, the rebellious. In the space and time of reading this wild ride of a book, I returned to that creative, crazy margin, and I think many other readers will, too.