Blog

I wanted to say a few words about faith. When you write a book it’s hard to know exactly how it’ll be interpreted by readers. You can suggest things in interviews, guide people towards your intentions, but in the end you’re just an author, and we all know authors are dead. Viv Groskop highlighted what … Read More

I came to Jamaica with a broken heart. I was twenty – maybe the best time to have your heart broken. The teens are spent lurching from one emotional train wreck to another, but underlying the pain rests the knowledge that things are not yet serious, that your heart is not yet quite en jeu. … Read More

We didn’t really do Gap Years in Worthing. Gap Years were for the beautiful daughters of Kensington millionaires to screw their way through a ski season and then find spiritual redemption in India, or for the double barreled sons of City financiers to dye their already flushed cheeks vermillion in the Africa sun. But due … Read More

I read Stuart Evers’ blog about Georges Perec’s  fabulous Life A User’s Manual with great interest (Evers adds a colon to the title of Perec’s novel that doesn’t appear in my copy). One of the bitter shades who haunt that journalistic Abaddon, comments sections, suggested beneath my review of Evers’ Ten Stories About Smoking on … Read More

This Bleeding City was published a year ago today. I thought I’d try to write down some of the thoughts and impressions that occur to me as I contemplate this mad, fantastic year. Firstly, though, I guess I should look back two years, back to when my agent delivered the novel to Faber, and a … Read More