A Literary Life

How y'all been?   Busy, I hope. What have I been doing?   Well, today I sent my new novel out into the world, to find representation and love.   It's called 'Shadow of the Mountain', and it's a contemporary novel about love and faith, about what leads a young man from a small town in Wales to fighting a war in Afghanistan.   I'm incredibly proud of it.   I spent two years writing it, poured everything I had into it - and then some emotional reserves I didn't know I had besides - and the result is something I hope you, and many other future readers, will want to buy in the not too distant future. It's hard work, writing a novel.   It's not something you can truly do just on weekends, around your other jobs and hobbies and social life.   I mean, I know many do - many even have success doing it his way - but you do have to make sacrifices.   For two years I've barely been out socialising.   I've spent most of my free time bent crooked...

Roberto Bolaño is a novelist whose work I return to frequently.   He has progenitors in Borges, Kafka etc, but feels distinctly separate from them as to become something unique.   Since his untimely death in 2003, Picador in the UK has slowly been releasing everything Bolaño wrote, it seems.   These releases have not come chronologically in Bolaño’s career, but from scattered times in his life, and there does seem to be something apt about that.   Their latest release is actually the last Bolaño worked on in his life – he was prepping it for publication when he died.   Called The Insufferable Gaucho, it is again translated by Chris Andrews into English (he has done sterling work on Bolaño in the past, and does so again here), and is five short stories and two essays. The stories, for the most part, offer something of worth. Jim, the opening piece, is brief.   Jim is a Vietnam vet now living a poet’s life in Mexico.   The little Bolañ...

Donna Tartt announced herself brightly in the literary firmament with her debut novel, The Secret History, in 1992.   That novel bought oodles of critical acclaim and enormous pressure for her to produce a follow-up.   What followed seemed a Salinger-like silence, until, finally, a decade later, she produced The Little Friend.   That novel again bought much critical acclaim to her door, and unfortunately for her fans, another decade plus silence, eleven years this time.   The Goldfinch, the novel born from that silence, was published in 2013, and rather unsurprisingly now, to more rapturous critical acclaim.   When the critics of the future come back to look at late 20 th century, early 21 st century fiction, it is certain Tartt’s name will figure highly in their estimation. Tartt’s fiction has always been concerned with young people coming of age, of their exploration of sexuality and identity, from the six students in The Secret History, to Ha...

I can still remember the moment I fell in love with this thing called cinema.   Doctor Alan Grant, striding into a field, and looking out over the plains and seeing dinosaurs .   Living, breathing up-there-in-all-their-glory dino-fricking-saurs!   I didn’t know how Steven Spielberg had done it – but that summer in 1993, I sat entranced in my local flea-pit cinema (one screen, sticky floor, but with ushers, projectionists, chocolate raisins at the food counter; a cinema that didn’t seem to have changed since the 1930s and one I hoped never would: That old cinema is a Wetherspoons pub now.)   So anyway, Jurassic Park was the first time I fell in love with the medium.   I’d seen films before (Timothy Dalton as Bond in The Living Daylights in 1987, in the same flea-pit cinema… how I miss her!   I’d been terrified by Spock as they Searched for him in 1984 and I was 5), seen many more on home video (I cherished those days when Mum used to bring home someth...

The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize seems a diverse one.   There are works that range from 100 pages to 1,000.   They are a set of works that cross continents and set in different historical periods, from the dark ages to present day.   They are works that deal with the Iraq conflict, the fallout from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the enclosure of British land, a pioneering flight and the effects of the 2008 economic crash on two very different countries. Yet despite such differences, there are common links between some of the works.   Two novels deal with the economic crash (The Spinning Heart, Five Star Billionaire).   Two novels mention Virginia Woolf (Unexploded, in which Woolf appears).   A number of the novels deal with foreigners adrift in the United States (We Need New Names, The Lowland, TransAtlantic).   There are novels that deal with motherhood (The Testament of Mary and The Lowland) and novels that deal with children...