Authors Electric

I have always been drawn to books in which the setting is one of the principle characters. It may be the landscape like the wild Cornwall of Du Maurier's Rebecca; or a building like the echoing corridors of Thornfield in Bronte's Jane Eyre ; or even a claustrophobically small space, as in Emma Donoghue's chilling  Room. My second novel, The Ball Game, published in 2009, was completely inspired by its setting. I had no characters or plot or even the embryo of a storyline in my head when I decided to write it. I was a student at St Andrews University in the (for me, slightly) swinging sixties. Those were four wonderful, unforgettable years, so utterly and completely different from the life that followed them that, if I thought about them at all, it was always with a sense of unreality. Did that really happen to me? They were like a book I had read or a film I had seen only ever once, adored but never returned to. Until, in the summ...

We are living in an age where entertainment is provided with the flick of a button, the wave of a remote control, or a spoken command, and I’m sure the time is fast approaching – if it isn’t here already – for entertainment to be activated by thought processes. One of the disadvantages of this rapid progress of technology is the shortening of many people’s attention spans, so a writer has to snare the reader from the very first word, or the book may be discarded as not worth the time it would take to read. Long winded openings and pages and pages of description no longer attract the reader looking for a quick fix, although those seeking a more literary experience may stay the course. Writers have always known that the need for a hook on the first page – preferably in the first paragraph, and even better if it’s in the first sentence – is imperative. And that is more true today than it has ever been. But how have various writers fared in this search for the perfect hook?...

For the last few months I’ve been helping with a teenage book-club and the breadth of reading of these 12 – 14 year-olds is awe-inspiring. Pride and Prejudice and The Help get equal billing with comic books, Harry Potter and Maze Runners . What was I reading at that age? Apart from school Home Readers and a few  children's classics, m ostly the novels loved by my parents and already on our bookshelves at home. I mean authors like Howard Spring , Nevil Shute, Hammond Innes, Alistair McLean.  Those we have loved This brought me to think about the lifespan of popular novels, books regarded as de rigeur by one generation and elevated to classics or simply neglected by the next. I mean is anyone still reading Rider-Haggard – adventure novels par excellence of my parents’ generation?  Will The Thorn Birds , possibly the most popular novel of my twenties, still be around when my own copy has been consigned to the bin by grieving (I hope) offspring?  Is there ...