Authors Electric

A LIFETIME BURNING   (Kindle 88p/$0.99) I've just re-published my second novel, A LIFETIME BURNING on Kindle. First published in 2006, it was one of those still-born books torpedoed by its cover and ignored by reviewers, perhaps because it belonged to that non-genre, accessible literary fiction. My publisher had no idea how to market the book (neither did I) and it sank without trace.  Well, not quite.  Readers loved it. (And a few loathed it.) A LIFETIME BURNING has only 5-star reviews on Amazon (twenty-five of them) and over the years its devotees have described themselves as haunted - even disturbed - by the book. A few have complained they were up all night finishing it and one man told me he read all 410 pages in one sitting. I started making notes for A LIFETIME BURNING even before I’d finished my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY . I didn’t have a publisher then. I hadn’t even thought about trying to find one, I was just writing to amuse myself. I'd just ...

Dorothy L Sayers Fabulous and dead "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.” Dorothy L Sayers.   When ill health forced me to give up teaching some years ago, I used my convalescence to catch up on reading. This was 2000 and bookshops were awash with chick-lit. (Jane Austen and vampires hadn’t yet been discovered by the marketing men.) As I was forty-seven, with only a limited interest in shopping, shoes and handbags, I struggled to find commercial fiction that reflected my taste or even my life. Few novels featured women of my age centre stage. Romantic heroines over forty simply didn’t exist. Mature women appeared only as somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife and they never had sex (unless it was for comic effect.)   LINDA GILLARD Fabulous and 50-something So I gave up looking and decided to write a book for myself, the sort of thing I wanted to read, but couldn’t find: a thinki...