Authors Electric

In August last year, I was right amid book launch mayhem for You Beneath Your Skin . Almost one year later, the world is irrevocably changed--there is a pre and post covid era, and we are all waiting for the shape of us when we emerge at the other end, when covid becomes a memory. Things are apparently not yet at their worst. Through it all, life has gone on, as it does. Last week, amid all the crazy anxiety for friends and family, I announced a piece of news that helped cheer us a little. Endemol Shine has optioned You Beneath Your Skin for TV screens, and the news emerged on Hollywood Deadline . This will hopefully take the book into new hands--and when the TV series gets made, I would get see my characters on screen. I'm equal parts excited and apprehensive, for obvious reasons, but it still makes for good news for the two nonprofits the book supports: Project WHY and Stop Acid Attacks . Meanwhile, the world still goes on. Everywhere I look, there's misery...

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 ...