Authors Electric

Italy is one of those countries you just have to love. It has some of the best countryside and most interesting towns and cities in the world; it’s the country of the Renaissance, of glorious art and architecture. Its wine, fashion and food are widely considered to be second to none. Besides, how can you not love a country shaped like a boot? Yes, there’s no doubt about it: Italy gets rave reviews all round. What of Italian literature, though? Ah, this is where things begin to go quiet – at least outside Italy. Italian literature has something of an identity crisis in the English-speaking world. Italy, at a fleeting glance, just doesn’t appear to have a literary tradition to rival those of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, or the United States. Mention ‘Russian Literature’, and vast numbers of writers will spring to mind: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Pushkin, Turgenev, Bulgakov. If someone mentions ‘Italian literature’, what or who do you think of? Well, ...

One thing that I’ve always appreciated in fiction is a fully realised sense of place: a writer’s ability to bring a real or imagined landscape to life on the page or screen. Not too long ago, I read Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café , and found that it made the American Deep South – an area with which I’m actually unfamiliar – seem absolutely real and immediate. By the time I’d turned the last page, I felt that I’d just paid a visit to the Georgia town in which it was set. And, to McCullers’ credit, I hadn’t felt like a gormless tourist once, but almost like a local. Putting the book down, I was surprised to find myself back in Northern Italy on a chilly autumn night. Many of my favourite books share this quality: they allow the reader to immerse him- or herself in the world in which the story occurs. In the hands of a skilled author, the reader can move quite easily through an unfamiliar place, and never feel like a stranger. Place. It’s more than just a geographi...

     Our regular blogger for the 28th, Enid Richemont, is indisposed , so we're grateful to Kathleen Jones for bringing us this interview with thriller writer, Rachel Abbott.. . (and to Lynne Garner for scheduling it!) The Back Road -  Rachel Abbott I've just been reading Rachel Abbott's new thriller The Back Road , and I'm very impressed by it.  I'm also curious to know what's behind an Indie best-seller.  Rachel works very hard and is very professional and I'm anxious to learn as much as possible. 1.      Rachel, I know that - like me - you spend quite a lot of your working life in Italy.  Do you find it disruptive going to and fro?  How do you find the atmosphere of Italy affects your ability to work?  What are the drawbacks, from a research point of view, of being in one place and writing about another? When we found our home in Italy we were really fortunate because from the day...

A few weeks after I had my second child, short on sleep and high on anxiety, I woke up one morning and when I opened my mouth to speak, found that only gibberish came out.  The link, between what I was saying in my brain and what came out of my mouth, was broken.  I was utterly terrified.  Exhaustion - the doctor said - what you need is sleep.  So, a couple of pills were swallowed, baby, feeding bottles, and toddler were handed over to a panicky 'What do I do now?' father, and then I slept for 14 hours straight, woke for a drink and then slept again.  The following morning, my voice was back in its normal place, the tongue articulating what the brain dictated.  But I've never forgotten what it was like not to be able to communicate. Since then, I've been a compulsive communicator.  And compulsive is the word.  In fact, there's a label for it and I think it ends in 'aholic', and has nothing to do with the amount of wine I drink (though, on the...

An earthquake sounds like a jumbo jet landing on the roof. An immense, relentless assault of noise - rattling, rumbling, shivering, cracking, quivering. In the walls, the ceiling, the windows and the ground. It goes on for ever and when it stops the stillness is thick as rock. It was 9 in the morning. We were a group of friends from seismically solid England spending a week in a Palladian villa in Vicenza. Our expectations for the day were nothing more challenging than agreeing which old towns to explore or where to have lunch. But now we were dashing out of our bedrooms and bathrooms, all calling out the same - obvious - question. Was that what I thought it was? Is everyone all right? We had no internet access, no way of pinging the outside world to check. As if it wasn’t clear anyway, for above our heads the heavy iron chandeliers were swinging. All of them, in every room, beat in slow, wide arcs. It took twenty minutes for them to stop. Gradually we got on with our day. In...