Authors Electric

I don't usually read one book after another, because I'm a slow reader, and I usually prefer to digest and contemplate one book at a time. However, I am currently emerging from a mini Reading Binge. This has come about because, like a lot of people, I buy far more e-books than I can actually read at that moment, assuming they'd always be there in a period of book famine which rarely happens as I live in a house very amply stocked with real print books. However, I've been doing Early-to-Bed-with-a-Kindle stuff in the last few months of extended convalescence from ankle surgery, and Kindles are so much easier to manage physically, although irritating in other ways. And so it was that I discovered books I'd never read, among them one by friend and fellow author, Adele Geras. I'd first met Adele at a Scattered Authors conference aeons ago, and found her rather terrifyingly impressive, but in all the intervening years, I'd never read her work, until lo! there ...

I have spent the past few months house hunting in Cornwall. I thought I was looking for a new home, but actually I'm finding a lot of sad stories, any one of which expanded into fiction would make the basis of a good novel. People splitting up so the house has to be sold to split the equity... people who love their small home but have to move on because of a growing family... tenants who have lived there happily for years, but are being evicted because the landlord wants/needs to sell up... death in the family... infirmity forcing older people out of their much-cherished cottage into something more practical... redundancy. And then those strange places where the estate agent seems reluctant to tell you anything at all, and my writer's imagination starts working overtime... What exactly does "ready to go" mean? Are the neighbours horrible/drug dealers/axe-murderers? Truth is, a new home is not the easiest of things to find, even (I imagine) if you are looking f...