Posts

Shirley Read-Jahn: Life, Writing, Illustrating, Dancing & Parkinson's Disease

Shirley Read-Jahn is an old friend or, more accurately, an old friend of my mother's who I've also come to know and love over the years. If you've read my third novel The Secret Life of Alfred Nightingale, you'll remember that my protagonist…
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How to Grow a Library

A couple of years after moving with my family to Nairobi (where we lived between 2013 and 2017), I started thinking about the fact that the school my children attended didn't have a library and I felt unhappy about this. A reading culture in…
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A Year Of Reading Outside My Ethnicity - Results + Reflections

Towards the end of 2020, I decided to spend the following year reading outside my ethnic group. If you'd like to see my original blog post and the intention I set, click here. The vast majority of books published globally are written by authors…

📚Top Ten Books of 2020📚

I read quite a lot of books, so it wasn't at all easy to narrow this list down to ten. I have also discovered the joys of audiobooks this year which has significantly bumped up my book intake. I spent some time writing out my long list, crossing…

Top Reads of 2019

As the end of 2019 is fast approaching, I thought I'd write a list of my top ten books of this year. If you like the sound of any of them, you've still time to pop down to your local bookshop before Christmas. The following books are not in…
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My 5 favourite books from the first half of 2018

'Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world.' Mary Ruefle Over the past six months as I have been travelling round India, I have been reading and reading and reading. Not that this is any different from normal, but what has been…

Searching through the Jungle for Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling. We all know that he wrote The Jungle Book, one of the most famous pieces of children's literary works from the Victorian era, spawning of number of big screen adaptations and a plethora of jungle-based adventure stories.…