Mark Billingham is one of Britain's well established writers. His DI, (Detective Inspector), Tom Thorne novels have been spectacularly successful in the UK and abroad.  He was the opening speaker on the Friday morning session of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate.  He was also the winner of Best Crime Novel 2009 prize, Continue Reading

Crime scene on Harrogate Station which I saw on my way to the Old Peculier Crime Writers's event. Then it rained and rained and rained. Arghhh So I had to take a taxi. Continue Reading

Born in Shanghai in 1930 James Graham Ballard lived the life of a rich expat's son until the Japanese invaded 1941. He lived in an internment camp for three years. He told fellow writer, Ian Sinclair, that he spent the first twenty years trying to forget the experience and the next twenty years trying to remember. His recollections resulted in Continue Reading

You can freely download books from Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Kafka, Tolstoy, Jane Austin, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo and thousands more from Project Gutenberg. In addition you can also download a wide variety of non-fiction including seminal books on History, Mathematics, Architecture, Sex, Business as well as Continue Reading

  If you want to play around with ideas then site, Seventh Sanctum is for you.  All this site does is generate names, good and evil, locations, technologies, dieties, types of government, magic spells and much, much more.   On the site there are fifteen different generator categories, with well over fifty different generators. These range Continue Reading

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In Before The Knife Carolyn Slaughter describes her childhood, a fraught, anxious prelude to an adulthood that continued to suffer from its heritage. She tells us early on in the book what caused this anguish, and what gave rise to its associated self-pity, self-abuse and anger. She was raped by her father at the age of six. But then the book Continue Reading

This is not a review of Losing Nelson or England, England, or a record of visits to Chester. As the title claims, it’s a reflection, a few observations on culture and identity seen through Englishness. The trips to Chester are offered by the way, as a start and a finish. I don’t recall the year when my dad’s Electricity Board Sports Club Continue Reading

It is not often that a novel comes to hand that has been prized, praised and pre-inflated. Half of a Yellow Sun was in that category when I opened it and began to read. And I was captivated immediately. I read the first hundred pages at a pace, delighting in the ease with which the Chimanada Ngozi Adichie used language to draw me into the Continue Reading

In offering a review of a novel by William Boyd I could certainly be accused of bias. I would proudly plead guilty, since I regard him as one of just four or five British writers who are capable of constructing supreme works of fiction, written in a framework that is both informative and thought-provoking and all this set within a continuum of Continue Reading