Bird Summons – Mari’s latest read – a remarkable combination of poetry and social insights from Scottish based Egyptian/Sudanese author Leila Aboulela… read more at the Mari’s Book Club page –

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‘Living systems are sensitive to very small changes…’ so says Dr Ovid Byron, lead scientist of a group investigating the strange appearance of pretty much the whole population of Monarch butterflies to a farming area of the Appalachians in Tennessee, when they should have flown, as usual, to overwinter in Mexico. It’s fiction, but its… Read More

Friendly, feel-good, and familiar (if you’ve already caught up with Debbie Young’s Wendlebury Barrow stories…) a mini-novel about the charity-focussed doings of the villagers: will they achieve helping the homeless to keep warm, without a mishap? Read on at the Mari’s Book Club page…here

Do your inanimate Things frustrate, challenge, and defy you? Does you computer perform nasty tricks, do your keys lose themselves, has your futon let you down? Find my next monthly contribution to the Authors Electric group blog And while you’re there, take a browse around at the other authors’ contributions…

This review tries to cover the latest two books I’ve read recently: Where are the Grown-ups and Unsettled. They’re very much not a pair, so don’t expect one to cover both memoir and the challenges of change… Click through to Mari’s Book Club to read about Ruth Badley’s memoir Where are the Grown-ups? and Barbara… Read More

I love this book, and began reading it avidly the day it arrived. Celia Paul is an artist, a painter, and, as the book documents, we learn what it can be like when creativity is the driver in your life. “You need to give yourself completely, while at the same time seeing things from a… Read More

I’m excited to have been invited to join a ‘writers’ bloging group’: Authors Electric is a daily blog, where a month’s worth of writers each turn in a blogpost once a month. My ‘day’ is 22nd so look out for my first post on Friday – I’ve called it Introduction: beginnings please – as it’s… Read More

Podcast! You can now learn more about the background to my books and writing – Go to the About page, scroll down, and listen to this interview with Howard Lovy, a journalist with a special interest in promoting Indie Authors.

It’s a really personal choice: why we read, what we read, and when… Reading the Amazon reviews, I was struck by the number of readers who said they ‘couldn’t engage with the characters’ Or that ‘the characters all do far too much overthinking,’ or ‘talk too much the same’ or ‘are too articulate about their… Read More