A Million Miles from Normal

Category: booksa

  • Bottoms up at the launch of This Way Up

    So my new book, This Way Up, was launched at the wonderful Book Lounge in Roeland Street on Tuesday night. If you haven’t been, and you like books, I highly recommend it. (My bank manager would tend to disagree, but don’t listen to him, he’s a complete shoe and book bigot!) So there I was […]

  • What James Ellroy said

    For those of you who have been hiding under a crack pipe for the last month, I went to a literary festival in Cheltenham in October, and saw some authors speaking (here are my notes for Salman Rushdie and Bernhard Schlink) and took some notes. Here are my notes on a talk by crazy awesome […]

  • How long do you give a book?

    Some months ago I took a book out of my book club. It had won a Booker and four friends raved about it, so I nabbed it. 48 pages in I found myself bored and restless. I persevered for another three pages and then I did something I very rarely do (particularly with a Booker), […]

  • 5 things I love about fiction

    5 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT FICTION: 1. Three minutes, or even just a split second can take pages to describe. Or a day can be done in a line. 2. There’s material in every breath. 3. You get to take things that have happened to you and try them out with alternative endings. Real fact […]

  • writing sex scenes

    I wouldn’t ordinarily spend too much time thinking about what to call my private parts, not usually finding a need to mention them in my day to day life. But as most of you probably already know, I recently had my first novel, A Million Miles from Normal, published by Penguin, and as it’s a […]