-
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
I knew that I wanted to read this book almost as soon as I heard about it. There were at least three podcasts featuring Wiener in my queue, and at least a couple of newspaper features I’d come across. But I’ve yet to listen to or read any of them, because I knew that I…
-
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Good Omens is one of those books that has somehow slipped past me for thirty years… until now. The book was published in 1990, and at that point I’d read both comics written by Neil Gaiman, and at least the first Discworld book. So I knew who the writers were, and I shoe have been…
-
Winter Sun
A few more from this series on Flickr.
-
Silver by Chris Hammer
Having just read and loved Scrublands, I was delighted to discover a sequel has just been published. Once again, we follow Martin Scarsden, just a few weeks after the events of Scrublands. He’s just been away in the city writing a true-crime book that summarises the events of that earlier title. Now he’s somehow ended…
-
Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade
The premise of this book is so ridiculous that I wouldn’t have given it a second thought, had I not heard a really good review of it. I got the audio book of this, and it was laugh out loud funny – I had to be careful where I listened to it! View From The…
-
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Another title that has been kicking around in my home for a while, but which has all the ingredients for me to really enjoy. Spies at wartime; a post-war BBC radio setting; multiple timelines. Juliet has been plucked from an administrative government job to help run a monitoring operation out of a London flat. The…
-
A Very Murderous Christmas by Various
This anthology had been kicking around for a while, so over Christmas I finally got around to reading it. It’s a collection of short stories by various writers, all of which have been set around Christmas. Not all of them are tales of murder, and not all of them are by famous writers. Indeed, not…
-
Ness by Robert McFarlane and Stanley Donwood
Orford Ness, on the Suffolk coast is a remarkable place. I first visited it as a child when we were spent a week of our summer holidays in Walberswick further up the coast. Since then I’ve visited a few times, always heading to the remote village of Orford and then getting the National Trust run…
-
Scrublands by Chris Hammer
When I first saw Scrublands appear on bookshelves, I thought that perhaps it was the usual story of another publisher jumping on the bandwagon of Jane Harper’s very successful outback crime thrillers. But towards the end of 2019, as various readers and writers compiled their “best of” lists, Scrublands kept appearing. I’m so glad I…
-
The Lost Man by Jane Harper
The Lost Man follows on the heels of Jane Harper’s two previous crime fiction novels set in the Australian outback – Force of Nature and The Dry. But unlike those two, this novel does not feature her detective Aaron Falk. The Lost Man’s setting feels even more remote and desolate than those previous titles. The…
-
Times Radio?
Update 28 January: This is now confirmed as happening, so I’ve added an addendum below. It’s interesting to read the reports suggesting that News Corp is about to launch what has been described as “a new radio station designed to threaten Radio 4” or “a rival to Radio 4” this spring. According to the Telegraph…
-
Experiments with Acrylic Ink and Water
The other day I was drinking a cup of tea in one of those cafés where they provide the hot water, tea bag and milk separately. I let the tea brew before stirring the milk in and was entranced by the smokey effect of the milk being stirred into the water. Then I went to…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
-
Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
Check out some of my other photography
