How to Write Damn Good Fiction is not a writing book for beginners. It doesn’t cover the basics of characterisation, plotting, dialogue, grammar or novel construction. What it does cover is the difference between writing that is mediocre and writing that…
Tag: fiction
A Review of The Scar by China Mieville
Much of what makes Mieville’s work so appealing to readers not normally enamoured with fantasy literature is classic literary technique. His settings are very well mapped out, his characters are complex and, strong and very real, even when they are…
A Review of Baudolino by Umberto Eco
In this, his fourth novel, professional liar Umberto Eco spins the yarn of Baudolino, a fellow artificer hailing from Eco’s hometown of Alessandria and possessing more than a bit of the author’s personality. Like Eco, Baudolino is a master of…
A Review Of Harkening: A Collection Of Short Stories Remembered by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Carolyn Howard-Johnson has the magical way with words that makes her a great story teller. She has the talent and determination to succeed that all writers strive to achieve. Her descriptions of characters and places are so real that her…
A review of Going Home by Michael de Valle
But it is when de Valle brings death itself directly into the story that his prose really shines. The complex relationship between life and death are the centre of action in “Two slices of blue”, a story about a child who is given back his eyesight from a donor’s corneas. The tightness of the narrative is superbly handled as de Valle moves back and forth between the moment of death/damage, a wife’s realisation that she’s lost her husband, and a parent’s experience of their child’s accident and subsequent operation.
A Review of Coraline by Neil Gaiman
The whole tone is a bit Alice in Wonderland like, and even has a talking cat, silly songs, cryptic messages, characters that metamorphosis, and the kind of almost surreal play between waking and dreaming, life and death, shadow and light which made…
A Review of French Spirits by Jeffrey Greene
French Spirits begins with the earth’s axis tilting away from the sun and sliding “down into the narrow pit of gray winter months” and ends in the Burgundian winter mists, the warmth of life and human celebration contrasting with the eternal…
A Review of Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce
So often novels have style but little substance and often there is a struggle to express substance but the project is doomed without style. Here is a book with both in abundance and a sense of poetry that illumines both…
A Review of Dreaming Water by Gail Tsukiyama
At times the narrative was almost too pretty for its subject – too sentimental. As a reader, I wanted more anger, more pain, more depths into Hana and Cate at least. They are both so good, so radiant, even when…
A Review of J M Coetzee’s Disgrace
David Lurie is a man who has, at fifty two, sorted his life and his sexuality out nicely. He has a tidy job teaching poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, a once a week visit to a discrete…