I don’t often gush about a book, but this memoir by Xiaolu Guo – one of Granta’s 2013 Best of Young British Novelists – is terrific. If I ever do choose a book of the year here on this blog, this would be a definite contender. You can read my Sunday Times review here
Very pleased to have a new short story published on storgy.com. ‘Mr DIY’ is about a man who is struggling to fix both his house and his life. I actually began writing it in 2003, but then abandoned it, only to pick it up again last year and completely rewrite it. Experts often advise writers to put away their writing for a while in order to come back to it with fresh eyes. I don’t think they mean leave it for 13 years, but in this case it did the trick. You can find the story here
I’ve not written much drama, though the only award I’ve ever won was third prize in the Watford Palace Theatre Young Playwrights’ Competition, back in 1991. That script is buried somewhere in a box in the attic, but I’ve always loved theatre, and recently I had a couple of ideas that I felt would work better as plays rather than prose. Script writing is a very different challenge to writing novels or short stories, but as I’ve always enjoyed writing dialogue (and always found writing description hard) it’s been quite a liberating experience.
I’m delighted that Player Playwrights have selected one of my recent plays for a rehearsed reading in the New Year. Player Playwrights run weekly Monday night readings at the North London Tavern in Kilburn. The plays are rehearsed beforehand with professional actors and a director, and it’s a great opportunity to see how words on a page work (or maybe don’t work) when spoken aloud by real people, and to gain some insight into the mechanics of theatre production.
More details to follow!
This week’s review for the Sunday Times is of Isobel Charman’s intriguing book about the founding of London Zoo in the nineteenth century. You can read it here
My latest Sunday Times review is of Tim Harford’s new book, Messy, which argues that we should all allow a bit more messiness into our lives.
A few months ago I reviewed Chris Cleave’s wonderful latest novel for the Times Literary Supplement. You can find the review here
Here’s my review of Linda Grant’s excellent new novel, The Dark Circle – a tale of TB in the early days of the NHS – from the Literary Review
Ian Critchley 