Child’s Play – Carmen Posadas

Carmen Posadas is a literary superstar in Latin America, Spain and other countries in Europe.  Originally a children’s author, she turned her pen to writing adult mysteries in 1980.   Her second novel – Little Indiscretions – won the Planeta Prize in 1998.  Since then she has sold over 1 million books and has been translated into 21 [...]

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TSS: Glasgow strikes back (1)

You may not be aware of the rivalry between the East of Scotland (Edinburgh) and the West (Glasgow).  I won’t tell you what my Glaswegian friend says about the “stuffy” burghers of E___ and I’m sure that it’s no coincidence that the only Glaswegian in Alexander McCall Smith’s  44 Scotland Street series is a gangster named [...]

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Dutch Masters: Beyond Sleep – W F Hermans

The veil of mystery shrouding life in its entirety lifts momentarily and I know that at all times and in everything I do I am defenceless and powerless, as replaceable as an atom, and that all my resolve, hopes and fears are nothing but manifestations of the mechanism governing the movements of human molecules in [...]

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TSS: Tiff-lit, Split-lit – Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off

Should you require an antidote to all hearts, flowers, champagne and chocolates doing the rounds right now, you may wish to pick up the literary equivalent of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”. But where to start? I’m not a seasoned short-story reader.  It’s something I am working on.  However, I am not yet able [...]

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Book Group: The Road Home – Rose Tremain

I could not have predicted that my book group would have been reading Rose Tremain this month or that this review is of a book written by the same author as that on my inaugural post two years ago today!  Serendipity? Coincidence?  Symmetry?  Whatever it is, it certainly was not planned. Rose Tremain’s 2008 Orange-winning “The Road Home” was a [...]

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TSS: Tea, toast and honesty – Interview with Alex Pheby (+ Giveaway)

Alex Pheby (as pictured by his 3-year old budding photographer son, Elliot) looks as pleased as punch. His debut novel, Grace, which tells the story of the dramatic escape of Peterman, from a secure mental hospital, was recently published by Two Raven’s Press, and, to cap his success (!) reviewed favourably here on Lizzy’s Literary Life. [...]

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Grace – Alex Pheby

I was in the mood for colour and action.   So it was that the first sentence on the back cover of Alex Pheby’s debut novel  promising an inmate on the run from a secure mental hospital pushed Grace to the top of the TBR.  The vividness of the first paragraphs pulled me right into the alternate [...]

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TSS: A Day and Another Night Out With Oor Rabbie

A week’s holiday at the end of the January commemorating Burns’s 250th can lead only to one thing – Oor Rabbie taking over.  So I read not just snippets from Canongate’s anthology but the whole thing.  So that would be 41 poems more than I’ve read in the last 41 years and by the end [...]

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