First the bad news. Hilary Mantel’s publishers HarperCollins have all but confirmed what many feared; that The Mirror and the Light, Mantel’s much anticipated conclusion to her Booker Prize winning Thomas Cromwell Trilogy is unlikely to appear in 2016. To be fair, what they said was that the book was “tentatively expected” but that there was no set publication…
When it comes to reviewers and published authors men rule. But is that OK?
Men are still the big winners in the latest count of male and female bylines in 
book reviews, magazines and literary journals published in America, according to VIDA, a women’s literary organization. VIDA tallied bylines in 39 publications including New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Granta and The New Republic.
When the London Review of Books was recently approached over the same issue, this was its response: “It shouldn’t be controversial to say that doing better isn’t as easy as it seems. The number of women’s bylines are low in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the TLS. Just as numbers of women are low on corporate boards. It’s down to more than editorial whim. The problem is, as Jenny Turner said earlier this year, both subtle and deep-rooted. Partly a matter of social arrangements that work against women and partly due to the effect a sexist world has on women. Women send fewer pitches to the
You really will laugh out loud reading Love Nina by Nina Stibbe
Too often, when someone says that they “laughed out loud” while reading a book they really meant there were a couple of moments that provoked a silent chuckle and maybe a wry smile or two. When I read Love Nina by Nina Stibbe I laughed out loud. A lot. I laughed out loud enough times when I was travelling on the London Tube that other passengers were surreptitiously eyeing seats further away from the crazy woman.
Writing funny is a rare skill and when the humour is a