I still remember the first time an annotated edition made me see a book I thought I knew in an entirely different light. I had picked up a battered novel from a secondhand stall because it kept surfacing in the margins of other books — an author other reviewers mentioned in passing, a phrase that...
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Reading Guides
I love the peculiar thrill of finding a paperback in a charity shop that seems...
Interviews
When I first began comparing translations as part of my work at Storyscoutes...
Reading Guides
I once found a slim paperback wedged between gardening manuals and a stack of...
Reading Guides
I have always loved the small, delicious friction that happens when two...
When I sit down to interview a writer, I’m not only listening for a soundbite or a publicity quote; I’m tracing a map. That map shows the routes between books, the hidden corners of a writer’s bookshelf, the older texts that taught them craft...
When I first started rooting through the secondhand shelves of a tiny bookshop in Brighton, I kept finding the same thing: novels with dust jackets browned at the edges, author names I recognised from footnotes or literary histories, and blurbs that...
There are books that show you a historical date, a set of facts and figures. Then there are novels that make history feel like a living room you can enter — the creak of a floorboard, the smell of cooking, the small, embarrassing, humane gestures...
I remember the first time I opened a restored edition of a book I had already read in a cheaper paperback: the pages felt like someone had taken a curtain aside and shown me a room I thought I’d known. Restored and annotated editions do something...
I love the little thrill that comes when a book you thought you knew finds a surprising echo in something new. Pairing a neglected classic with a contemporary counterpart is one of my favourite reading games: it sharpens attention, reveals...
I remember the first time a debut novel by a writer from an underrepresented background stopped me mid-page and made me reorder my reading list. It wasn’t just the novelty of a voice I hadn’t heard before; it was the way the book treated time,...
I still remember the thrill of opening a novelist’s backlist for the first time—the sense that a whole world of books had been waiting, quietly, behind the one everyone had been talking about. Backlists are where you find the brittle early...
I confess: serialized Victorian novels used to intimidate me. The idea of starting a book that sprawled across months (or years) of instalments felt like opening a ledger rather than sinking into a story. Then I started treating these works as...
I still remember the first time I realised my relationship with crime fiction could be more than Nordic thrillers and blockbuster TV adaptations. A reader at the shop asked me for “something like Stieg Larsson but not Swedish,” and I felt that...
I keep a small stack of nineteenth‑century poetry on my desk at all times — not the canonical handful everyone learns in school, but a scattered assemblage of voices that used to sit at the edges of anthologies. Over the last few years I’ve...