(Please note: This post replaces an earlier version that was somehow jumbled in the transmission – I’m hoping it will read in the right order this time!)
After emerging from a frantic period of activity, I’m just trying to catch up with myself, and have realized to my horror that I haven’t posted on my blog here since 8th April. So today I’ve decided to do a bit of catching up before it all gets completely out of hand.
Despite my house already being full of books, with multiple shelves in every room, I can never resist the draw of secondhand books, whether from a dedicated seller of used books or from a charity shop. Whenever I go on holiday, whether for a long or short break, there seems to be an unwritten rule that I must return with at least one book for every day spent away from home.
My recent trip to visit my aunt in London resulted in a five-book haul from charity shops, plus one volume purchased from a purveyor of new books, to salve my conscience for buying so many secondhand. It’s important to support independent booksellers too. (That’s my excuse, anyway.) Continue reading “The Fascination of Secondhand Books”
In last month’s In Conversation post, Scottish author Lorna Fergusson and I discussed writing about a sense of place, with particular focus on Lorna’s latest book, One Morning in Provence, in which the lives of British characters are changed by trips to France.
This month, I’m talking about books set in France again, this time with Australian author Liza Perrat, and with a different perspective. In Liza’s France-based books, the characters are French, and the reader is immersed in French life and culture from down the ages.
So how did an Australian come to write such convincing novels set in another country? In her younger days, Liza would have been surprised about this too! Over to Liza…
Continue reading “In Conversation with Liza Perrat, Historical Novelist”
Filing my tax return just before a significant birthday last month, Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that “nothing is certain in life except death and taxes” hit home. Seeking uncertainties as an antidote, I turned to thinking about English weather. What could be more uncertain? Perhaps that’s why we talk about it so much. According to social anthropologist Kate Fox, author of Watching the English, every hour of the day at least a third of the population of England remarks on the weather.
Continue reading “WHATEVER THE WEATHER: In Praise of Temperature Blankets”
If it weren’t for my aversion to honey, I’d believe that in a former life I must have been a bear. As soon as the clocks go back in the autumn, I sleep a little longer each night, peaking at ten hours in midwinter. I hate the short days and long nights of winter.
