When I was a teenager, the wealth of stories my mother raised me on began to resonate more deeply. All of them — memories of her youth — were exciting, romantic, and drenched in settings that cried out to be immortalised by literature or cinema. By then, I was already writing humble novellas, short stories [...]
I don’t know if my brother liked Pink Floyd, but in many ways, he was a crazy diamond. There was a lot I didn’t know about him. My half-brother, to be correct. I didn’t even know he existed until I was eighteen, when my father told me about the son he'd had to a previous [...]
Before going any further, how about this quote to make you sit up and reflect. 'How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.' So, did it make you sit up and reflect? If not, then perhaps Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons, will not be your cup [...]
‘Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget. Should have kept a journal.’ I came across those words while reading Ian McEwan’s latest novel, ‘Lessons’, and they lifted my mid-winter spirits astronomically. Why? Because keeping a journal is at least one New Year’s Resolution I don’t have to worry about, seeing as I’ve [...]
When Father Matthew and I woke up again, at some unknown hour later in the evening, the wind had stopped. I turned my head towards the latticed window, buried deep within the thirteenth-century stone wall, and noted with an unbearable sadness that it had stopped snowing. Phantom hills were now visible, rolling and colliding into [...]
‘Wow, you all looked so glamorous back then!’ my daughter said to me the other day, with more than a touch of envy. We were browsing through a selection of old photo albums from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and happened to stop at one particularly fetching snapshot: the one I ended up selecting [...]
Don’t you sometimes just want to grab Time by the scruff of its neck and drag it backwards? Yell at it, “Stop moving! Stop running away from me! Hey, I haven’t finished here yet, dammit, I’m only halfway through … WAIT, can’t you let me take a breath before hurtling forwards again?” And how does [...]
Wendy Skorupski 