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, full disclosure. If you’re someone who hated your schooldays and never wants to be reminded of them, then maybe this blog post isn’t for you. But on the other hand, why not give it a go? My own schooldays weren’t exactly plain sailing – there were some pretty grim experiences, some [...]
Eleven years ago today, my mother died. Sixty-six years ago, her fiancé was murdered. Ten years ago, the first ideas for my book were forged. Today, memories can live on via the pages of my semi-autobiographical novel, Infinite Stranger. My mother – the real character of Molly Williams in my book - was a charmer. [...]
A mother’s lost love. A daughter’s forbidden desire. A tale of obsession inspired by true events. The above three sentences are from the taglines of my latest novel, INFINITE STRANGER, to be launched later this month. And it's the last line, inspired by true events , that is the key issue. As with any work [...]
Here's a preview of the first chapter of my next novel, Infinite Stranger, which is being published this summer. On a snowy February morning in 1978, eighteen-year-old Leah Cavanagh meets Brother Matthew Haddon while on a retreat with her Catholic girls’ school. The four days she spends at Greystones Abbey in the wilds of North [...]
Believe it or not, I’d never heard of the term ‘dead bedrooms’ until just the other week, when I was having a chat with an old friend about the conundrum of marriage and what makes it so terminal. As soon as she mentioned the phrase dead bedrooms, something deep inside me all at once came [...]
Falling in love again. That’s what the sultry Marlene Dietrich sang, way back in the nineteen-thirties. 70-plus years on, she might as well still be singing the same words. I mean she’s right, isn’t she? We fall in and out of love again and again and again. Or is it just me? – in which [...]
Wendy Skorupski 