the literary lounge

  Today, we’re delighted to welcome writer Mike Shanahan to The Literary Lounge. Mike’s beautiful book, Ladders to Heaven, is published by Unbound. It celebrates the fig tree, a ‘keystone species’ which sustains a huge number of animals and insects around the world and is also important not just in terms of our past but … Continue readings →

Tags : book review, book review Shanahan, books about trees, botany, fig trees, flora and fauna, Ladder to Heaven, Mike Shanahan, non-fiction, Q&A, The Literary Lounge Q&A, tree love, Unbound

  This is an important year, the centenary of the introduction of the first vote for women in Britain. The vote – the privilege of being able to vote, to step forward and have a voice – is something to be celebrated, especially in these times of politically shifting sands. So, when I first heard … Continue readings →

  The Incendiaries, RO Kwon’s debut novel, is a restrained study of obsession, deceit, love and loss. Kwon’s characters, Will, Phoebe and John Leal, meet at an elite American university. Will and Phoebe are students there, John Leal, the arcane leader of a cult linked to North Korea who focuses his attention on recruiting Phoebe. … Continue readings →

  If you were to say that you were writing a book combining Sherlock Holmes, iconic filmmaker Billy Wilder and the Loch Ness Monster, set in London and Scotland, in two different time periods, I would probably wonder if the world had gone slightly mad – yet that’s exactly what novelist Patrick Kincaid has done … Continue readings →

    Today, we’re delighted to welcome writer Patrick Kincaid to The Literary Lounge.  Patrick’s debut book, The Continuity Girl, is published by Unbound. It draws on iconic filmmaker Billy Wilder’s controversial and yet cult movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. We’re particularly excited as we love Sherlock in all his incarnations and yet … Continue readings →

  doppelgänger noun An apparition or double of a living person.“   The doppelgänger is a recurring device in popular culture, the duplicate other often featuring as part of some larger, nefarious plot – the rather creepy film The Double Man (1967) and Ira Levin’s excellent The Stepford Wives (1972) cases in point. Michael Redhill, … Continue readings →

  A great setting is important to any book, but in a work of crime fiction it is particularly so. In this, Sandra Ireland’s Bone Deep doesn’t disappoint: it has atmospheric locations in spades. A disused watermill lies at the heart of the book, a place suitably immersed in history and legend and bound up … Continue readings →

August is the month that celebrates women writers in translation, of which statistically there are still far too few. Teresa Solana has the distinction of being both a writer in translation and a career translator. Her books, which often blend crime, dark satire and the surreal or grotesque, are translated from her native Catalan by … Continue readings →

  I’m a diehard Billy Wilder fan, brought up by a mother who absolutely adored film. Along with my brother, I was introduced at an early age by mama to the likes of Hitchcock, Curtis, Mankiewicz, Hawks, Powell and Pressburger, classic filmmakers who visited our home on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons, making magic in … Continue readings →

Tags : Arthur Conan Doyle, Billy Wilder, film trailers, great films, Patrick Kinkaid, reading on location, Sherlock Holmes, The Apartment Billy Wilder, The Continuity Girl, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes trailer

  Good crime fiction usually grabs you from the very first page, immersing you instantly in the author’s world. Great books grab you from the very first words: Ausma Zehanat Khan’s excellent The Language of Secrets does just that. Set in twenty-first century Canada, on paper the book is a tale of our times, its … Continue readings →

Tags : 21st-century terrorism in fiction, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Canadian crime fiction, Canadian noir, crime fiction award-winning fiction, Khattak, The Language of Secrets, Toronto

  The ability to make people laugh is a great thing – and writers who can do so seemingly effortlessly are worth their weight in gold. Gina Kirkham is one such author, and Constable 1261 Mavis Upton a wonderful protagonist. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, Mavis’s second outing, hits the ground running. The year is 1999 and … Continue readings →

  Today, we’re delighted to welcome writer Gina Kirkham to The Literary Lounge. Creator of Constable Mavis Upton, Gina publishes Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, the second outing for her hapless, humorous heroine, with Urbane Publications, in July 2018. First of all, welcome, Gina – thanks so much for joining us.   LS: Most people have one … Continue readings →

  Rich in culture, history and beauty, India is a popular setting for novels, particularly ones of a historic persuasion – the southern states though, usually don’t get a look in. Claire Scobie’s The Pagoda Tree, set in late 1700s’ Tamil Nadu, thus stands out. It’s a book I read with particular interest as my … Continue readings →

   It’s a bright  moon outside, and from the window of my house I can see the skeletal gray of the factory, the banners draped like sashes and the deep arterial red of Mandarin characters demanding change … “I’m standing by the window thinking about Jews and shoes and this beautiful Chinese woman asleep behind … Continue readings →

  Ken Lussey joins the bastion of writers and artists drawing on the Second World War for inspiration. The extremely enjoyable Eyes Turned Skywards takes a real event from August 1942 and runs with it – the mysterious death of the King’s brother, the Duke of Kent, in northern Scotland. While en route to Iceland, … Continue readings →