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My mum, Jo - whose work you can find here - has very kindly handed me some of her original linoprints to give away to any new paid subscribers who opt for the reduced price annual subscription or founder member option today I absolutely love the hedgehog (which originally appeared
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Subscribe now * Jim is a cat our male cat Charles brought over to our house in early December last year. It’s mid-April now and Jim’s still here so I guess it means he’s officially ours - especially since the lady whose barn he used to live in
This is a piece I wrote in January, 2018, directly after I’d moved to an extraordinarily lofty and isolated spot in the Peak District specifically to write my short story collection Help The Witch. A few of you might have read the piece at the time or/and Help
This is a free post for all subscribers. I’m keeping it that way because I appreciate everyone who subscribes this Substack, paid or not, and prefer that these 2200 new words of fiction be widely read, rather than limited to a few people. But if you are in a
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This is a piece I wrote last autumn, but I thought it worth posting again here, since many of my Substack subscribers won’t have seen it. Plus, in the week of Villager’s paperback publication, it’s probably a good guide for anyone wondering whether to read the book.
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My novel Villager is published in paperback today. If you’d like to order a copy, you should be able to get one from your local independent bookshop, or you can order online from my publishers, Blackwells (with free worldwide delivery) or Amazon. Alternatively if you’re in the UK
What is more remarkable: our capacity to forget suffering and darkness, or our capacity to remember it? I’m frequently equally struck by both. But I do know that my memory has a special knack of editing out troubling experiences: a process it does all by itself, without me really
Most of the posts here have been free but today’s - a short story I wrote a few weeks ago - is for paying subscribers. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription, there’s a cut price rate for 12 months, and I have some original
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One of the many ways that the internet is cruel and annoying in a “pissing down your back and telling you it’s raining” way is that, at the very same time as ruining people’s attention spans and preventing them from concentrating properly on books, it is constantly reminding
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Thank you for subscribing to my Substack. Generally it’s more of a new writing newsletter than an actual news newsletter but sometimes quite a few things are going on, and/or being given away, and now is one of those times, so I wanted to tell you about those
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* People always ask you if you’re lost if they live in a place and see that you’re in the place too and you’re looking at a map. It can be socially tricky for someone like me who walks a lot, loves maps, is quite proud of his
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Since my new novel is set there, I’ve been thinking a lot about Nottingham recently, remembering the many the good and interesting things about growing up there. You can listen to the brief tour of the city and its edges that I took a few weeks ago with my