Novel

Someone on Facebook recently posted to ask me about how to restructure an entire book if it needs a bit of an overhaul. This is something I work with authors on at Avon, and it's also something I had to do for my own book, so I do have a few tips on the best way to approach this.  Read more

I do not think it is a coincidence that the novel as a form reaches maturity at the same point as the bourgeoisie as a class are ascendant. Although the novel has its forerunners and predecessors - Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, de la Fayette - it gets into its stride with affluent, middle-class white men: Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett.

Emily Dickinson said, over a century ago, that "There is no frigate like a book to take us Lands away," and it's true. When we pick up a book, turn on the TV, or watch a movie, we are carried away down the currents of story into a world of imagination. And when we land, once more, on a shore that is both new and familiar, something strange happens. Stepping onto the shore, we're changed.  Read more

The days of slowly introducing a reader to a novel are over. Authors now believe that their first sentence is crucial if they are going to hold their reader's attention because they are so easily distracted by modern technology such as iPads.  Read more

As Hilary Mantel carries off the Costa to add to her second Booker win, Sameer Rahim in the Telegraph comments: 'The richness of its language and psychological penetration cannot hide the fact that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies can be read as posh Philippa Gregory.'