FIRES It is New Year’s Eve, a darkening afternoon, and I have pulled my two young children away from a gleaming fire because of my impatience to visit a lighthouse. The temperature has fallen below freezing. When I look back now at that time, six months after my husband died, I barely inhabited myself. I […]
Non Fiction
The Bicycle Thieves
The Bicycle Thieves I remember going to a shop with rabbits and a wall of fish tanks in the back room. Tiny sunken castles in lurid pinks and greens and surrounded by pebbles at the bottom of tanks inhabited by fish that had no business being coloured so outrageously, brighter inside their tanks than anything […]
Japanese Bookshop Buzz
JAPANESE BOOKSHOP BUZZ In Japan after dark, the big chain second-hand bookshops buzz with activity. Bright and clean and ringing with the tinny sound of J-Pop music, they are literary supermarkets, their shelves crammed with paperback novels, business handbooks, holiday guides to Guam and Hawaii, calligraphy practise books, educational primers, and of course manga in […]