"When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before."Cliff Fadiman, American author Recently a well-read friend surprised me by saying how boring she found George Eliot’s Middlemarch. 'I decided to re-read Middlemarch,' she explained to me. 'It was … Continue reading Catching up with the Classics

I started to write my first novel-length manuscript five years ago. After two years I had written it and dismissed it as a failure. Not that I hadn’t learnt a lot from it – I had. Not that there wasn’t any good writing in it – there was. I had planned the thing out in … Continue reading The Anatomy of a Scene

Imagine a woman with an eighteen-month-old daughter. She has just migrated from England to New Zealand. Now she knows how big and how small the world can be and how lost she is within it. She has just discovered she’s pregnant again. This was me. My husband worked long hours and I spent long hours … Continue reading Working with small children