Thank you for visiting my website. Here you will find news of my various publications – novels and short stories, papers, talks and journalism – as well as details of any events that are forthcoming in relation to current projects and long standing interests.
My new novel “Caroline’s Bikini”, described by Modernist and Woolf scholar Dr Jane Goldman as “a finely constructed, deceptively slight, piece of sleekly arabesquing narrative that plunges the reader into the scene of its own making”, is a comedy about the telling of a love story and is out with Faber and Faber in hardback this June.
Read the full piece and other reviews here.
I‘ll be reading from and talking about this strange romance at a range of festivals and events over the year. See further information for these and other dates events on my NEWS AND EVENTS page. In addition, if you come along to any of these talks or discussions, do drop me a note. I’d love to hear from you.
If Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is a novel drawing on the conventions of classical tragedy to imagine a protagonist actively setting out to get herself murdered in the manner reported by the misogynist tabloids, then Caroline’s Bikini with the aid of canonical renaissance and modernist poetics confronts the reader with the stupidity of the dominant realist narrative contract (that imagines art merely as a reflection of reality rather than itself a new reality) by hilariously acting out and documenting the collaboration between a character desperate to star in a novel and his amanuensis recruited in the person of a childhood friend with copy skills and literary aspirations, and thereby unraveling modernist free indirect discourse, its third and first person narratives, and re-entangling them. In the process, a new kind of sentence, and new explorations of voice and point of view are expertly furnished”
Dr Jane Goldman, University of Glasgow, Gneral series Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf