Over the last few months, I’ve been quietly publishing some of my Young Adult novels onto Kindle. The most popular so far has been the reissue of my 2001 novel about the Glastonbury Festival, but the time has come to go further back, to the early 90’s, with my Nottingham based series about young police officers, The Beat. The Beat mysteries, while ostensibly a YA series, was aimed rather older and always had an adult audience. While there’s alway a teenage point of view character, the majority of the protagonists are in their twenties or older. Over the course of eleven novels, it follows the central character, Clare Coppola, from her first day on the beat to just after her twenty-first birthday and the…
I’m not much given to reading memoirs, unless they’re by writers I already like a great deal, but this book’s subject matter appealed to me (and it’s still only 99p on Kindle) as it covers territory that I’ve written about in two of my novels, Denial and Love Lessons (eBook edition coming soon). In each, an underage girl sleeps with an older man: 23 in one case, nearer forty in the other, and the man’s exploitative behaviour is demonstrated, then skewered. There’s a moral element, of course, in that YA fiction is for emerging adults and the novel acts as a warning to young people tempted to have sex with an unscrupulous teacher (or, for that matter, university lecturer). Not long after I wrote Love Lessons, the law…
Was it really thirteen years ago? I had an idea for a novel and went to the Glastonbury Festival, the last year before they built the big fences. I wrote a long diary about it and, by the time I’d finished that, had a commission to write Festival. It was written as a YA novel but works fine as a short novel for adults too and, I was pleased to find when rereading it this year, most of the music references are to artists who still mean a lot today. Festival was my best selling YA novel this century, even without counting the free copies given away with every issue of Just Seventeen magazine ten years ago. Why was I rereading it? Because the rights have reverted, so I am…
Five albums and fourteen Grammies into her career, Alicia Keys has the purest soul voice of her generation. She nearly fills the Capital FM Arena, where she last appeared twelve years ago, an evening that my companion witnessed. He describes it as a painful event: she only had one album out and every song was extended with singalongs and solos to make a 40 minute set last twice as long. These days, she’s a veteran, bolstered by her biggest hit to date, singing with Jay Z on Empire State of Mind After a bombastic intro, Keys appears behind a curtain to sing a snatch of that classic, but we know she’ll save the full version for last. Five security guards sit impassively in front of the triangular stage,…
About three years ago, I heard mention of a novel with an intriguing title that had an introduction by one of my favourite writers, John McGahern. I got it and read a couple of pages. It looked well written but, rather… ‘a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man’ says The New Yorker on the cover. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? And the opening pages, about a Missouri farm boy heading to agricultural college, aren’t gripping. Then I read this article about how Stoner, while little known in the US, was steadily gathering readers all over Europe (a selection of the translation covers above) and thought, I’d better give this another go. I finished it in 48 hours this bank holiday weekend. The novel…