“Thanks for the dance / It was hell, it was swell, it was fun / Thanks for all the dances / One two three, one two three one”
“If a friend lets you down – perhaps by moving away for work and not answering your texts any more – you can take revenge by organising a reunion and slipping a fast-acting laxative into their pasta.”
Scarlett Thomas talks about her process for writing a Worldquake book…
“In the heart of the Green Belt nothing seemed to move. Stranded in the past, it wrestled with the present, and hated the future. And there I was, stuck with it.”
“If everybody lived a life like mine, there would be no need for novels”
“Eerie, engrossing … The author skilfully sifts through the secrets harboured in homes and haunting the heart … The tension between concealing and revealing utterly grips”
Anita Sethi
The Observer
“Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan are reimagined in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, in this compellingly ambitious examination of gender, semiotics and warfare … The narrative mode is to show through dramatic, often moving scenes, and then to tell, reflecting on them analytically. This disjunction can be jarring, but it’s knowingly done, because the book’s style is itself a theme”
Lara Feigel
The Guardian
“ALAN Parks is an amiable bear of a man who these days spends his time wandering around Glasgow thinking up ways to murder people. No, don’t worry. His criminal activities are purely fictional. Parks is that not-so-rare thing these days, a Scottish crime writer. His first novel Bloody January is out now”
Teddy Jamieson
The Herald