“Throughout this wonderful book, Pratt demonstrates acute descriptive powers and a piercing intelligence. It’s in describing her loneliness that she forges the deepest communion with the reader”
Anita Sethi
The Guardian
“As children, my brothers and I dreaded nothing quite as much as a solo drive with my father. His ability to say precisely not one thing to us during an entire journey of several hours was breathtaking”
“Our clinic is full of action, drama, glamour and movie magic: car chases, heroes who survive ridiculous injuries, real-life accidents on set. Go on, collect a ticket at reception. The Movie Doctors will attend to you shortly”
“We love our favourite writers because they are human, and they have made an effort to communicate something important to us. In knowing they are human we understand that they feel just as much as we do”
“To allow money to help us lead a good life and create a good society (which it can do), we need a better understanding of our psychological relationship with the stuff”
“Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost”
‘As quick-witted as a stand-up comic and as serious as the best of them tend to be, Kevin Barry is not only an inspired blend of Flann O’Brien and Anthony Burgess, he is an original.’
Eileen Battersby
The Irish Times
“She’s made me see that most of the writers I love are wild or nuts”
Geoff Dyer
The Guardian
“At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening”
Watch the Trailer for the adaption of The World Made Straight
“Dyer’s eyes miss nothing, and his brain emits sparks as brilliantly as The Lightning Field is meant to do in an evening thunderstorm”
Peter Conrad
The Guardian
“The sand is made of gypsum—whatever that is—and is as bright as newfallen snow. Brighter, actually. It’s really quite unbelievable that anything can be so bright”
Listen to Stephen Fry read from A Boy Called Christmas by Matt Haig! But only if you believe in impossible things.
“I think the Pied Piper is such an interesting figure. When you think about it’s weird what he did, taking them children away and it makes you ask questions. Why did he do it? Is that okay? Why did it happen? What’s the story trying to tell us?”
Russell Brand
The Guardian
The Book of Strange New Things
Michel Faber on Start the Week – along with writer William Gibson, LSE Professor Judy Wajcman and historian Dominic Sandbrook – talking science fiction and The Book of Strange New Things.
Start the Week
BBC
Russell Brand reads from The Pied Piper of Hamelin
A fascinating visual breakdown of some of the effects in the Amazon pilot Oasis, based on The Book of Strange New Things.
The Book of Strange New Things
Michel Faber visits the Guardian’s books podcast, to talk about The Book of Strange New Things, and the separations of cosmic distance and death.
Books podcast
Guardian
Michel Faber reads ‘Don’t Hesitate to Ask’ from Undying