Review This Book!

Sadly after being out for two months it looks rather like I'm not going to get any United States newspaper reviews for I Hear The Sirens In The Street which isn't that surprising to me really. American newspapers have been cutting down on their review staff and for the review section to remain profitable it has to feature books that the public is interested in. It's a bit of a Catch 22. They'll only review books by well known authors but you can't...

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Borgen

Season 1 of Borgen finished on Wednesday night here in Australia on the "minority needs" channel SBS. Borgen gets about 40,000 viewers each week in Melbourne which represents about 1% of the population of the Greater Melbourne Area. Borgen gets even lower viewing figures in Australia's other capital cities. (For some reason all the quality shows get their highest ratings in Melbourne, while the lowest common denominator shows get their highest ratings...

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Willam Least Heat Moon

One of my favourite contemporary authors is the American travel writer William Least Heat Moon. A best seller in the United States he is almost unknown in the UK and is completely unknown here in Australia. This is a shame because his stance would go down well in Britain and Oz. He's a slow traveller and a close observer of places and people. He's the antithesis of the Michael Palin school of travel journalism, whereby a celebrity Palin goes on vast...

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Where Did The Irish Come From?

I won't draw out the suspense, the simple answer is Spain. I think the evidence is now pretty definitive that Ireland was populated from the Iberian peninsula fairly soon after the ice retreated at the beginning of the current Holocene Epoch. In the last five years DNA evidence has shown convincingly that from an Ice Age refuge somewhere in the current Basque region the original founder population of Ireland migrated up the Atlantic coast before...

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The Most Creative Place On Earth - Iceland

They have more professional musicians per capita than any other country in the world. More authors, more poets, more screenwriters, more directors, more playwrights per capita than anywhere else. One in every ten Icelanders will publish a book in their lifetime - in Reykjavik the percentage is even higher. The Scandinavian crime writing boom has been a feature of the mystery scene for half a decade but what is even more remarkable is the fact that Iceland with a population of 300,000 (an over estimation because many Icelanders live abroad) holds...

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The First North American Newspaper Review of I Hear The Sirens In The Street

First of all let me wish you all a Happy Bloomsday. Do try and read some Jim Joyce, today, you'll thank me for it...Now down to business...The first North American newspaper review of I Hear The Sirens In The Street came out in last Friday's Toronto Star (Hemingway's old newspaper). It was written by the great Jack Batten who had this to say about the book: Toronto Star Fri June 14 2013Jack Batten Book ReviewsI Hear The Sirens In The StreetBy...

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The Icknield Way

As you know last week I had a whale of a time listening to Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways which I just thought was wonderful and up there with the best travel writers I've read. Macfarlane began his journey in part as an homage to the Welsh writer Edward Thomas who was killed in World War 1 and who was one of the first old way walker/explorer/writers in England. Macfarlane took with him The Icknield Way where Thomas wrote about his journey on "the oldest road in England" that runs from East to West (or West to East) over the chalk downs...

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George McFly Day!

What is George McFly Day? It's the bit in Back To The Future where George McFly's box of books arrives from his publisher and his career as a science fiction writer becomes a reality. If you remember the film, in one version of the present George doesn't follow his dreams to become a writer because he's afraid of failure, but in the altered version of the present a more courageous George McFly does pursue his ambition and when his box of books comes...

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The Old Ways

Most of the products of our dumb, doomed culture seem specifically designed to get on my nerves, almost as if their authors have looked inside my head and thought to themselves: now what can we do here that will irritate Adrian the most. Of course this is a paranoid, solipsistic way of thinking and probably as silly as the implied idea that in the past things were better (things only look like that from the perspective of now but I'll bet back...

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Radio Silence

If you've read my Sean Duffy novels you'll know that, I, like Duffy, am a bit of a music obsessive. I like all kinds of music: classical, pop, rock, opera and my daughters have explained to me the differences between someone like Keisha (a hack) and Taylor Swift (apparently a rather good song writer). Last year an old friend of mine, Dan Stone, offered me the opportunity to write a piece for a new journal he was starting up called Radio Silence whose...

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