Mat Osman: ‘I wanted to write about a dirty, dangerous, working-class London’

The Suede bassist and author on writing without a safety net, terrifying himself for his next novel and which of the Thursday Murder Club books – by his brother Richard – he likes bestMat Osman is, along with Brett Anderson, a founding and current member of the band Suede, and the author of two novels. The Ruins, published in 2020, is a modern murder mystery about estranged brothers. His latest, The Ghost Theatre, is set in Elizabethan London and tells the tale of the Blackfriars Boys, a real life Elizabethan theatre troupe made up of children who were often snatched from the streets to act in popular plays of the day. They are joined by Shay, a young female “Aviscultan”; a worshipper of the birds that she communes with as she scales the city’s rooftops on the run from her enemies. The book has been widely praised and the Guardian picked it as one of its novels of 2023. Osman is the older brother of TV presenter and fellow novelist Richard Osman and lives in north-west London..It isn’t the kind of book you imagine a musician would write…I really hope that’s true. My first novel was about a musician, about brothers and stuff and it drew from [my] experience. [With The Ghost Theatre] I was really aware that I wanted to write something without a safety net, where I had to make it all up. Because I want to be a writer, not a musician who has written a book. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2024-03-23 18:00:26 UTC ]

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In Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Klara and the Sun,’ a robot tries to make sense of humanity

Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017 is a delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope. Continue reading at The Washington Post

[ The Washington Post | 2021-03-02 16:46:21 UTC ]
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Olga Tokarczuk's 'magnum opus' finally gets English release – after seven years of translation

The Books of Jacob, praised by the Nobel prize judges and winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike award, will be published in the UK in NovemberThe magnum opus of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk – a novel that has taken seven years to translate and has brought its author death threats in her native... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2021-02-26 15:00:18 UTC ]
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How Has Queer YA Addressed HIV/AIDS?

The first YA book to deal with HIV/AIDS was M. E. Kerr’s Night Kites. Published in 1986, the novel features a teenage protagonist whose older brother is sick with AIDS-related illnesses. As Christine Jenkins and Michael Cart point out, this novel did not inspire a trend: HIV/AIDS “would receive... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2021-02-25 09:48:43 UTC ]
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Faber bags Caldwell's 'beautifully moving' wartime novel

Faber is to publish Lucy Caldwell's first novel in nearly a decade, These Days. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-23 01:30:10 UTC ]
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Paul O'Grady signs 'major' children's book deal with HarperCollins

TV presenter and author Paul O'Grady has signed a “major” multi-book deal with HarperCollins for his debut children’s novel, Eddie Albert and the Amazing Animal Gang, the first in a planned series. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-17 19:53:37 UTC ]
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Open the Portal: A Conversation with Patricia Lockwood

READING PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S first novel feels a lot like having your brain poisoned by the internet — or at least like having that particular contemporary condition understood. No One Is Talking About This is a searing entry into the rapidly emerging pantheon of digital culture literature, told... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-16 16:00:53 UTC ]
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Unseen work by Proust announced as ‘thunderclap’ by French publisher

The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown,... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2021-02-16 15:21:36 UTC ]
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Here’s the cover of Jonathan Franzen’s next novel.

On October 5, this timeline will be blessed/cursed by Jonathan Franzen’s first novel since 2015: Crossroads, or, if you’re not abbreviating, Crossroads: A Novel: A Key to All Mythologies, Volume 1. It’s the first novel of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, which, yes, nods to the doomed... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2021-02-10 17:59:29 UTC ]
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HarperNorth snares first novel with Woods' gangland thriller

HarperNorth has snared its first fiction acquisition, a gritty gangland thriller by Karen Woods. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-08 01:06:27 UTC ]
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Voiceless in Vienna

LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH was the original kinky bastard. A 19th-century Viennese nobleman, he wrote the controversial 1870 novella Venus in Furs, which explored his fetish for pain and abasement, and inadvertently helped coin the term “masochism.” The Masochist, Slovenian poet Katja Perat’s... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-01-19 18:00:58 UTC ]
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Virago to publish first novel in two decades from Gayl Jones

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[ The Bookseller | 2021-01-17 23:38:33 UTC ]
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Duchess of York’s first novel to be published by Mills & Boon

Sarah Ferguson says historical tale Her Heart for a Compass is inspired by experiences in her own lifeThe Duchess of York has landed a book deal with the romantic fiction publisher Mills & Boon, revealing that she “drew on many parallels from my life” for the historical tale.Sarah... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2021-01-13 10:13:08 UTC ]
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Am I Argentine? On Identity, Tradition and Finding Ties to One’s Homeland

I consider myself Argentine. I tell people it is not only part of my origin story but my identity. My first novel is titled Hades, Argentina, and to my friends I’m sure that seems fitting, the natural summation of my life and literary ambitions so far. But the truth is I had never been to […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2021-01-12 09:48:41 UTC ]
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In ‘The Liar’s Dictionary,’ People Work on the Definition of Love and Many Other Words

Eley Williams’s first novel follows characters living in London more than a century apart who toil to compile the same ill-fated dictionary. Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2021-01-05 10:00:02 UTC ]
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Has the Parent Plot Ousted the Marriage Plot in Contemporary Fiction?

When my wife and I were expecting our first child, a friend described it as “the ultimate deadline.” Many writers I’ve known since have determined to finish their books before a baby arrives. Some do, of course, but the deadline wasn’t so ultimate in my own case. I was five years into my first... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2021-01-05 09:49:10 UTC ]
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Bloomsbury lands first novel in 48 years by Wole Soyinka

Bloomsbury is to publish Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate's first novel in 48 years. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-12-09 16:14:16 UTC ]
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We’re getting a new Lauren Groff novel (about nuns!) in 2021.

Yes, the two-time National Book Award finalist and America’s most famous contemporary practitioner of the Joni Mitchell school of marriage fiction (think about it) is returning to the novel game. Riverhead Books announced earlier this afternoon that Matrix—Groff’s first novel since 2015’s... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2020-12-01 18:25:06 UTC ]
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William Heinemann lands 'masterpiece' from Richard Powers

William Heinemann will publish Bewilderment, Richard Powers' first novel since his Booker-shortlisted and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (William Heinemann, 2018). Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-24 19:27:03 UTC ]
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Attention: the principal from Buffy just wrote a novel. It’s called Illyria.

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[ Literrary Hub | 2020-11-17 15:43:11 UTC ]
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