Readers never meet her directly, but we are told that she looks like the Holbein portrait of Lady Barker. (Here shown in such a way that it’s easy to imagine a wallet photo.) This is the mother of Hal and Dorothy. Once George Crawley’s wife. On the surface, this
At first glance, I think that Digby, from the previous story “A Question of Disposal”, is a world apart from Colin Graves in this story. Consider how Digby’s mother, Mrs. Glover, imagines him, carrying on after her death. She isn’t particularly complimentary: “He would continue driving about in hairy
There is a line in Steven Price’s 2016 novel, By Gaslight, which seems to suit his new novel generally: “Everything is about the dead.” And another which seems even more appropriate: “The truth that is found in a story is a different kind of truth, but it is not
When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, I was a teenager. In a few years, I would start to keep records about my reading: a log and handwritten (or typed( passages that I favoured along the way. The log in a notebook (usually practical rather than pretty) and the
Ian Williams landed in my stack with his longlisting for the ReLit Award in 2011. This is why I read prizelists: they encourage me to read in different directions, when left to my own devices, I sometimes plod along, in familiar reading territory, simply out of habit. The title
