Book review: The Ghost at the Wedding

Book review: The Ghost at the Wedding

The Ghost at the Wedding, Shirley Walker’s 2010 memoir of her mother-in-law Jessie, explores the devastating impact the First and Second World Wars had on the soldiers themselves, as well as the women left at home. She does so with deftness and subtlety, in a...

Writing for work and writing for play

When I was seven or eight years old, sometime between reading Little Women and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I began writing little books, culminating in the seven-chapter opus Amabel Strikes Back, which received rave reviews...
Book review: Boy, Lost

Book review: Boy, Lost

Children are always episodes in someone else’s narrative, not their own people, but brought forth into being for particular purposes. So wrote historian Carolyn Steedman in her 1986 memoir Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives,which contrasts two working...