Blogs

Maureen Myant (2025) The Fallen

Posted by celticman on Sat, 11 Oct 2025

Maureen Myant, like most writers, was a writer in search of a publisher. I’ve read the first and her latest, The Fallen , in her four book, South-side of Glasgow, police-procedural published by Hobeck Books. I also read a fair bit of her reissued first book, The Search . The Confession , which kicks off the crime series, is her best. The point of view shifted in her first Southside novel. Mostly the story was told from the point of view of DI...

Review of 'Wild Moon Rising', by Jenny Knight, HarperCollins, June 2025 – A Review

Posted by VeraClark on Sat, 11 Oct 2025

Jenny Knight’s ‘Wild Moon Rising’ is a bewitching and powerful novel of one woman’s midlife transformation following divorce and loss. Themes of witchcraft, kinship, desire and growth collide in this waxing and waning journey in which Claire, main female protagonist, moves to a rental cottage to pursue a project as an illustrator and finds herself attending to her injured neighbour’s wild garden, instead. Structurally, the novel closely mirrors...

Story and Poem of the Week, with Inspiration Point

Posted by insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Fri, 10 Oct 2025

Story and Poem of the Week, with Inspiration Point, posted with huge apologies for the lateness, by di-hard Thank you very much to everyone who has posted their work this week; though making the choice so difficult, it is a great privilege. Story of the Week is this luscious and intense piece by Vera Clark : https://www.abctales.com/story/veraclark/please-follow-my-instructions-y... Poem of the Week is deceptively simple, wonderfully vivid and...

A Letter to Summer

Posted by VeraClark on Wed, 08 Oct 2025

Farewell to summer. Go steady, now. Retreat. No more nuking of nature, no more bleaching the birds into hiding. Farewell to the campsite with pastel bunting and hay bales with its swish of retro deckchairs where the coast was an iron concertina. Farewell to Modbury with its mosaic market-place feel, to the big of the sea, the big sea, the aged doll's house shop of thrift, to the candlemakers and tapers, farewell to the brazen cat rapping chaos...

Maureen Myant (2022) The Confession.

Posted by celticman on Mon, 06 Oct 2025

Maureen Myant is on a roll four or five of the same books (around 80 000 words a year) same characters, Glasgow Southside Series. I read around a quarter of her first novel, The Search , which I take was her doctoral dissertation in Creative Writing from Glasgow Uni. It was set in Poland, 1942. OKish, I won’t finish reading it. Habeas corpus , you shall have the body. Police procedural centred on (the story being told mainly from point of view)...

Story and Poem of the Month

Posted by insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Sun, 05 Oct 2025

Story and Poem of the Month for September

Nadia Dalbuono (2015) The American

Posted by celticman on Sat, 04 Oct 2025

Nadia Dalbuono (2015) The American The American is one of a series of books featuring Detective Leone Scamarcio. Daluono’s book was published before the election of the moron’s moron Trump, when the idea of destabilising society—with false-flag operations—and saving democracy by appointing a dictator belonged in Roman History and not current affairs. The CIA has been at work at home and abroad assassinating presidents and asset-stripping...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Posted by insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Fri, 03 Oct 2025

Posted by airyfairy. Welcome to cold and rainy October! Fortunately there's been lots of splendid stuff on ABC to take our minds off it. Our Story of the Week is Caldwell's darkly funny 'Trump Reads Hansel and Gretel'. As one commenter observed, laughter in the dark is the most precious. Also, the author perfectly captures the tone of his narrator. It's a brilliant response to last week's Inspiration Point: Trump reads Hansel and Gretel |...

MY BEST 5 WRITERS SEPT '25

Posted by Nolan on Wed, 01 Oct 2025

My current best Writers on AbcTales September 2025 5. mcscraic – Paul McCann 4. rhiannonw – Rhiannon 3. luigi_pagano – Luigi 2. valiswaverider – Rob Wheeldon 1. queen beatle – Morwenna A very optimistic newcomer, Sir Loin with three stories.

Rachel Wilson (2023) Losing Young. How to Grieve When Your Life is Just Beginning.

Posted by celticman on Tue, 30 Sep 2025

I read some books. Pick others up and start reading them. Think that’s interesting and realise I’ve read it before. I was going to say something about grief. But don’t really know what I’m talking about, which isn’t unusual. I couldn’t, for example, make a podcast about it, as Rachel Wilson did, The Grief Network. Or write this book. Here (more or less) is her mission statement. ‘When my mother died, I took it for granted a group tailored to...

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