Eleanor Birne

I don’t know whether I’m fat or thin. I suspect I might be ‘plump’. I do know that when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I was skinny. I also know that I am not skinny now. One reason I know this is that when I went back to my old university last summer, I had to be reintroduced to the college chaplain by my (still) skinny boyfriend who was in the same year...

All three of Ali Smith’s novels are set in holiday places. In Like (1997), Amy Shone and her daughter Kate live on a caravan site in Scotland; the characters of Hotel World (2001) are guests and workers at the Global Hotel in an unnamed city; in The Accidental, the new book, the Smart family are spending their summer in a mock-Tudor holiday house near the Norfolk Broads. Caravan sites,...

The first time Alexander Masters met Stuart Shorter, he was crouched in a doorway next to the discount picture-framing shop round the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge: as it happens, the framing shop I used to work for as a sandwich boarder in my teens. Every Saturday the shop owner would hand me a board and a stack of leaflets and I’d hurry down to Christ’s Pieces,...

Hanif Kureishi’s father, like many fathers, hated his job (he was a clerk at the Pakistani Embassy in London). But unlike many fathers, he tried in his spare time to forge for himself an alternative, fulfilling career as a writer. He was proud, humiliated, persistent. He wrote at least four novels, all of which were turned down by publishers and agents. Kureishi recalls mornings in the...

“Love comes dangerously close to looking like a creative-writing exercise. Characters tell different versions of the same story. Their pasts are recreated in flashback so that the reader can construct their lives from moments and fragments. Beloved and Jazz are bigger and more generous, maybe more old-fashioned, but more interesting; in Love, Morrison has tried to keep all the grand narrative elements without having anything grand to narrate. The result, a novel by drip-feed, is sterile. There’s no excess, and nothing to spare. Morrison is short of breath.”