The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

A novel about women’s football? Yes – and it’s terrific!

by 2 Comments

I’ve had the pleasure recently of proofreading a debut novel by David O’Reilly, a fellow who runs two women’s football teams in Belfast, and whose day job (well, evening job) is being a radio personality with a pseudonym on an ‘indie guitar bands’ sort of show. I don’t know David, really – just a friend of a friend who asked for my services – but I was struck by how fantastic his book, ‘Lottie the Raven’, is, and I’d like to commend it to Afterworders.

It’s aimed at a teenage audience, being the story of a 14-year-old girl (a soccer prodigy who is ambivalent about whether she even likes the game, and who has other matters to deal with in the tale) in an under-18 team. Her dad – a single father – is a sort of Tom Bombadil figure, an effervescent, almost absurd character with a thread of profundity under the surface, who used to be a Premier League player until mysteriously leaving the game.

Even though it’s aimed at teenagers, I found it a page turner (I would have kept turning even had I not been hired to do so!) with drama, humour, pathos and heart. I know » Continue Reading.

Jack Reacher – Your Thoughts and Opinions

by 31 Comments

I’ve just finished the book Reacher Said Nothing by Andy Martin. It’s an interesting book about the creation of the twentieth novel (Make Me). It’s worth a read if you’re interested in behind the scenes stories.

I’ve not read any of the Reacher novels as I’m not into airport genre fiction. They just don’t do anything for me. Someone said they’d get their hands on a book for me so I can give it a try but I doubt it will hold my attention.

I feel there’s a blog post to be made about the books despite my own lack of useful input. So, any opinions on the books you want to share? Favourites or hated books.

I watched the first movie for the second time. My review:

Jack Reacher (2013) Nomadic ex-military policeman Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) becomes involved in investigating a mass killing by a sniper.

I don’t know if it’s the original book by Lee Child or if it’s this film’s writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, but there’s a strong sense of an intelligent person overseeing what is a rather nuts and bolts pulpy story. It has an authority to it that elevates it a notch or two » Continue Reading.

One book wonders?

by 68 Comments

I suspect that Afterword bookworms are in a huff.

We’ve had one album wonders and one film wonders . But what about those writers who only produced one magnificent novel?

Here’s your chance to share those neglected masterpieces with us!

As ever, the rules are fairly elastic. If a writer’s publishers have dug up a piece of juvenilia to publish long after the masterpiece, that still counts.

I’m bagsying A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Punblished in 1980, 11 years after his suicide.

What one book wnders are on your shelves?

Everything Is Less Than Zero…the lit brat pack revisited

by 14 Comments

moseleymoles on A short introduction to some East Coast writers of the eighties

Picking up Donna Tartt’s latest novel The Goldfinch at a local charity shop got me thinking about how, while I’ve lived out my life through new wave, goth, acid house, britpop – literature isn’t quite like that. Movements take decades to crystallise rather than months. But there was a group of young American writers who resembled if not a group, then a loose scene – those described as ‘the Literary Brat Pack’ in the mid-eighties whose image and much of its writing drew heavily from the music and creative scene of New York. They were young, wore shades after dark, listened to music, went to clubs, took drugs and wrote about…mainly other people who were young, wore shades etc…

Tartt was famously at Bennington, an exclusive East Coast college with Bret Easton Ellis in the early eighties as was Jonathan Lethem. Ellis became famously associated on the New York party scene with Jay McInery. Add Tama Janowitz and you have five writers whose work all features heavily on my shelves.

As an impressionable teenager and avid reader these writers – many of whom wrote debut novels set » Continue Reading.