Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award
Photograph © Francesco Guidicini Kindness is dead. She was knifed, no axed, no shot by her boyfriend, a lover, a man in a red car that was not a silver Pajero and the five ladies who were her colleagues in the hair saloon (sic) where she was the best (and cheapest) braid plaiter in Harare can’t get enough of her death. They weave it in and out of their day, around their customers, a blind beggar and his seeing-eye boy – both barefoot, the tennis-playing lady they reckon is no
One with You
One With You by Sylvia Day (Penguin, £7.99) Hankies, check. Glass of wine, check. Comfy sofa, check. Copy of One With You? Sorted. I’m settling down for the blockbuster finale of Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, a bit late to the party I admit, this is my first Crossfire novel, but here I go. Suffice to say that in the beginning was Sylvia Day, the author of a chart-topping series of novels teeming with all the breathless romance and eroticism you’d need to set Mr Mills’ and Mr
L'amour fou
We'll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington, (Pan Macmillan, £12.99) Never trust a book by its cover. After reading the line on the front of Emma Beddington's memoir, I thought it was about trying and failing to become French - frothy, witty, insightful, I thought, just what I need as a break from my day job writing about a 700-year-old prison. And it is all those things - the sections where teenage Emma is kicking against her childhood in nice middle-class Yorkshire rang very
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