There’s nothing guaranteed to get an author worked up as a chat about book covers. We all have quite fixed ideas of how our book should look but sometimes a publisher thinks differently and we bow to their knowledge of the market. They usually do know best! As a reader too, I’m increasingly aware of … Continue reading Two similar covers, two very different books. The power (or pestilence) of genre.
I’m thrilled to announce that my latest historical novel, The Absent Heart, the story of Frances Sitwell, enigmatic muse to Victorian Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson will be published early in 2025 by Linen Press. Followers will know this book has been a while in the writing and rewriting and I’m delighted it has found … Continue reading NEWS! ‘The Absent Heart’ to be published by Linen Press.
I was introduced to Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Christmas Sermon (first published 1888) at an online lecture in December 2020 by Stevenson expert amd fan Robert Louis Abrahamson. If I’m unconsciously replicating any of what RLA (whom I’ve since met) said, apologies and also thanks to him. Thanks too to Debbie Young for inviting me to … Continue reading Kindness at Christmas: R.L. Stevenson’s ‘A Christmas Sermon’
When I visited A New Power, the Bodleian Library’s photo-history exhibition which ran earlier this spring, I was fascinated to learn how daguerreotype images were used to produce wood engravings which then became the basis for newspaper illustration, an application of the daguerreotype process of which I had been totally unaware, and so I turned … Continue reading More than history: The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre by Dominic Smith #fictionalbiography #photohistory @bodleianlibs
‘Truths needn’t depend on facts for their expression.’ The quote is from Tom Crewe’s author notes for his novel The New Life. It’s a book I think will be noticed for its unselfconscious depiction of sex between men, but I also admire it as an example of how history can be melded into create great … Continue reading ‘Desire and the search for freedom in Victorian England’: The New Life by Tom Crewe @TomCrewe1
Ali Bacon, Author 