Natasha Poliszczuk

1 week ago | natashap.substack.com | Natasha Poliszczuk

This weekend, I had the very great pleasure of interviewing Gill Hornby about her new novel, The Elopement, a very fine tale of two families - the Austen-Knights and the Knatchbulls, the choices on offer for Regency women of a certain class: marriage - for love if you were very lucky, by arrangement if not viz.

2 weeks ago | natashap.substack.com | Natasha Poliszczuk

There are some books which sneak up on you and wrap their tendrils around your heart. Before you realise it, it’s midnight and you are sobbing quietly, trying not to wake the slumbering, as your heart cracks and expands to let the story in. The Correspondentis such a novel. A novel written in and about letters and life – and what makes a life well lived. The type of book that peers into the cracks and lets the light in.

3 weeks ago | natashap.substack.com | Natasha Poliszczuk

May - you were glorious. Sunshine on the hedgerows, wisteria, cow parsley-thronged lanes, sunshine, the satisfaction of work, writing, a birthday trip to Jane Austen’s House, meals in the garden at every opportunity, sea swims, and re-reading Mary Wesley on the beach. And an extra joyous bonus - over 6000 subscribers on Substack! I am delighted and frankly rather bowled over by this - thank you, thank you. You have made my month.

1 month ago | natashap.substack.com | Natasha Poliszczuk

I say this about almost every month (aside from February, which has little to redeem it), but I think May is my favourite. Everything is green and fresh, the sun when it shines has actual warmth, the blossom has skittered from the trees and everything is bursting forth into bloom. In the countryside (where I am now), the narrow lanes are thronged with a tangle of cow parsley and foxgloves.

1 month ago | natashap.substack.com | Natasha Poliszczuk

Summer is coming (*averts eyes from the current weather*): lazy days in the garden, deckchairs, holidays - and books. And The Treasures, the new novel from the pen of a.k.a. The Lady Novelist, is a dream summer book. It’s Harriet’s (counts on fingers) seventeenth novel, and - to my mind at least - the novel she was destined to write.