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2 months ago | andrewblackman.net | Andrew Blackman |WeChat icon

Join bookshops around the world to celebrate the right to read freely. Just discovered that bookshops around the world are celebrating the right to read freely today, in support of the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem which was recently targeted by Israeli police. The Educational Bookshop is a small family-run chain of bookshops that’s been around for over four decades.

Jul 18, 2024 | andrewblackman.net | Andrew Blackman |WeChat icon

John Banville has a way of writing novels that captivate me with their prose even when the subject matter doesn’t thrill me. Birchwood won me over with its stunning prose even though I wasn’t much interested in the nostalgic story of aristocratic decline, and a few years later I described his Booker-winning novel The Sea as “a beautiful ride to nowhere in particular.”So I wasn’t too worried when the premise of Eclipse failed to grab me.

Jun 8, 2024 | andrewblackman.net | Andrew Blackman |WeChat icon

I’ve become quite disconnected from life in the UK in all my years of living overseas, and every time I look back, it becomes harder to recognise the place where I grew up. Take this example: during a school fire drill, an 11-year-old boy says that he hopes the school burns down. To be honest, it sounds like the kind of flippant comment I might have made at that age, and my classmates would have chuckled and life would have moved on. But Britain today is different.

Aug 23, 2023 | andrewblackman.net | Andrew Blackman |WeChat icon

Those of you who’ve been following my email newsletter will have heard me talking about a new novel I’ve been working on. I thought it was time to talk about it here on the blog too and to reveal its title: “Refugees Welcome”. It’s a story about a London family that decides to invite a Syrian refugee to come and live with them.

Jun 15, 2023 | andrewblackman.net | Andrew Blackman |WeChat icon

The story of how Shadows on the Tundra came into existence is almost as amazing as the book itself. As a 14-year-old girl, Dalia Grinkeviciute was deported with her family from Lithuania to a Siberian labour camp. Seven years later, in 1949, she escaped home and wrote her memoirs on scraps of paper which she buried in a jar in the garden to keep them safe from the KGB. But then she was arrested again, and when she returned years later, she couldn’t find the jar.