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About this blog

This blog is a place for my non-fiction writing.

There will be posts promoting my writing, in all its areas. I will talk about my writing in general, the inspiration behind it, my writing process and several of the issues I’ve faced writing. It will also contain essays, reviews and other examples of my non-fiction writing. There won't be any politics here but there will be social commentary and personal stories.

(I have started a book reviewing project, I am attempting to review as many of the book I've read as possible, and I am going to post those book reviews here too)

Entries in this blog

Book review

Book Review: Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge

It’s 1970s North London. Middle class and conservative accountant Edward is married to Helen, but he is also having an affair with Binny. But single mother Binny is tired of being the other woman and wants a social life with Edward, a part of one anyway, more than just occasional meals in restaurants were Edward is sure no one will recognise him. To this end Binny wants to host a dinner party for Edward and his friends George and Muriel Simpson. The two couples duly sit down for their dinner par
Book review

Book Review: How to Talk to Girls at Parties by Neil Gaiman

It’s the suburbs in the 1970s, and two teenage lads, Enn and Vic, go to a teenage party to meet girls. Vic is the charming and handsome boy, who is always successful with the girls, while Enn is tongue-tied and awkward around them. At this party Vic pushes Enn to talk to them, to finally have some success with the opposite sex, but the girls at this party are amazing and so easy to talk to. This short story is a showcase for Neil Gaiman’s storytelling skills and his otherworldly imagination
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Holocaust Tips for Kids and Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown by Shalom Auslander

Satire is a difficult form to get right. If it is too humorous then it might not be biting enough; if the satire hits home then it can be dry and even dull, and then it can be humourless and miss its target. These two short stories take a satirical aim at religious persecution and antisemitism in particular. Holocaust Tips for Kids is a young teenage American boy’s view of the Nazi Holocaust. It reads like that teenage boy’s scrapbook, facts and reportage sit all beside the boy’s own w
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Book review

Book Review: HIV (Third Edition)

Treatment and survival of people with HIV has improved greatly over the years. No longer is HIV an automatic terminal condition. Now treatment opinions are varied and complex so treatment manuals are a required resource, but a resource is only as good as the information in it. The editors here, Libman and Mackadon (both doctors), appear to have put a lot of work into this volume. The authors of each section are qualified for the area they are writing on. It felt refreshing that the editors
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Book review

Book Review: Heterosexism in Health and Social Care

Homophobia is a word used frequently in our media, but what is meant by it? The dictionary definition is fear of someone homosexual, but Julie Fish (senior lecturer and research fellow in social work at De Montfort University, Leicester) doesn’t think it goes far enough to define the discrimination faced by lesbian, gay and bisexual people. This is the argument behind her book. In her opening chapter, Fish argues for the use of the term Heterosexism for prejudice/discrimination against LGB
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

It is 1930s Berlin and “Christopher Isherwood” is enjoying the notorious nightlife and culture of the city. Isherwood is an upper-class Englishman, surviving by teaching English to different citizens of the city, as he explores a life very different to his previous one, that opens him up to a diverse cast of characters. This book has become a modern classic, the basis of the musical and film Cabaret, but don’t expect a novelization of Cabaret here. The musical was inspired by this novel but
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Going Down in La-La Land by Andy Zeffer

Adam, an aspiring actor, makes the trip from New York to LA in search of fame and fortune. What he finds is a trip into the underside of fame in LA. Here is a modern-day Rake’s Progress; Adam (the narrator) arrives in LA with such high hopes, he has the looks and talent to be a star, but he finds an unfriendly city where he can’t get his foot on the bottom rung of the showbusiness ladder. This novel could have been a pro-faced, and even homophobic, grime tale, warning about the “evils”
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why; The Science of Sexual Orientation by Simon LeVay

Gay marriage has been making the headlines recently and there are a lot of arguments for and against it. At the heart of a lot of these arguments is whether homosexuality is “natural” or “unnatural”. Simon LeVay is a neuroscientist and takes an evidence-based approach to his subject. He doesn’t just look at the theories behind human sexuality; he looks at the evidence for those theories, or lack of it. This is what lifts this book head and shoulders above previous books looking at the origi
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: From the Windrush to Wapping by Jeff Jones

Jeff Jones has certainly lived enough to fill six ordinary lives. Since growing up in Wapping, East London, he’s been in trouble with the police, been sent to prison, been homeless and been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But he has also been to university, been a manager in mental health and youth work, met Prince Charles and even passed The Knowledge, the exam for London black cab drivers. This book charts his life in a clear and very readable style, sometimes also at break-neck sp
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: From Doon with Death by Ruth Rendell

Its 1964 and the beginning of summer in the English market town of Kingsmarkham. Margaret Parsons, a shrewish and quiet housewife, disappears from her home. Days later, her murdered body is found in a copse of trees outside of the town. Chief Inspector Wexford leads the enquiry into her death, criss-crossing the almost quintessential Home Counties town to do so. From Doon with Death is not only the first Wexford novel by Ruth Rendell, it is very much a novel of its time. It isn’t just that
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Book review

Book Review: Faggots by Larry Kramer

“2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.” So begins Larry Kramer’s infamous novel. It is a strange opening for a novel but, in some way, is indicative of this one. It is the late 1970s and this novel is an odyssey through gay New York life. The main protagonist is Fred Lemish, almost a gay everyman, who is just short of forty. He is searching for love, especially the love of the gay hunk Dinky Adams, but all he can find is promiscuous sex, recreational drug use and almost constant disa
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Dying to Be Men by Will Courtenay

“Women have more illness but men die younger,” this simplistic old saying does have a grain of truth in it. Men still have a shorter life expectancy than women, but why? Will Courtenay has twenty years’ experience in men’s health and has seen it go from an “oxymoron” to a subject that is now taken seriously. He has the expertise to write this book and the evidence is here in the book’s pages. The book takes an in-depth look at its subject. It examines the different social and environme
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Book review

Book Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick’s name gained notoriety with a string of Hollywood films, but none of them have done justice to the dark and paranoid worlds created in his books. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner in 1982) is Dick at his best, combining so many of his favourite themes—post-nuclear war, religion, identity, technology and dis-utopia. It is set in the near future, on an Earth that has suffered a nuclear war but at a high cost. This Earth is dying, everywhere is su
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Book review

Book Review: Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, by Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot is ill, he is dying, and he invites his old friend, Arthur Hastings, to stay with him at the Styles guesthouse, for one, last investigation. Poirot, though now an invalid, is chasing his one last case, a serial killer with a terrible modus operandi, known only as X. Here Christie returned to the location of the very first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, except this is not the glamorous life of the upper-class people who filled Christie’s novels of the 1930s and
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Santiago Nasar is to die, to pay with his life for his crime, and the twin brothers of Angela Vicario will make him pay. The whole town knows this will happen and why, but no one steps forward to prevent it. Why? This book has a fascinating premise but just fails to follow through with it. The problem lies at the heart of this novel; its structure makes for a cold and distant storytelling. It is narrated by a nameless narrator who has returned to the area twenty-seven years after the murder
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Though this is a classic dystopian novel, the world it portrays is still strikingly original, even though it was first published in 1932. There is an oppressive, totalitarian regime ruling the world, here they are ruling it by creating a hedonistic society where everyone’s sexual and pleasurable desires are fulfilled. This is also the ultimate classist society, here people are genetically engineered for the class they will live out their lives in. Even now this is still a very original dyst
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: Arkansas by David Leavitt

Arkansas is a collection of three novellas that show David Leavitt at his best, exploring the lives and emotions of his characters. The first story is The Term Paper Artist, which is the closest he has come to writing a sex comedy. The narrator is a disgraced novelist who is hiding at the home of his professor father. He soon becomes involved in accepting sexual favours from jock-students in return for writing English literary essays for them. Soon, word spreads, and he has several jocks an
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Book review

Book Review: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was the queen of the literary three-card trick. She would create a mystery, lead you down a path thinking a certain character was the murderer and then at the end pull the rug from under your feet with the murderer as a totally different character—the last character you would suspect or the first one you’d discounted. Reading one of her books is like playing a game against her, can you spot the murderer before she reveals them? It can be said, and not unfairly, that many of
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Book review

Book Review: A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French

This is a story of modern family life, told through the diaries of three different members of a family. Mo, the mother and child psychologist, who is rapidly approaching fifty and stuck in a rut, and her two teenage children, Dora, who may have finally found a man worthy of her affections, but she has never met him, and Peter, who now wants to be known as “Oscar” after his idol, Oscar Wilde. The mother is the most well-drawn character in this story and she falls into the far too well treade
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

“A murder is announced and will take place on Friday October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m.” So reads the announcement in the Chipping Cleghorn Gazette that morning. That evening, the local neighbours all dutifully turn up at Little Paddocks, all with their different excuses for being there. At 6.30 p.m., without warning, all the lights go out and… This is the beginning of one of Agatha Christie’s most intriguing novels that is firmly rooted in post-war Britain. She chose to set
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell

“Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” This isn’t a plot-spoiler but the opening line to one of Ruth Rendell’s finest novels. Though she sums up the plot of her novel in one line, there is much more to this book. It is the mid 1970s and the upper middle class Coverdale family have moved to a manor house in the English countryside, but the housework is “too much” for Mrs Coverdale, so Eunice Parchman is hired as housekeeper-come-general-dog’s-
Drew Payne

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Book review

Book Review: A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell

It’s the mid-1970s, Northwest London, and an old town house has been divided up into bedsits and small flats. In one of the flats lives Arthur Johnson, a dull middle-aged bookkeeper. A repressed and socially awkward man, who never learnt how to talk to women, he hides a darker and violent side, but he keeps it in check by strangling the “woman” hidden in the house’s cellar. Then Anthony Johnson, a doctoral psychology student in his early twenties, who accidentally shares the same surname, moves
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Book review

Book Review: 84 Charing Cross Road & The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

In 1949, the New York based writer Helene Hanff replied to an advert in The Saturday Review of Literature by the London bookshop Marks & Co. Her letter had the list of books that she was looking to buy. Frank Doel, an employee of the bookshop, replied to her and from those first letters grew a nearly twenty-year friendship, though the two of them never met. 84 Charing Cross Road, the first book in this double book volume, is Hanff’s letters to and from Marks & Co. She mainly corresp
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