Novel Thoughts: Case Study (Saraband, 2021)
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study provides novelists with a brilliant example of how the form of a novel can perfectly exploit its...
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David Savill
- Dec 15, 2023
- 9 min
Novel Thoughts: The Island of Missing Trees (and a problem for contemporary novels).
In this week's blog, an extended essay in response to James Marriott's take on the contemporary novel. Times columnist James Marriot is...
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David Savill
- Apr 1, 2023
- 4 min
Novel Thoughts: Brother of the More Famous Jack (Victor Gollanz, 1982)
Barbara Trapido’s 1982 debut is a dazzling bridge between the romantic dramas and comedies of Somerset Maugham, (or EM Forster), and...
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David Savill
- Oct 1, 2022
- 3 min
Novel Thoughts - No-One is talking about this: Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury, 2021)
What do we mean when we say a novel feels poetic? In the creative writing classroom, students usually use the ‘p’ word when they detect...
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David Savill
- Jul 24, 2022
- 3 min
Novel Thoughts - The Invention of Morel (Alfredo Bioy Casares, 1940)
There are two big questions an author needs to answer when choosing to write in the first person. For whom is your narrator writing, and...
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David Savill
- Jul 20, 2022
- 4 min
Novel Thoughts - Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories, 2012)
(Novel Thoughts is my blog of quick reads on craft and technique in the novel, reacting to every novel I read). Deborah Levy’s Swimming...
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David Savill
- Jul 16, 2022
- 4 min
Novel Thoughts - Klara and The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber and Faber, 2021)
Every year I teach a class in children's fiction. The most difficult reads for my students to enjoy are a particular ‘middle grade’ of...
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David Savill
- Jun 26, 2022
- 4 min
Novel Thoughts - Natasha Brown, Assembly (Penguin 2022)
Elsewhere in this blog I have asserted with the (false?) confidence of a creative writing teacher, that a novel can be defined as nothing...
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David Savill
- Jun 19, 2022
- 3 min
Novel Thoughts - Antonio Tabbucchi, Requiem: an hallucination (Penguin 1994)
It is nearly always dull to hear other people’s dreams recounted, partly, because in dreams there are no dramatic stakes. Whatever...
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David Savill
- Jun 7, 2022
- 2 min
Novel Thoughts: Sandro Veronesi - The Hummingbird (W&N 2022)
If I was asked to demonstrate the potential of the novel to someone who has never read one before, I might suggest The Hummingbird. This...
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David Savill
- May 29, 2022
- 3 min
Novel Thoughts: Antal Szerb - Journey By Moonlight (1937, Pushkin Press 2001)
Novel thoughts is a blog of my immediate reactions to reading a novel. This is not a critical review or recommendation, but the first...
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David Savill
- May 29, 2022
- 3 min
Novel Thoughts - Sarah Winman, Still Life (Fourth Estate, 2021)
Novel thoughts is a blog of my immediate reactions to reading a novel. This is not a critical review or recommendation, but the first...
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David Savill
- Mar 11, 2022
- 2 min
Behind the frontlines on March 11 2022
On the M60 westbound in Manchester this morning civilians drove to work under clear skies in light, Friday traffic. An accident on the...
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David Savill
- Oct 20, 2016
- 7 min
A European Education
What does Europe mean to you? I was introduced to the history of Europe while careering through the continent on the backseat of an...
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David Savill
- Mar 25, 2016
- 5 min
Karadžić’s sentence is the end of a chapter for some, but if the future for Bosnia remains bleak,
They were living in a student dorm. One family per room. Lives packed up into shopping bags. They cooked on Bunsen-burners looted from...
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David Savill
- Sep 7, 2015
- 9 min
Two Kurds received in good order
Two men squatted on the dock, in the shadow of a London policeman. I do not know if they had just arrived in one of the rust red shipping...
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David Savill
- May 27, 2015
- 9 min
Teaching: the importance of being unfashionable
Students experiencing their first Creative Writing workshops fear criticism. Of course they do. They hope they will 'get away' with all...
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David Savill
- May 3, 2015
- 9 min
Teaching: The pains of poetry and political commitment
Late in 1949, George Orwell lay dying in University College Hospital. In his superlative collection of essays and memoirs, The 30's and...
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David Savill
- Apr 24, 2015
- 6 min
Research: The challenge of nostalgia in the creative process
The Cold War is back. Both in academic circles and popular culture. The popularity of Tom Robb Smith’s Child 44, (given a big budget...
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David Savill
- Apr 16, 2015
- 3 min
Research: Yeltsin's House of Cards
Sehii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevskyi professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University. It is no surprise then, that his account...
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