Fi Phillips

When the Who Do You Think You Are magazine gave me the opportunity to review Watling Street by John Higgs , I jumped at the chance. British history, especially history from the point of view of the people, has always been one of my favourite topics to read. Add to that, the chance to get a free book and what's not to like? I initially received a paperback proof copy of the novel  but a few weeks later, courtesy of Higgs' publisher Orion Books, a beautiful hardback copy arrived too, this time full of maps and photographs that hadn't figured in the proof copy. The colourful cover perfectly captures the contents of this book with its witty combination of the past, national identity and more recent pop culture (the Tardis is my personal favourite). According to the accompanying press release, Watling Street is a road of witches and ghosts, of queens and highwaymen, of history and myth, of Chaucer, Dickens and James Bond. Armies from Rome arrived and straightened th...

After the build up to Christmas and the day itself, my family and I are having a few days at home together. It's all very relaxed and with no real plans to keep to. Late nights, family games and good company. My husband and children are taking advantage of the lack of routine to have lie-ins so I'm usually first up, enjoying the quiet with my morning coffee. It gives me time to think and reflect on the year that's almost over. It's been generally a good one, in some ways quite magical, and definitely a year I want to remember. Back in January, I posted my 2015 reading list and my goals for the year . I didn't do very well with the reading list, only completing three of the fifteen (even worse than in 2014). I must read more next year. I did better with my goals. I revised and polished my novel and began the search for an agent. I returned to the partial first draft of my second novel which now requires a massive rethink because of changes to the first novel. Du...

One of the delights of my recent family holiday was having the time to read. The literary gem that I took away with me was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern . I love a book that enthralls me so much that I forget time and my surroundings. The Night Circus was just such a book. This is a novel of magic, illusion (magical, mechanical and emotional), gameplay and love, set at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe and the USA. These are the first lines that I read. The circus arrives without warning.    No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and  billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. To me, this opening does two things. It announces the arena that the novel will take place in, the circus, and it employs the magic of the circus (that most of will have experienced) to pull us in as an audience. We want to read on and find out what happens. The various cover desi...

Last year, life impinged on my reading time. This year, I decided to make reading a priority ( see my reading list here ) and as my first book for 2015, I eagerly picked up the children's book  The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. This is the back cover blurb, Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts. There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard. But it is in the land of the living that real danger lurks for it is there that the man Jack lives and he had already killed Bod's family. Neil Gaiman's dark, rich imagination has always appealed to me, ever since I read Neverwhere . His tone of writing voice is thoughtful, poetic and often unpredictable, pulling you along through his stories. The Graveyard Book begins in a very dark way - murder. It introduces us immediately to the assassin, the man Jack and the peril that our protagoni...

It's that time again, the breath before the final leap into the new year. It's that chance to take a moment to look back before we shut the door on the old year, to check over our intentions for then and our wishes for the future. Back in January , I talked about what I had accomplished in 2013 and how I wanted to approach 2014. I think I managed to maintain that wish to see my life, good and bad, with new, refreshed eyes. Later that month , and again in February , I set myself a reading list. I got around halfway through that list, reading some wonderful novels and poetry. The rest are for next year's reading list. Towards the end of February, I began a new series of blog posts - Something Useful for 2014 - that provided my readers with monthly writing exercises. That's something I'll be continuing in 2015, along with my monthly photo inspiration posts. In the first half of the year, I took customer commissions for three separate murder mystery plays...

 Today sees the release of writer Heather Blanchard's debut novel, Dark is the Sea. Set in the imaginary Scottish village of Dorchay, this is a young adult fantasy novel following the journey of eighteen year old Rowan Munro. "Haunted by her mother's disappearance and plagued by nightmares, eighteen year old Rowan Munro abandons London for Dorchay, the remote Scottish village where she spent her childhood. With the help of her eccentric aunt and a familiar face from the past, she unlocks a power in her that is at once terrifying yet curiously addictive." "As she uncovers the deeply buried secrets of her family, she awakens something only imaginable in her worst nightmares. The Hunter: centuries old, malevolent, ferocious... and intent on killing Rowan and those closest to her. To survive, Rowan must learn to harness her new-found inheritance, and use her powers to finally confront the brutal, murderous force which has plagued her family for gener...

I've just added a new page to my blog (you can see it on the Pages panel on the top right of this page) - my reading list for 2014 . I've drawn books from two intentions. Firstly, back in January, I told you that the nearest I'd come to making a new year's resolution would be the decision to read books of writers that I knew and interacted with online. Then in February, I told you how I was adding to my reading list by taking part in The Year of Reading Women . There are fifteen books on my list. After a busy start to the year, I'm lagging behind as I've only read the first two, although I have started on number three. I'll review some of the books on my blog (have you seen my review of the first book on my list, Ninety-Five Percent Human ?). What about you? What's on your reading list this year?

I have an old, battered copy of this novel that belonged to my mother. She loved a good murder mystery, in a book, on stage or on TV. Maybe that's part of the reason I write murder mystery plays for a living. I have always found Agatha Christie's writing to be very readable: entertaining, clever and involving. She doesn't force feed you her detective work (as I've seen some murder mystery writers do) but instead draws you in paragraph by paragraph. In Curtain , Poirot's last case, we find ourselves at the scene of his first case, a  country house called Styles, and his companion, as it was then, is his old friend Hastings. Poirot is elderly, his familiar black hair and moustache augmented by a wig and dye. He is seeing out his final days doing what he has always done, investigating a murder. The inside cover description reads, 'Styles is now a guest-house, and Poirot one of the guests. He invites his old friend Hastings to join him there, and confides th...