Dabbler editor Brit has written a piece about The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald here - and in a fine example of great dabbleminds thinking alike, later recalled that we'd featured the book on this site back in 2010. Here's ZMKC's 1p book review... The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald (available at 1p here) ... Read More...
This is one of the editors' favourite ever Dabbles. ZMKC recalls an early experience of being too creative for a 'creativity-first' school, and explains how it has influenced her career as a blogger... When I was about nine I began exchanging letters with a girl called Paula who was in the ... Read More...
ZMKC is captivated by a romantic comedy which is also a 'remorseless satire of the eighties and nineties'... The action of One Day (available for 1p on Amazon) takes place over twenty years and follows the lives of two characters - Emma and Dexter. These two spend the night together at ... Read More...
ZMKC recommends the often hilarious memoirs of Deborah, Duchess of Deveonshire and youngest of the notorious Mitford sisters... Wait for Me!, the autobiography of Deborah Devonshire, is worth at least 1p for its first section alone. This part of the book – an account of the author’s childhood surrounded by a ... Read More...
Today we suggest you seek out the works of the representative of a long-lost tribe - many of them available for a mere penny on the web... Despite being prolific and successful, (twice winner of the Whitbread, winner of the Heywood Hill lifetime achievement prize et cetera), Jane Gardam is not ... Read More...
ZMKC enjoys a modern classic, available for a penny on Amazon.... I think I may be the last person in the world not to have read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Indeed, it is possible that the only reason the book is actually available for 1p on Amazon is that the market for it ... Read More...
The strange ways of internet commerce mean that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. Today ZMKC turns up an interesting title. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (available here for a penny) is the first Iris Murdoch I'd read. It was published in 1970 (and yet, amazingly, contains a ... Read More...
ZMKC recalls an early experience of being too creative for a 'creativity-first' school, and explains how it has influenced her career as a blogger... When I was about nine I began exchanging letters with a girl called Paula who was in the year above me at my funny little Froebel school. I don’t ... Read More...
Tender is the Night (available for a penny here) opens on the French Riviera in 1919. Through the eyes of a young film actress called Rosemary – the ‘new cardboard paper doll’ the film world has cut ‘to pass before its empty harlot’s mind’- we observe the apparently charmed lives ... Read More...
My grandmother always seemed to be reading CP Snow when I was young. E L Wisty used to mention him a bit as well, although, thanks to a subtle stress shift, the author I thought he was talking about was someone called Seapy Snow. The first CP Snow I tried was the initial ... Read More...