From the category archives:

Alphabet

Alphabet

March 13, 2010
alphabet450

What will she be like? he thinks. I don’t know. Who will I become? Ditto. A leap in the dark… “…a wonderful book, peculiar, intense, revealing, challenging, exhausting and above all riveting…I kept saying to myself, how could she know this?” Guardian (UK) columnist Erwin James (author of A Life Inside) Simon Austen is serving [...]

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Comments and Reviews

March 13, 2010
manreadingalphabe

”A complex book, and splendidly written, Alphabet is an intensely compelling reading experience that speaks to the power of words and the significance of language in all its dangerous subtleties.” Marc Horton, The Edmonton Journal “Kathy Page knows that the things we can’t understand are often the things that terrify us the most. In her [...]

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On Writing Alphabet

March 13, 2010
Manandbars

You could say that I have spent  the  three years it took to complete  Alphabet  co-habiting with a dangerous  man. Someone brutal and manipulative,  but also damaged,  intelligent, and, occasionally, charming. My family were  forced to be close to this man  as well. It was something of a roller coaster ride  and from time to [...]

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Excerpt from Alphabet

March 13, 2010
Landing

Alphabet Kathy Page Weidenfeld & Nicolson LONDON 1. There’s no chair, even. The room is blue-grey, fluorescent-lit, like the rest. ‘Property ?’ the man at the counter asks. Well, they’ve already taken his proper clothes: Simon’s standing there in a striped shirt, a pair of thin jeans that won’t stay up. ‘Anything that might get [...]

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Love Inside

March 13, 2010
The Big Issue Logo

Love Inside Extracted from an article about Kathy Page’s experience as Writer in Residence in Nottingham Prison, published in The Big Issue, 19 July 2004 A neatly dressed, balding man with some alarming facial scars leaned back in his chair and treated me to a list of  already familiar complaints about the state of the [...]

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Sales Figures

April 8, 2009
manreadingalphabe

The trip was part family, part business. Melatonin did not work and for several days we had walked in an exhausted, dreamlike state through the shade of galleries and museums taking in old favourites and seeing strange new things, such as the National Portrait Gallery’s video loop of David Beckham, sleeping. He was artfully lit [...]

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The Reading

April 7, 2009
manreadingalphabe

Maria hasn’t arrived.  I refuse to panic myself by checking my watch but I know it’s after 7pm, and I’m supposed to read at Pages at 7:30.  I peer out at the glitter of passing traffic; nothing even slows down, and finally I cave in and call her. “Hi, Maria, how are you?” “Kathy, I [...]

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Notes & Queries

April 6, 2009
manreadingalphabe

The Book Arrives (Alphabet) Strawberries. Sunbathing snakes.  The first garden vegetables, the first swim in the lake, the last days of school, the long, golden evenings…  I write in the garden, lying in a hammock that’s shaded by an old cherry tree;  in a branch above me a robin pecks at the fruit, splattering my legs with  [...]

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Snakes and Ladders

March 15, 2009
s&Lthumb

Snakes & Ladders. The phone rings at 7.40 am: I’m easing the kids into raingear and out of the door along with their lunches, books, sports equipment and a recently discovered sheep skull for Show & Tell. Yes? I say, thinking it’s either a UK emergency, another cancelled soccer match or the dentist again – [...]

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