On our Substack: an excerpt from the second novel by @eoghanwalls.bsky.social, FIELD NOTES FROM AN EXTINCTION, an IndieNext pick for March that Graeme Macrae Burnet, in the New York Times Book Review, describes as as “a unique and richly imagined novel.”
sevenstories.substack.com/p/field-note...
Pre-order FIELD NOTES FROM AN EXTINCTION by @eoghanwalls.bsky.social here: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/fiel...
OooooOOOOOooooH!
In This Novel, an Island Is a Petri Dish for Humanity www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/b...
To my friends and soon to be friends in America - I am touring a book about colonialism and extinction, about Irish famine immigrants, fatherhood, awks and feral children. IF that sounds up your street, I may also be up your street - in these cities and dates!
I'd love to see you!
🐚 Coming soon: FIELD NOTES FROM AN EXTINCTION by @eoghanwalls.bsky.social 🐚
"Vividly told, original in form, ambitious in scope and completely winning... a stark and compelling tale."—Lucy Caldwell, winner of the BBC Short Story Prize
Pre-order here: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/fiel...
Need a new author photo for some books. Might get a photographer ths time, as my arm is not long enough to get eno8ugh soft focus with selfies. MEANWHILE, here's another slightly belated halloween pick, because I vant to suck your buuuuuhd.
Summer book 8: Ginnel by Lucy Newlin: rich Yorkshire childhood poems, dense in consonants and tight squat square structures; pleasingly full of wonder and regional diction and a few hard edges in there to trouble the rosiness of choldhood.
Summer Book 7; Poetry as a state of wold loneliness, a harrowed, hollowed physical mourning at one with herons, a widow with a broken bottle. This rawness good; my favourites play with sound and form tightly too. Kerry Hardie, The Zebra Stood in the Night
Oswald's Falling Awake. No 4 but late. As always, it's like talking with a druid in the languages of rocks and locusts- holy and thing-voiced. Also, as ever with Oswald, actively trying to break the limits of what a book can be. Poetry as experimental space
Summer book 5. Took my time getting to this. Arch; disruptive; queer; intelligent. Some essays, mostly poems - and the poems excellent: the fruit poems (there are many) my favourite, as they manage to be wholly tactile/disruptively theoretical at the same time
Summer Book the Third, the latest Caroline Bird. If you've not read her, she's a sure thing - even for a non-poetry reader - every poem clear as mineral water, sit-com funny but with a steep existential lurch of the heart somewhere in each poem. Like a series of mini Twilight Zones
Summer book two. Unself-conciously English; capable of great emotional depth - Entropy one of many standout poems; often quiet to the point of demureness ( two poems on mice, two on Mary Poppins) but all the more original for it- muchos gracias, Senore Watts.
Holiday book one. Fantastic squelchy music: a gorgeous dirty book of poems, all bonfires and slabbers and tight consonantal play: well done, McKendry
Just finished this. A tale of Modern England, from 90s optimism to Brexit and Covid, brought to life with billionaires, spies and rekindled marriages. Quite excellent
Fancy a preorder? First sighting of my new wee book in the wild.
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/806932...
Nonsense-poem with Class 1 from Glasson Dock Primary - the words theirs, bad handwriting mine. About an ice-cream monster. I like the rhyme of brainfreeze/Sainsburys at the end.
Wee interview about The Gospel of Orla on the wonderful Deborah Kalbs's fantastic blog.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2025/05/q-wi...
Live scenes from the Heard and McDonald Islands stock exchange this morning.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBk9...
Noo hedd.
My 5 year old keeps asking what'll happen after she dies. Dad of three, used to this question, I spell out her options;
a) heaven,
b) hell,
c) reincarnation,
d) nothingness, like sleep.
I THOUGHT she had early existential angst; actually, she's just excited to be reincarnated as a reindeer.
Had a bday at the weekend. My 13 year old painted my favourite animal.
