The list of recommended novels based on newspapers is growing like topsy. Thanks to Terry Ramsey, formerly of The Northern Echo and Evening Standard, for his excellent list. Terry writes: "I can't pretend to have read them all, but it makes a pretty decent reading list for a prolonged holiday (or freelancing, as I prefer to call it)". David Kernek has also added to his original suggestions with this email: "I can also recommend The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter (Penguin), in which the mismanagement and decline of regional newspapers is featured hilariously, along with the bastards who fucked the banking industry and the property markets. It's set in the States, but it - as they say - resonates here." Review here. Mike Watson also recommends A Crooked Sixpence by Murray Sayle (good background at Gentleman Ranters). He says "GR is also currently recommending The Street of Disillusion by Harry Procter, but that's a memoir rather than a novel". Our full list is on our recommended reading page. Keep them coming.
My Milton Keynes Citizen colleague Sally Murrer - famously arrested for having police sources; see (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/28/pressandpublishing-medialaw) - has a novel out: 'According to Bella' (Review at http://bit.ly/9n2n1D)
ReplyDeletePete, apologies if I have missed it but the list should include The Accidental Time Traveller by Sharon Griffiths.
ReplyDeleteMy sadly neglected blog, Scoop! Journalists in Fiction (http://publicsphere.typepad.com/scoop/) has a few suggestions - including My favourites include Monica Dickens' My Turn To Make The Tea, and several novels by Robert Harling.
Thanks for alerting me to Still Lives!!!