August 01 2025, 19:21
Morvern Callar
On Christmas Eve in a Scottish port town, Morvern Callar finds her boyfriend dead on the floor of their flat. In a suicide note, he asks her to send out his unpublished novel to a list of agents. Morvern is trapped in a supermarket job and has no family, so she convinces herself he means for her to post the novel under her own name. [more...]
July 30 2025, 20:08
Picnic at Hanging Rock
On an outing from their boarding school in the Australian outback, four girls wander around the base of Hanging Rock and are tempted to climb higher. The rocks seem to have ghostly powers and the girls fall asleep in a stone circle near the top. Three of them walk through a gap and disappear. [more...]
July 27 2025, 21:35
Run Lola Run
I saw this in the cinema when it came out and I remember being blown away by the mixture of pulsing techno, Franka Potente running through the streets of Berlin, and the looping narrative. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. [more...]
July 25 2025, 13:49
Picnic at Hanging Rock (novel)
My daughter bought this for me for my birthday in March, and I wanted to watch the Peter Weir film for #ArthouseSummer2025, so it seemed right to read it before the film images infected my imagination. [more...]
July 23 2025, 14:23
The Fog
This is one of those formative books for me. I mean, look at the cover! The one I have now is on the left, but the hastily Photoshopped one on the right is the edition I owned in my teens. [more...]
July 16 2025, 18:56
Splashing in the shallows
A month ago, I said I was going to try new things, and that’s what I’ve done. I started swimming lessons. I had a guitar lesson (with another tomorrow). I redesigned this website and built it under a new domain name. I read a non-fiction book about the death of neoliberalism. [more...]
June 17 2025, 21:49
Satin Island
I bought this in Barter Books, Alnick, because of the beautiful cover, unusual size, and the blurb proclaiming it was shortlisted for the Booker in 2015. The cover has a colour wheel of some kind with a coating of oil on one side. [more...]
June 15 2025, 13:34
Soft machine
I’m thinking about digital gardens and my creative mechanisms. Making anything involves ideas, craft and tools. My current mechanism feels like a meat grinder. I’ve managed to make “creative writing” into something brutal and excruciating. Time to dismantle the machine. [more...]
June 07 2025, 11:58
Gabriel’s Moon
I was looking for something literary and genre, and I remember loving Any Human Heart many years ago. I know Boyd has written several spy novels, but I didn’t finish the last of his I tried (a whodunnit about Freud and Vienna), Waiting for Sunrise. [more...]
June 01 2025, 14:32
Reconfiguration
I’m switching the domain name of this website to michaelwalters.uk over the coming months. I bought it on a whim, but I knew something was brewing, and I was right. [more...]
May 21 2025, 19:35
Good Morning, Midnight
Reading the afterword by A.L. Kennedy, this is the fourth novel in a row where Rhys was working with a similar character, as if trying to find the ideal version of her: intelligent, lonely, processing personal tragedy, and struggling with alcohol. [more...]
May 14 2025, 09:00
Ghost Wall
This was a tough read. The prose is lyrical, often beautiful, but the physical abuse Sylvie suffers was hard to stomach . It opens with the sacrifice of a young woman at some time in the past by the community she grew up in. [more...]
May 11 2025, 12:26
Businessmen as Lovers
Mimi and Caroline, second cousins and close friends, travel by train from England to Italy for a summer holiday at the house of Mimi’s Aunt Evie. Mimi is grieving her mother’s death, but she’s also newly in love with a Reuters journalist she affectionately calls Beetle. [more...]
May 03 2025, 20:34
Audition
The nameless narrator is an actress married to Tomas, a writer, and they don’t have children, but in the opening she meets at a restaurant a young man, Xaviar, who is convinced she is his mother. [more...]
April 30 2025, 14:59
Did not finish
Instead of posting negative reviews on books I don’t like, I’ve decided to take a few notes about what didn’t work for me, put the book down and move on to the next one. [more...]
April 06 2025, 14:13
Holding
I’m going through an uncomfortable phase. My creative projects feel stale. It’s an effort not to check the news. My YouTube algorithm has been infected with news influencers. The people I follow on Bluesky are understandably incensed by what’s happening in the world, so the news cycle plays out there too. I need to take some time away from being online. [more...]
April 05 2025, 21:52
A Visit From the Goon Squad
I wanted a novel, and this pushes the boundaries of what a novel can be, interweaving short stories over multiple decades with connected characters. It’s a work of genius, and occasionally maddening for that, because she represents some of these characters in irritating ways... [more...]