The Guardian's Blog, page 234

Livi Michael draws on her northern, working class roots to bring the Lancashire Witches back to life

Manchester novelist's grandmother used herbs for medicine because she could not afford a doctor. Three hundred years earlier, she might have been hanged for that. Bernadette Hyland reports

Livi Michael defines herself as a northern working class writer and keeps things as simple as that:

I write from a female working class perspective. My politics are driven from where I come from. It is an emotional bias that stays with you all your life. Politics is more than an intellectual position. Even though I live a respectable life, I recognise that class bias still exists in society and I cannot help but be on that side.

Her first novel Under a Thin Moon, published when she was 32, was set in Ashton-under-Lyne, where she once lived. It is a story about Thatcherism and its effects on a young single mother who is living on a council estate, and about the limited options available to her. Its theme was described as 'northern realism' when it came out in 1992. That does not seem dated 20 later.

Since Moon she has written four novels for adults and 12 for children. Her latest book is Malkin Child, commissioned by the Lancashire Literature Festival. They asked her to write a book for children based on the story of Jennet Device, the nine-year-old girl whose evidence in the notorious Pendle Witches trial of 1612 led to the hanging of her family and friends. Livi sees many parallels with her own life

The book made me ask questions about myself that I hadn't thought about…what do I think about witchcraft, not the New Age type, basically I didn't want to say it cannot/doesn't exist, I think that Jennet lived in so different a world, to live in it would demand different rules, a different language and different ways of seeing.

Life in the northwest has changed beyond all comparisons since 1612, but Livi still sees parallels with the way in which certain sectors of society are treated.

Jennet's family were very poor, Alison (her sister) had to go begging regularly, James (her brother) did go poaching, which was a criminal activity but it was their way of life. None of them could read or write. It is hard to know what position they had in the community, their mother was known as a witch but if they had any powers would they be that poor?

Livi was brought up by her grandmother in Collyhurst in Manchester. Her grandmother was born in 1900 and had a distinct Lancashire dialect. Livi says:

My gran used herbal remedies because she couldn't afford a doctor…but she wasn't going to be accused of being a witch, but 300 years previously she certainly could have been.

Livi is fascinated by the 17th century because of the great social changes that took place over its 100 years.

Within 20 years of the Pendle Witch trials everything had changed. King James I had died and his son Charles I was more sympathetic to Roman Catholics; medicine had also progressed and could explain strange marks on people's bodies. It probably couldn't have happened at any other time in history but it was massively unfortunate for these people. It was a localised story but has wider ramifications for how we treat different groups in society and how we treat things not of our culture.

Part of the proceeds of the book are going to a local charity called Stepping Stones who was set up to help children in Nigeria who are presently being accused of being witches. Stepping Stones started in Lancaster and is linked to the Literature Festival. It has four workers locally who link up with partners in Nigeria who intervene in cases where children are accused of witchcraft. They have helped to fund a school so that children at risk can be taken away from parents and educated.

The Nigerian workers have had death threats and Stepping Stones recognises the problems of walking into someone else's culture with a very different worldview. And, as with the Pendle Witches, Livi can see why witchcraft in 2012 can be seen as a remedy for communities that are remote and suffer from what seem to be inexplicable circumstances such as child deaths and famine.

People living in remote communities have a different world view. I do think that the world is bigger, stranger and more varied than we know.

Malkin Child has also been chosen by Lancashire Libraries as its book for its Lancashire Reads project this year because of what the county council calls

Livi's ability to bring the history and landscape of the region to life that led to us approaching her about this project.

Livi will be reading from Malkin Child at Lancaster Library on 20 October 2012. Further details are on the Literature Festival website here.

You can read more from the Guardian Northerner about the Lancashire Witch trials and this year's celebrations here and here.

Bernadette Hyland is a freelance writer and blogger. She is active in her trade union, Unite and volunteers at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford.

LancashireWitches, wizards and magicCrimeNigeriaChildrenManchesterWomen
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Why have authors written the IT revolution out of the story?

New technology is changing the world of books beyond recognition, yet little reference is made to it in fiction. Why?

This blog, and thousands like it, is part of the IT revolution that's changing the world of books beyond recognition. I've said it before, but it bears repetition: not since the late 15th century, specifically the Gutenberg-Caxton innovations of the 1560s and 70s, has there been such a wholesale transformation of our literary environment.

Yet, although the literary community – in the broadest sense – is part of this paradigm shift, it is odd, and slightly baffling, how little reference is made to it in poetry, drama or fiction. Jeanette Winterson published The Powerbook in 2000, exploiting emails as a genre. In India, Chetan Bhagat (One Night @ the Call Center) and Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) have flirted with the socio-economic impact of the new technology on Indian life. Otherwise, I cannot think (perhaps readers can help out here) of a contemporary scene or character whose narrative or development owes much, if anything, to the new technology.

Well, why should it, you will say, and fair enough. Electronic media is/are a delivery system, a means to an end. The creative act of putting black on white remains unchanged, even if you use a screen to do it. A hundred years ago, writers weren't writing novels about typewriters and linotype presses. Mark Twain lost a fortune on a new printing press, but that's another story ...

So I was interested to read Carl Wilkinson in the Telegraph exploring the theme of writers who acknowledge the distractions of social media, Wikipedia etc. Zadie Smith – always at the cutting edge – has a note in NW, apparently, in which she makes a wry reference to the distractions of the worldwide web.

Wilkinson develops this point to explore the impact of the new technology on our brains. As he puts it, "the internet is not just a distraction – it's actually changing our brains, too." He goes on, "In his Pulitzer prize-nominated book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (2010), Nicholas Carr highlighted the shift that is occurring from the calm, focused 'linear mind' of the past to one that demands information in 'short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts – the faster, the better'.

"For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg's printing press made book reading a populist pursuit," he writes, "the linear, literary mind has been at the centre of art, science and society. As supple as it is subtle, it's been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the industrial revolution, even the subversive mind of modernism. It may soon be yesterday's mind."

Wilkinson continues: "Our working lives are ever more dominated by computer screens, and thanks to the demanding, fragmentary and distracting nature of the internet, we are finding it harder to both focus at work and switch off afterwards. 'How can people not think this is changing your brain?' asks the neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. 'How can you seriously think that people who work like this are the same as people 20 or 30 years ago? Whether it's better or worse is another issue, but clearly there is a sea change going on and one that we need to think about and evaluate.'"

Quite so.

After a week in which the impact of computers on books has been confined to news about "sock puppetry", and Philip Roth whingeing about his Wikipedia entry, it's time to consider the questions Wilkinson raises more carefully. After all, didn't Shakespeare have a character, Holofernes, in Love's Labours Lost who "eats paper" and "drinks ink" (a clear reference to booming literacy and the consumption of books an pamphlets)? Is it not high time we began to integrate the IT revolution into the creative process? Where, for instance, is the creative dividend of the new IT? A contemporary Holofernes might be expected to "eat e-media" , "inhale tweets" and "drink at the Cloud". In due course, if he can tear himself away from Flickr or his Facebook page, he might find inspiration for the first genuine e-novel, something of more significance and durability than Fifty Shades of Grey.

FictionInternetSocial mediaEbooksRobert McCrum
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Reader reviews roundup

This week: Ian McEwan, Victor Hugo and Gerald Durrell

Greetings, reviewers: all well, I trust? Top of the pops this week is a masterful review of Ian McEwan's latest offering, Sweet Tooth, from Christopher Philip Howe. The novel's written from the point of view of one Serena Frome, and Howe begins by offering us a raft of examples of authors who've managed the gender switch effectively, before entering into a discussion of the novel's double-dealing and authorial hoodwinkery which has the effect (always salutary, in my view) of making the book sound like a mid-period Roth. Apparently that's a good thing as far as Howe's concerned, too; while he found the ending "too quick, too neat and too contrived for me", he came away "shaking my head once again in admiration of McEwan's inventiveness in giving fictional words on the page a reason to be there, his ability to entertain, and the sheer audacity and confidence that is necessary to attempt things other writers wouldn't even contemplate". I've yet to read more than an extract (for which you can blame James Smythe: this was the summer I finally discovered Stephen King) but this review more than any other has persuaded me I need to correct that.

Also up this week: NickVirk's review of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables which caught my attention for being the first review I've encountered to open with a word count ("Victor Hugo's 530,982 word classic, 'Les Misérables' is a masterpiece …") but held it through its discussion of the merits of Norman Denny's translation alongside those of Hugo's protagonist Jean Valjean, "a character as significant and influential as Shakespeare's Hamlet". This is another book that, to my shame, I've yet to read - although at 530,982 words I'll most likely leave it until after the McEwan.

And finally - to spare my blushes - a review of a book I have read - Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals by StevieCatny. "I would reccomend this book to anyone who has any interest (however small) in animals," says Stevie. So would I! Read it!

As ever, if your review appears here, mail me on sarah.crown@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you some books. On which note, there've been a couple of weeks over the last few months where I've been short of mails; if you've got in touch and I haven't responded, a) apologies and b) it's possible that you're hitting my spam filter. So can I ask that you a) you mail me again and b) you copy in Richard Lea (richard.lea@guardian.co.uk) so that, with luck, at least one of us gets it? Thanks, and have great weekends, one and all.

Sarah Crown
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Open thread: Which are the best sports books?

With three days of the Paralympics still to go, let's create a list of the best sports books, biographies and autobiographies.

Regular books site commenter atriox left this topical suggestion in last week's Tips, links and suggestions:

I was surprised that during the Olympics you didn't discuss bio's from different types of athletes. I'm reading David Millar's 'Racing through the dark' (a member of team gb, tour de france cyclist and an ex-doper), and I've ordered Chrissie Wellington's book 'A life without limits' about her meteoric rise to become Iron man world champion, also endurance tale 'The worst journey in the world'. It seems that an intellectual sports person is an oxymoron so when you stumble on well written accounts then it's worth lauding them, Also worth while, Scott Jurek 'Eat and Run', Christopher McDougall 'Born to Run', Haruki Murakami's running book. You missed a trick there.

We hate to miss a trick, and with the Paralympics in full swing there is still time to take up this great idea; it's the perfect open thread topic for the weekend. Let's not restrict ourselves to biographies alone, though; how about we put our heads together and come up with a list of the best sports across the genres? All nominations, factual and fictional, in the thread below, please.

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Poster poems: September | Billy Mills

Politics, war and a sense of passing have all been recurring themes among poets going about their business as summer turns to autumn. Are your thoughts of a rusty brown hue?

Ah, September: the ninth month of the year with a name that indicates that it is, or rather once was, the seventh one. Maybe we should just gloss over that. The September poem in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender starts out as a cautionary tale of the other man's grass, but soon descends into yet another round of papist-bashing. Maybe we should just gloss over that, too. At this point, you may be thinking I'm just going to gloss over the entire month; fortunately, there are lots of very fine September poems that we can look at to get us back to our ongoing poster poems calendar challenge.

There seems to be something about September and political poetry. Two particularly well-known examples of the genre are Yeats' September 1913 and Auden's September 1st, 1939. It would be difficult to imagine two poets with more divergent politics than the haughty, aristocratic-leaning Irishman and the young English socialist intellectual. Yet Auden came to admire the older poet, and wrote a fine elegy for him.

Yeats' poem, characteristically enough, was inspired by middle-class Catholic Dublin's failure to support a scheme to secure Hugh Lane's collection of contemporary art for the city. The oft-quoted refrain "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, / It's with O'Leary in the grave" compares the penny-pinching bourgeoisie of 1913 Ireland with the poet's semi-mythological golden age of Irish cultural nationalism, the Young Irelander period in the middle of the previous century. Unsurprisingly, the comparison is less than flattering.

Auden was a different poet writing in a different era and, by September 1939, a foreign country. His poem is an angry meditation on the outbreak of war in Europe, an event he had long foreseen. The poem's perspective is coloured by Auden's residence in New York, in the neutral US. It is in many respects a clumsy work, perhaps marred technically by the poet's lack of emotional distance, and Auden himself came to consider it "trash which he is ashamed to have written". Nevertheless, it is a powerful piece of rhetoric that captures a particular, earth-shattering moment in history.

Another poem with links to world war two is Geoffrey Hill's September Song. Hill is not a particularly rhetorical poet – certainly not in the ways Auden and Yeats were – but the quiet detail of his song for a victim of the Holocaust carries its own very specific weight. It is one of the most understated and affecting poems on the topic that I know of in English.

In Denise Levertov's September 1961, the freight of history is less political than literary, but the sense of something passing away is just as strong. She is marking the drift of three of her poetic forebears, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and "HD" (Hilda Doolittle) into silence, a "learning to live without words". Levertov and her contemporaries are left to try to follow the road opened up by the older poets, but in the dark, without "the light of their presence".

None of these September poems explicitly mentions the autumnal aspect of the month, although all are suffused with a sense of things passing away, so the season of the fall is there implicitly. Other poets take a more straightforward approach. Carl Sandburg, in his poem Hydrangeas, focuses on the rusty brown of autumnal decay, but interestingly sees it not in the leaves of trees, but on the white flowers of the hydrangea bush. It's an illuminating twist to a very traditional poetic trope.

In his To the Light of September, WS Merwin avoids brown altogether, but still contrives to evoke the early autumn feeling through a series of images from nature culminating in the plums "that have fallen through the night / perfect in the dew". In Another September, the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella takes a different traditional trope as his subject matter: autumn's association with ageing and intimations of death, overlaid by a sense of the poet's distance from the facts of experiences that come filtered through a sieve of words and forms.

And so it's time to fill in the ninth page of the poster poems calendar. There's a hint of autumn in the air and, once again, we are living through momentous times. Maybe your September is a suitably natural brown, or perhaps your mind inclines to thoughts of a wider social decline as the days close in. One way or another, please post your September poems here.

PoetryBilly Mills
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Non-fiction roundup - reviews

Steven Poole on Obama and America's Political Future by Theda Skocpol, Water by David L Feldman and The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B Burger and Michael Starbird

Obama and America's Political Future by Theda Skocpol (Harvard, £19.95)

While Barack Obama's advisers work furiously on an election campaign that will reunite American left and right (I've got it: a pledge to use drones to bomb bankers), this symposium in political academia considers the legacy of his first term. Skocpol, giving the headline lecture, likes what Obama did but thinks he could have done more, and that he culpably failed to explain his ideas properly on TV for the ordinary folks. With healthcare and other initiatives, she concludes, Obama got only a "halfway New Deal".

The first respondent, Larry M Bartels, robustly argues that Obama did as well as he could given the political context, while Suzanne Mettler laments how many of Obama's policies operated in the "submerged state" of tax credits and the like. Throughout, there is a lot of high-table hand-wringing about how you can make citizens realise what is good for them. Former Republican congressman Mickey Edwards offers pithy relief, suggesting that Obamaites just assumed "that the wisdom of their own preferences was so self-evident that any intelligent person would certainly agree if only one were patient enough in explaining it".

Water by David L Feldman (Polity, £12.99)

Remember our great drought of the spring, closely preceding an impressively sodden summer? Feldman's useful and clear overview of the modern world of water takes in issues about pollution, "virtual" water trading, river damming, privatised supplies, the crazy economics of the bottled-water business and inter-state water geopolitics. He does pass rather hastily over the dramatic human benefits of projects such as the Three Gorges dam before inviting us to mourn a disappearing fish, but he makes a very strong case overall for the involvement of scientists and local people in planning. (I enjoyed the description of our general short-termism as "temporal provincialism".)

Also on offer are definitions of terms such as "sustainability" and "stewardship". The latter apparently implies that "all living things have inherent value" (though millions might disagree with regard to, say, the malarial mosquito), and that we don't own natural "resources" but merely borrow them from future generations. I take this to mean that the ultimate owners of nature are the last generation of human beings who will ever live, and who therefore will have every right to destroy it utterly.

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B Burger & Michael Starbird (Princeton, £13.95)

If American voters can't be trusted to assess policies for themselves, and we are all temporal provincialists, perhaps it's time for a rousing defence of the art of thinking properly. Thinking is good, enthuses this book by two distinguished teachers of mathematics. You might think you're being creative or having intuitions or conducting a romance or whatever, but it's all thinking, right? And you can learn to think better!

So you can, and the advice herein, which includes many practical tenets of "critical thinking", will surely be useful to many a schoolchild or business leader. The "elements" to master are: "change" (self-explanatory), "earth" (understand stuff deeply), "fire" (be OK with making mistakes), "air" (ask questions), and "water" – splash happily in the "flow of ideas", always looking "back" and "forward". Of course, the back-and-forth axis was itself once a mental prison from which Edward de Bono sought to liberate us with the exhortation to think laterally. Spotting a gap in the visible dimensions, my own forthcoming book of cognitive self-help will be called Think Up, Please.

Steven Poole
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So much more than sock puppetry: in defence of reader reviews

Ersatz enthusiasm is much rarer than simple incompetence among reader-critics – but there's also a good deal of worthwhile opinion

A couple of years ago, for my own amusement, I began to review books online. I was an unemployed middle-aged man with a postgraduate education and a serious reading habit – I am still all of those things – looking in a small way to exercise his thinking and writing skills; to keep the wheels of the mechanism turning, as it were, and so at least to retard the inevitable slide into babbling dotage. I was a reader of 50 years' standing, and as a former bookseller had some knowledge of the trade aspects of literature. I had written enough to know how difficult it is to write well, and to admire authors who succeeded. I knew that there were already plenty of intelligent, well-educated, widely-read, passionate people who were taking advantage of the new freedom of comment. It didn't look like a profession, but for an incorrigible reader it might make a tolerable hobby.

Should I join the ranks of the bloggers? I had serious doubts. Blogging, as anything other than an exercise in unrestrained egoism, seemed to demand a commitment to regular substantial posting that I wasn't sure I wanted to undertake. I had read too many posts that clearly sprang more from the writer's consuming love of the sound of his own voice than from having anything useful to say. And who was reading these blogs? Would I find myself preaching to an audience of the converted? What would be the point?

For better or worse, I preferred to place my writing where it might be seen and read and have an effect. As a working-class boy by origin, I preferred a potential audience that wasn't limited to the demographic of readers of the literary pages. Internet reviewing seemed to combine a number of advantages. I was already reading the books. I could post when I chose. I was under no compulsion to review any particular book (and I still don't review everything I read). I would have no boss, and, working unpaid, I would be genuinely independent. I could review any book that took my fancy, rather than having my reading dictated by an editor's judgement or publisher's schedule.

On the downside, unlike a professional reviewer, I would have no income stream, no early access to review copies or proofs, and no particular authority. I would be reviewing for the hell of it.

But where to post? I chose to place my reviews on Amazon's UK site. Immediately the question arises: why would you do that? Why give away review material to a commercial site? My answer is always the same: because that's where the readers and the other reviews are.

As a reviewer, my perspective is that of a reader. I review to inform other readers, not to impress publishers, academics or writers, not purely to gratify myself. I wanted to place my reviews among others, not in isolation, because readers like a range of opinions. The discipline of writing within review guidelines would be a useful corrective to the inevitable flights of ego. And I would use my real name: not because anyone would recognise it, but because I felt that it was a basic guarantee of the integrity of the review.

I didn't set out on this course – which has now seen me publish something over 200 reviews of varying lengths – to be "an internet reviewer". But I wouldn't have persisted if I hadn't believed that reader reviews are of value. I have been reading online reviews for more than 15 years now, and while I would be the first to concede that it would be foolish to depend on nothing else, it seems equally silly to insist that the fact that they appear on commercial sites must mean that they are necessarily valueless.

Bad and useless reviews are a fact of life, of course - the flip side of the coin of freedom of comment. In my view, the deliberately fraudulent "sock puppet" reviews whose exposure attracts journalistic comment are enormously outnumbered by reviews that are simply unhelpful: reviews in which the reviewer, while genuine, has forgotten that a review comment is a service to others, not an opportunity for a display of personality. Such reviews are generally easy to detect and ignore. Excessive praise coupled with surprising vagueness about specifics gives away cousin Bert, who was begged for a review but hasn't read the book. Abuse of competing writers trips up the sock-puppeteering author. Unbounded enthusiasm for everything and everybody betrays the fan.

The qualities that make a good online reader review are the same qualities that make for a good review anywhere. When I read a review, I ask myself: has the reviewer read the book with attention? Does he seem to know what he's talking about? Does he seem prejudiced? Does what he says about what I don't know gibe with what I do know? The answers to these questions determine whether I will trust the reviewer – which is more important than whether the final judgment on a particular book is yea or nay.

The existing body of online reviews, which expands every day, represents an enormous unpaid outpouring of expertise and goodwill. This is the internet at its best: informed help, freely offered; a little gesture of faith in the community of readers. It is a standing refutation of the idea that the conversation is closed to all but the privileged members of the traditional literary class.

The reader review – like Twitter, like Facebook – offers us the opportunity to parade our ignorance, to be uncritically fannish, or malicious without personal risk: but it doesn't have to be that way. To the doubtful I would say – dive in. If the poor quality of reviews you have read offends you, improve on it. Drown out the bad and the dishonest. The online world is really only an electronic transcription of the larger human world. It will be what we choose to make it.

Literary criticismAmazon.comInternetE-commercepaul-bowes
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What does the sock-puppet scandal mean for online reviewing?

RJ Ellory's admission that he wrote anonymous reviews trashing his rivals has opened a can of worms – or has it?

The backlash against "sock puppetry" prompted by RJ Ellory's admission that he had written anonymous book reviews trashing his rivals and praising his own work is now developing its own backlash.

In our own Tips, Links and Suggestions, regular commenter PaulBowes01 declared himself as the author of more than 200 reviews, and said "I can tell you that most reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are clearly not purchased. The general rule is that the more reviews a book has, the more reliable the overall impression is likely to be as the effect of any dubious reviews is diluted."

Neither Amazon nor Goodreads have the resources to vet every reader review for integrity. But the idea that most online reviews are deliberately deceptive is a gross exaggeration. It should probably go without saying that the traditional print media also have a vested interest in drawing attention to the supposed shortcomings of their online rivals, and rarely fail to do so.

As a group of writers launch a No Sock Puppets Here Please campaign – aimed at creating a voluntary code of conduct to stop the practice – novelist Barry Eisler blogged about his misgivings, even though he had decided to sign up.

These ranged from discomfort about the campaign's decision to name and shame offenders, to reservations about the campaign's attempt to co-opt "readers" to the clean-up cause.

Perhaps most interestingly he questions the implicit idea that all forms of sock puppetry are equally bad:

Because I think intent matters, I also have to add my sense that review-buying and self-praising-sock-puppet-deploying authors aren't trying to hurt anyone else. They're only trying to help themselves. Yes, at least arguably, there is a likelihood of harm regardless of intent, but in criminal law intent matters, and for me it matters here, too.

This is part of why the use of sock puppets to trash other authors is, for me, another story. I find it disgusting and not just regrettable, but reprehensible. In addition to its inherent, direct likelihood of harm to the authors against whom it's directed, it is intended to cause harm. Harm, not just personal advantage, is its purpose.

In the comment thread on Eisler's blog, 1001 Secrets of Successful Writers wrote: "Writers and publishers have been paying for reviews for decades. It's a well-known practice. Do people really think that giving a free copy away to a reviewer is not a bribe? Sorry, it is. I wonder how many writers on that list have had free copies of their books sent to reviewers or had their publisher pay for reviews … They should look at themselves before they throw stones at others."

Do you think 1001 Secrets of Successful Writers is right? Do you trust online reviewers? Do join the discussion.

Claire Armitstead
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Authors! Tell us about your work

A new space for authors to tell us about their books

With the books site this week full of reports about authors posting negative reviews of fellow writers' books, we thought now was the perfect time to introduce this new thread dedicated to those readers and commenters who are also authors and would like to tell us about their latest published work without fear of annoying others and being accused of "astroturfing".

If you have written a book, collection of poems or essays, or a script and you'd like to tell the readers of the books site about, here's your chance. It does however mean that if you repeatedly plug your book on other threads, we will delete your posts.

This thread was suggested a while ago by commenters on the Tips, links and suggestions blog, so thanks for the suggestion, but I do think we should have a few rules so everyone knows how to use this space. Here are the rules of engagement which, of course can be changed and added as we go along.

1. Include the title of your book, the name under which you wrote it and a brief synopsis
2. If you can purchase it online, please link to the page
3. If other readers leave comments or questions for you, please answer them; it's only polite, after all.

If you have anything to add, please let me know in the thread. So, all that remains is for me to ask, what have you published recently?

Hannah Freeman
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Open Thread: The best back-to-school books

Let us know which books get the highest marks for their accounts of the great return to teaching and tests

September is here, and the summer – what there was of it – is officially over. Nights are drawing in, trees are taking on their autumn colours and parents and children across the land are gearing up for the great annual return to school: sewing on name tags, buying new stationery and/or weeping tears of horror and despair at the thought of another term.

So tell us: which books remind you of your own school days, which best conjure the back-to-school feeling, and which would you buy for your own children, to encourage them out of the door? Suggestions from the desk include New Boy by William Sutcliffe, What Katy Did at School by Susan Coolidge and of course each and every one of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers series. What about you? What will you be giving to school-bound youngsters this month? (And if you're after a place from which to buy them, might we recommend that you take a look at our marvellous map, created with the help of the fine folk at National Book Tokens, of the best bookshops in the UK?)

Children and teenagers
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