Andrea Montgomery's Blog: Andrea Montgomery's Blog, page 5

TV Adaptations of Favourite Books

Recently, there have been a couple of TV adaptations of favourite books and, although both were very enjoyable, there was a marked difference in the way the original storyline was dealt with.

All The Light We Cannot See

A couple of nights ago, we watched the final episode of the Netflix adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See. Just four episodes in length, I thought this adaptation was superb from opening scene to closing credits. The cinematography, lightin...

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

Browsing the displays in Waterstones a few weeks ago, Jack read out the opening paragraph of The Heart’s Invisible Furies:

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.

The consummate opening paragraph, what reader would be happy closing the p...

Life Should Be An Adventure

I don’t know when I first concluded that life should be an adventure, but it seems to have driven mine and Jack’s lives ever since we first started dating. And that was a very long time ago.

It began with long haul holidays to the Far East, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. It moved up several notches with the momentous decision to walk away from our secure, well-paid careers and move to the North of Tenerife (pictured below is our home there for 13yrs), and it continued with...

How Influential Can Writing Ever Be

How influential writing can really be is the enormous question that, from time to time, makes me stop and think. It’s far too big a question to be able to tackle in one short blog, so I’m merely skirting the edges of a much bigger issue here.

Just over a week ago, Jack and I were staying in a sassi hotel in Matera. Sassi is the name of the two districts carved from stone that line the Matera ravine in Puglia’s Basilicata and make up the extraordinary town of Matera. Here, orn...

Triflers Need Not Apply by Camilla Bruce

Triflers Need Not Apply by Camilla Bruce is historic fiction set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries and based on real life. It follows the life of Little Brynhild as she travels from her home in Norway to Indiana where she assumes the name Bella and embarks upon a killing spree that has ensured her lasting notoriety.

Synopsis of Triflers Need Not Apply by Camilla Bruce

In Størsetgjerdet in Norway, seventeen-year-old Little Brynhild is pregnant by Anders, a...

Booking Offa’s Dyke Through a Walking Company

Having spent hours planning our Offa’s Dyke walk, we decided that it would be better to pay a walking company to book our accommodation and provide luggage transfers. With those two vital elements taken care of, we could then get on with getting some decent walks under our belts and making final preparations ahead of our departure next week.

But how do you choose the right walking company?

Our go-to provider, Inntravel, with whom we work on a consultancy basis, doesn’t do Off...

Planning to Walk Offa’s Dyke National Trail

We’re planning to walk Offa’s Dyke at the beginning of September… this September. Gulp.

The idea began with the final episode of Race Across The World, Series 3.
“It really makes me want to have another BIG travel adventure.” Jack was sitting watching the final credits roll with a wistful expression on his face. I felt exactly the same. We both sighed and started watching something else.

A week or so later, we were out walking not far from home when Jack said: “I’ve had an id...

Bad Books, Good Sales

Do bad books get good sales and if so, does that justify poor writing?

After a full-on weekend with our nephew, I could barely keep my eyes open yesterday so when it came to reading time, I feared it may only be a matter of minutes before I would be slumped in the armchair while the book slowly slid to the floor.

I had finished Triflers Need Not Apply and was due to start a new book. I decided to try a book I picked up at our village fete and whose cover was littered with hig...

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is set entirely and exclusively in a hotel.

But before you conclude that such a confined narrative space couldn’t possibly hold your attention for 495 pages, think Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

When the hotel in question is a place which, ever since its opening in 1905, had been ‘a gathering spot for the glamorous, influential and erudite’, there is no shortage of characters and incidents on which to effortlessly hang the narra...

Choosing Wall Art

For 20 years we lived virtually devoid of wall art.

 

When we lived in Tenerife, our interior walls had the bobbled, rough plaster finish which is a feature of traditional Canarian architecture and is not conducive to hanging pictures on. Subsequently, for 13 years the pictures we brought with us from the UK lay behind the wardrobe in the guest bedroom gathering dust and mould.

In Portugal, our house was rented so, apart from using the three existing picture hooks, we couldn...