We’ve come down the Thameslink trainline from St Albans, got off at Kentish Town and made our way to Hampstead Heath. We’re attempting to track down all the key places mentioned in Lissa Evans’s popular WW2 novel. But she is proving to be tricky. Yes, the Vale of Health is a real place and, thanksContinue reading “Crooked Heart Part Two”
Category Archives: Series 2
Crooked Heart Part One
Pack up your suitcase, write your name on a label and tie it to your coat – we’re all being evacuated to St Albans to take Lissa Evans’s popular WW2 novel for a walk. We’re looking for the house where the main characters live, said to be near a local scrapyard. Quite why we end upContinue reading “Crooked Heart Part One”
Get Carter Part Two
In Part Two of our Get Carter adventure, we discover another Scunthorpe – green, pleasant, well-heeled – as try and locate Kinnear’s Casino and the quarry where Jack’s brother died. Then we head 10 miles north to the abandoned brickyards of the Humber estuary, where Jack finally runs his quarry to ground. In the shadowContinue reading “Get Carter Part Two”
Get Carter Part One
We’re taking a book out into the wild which you might know better by its film version: Get Carter, by Ted Lewis. Originally published as Jack’s Return Home, this tight, dirty, hard and mean book is as sharp as a switchblade and as cold as the dirty winter streets of Lincolnshire. We travel to Scunthorpe,Continue reading “Get Carter Part One”
A Kestrel for a Knave Part Two
In Part Two of our attempt to use ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ as our guide through the real world, we track down the school where a lot of the book’s action takes place. We talk warmly about Brian Glover, the man who steals the famous football scene in the movie ‘Kes’. We also findContinue reading “A Kestrel for a Knave Part Two”
A Kestrel for a Knave Part One
Forget the film ‘Kes’ (hard to do we know). Let’s take the book that inspired the movie out for a walk. We’re off to Hoyland Common, near Barnsley in Yorkshire, in search of locations from the novel ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’. In Part One, we enquire about books on falconry at Barnsley Library. WeContinue reading “A Kestrel for a Knave Part One”
Cold Water Part Two
Taking Gwendoline Riley’s exquisitely concise novel for a walk around Manchester, we’re drawn across Piccadilly Gardens, through the Arndale Centre, across to a Salford pub and then back and round to the Central Library and the canal. We marvel at how rapidly Manchester keeps changing – old buildings demolished, new ones thrown up in theirContinue reading “Cold Water Part Two”
Cold Water Part One
This small gem of novel is a great way to introduce yourself to the world of early-noughties Manchester. In Part One we journey from Ian Curtis’s Macclesfield memorial stone to a basement bar somewhere between Oxford Road and Manchester Piccadilly. For Lloyd this is a bit of a homecoming. For Tim it’s a chance toContinue reading “Cold Water Part One”
The Rats Part Two
In part two of our adventure with James Herbert’s The Rats we discover how much the East End has changed, and how much it stays the same. The Regent’s Canal is a crumbling, abandoned ruin in Herbert’s book – today, it’s a polite playground for joggers and cyclists. But cheap tower blocks still loom overContinue reading “The Rats Part Two”
The Rats Part One
Fancy a trip into the dark heart of London’s East End? A place of racist killings, crumbling housing, and striking schoolchildren? We’ve got an unexpected guide for you: James Herbert’s 1974 splatterpunk debut, The Rats. Don’t worry – we won’t be reading the really gory parts. But we will be using the book to navigateContinue reading “The Rats Part One”
The Curiously Specific Book Club 