Never noticed in the busy room,the cleaner gathers, mops, carts awaytorn and cut, discarded clothessome to police and someshe takes from the great waste binto wash, dry, ironand cut. Squares like leaves drowning her chair.The TV mumuring.Precise stitchesjoining square to square,making wholea pattern of loss. Prisoners sleep beneath donated quilts.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is a pilgrimmage of farewell. Paul Theroux is following himself thirty years ago. He calls himself a ghost, but his readers are even more ghostly, distanced by his distance. I like travel books which share the writer’s experience of people and places in a direct style. In Ghost Train…

How do you work out where to give your money and time? I can’t find any comparisons and analyses of charities online that I trust. I’d have liked to post a link saying, here, want to help? Decide for yourself where your money and time will be most useful. As it is, I can only…

In the Wednesday round up Dear Author includes a mention of the expectations publishers and authors have of reviewers (the link to Mrs Giggles is interesting). Um. I always thought a review was a gift, reader to reader with the occasional grateful author thrown in. When people reviewed my romance novel, Guarded Hearts, I was…