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MIKE CAREY'S NEW DIRECTION Graphic novel and comic book writer Mike Carey tells us about his latest horror novel, The Girl with All the Gifts "Writing comics taught me about structure. I spent a lot of my teens and early 20s writing things that I thought were novels, but they really weren’t, they were shapeless bags of stories. The thing about writing comics is that a rigid structure is built in. You have 20 pages and you have to get to a cliffhanger within that, so you budget everything, you become a miser. After writing comics for seven to eight years, when I came back to writing prose I felt a heady rush of freedom. You get a bit drunk on power with all those blank pages." MORE >

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TEN ROMANTIC NOVEL LOCATIONS Alexandra Potter shares her most romantic novel locations in the world MORE >

HOW TO READ A NOVELIST Ex-Granta editor John Freeman on how to interview authors MORE >

	BOOK OF THE WEEK

BARRACUDA by Christos Tsiolkas Following The Slap was never going to be easy, but Tsiolkas appears to have written his latest novel with a very different approach. Kelly is an Olympic-grade swimmer, and his talent is his ticket out of the working-class upbringing he struggles against, as he is given a scholarship at a prestigious college to train for the Olympics. Exploring what happens to the sporting hero who suddenly becomes the less-than-sporting loser, Tsiolkas’ epic-length novel charts Kelly’s life through disillusionment in his inimitable, brutal and intense writing style, plunging the reader headlong into the drama that unfolds both in and out of the pool. MORE >