Tim Roux's Page

Earlier this year I read George Polley’s ‘Grandfather & The Raven’. Tonight I have read his ‘The Old Man & The Monkey’. There is one thing I have learnt about George’s books – that when you sit down to read them, you needn’t stop until they end, and probably that you cannot stop until… Continue

When my children were eight and five, they used to love listening to a couple of Barefoot Books CDs in the car and as they settled down to sleep – ‘Tales of Wisdom & Wonder’ narrated by Hugh Lupton and ‘Grandmothers’ Stories’ narrated by Olympia Dukakis.

Coming from Barefoot Books, these were charming multicultural tales suffused with wry observations on the world – the monkey who a… Continue

Bob Ellal’s ‘By These Things Men Live’ comes with a sucker punch in the final chapter (no, he doesn’t snuff it) but I shall declare my conclusion immediately. It is exquisite.

It plays towards one of my prejudices and against another.

The one it plays towards is my preference for novellas. You probably know the reply of the writer who was asked why his book had come in at seven hundred pages – “Because I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” Bob did have time and it shows. He obviously eve… Continue

Anthony Burgess used to claim that he wrote his novels to symphonic notation and Steve Sangirardi freely admits that as far as he is concerned sound trumps meaning, an attitude which is self-evident in his writing, not for any lack of meaning but for the prominence of the grandiose ebb, flow and swell of his compositions.

Steve publishes in slim volumes so although he loves to blow up a passage until it sounds like a full philharmonic orchestra flat out and hell-for-leather, perhaps he should b… Continue

John Joss is a writer for whom rigour and integrity are all: the rigour of the imagination, the rigour of minutely layered detail, and the rigour of linguistic precision. He clearly abhors short-cuts, laziness, vagueness and sloppiness and, in many ways, almost a lifetime since being invalided out of the Royal Navy where he trained as a pilot, he is still a military man in his essence, fascinated in equal measure by the truth and by the fiction of life as it surrounds him.

The recurring theme o… Continue