Such particularity of perception is rare and refreshing, and this sense of invigoration is intensified both by Johnson’s commitment to placing women at the heart of her stories (so much so that, at one stage, a lighthouse keeper is described as “wommaning” her radio), and by the attentiveness she brings to the business of imbuing their narratives with elegance, pattern, shape. Nevertheless, she embarks on an improbable relationship, which is unexpectedly cut short and even more unexpectedly transformed. You watch yourself pretend you’ve never known anything in your life and never much felt the compulsion to. You want to make him think you have no history or education; that you might have had language once but it’s gone now. You want to make him think you’re so scrubbed clean of any sort of intelligence that he can lay himself out on you and you’ll soak him up.” So thanks, thanks for deciding you were going to take the power you were given and to use it for evil instead of good.

Image: “And now for something completely different” – Monty Python’s Albatross sketch ( Source and httAs part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. Misschien zijn dingen die in de realiteit gebeuren gemakkelijk te beschrijven, omdat we ze kennen, of omdat we ze ons kunnen voorstellen. Maar natuurlijk is er geen garantie. Het is niet omdat een schrijver woorden gebruikt om iets uit het echte leven te beschrijven, dat alles geloofwaardig wordt. She… saw the ends and starts of conversations swimming up and then receding into the loud. Boat words she knew from Ruben caught at her like hooks.” Fen is on one hand ordinary. There's couples, sex, pubs, marriage. But within that, she weaves tales of magic and darkness, of inexplicable things, underpinned with something you understand. A longing, a need, that's ordinary, but works with the otherworldly.

There’s no one specific source for the hotel, with its gothic-style long chimneys and stained glass windows. Located “not far from Cambridge, or the sea on the train,” it throws a wide beacon over the East of England.Just finished rereading Daisy Johnson's story collection Fen. Just as powerful and beautiful and dark and strange as the first time. One of my favourite books of all time. -- Jeff Vandermeer Fen was written some two years previously. Its a collection of short stories, and had received praise from a relatively small number of readers. Nor do they work normally in Johnson's Fen. This is a world in which the peculiarity of the environment is manifest both in the lives and the natures of its inhabitants, and in the lineaments of the non-natural structures that have been made there. Johnson says she was never one of the teenagers hiding shots under the table in the local pub, or bumming a cigarette in the car park outside. “I was always very good. A lot of my work ethos comes down to guilt. I don’t know if that’s good, but that’s the way it works. I never would have been one of those people, which is why maybe I can write about them, from an outside point of view.” Daisy Johnson's book came to me by chance. I retweeted a contest, didn't know what books to say I liked, and was given a surprise bundle. The moment I read the blurb, I knew I had to read it. So I've been dipping in and out. Female protagonists each find themselves rooted in a British landscape that's familiar, but surrounded by a world that isn't.