A wonderfully readable ramble through literature

As a book fanatic, I felt sure I’d enjoy a collection of essays on the art of writing; but when I first picked up Artful, I had no idea what a joyous read lay ahead. Part novel, the book opens when the narrator, raw with grief, decides to reread Oliver Twist after a gap of 30 years.

It’s not long before she has a visitation from her dead lover, who looks like a blurred version of her live self. But why is she not speaking authentic words, and why return to life at all? It seems to the addled narrator, that it’s because she’s anxious to finish the lectures she’d been writing ‘On Time’, ‘On Form’, ‘On Edge’ and ‘On Offer and Reflection’.