by Catherine Deveney, Scotland on Sunday, June 2002
It's hard to let go of the dead. Stop seeing their face and hearing their voice. Stop smelling their smell. Strange the way you can bury your face in their empty clothes and drink the dead in, the way the scent of them lasts longer than they did. Like the soul, we are told, outlives the body. Read more>
If, as Graham Greene once said, childhood is the bank balance of a writer, then J. Wallis Martin was unusually generously endowed and has plundered her account wisely. Her roots were originally Irish: her great-grandparents came from Galway, but emigrated to England and set about shaking off their working-class roots. Read more>
