In Context

Rob Redman, founder of The Fiction Desk, has been asked to guest edit this month's blog for Context Travel, a 'network of architects, historians, art historians, and other specialists who organize over 300 different walks in 15 cities around the world', including Rome. He's exploring the relationship between travel and literature and he asked me if I'd like to talk about my experiences as an expatriate author. I was delighted. You can see what I said here.

The Pantheon (illustrated left) isn't mentioned in the article and doesn't feature in any of my fiction either. Which is odd, because it's my favourite building.

Futile preoccupations...?

A few weeks ago Rob at the Fiction Desk reviewed Any Human Face and, with great generosity, gave away ten free copies of the novel. One of the copies went to the man behind the book blog His Futile Preoccupations... You can see the impression the novel made here. Here's a bit to be going on with:

I had a bit of luck recently when I won a book give-away held by The Fiction Desk. The book, Any Human Face by Charles Lambert arrived and I almost immediately picked it up. I planned to read the back cover and perhaps a page or two as I had another book I intended to get to first. I ended up devouring this book in two separate readings over the course of a twenty-four hour period. The blurb on the front of the novel promises: A dark, fast-paced story of love, sex, abduction and murder, and the book certainly lives up to all those qualities.

Two people, one bleeding

And here's another review of Any Human Face, from The Fiction Desk this time. It's typically perceptive and I particularly enjoyed this sentence:

The character interactions are driven by Lambert’s interest in the way people react to power and vulnerability in themselves and in each other; it’s tempting to say that the archetypal Charles Lambert scene is one in which two people are in a room, and one of them is bleeding.

Fascinating, though I'm not sure how true this is. Any ideas?