My first ever review from a professional reviewer – Raelee Chapman of the Singapore Review of Books. Very pleased indeed with that! Just stumbled across it whilst googling… Originally posted on Singapore Review of Books Ann Bennett’s Bamboo Heart begins with Tom Ellis, a captive of the Japanese working on the Death Railway in 1943, in solitary confinement. It is in these opening pages and the narrow confines of his pit prison that we learn what gives him the will to live. Tuc

My first ever review from a professional reviewer – Raelee Chapman of the Singapore Review of Books. Very pleased indeed with that! Just stumbled across it whilst googling… Singapore Review of Books Ann Bennett’s Bamboo Heart begins with Tom Ellis, a captive of the Japanese working on the Death Railway in 1943, in solitary confinement. It is in these opening pages and the narrow confines of his pit prison that we learn what gives him the will to live. Tucked in his chest pock

At the end of the Second World War allied intelligence services surveyed newly-released prisoners of war with so-called liberation questionnaires. My novel, Bamboo Heart, started life when I discovered my father’s liberation questionnaire in the National Archives at Kew. It was an amazing moment when I first saw it; written in his perfect copper-plate hand in pencil, it answered so many questions I would like to have asked. From that moment I knew I had to write about his ex

Welcome to my first post about the inspirations behind my book Bamboo Heart, published by Monsoon Books. I have been thinking back to what first inspired me to write it It is the story of Tom, a British soldier during world war II who is captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore and sent to work on the Thai-Burma railway. Decades later his daughter Laura travels there to try to piece together what happened to him during the war. The seeds of the idea were sown over tw

At the end of the Second World War allied  intelligence services surveyed newly-released prisoners of war with so-called liberation questionnaires. My novel, Bamboo Heart, started life when I discovered my father’s liberation questionnaire in the National Archives at Kew. It was an amazing moment when I first saw it; written in his perfect copper-plate hand in pencil, it answered so many questions I would like to have asked. From that moment I knew I had to write about his ex