I’ve read India Knight’s Mutton and Gill Hornby’s The Hive and expected their event at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival to be all about their novels. How wrong could I be? Chaired by writer Jane Wenham-Jones, the hour-long session was far more entertaining than that. To sum it up, it was all about bees, Botox and bras. The straight-talking conversation began with bees because they helped to inspire Gill Hornby’s ...keep reading
Gill Hornby’s first novel has attracted the sort of coverage that most debut novelists dream of. A former BBC producer, ex Daily Telegraph columnist and wife of superstar writer Robert Harris, she’s now written The Hive, a novel set at the school gate. Publishers were falling over themselves to buy it and after a bidding war Little, Brown snapped it up for a six-figure sum. It’s out today so I downloaded ...keep reading