Anna Jones Buttimore

Here's an admission - I have started tuning to Radio 4 occasionally. I am officially middle-aged. I listened to Radio 1 until I was in my early 20's, and have been devoted to Radio 2 ever since. Growing up, my mother had Radio 4 on constantly (the theme tune to "The Archers" is the soundtrack to my childhood) so I associate it with, erm, slightly older people. But Radio 2 gets very boring in the evenings when it focusses on music genres I don't like, so I tune to Radio 4. Which is where I found this gem from American author Adam Gopnik about how to respond to a bad review. It's well worth a listen. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01jxw57/A_Point_of_View_What_to_do_about_a_bad_review/ I'd like to say I've never had a bad review. Unfortunately that wouldn't be entirely true. Maybe I'll just say that I've never had a bad review in print, but on Goodreads a couple of people were unimpressed by my books. One gave Honeymoon Heist one star ...

Here it is - your chance to read the first chapter of my latest book, No Escape. Menai Bridge, Wales. An island, forty miles wide, sits in the Irish Sea. A lush and green gentle quilt of fields divided by walls of large mushroom rocks is knotted with villages bearing names that defy pronunciation by the English-speaking world. Historical home of the Celts and their druidic traditions, the island’s southeast coast is edged by the sparking ribbon of the Menai Straits, spanned by a wide concrete railway and road bridge and a narrow, elegant, steel suspension bridge. The graceful bridge forms part of a 260-mile-long roadway linking the northwest portion of the island with the capital of its ruling neighbouring country, and was built by Thomas Telford in the early nineteenth century, a time when grandeur, elegance, and ostentation mattered more than practicality. At the landing point of the bridge is a town—a narrow high street interlaced with roadways and lanes, with tightly packed s...