fiction – Maddie Grigg

September reviews

I’ve been a bit lax lately when it comes to reading books, being so caught up in promoting my own. (In case you didn’t know, Plashy Fen comes out in paperback on 29 September. As you can imagine, I’m very excited.)

I had been reading a doorstep of a novel, The Year of the Locust (2023) by Terry Hayes, and was finding it very easy to sink into its short chapters and fast pace.

However, I’m about an eighth of the way in and have decided to quit while I’m ahead. I don’t feel much engaged with the protagonist and there is more to life than ploughing through a big book just for the sake of it.

This spy thriller, published in 2023 is more up Mr Grigg’s street than mine, which is what I initially thought about Hayes’ debut I Am Pilgrim (2013) before I picked it up at a book swap a few years ago.

I couldn’t put it down, it was gripping.

My well-read friend, The Fragrant Mrs Putter, told me she felt the same, so I was in good company.

It still hasn’t been made into a film yet, which I find astonishing, although there are references online to Pilgrim being in production.

I’m about to embark on The Cuckoo and the Cuckquean (2025) by Patricia Román. The novel is about Spanish Suffragettes – a new subject for me, but it’s good to move out of one’s comfort zone every now and then.

I finally read Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure (1999) as part of research into one of my family stories and, although I still don’t very much like Hemingway as a man, it confirmed my view of Palin as an extremely engaging and talented writer.

While I haven’t been reading, I have been listening to quite a few podcasts.

I’m hooked on both the UK and the US versions of Goalhanger’s The Rest Is Politics, which are such ear openers when it comes to staying informed about the corridors of power and the strange things happening on planet Earth right now.

The BBC’s Disclosure Investigates series are really good. I’ve listened to two standout documentaries – Charmain And The Prophet {2026) and Matched With A Predator (2025). The programmes’ common link is the horrendous consequences of controlling behaviour by men over women.

To provide some light in the darkness, I’ve also watched The Magic Faraway Tree (2026), ostensibly a children’s film based on the book of the same name by Enid Blyton.

It was beautifully done, and so, so enjoyable, with the original story updated but still with a glorious, life-affirming fantasy at its heart.

Fearing I might have gone a bit soft in my old age, I looked up the reviews afterwards to see if the critics agreed with my verdict. They did, wholeheartedly.

We’ve also binge watched Last Tango In Halifax (2012-2020, BBC) – great, character-led drama which is down to the brilliant script of the show’s creator, Sally Wainwright, and the superb cast.

Now starting, rather late in the day, on Ted Lasso (2020-present, Apple TV) and enjoying it immensely.

Can’t wait for the new series of the BBC’s Small Prophets (2026) to appear on our television screens. And with Slow Horses (2022-present, Apple TV) flying out of the traps, telly just got a whole lot better.

To live without my music…

In the words of singer songwriter John Miles, ‘would be impossible to do’.

It’s funny, I’m not keen on that song much, but, for me, the lyrics are so true.

I’ve been surrounded by music all my life, growing up in the 60s and 70s as the youngest of five.

And I think my siblings’ influence gave me eclectic tastes. I also have a son who is my musical guru when it comes to ambient, electronica and chillout.

I’m not one of these people who live in the past and complain that the music today is rubbish. It’s just different.

I love hearing new stuff in all genres, from all over the world, which is why I listen to BBC Radio 6 Music, especially on Saturdays and Sundays (especially Sundays with the wonderful Cerys Matthews‘ show and Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour.)

Headphones are always part of my writing kit when I’m trying to focus on getting words on the page.

Instrumental music taking me into imagined worlds and cutting out world noise is what suits me best.

When I was writing my new novel, Plashy Fen, my go-to album was Synaesthesia, by the Fresh Handmade Collective. You can listen to it on YouTube here.

The blurb on Bandcamp, where you can buy the album, states:

Bird song and an orchestral score place you in the Dorset countryside on a perfect English Sunday morning.

Passing through the day into a fantastical twilight, you arrive at the heart of a still forest in the dark, deep, depth of the night.

Soft rain brings in a glorious dawn chorus and the clarion calls of rooks and jackdaws herald your journey off the Scarborough Fair.

It was created by the late Simon Emmerson, Lush founder Mark Constantine and musicians from The Imagined Village collective, for use in Lush’s spa treatments.

It’s beautiful and was my personal soundtrack for Plashy Fen, blending perfectly the sounds of nature and the gorgeous musicianship of Simon – who lived and recorded in my Dorset village – and his talented friends.

Now that Plashy Fen is an actual book (out on Kindle now and published as a paperback on 29 September), I’ve put together a playlist of music to accompany it.

I’ll post a link to that soon, together with a bit of an explanation as to why I’ve chosen some the tracks. Listening to it is not compulsory, but when – and if – you read the book, you’ll understand my choices.

That’s about it.

Love, Maddie x

Why Plashy Fen?

The title of my new novel, Plashy Fen, came to me in the middle of the night a few years ago.

I wasn’t happy with the working title I’d given it, as who the hell did I think I was, calling it Dylan’s Wake, in a nod to the author of the wonderful Under Milk Wood, which is one of my favourite books.

And anyway, early beta readers told me they thought it was going to be about the funeral party of someone called Dylan.

I’ve been writing a column for The People’s Friend for over a decade now, after the then editor emailed me out of the blue telling me she’d seen my blog, The World From My Window, and would I like to write for the magazine?

She said (and it’s etched in my mind): ‘I think you might just be the writer we’ve been looking for! I like your ability to write with humour about the minutiae of daily life, but with a touch of emotional depth, too.’

So I introduced my village to Friend readers as Lush Places, named after the fictional newspaper column by the hapless and fictional nature writer William Boot, who, through a case of mistaken identity, becomes a war correspondent for The Daily Beast.

Boot is the main character in Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, which was published in 1938. It’s dated now and very politically incorrect but I loved the juxtaposition of a naïve, gentle writer in the cut-and-thrust world of horrid Fleet Street hacks out to make a name for themselves in a forgotten corner of the world.

I was redrafting my latest novel about Lush Places’s seaside sibling when the new village’s name – and book title – came to me during the early hours of the morning.

There is a line in one of Boot’s nature columns – ‘feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ – which has come to signify an affected style when it comes to nature writing.

I guess the the term plashy fen must have stuck with me. It’s become a bit of a personal joke and serves the purpose of making me check my prose style every now to make sure I’m not coming across as a complete jerk.

So that’s the story of how Plashy Fen got its name.

But the characters, well, they’re a different story…

The book is out!

After all this time, Plashy Fen is finally out in the world.

The Kindle edition is now available. *

A small village. A long memory.

And rather a lot of people I’ve been carrying in my head for several years.

Welcome to Plashy Fen.

If you prefer the paperback – and I know most of my readers do – that’s coming out on Michaelmas Day, 29 September. There is a reason for that date, which will soon become clear.

* (This is the Amazon.com link, do a search for Maddie Grigg, Kindle, Plashy Fen in the relevant country’s platform and you should find it.)

August book reviews

There have been some stinkers in my reading material of late, so I’m delighted to share with you two five star reviews for two very different novels.

Books have taken a little bit of a back seat in recent months as I put the finishing touches to my own novel, Plashy Fen, which will be out very soon, and research a narrative non-fiction story about the ancestor I share with that titan of 20th century American literature, Ernest Hemingway.

But it gives me great pleasure to recommend both these novels, which are well worth a read.

There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak *****

(Contemporary fiction combining historical fiction, 446 pages)

This is the most extraordinary book – and a long one for me to find myself completing with great relish.

It’s difficult to summarise the plot but here goes:

After a prologue set in the ancient past, the novel follows three timelines focusing on three characters inexorably linked by a single drop of water.

We have Arthur, who was born and raised in the Victorian slums next to the Thames but possesses an incredible mind. He learns how to decipher ancient texts at the British Museum and becomes obsessed with the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem written in Mesapotamia during the late 2nd millennium BC. He makes it his life’s quest to find the poem’s missing pieces, out in the dusty field.

And then there is Narin, a Yazidi girl living in Turkey in 2014, and Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who lives on a houseboat in London in 2018.

They lead entirely different lives but their stories are intertwined, with the past catching up with them all.

This is such a big concept book, but told intimately through the stories of the three protagonists. Beautifully written -a novel which will stay with me for a long time.

Lucie Dumas by Katherine Mezzacappa *****

(Historical fiction, 234 pages)

Katherine Mezzacappa is a voracious writer who has a real knack for finding fascinating true stories and characters from the past and turning them into literary gold, as her novel, The Virgin of Florence (2024), demonstrates.

Lucie Dumas was a real person, a young woman we would never have known were it not for Mezzacappa’s meticulous research and imaginative storytelling skills.

And it’s a good job, because Lucie’s story is important, particularly in an age where misogyny is still alive and well and living like a king, even in 2026.

Lucie is a ‘fallen’ woman, cast out of her native France and separated from the child she bore to become a prostitute in 19th century London.

She encounters many hardships and is then ‘rescued’ by a famous writer, Samuel Butler – to whom she refers as The Monsieur – who ‘keeps’ her in a modest house (with a maid) where she entertains him and other gentleman callers.

Lucie is never a victim but her tale unfolds quietly and with great dignity, a pawn in a world where men take centre stage and women are meant to fit in as they should.

The storytelling and writing are remarkable. I’d gone off historical fiction a bit but Mezzacappa has restored my faith in the genre.

This is a novel which means a great deal -it gives Lucie Dumas a voice and one with which we, the reader, empathise, giving us an unusual and important insight into the place of women in Victorian society.