This week I search for the illustrator Lola Fielding. Following traces of her working life, from record sleeves to travel posters, from books to magazines, fragments of her life unfold. More than ever, I realised how easily such artists can slip from view. stillsketching.substack.com/p/an-artist-...

Back to pen and ink and another garden corner. This time an old apple tree with sagging hellebores at its feet. #drawing

From the archive for Mavis Gallant, #BornOnThisDay in 1922, my thoughts on GREEN WATER, GREEN SKY. An excellent novella set against the backdrop of Venice, Paris and Cannes…it’s full of light and shade. #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2024/07/07/g...

Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant

There’s a scene near the beginning of Mavis Gallant’s 1959 novella Green Water, Green Sky which seems to encapsulate this stunning book. We are in Venice in the height of summer. Seven-year-old Geo…

jacquiwine.wordpress.com

Another pen and ink drawing, and then with a splash of soft pastel. These small sunflowers dance between the French beans and the chard have been such a cheering sight. They are the last flowers standing in the heat. #penandink

'All those things he’d said—she didn’t believe a word of it. She could tell that he was used to lying to women, she’d have to be very careful. Family, family everywhere, and no one to turn to—she was on her own.' #BookSky 💙📚 #WITMonth jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/08/09/l...

Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang (tr. Karen S. Kingsbury and Eileen Chang)

Last year, I wrote about Jasmine Tea and other stories/novellas by Eileen Chang, one of the greatest chroniclers of Chinese life in the 20th century. In these pieces, Chang exposes the traditional …

jacquiwine.wordpress.com

About ten years ago, I planted a walnut in a pot. Three years ago I planted the sapling out in my garden and now here are my first walnuts.

It’s taken me three goes to post this because it’s not the bit of writing I’m good at, but. For All This Time is available for pre-order. Would you like a story about love, a big house full of stuff, and an infuriating Victorian writer? Want to know more…? www.waterstones.com/book/for-all...

For All This Time by Lou Morgan | Waterstones

Buy For All This Time by Lou Morgan from Waterstones today! Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25.

waterstones.com

Lou Morgan@lmorgan.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It’s not often that I say this, but. I have some news. I’m absolutely thrilled that “For All This Time”, my first adult romance (with a little speculative twist, just because) will be published by Penguin Michael Joseph in 2027. www.thebookseller.com/rights/pengu...

The times, they are a-loopin' - my take on the fourth in Solvej Balle's timeloop series, On the Calculation of Volume #WITmonth

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle

I’ve changed as a person. I’m becoming one of those people who reads sequels/series in relatively quick succession! I started Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series in…

stuckinabook.com

Easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. I loved the incisive prose, the subtle foreshadowing, the flashes of dark humour, the caustic pen portraits, the circular structure, the sense that everything was fated to happen from the outset. Just superb! jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/08/04/t...

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

First published in 1980, The Transit of Venus is the third novel by the Australian writer Shirley Hazzard, an author I’ve been circling for some time. It’s also one of the best novels I’ve read so …

jacquiwine.wordpress.com

Today's drawing, the quince tree in my garden, which though has few fruit this year, is still beautiful. In this week's post, I talk about how drawing is much more than producing a picture and how beginning is the hardest part. stillsketching.substack.com/p/why-drawin...

This morning’s guest on the Writer’s Bookshelf is the incomparable @misterslang.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/mathewly...

The writer's bookshelf: Jonathon Green

Eight questions about writers, books, and reading…

open.substack.com

Why Drawing Matters In this week's post I encourage you to start sketching: it brings calm, increases you attention and the doing might just change how you see things. Do join me. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

A drawing of my, much shorter than usual, runner beans.

Dipping my toes back into drawing, and the ink pot, after a long break.

This week a riverside interlude and a visit to The Manor at Hemingford Grey, home of the writer Lucy Boston, creator of the Green Knowe books. Come and dip your toes in the water. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

I visited Camp Beagle in Huntingdon, where beagles are bred and kept in tiny cages. They have no access to outdoor space and are subjected to cruel experiments. These outdated practices must end and be replaced by modern, reliable methods.

The Met Office weather station on our Monks Wood site recorded 35.7C yesterday, 26 June. It was >30C by 10 am, and the grass temperature reached 45.2C. Imagine being a vole, hare, skylark chick, lizard or ground beetle in that heat. A foot deep, the soil was 22C.

Royal Mail boss’s pay package triples to £6.9m. Cost of postage stamps rocketing RM hasn't hit delivery target for 1st-class post since 2017, 2nd-class mail since 2020. Ofcom continues to reduce targets. Bosses rewarded for fleecing people.

Royal Mail boss’s pay package triples to £6.9m despite profits slide

Martin Seidenberg, chief executive of parent company IDS, handed payouts after takeover of UK postal service

theguardian.com

A forgotten name on a Penguin book cover led me to a cache of Burberry illustrations rescued from a skip, a Vogue profile of a "spy writer's wife" and a story of how easily women's creative lives can disappear. open.substack.com/pub/stillske... #illustration #womensart #midcentury

#RIP David Hockney. This glorious exhibition is currently running at the Serpentine’s North Gallery. It’s a beautiful, life-affirming show, the very highest of recommendations. #Art #ArtSky #DavidHockney

JacquiWine@jacquiwine.bsky.social · 5mo ago

An abundance of colour at the Serpentine’s DAVID HOCKNEY exhibition today! #Art #ArtSky (It’s free to view, but you’ll need to book in advance.) #DavidHockney

New on the blog today, I've written about some of my favourite COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS from the shelves. Featuring books by Rumer Godden, Jean Rhys, L. P. Hartley and more! #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/c...

Coming-of-age novels – some favourites from my shelves

This is a post I’ve been meaning to put together for a while, a celebration of some of my favourite novels in which the dark realities of the adult world begin to impinge on the innocence of childh…

jacquiwine.wordpress.com

One of the exquisite wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker, the illustrator of Through the Woods by HE Bates, which is the subject of this week's post. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

This week's post explores the perfect marriage between writer and illustrator: HE Bates and the wood engraver Agnes Miller Parker, and how some books follow us through life. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

For the past few weeks, my garden has been my refuge. This post began as a search for paintings of women in gardens which led me to Roger Fry, Jean Cooke and The Secret Garden. It became a reflection on how gardens can become places of refuge in difficult times. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

Some more pics from Tate Britain’s excellent WHISTLER exhibition. Haunting, hazy and ethereal all spring to mind… #Art #ArtSky

JacquiWine@jacquiwine.bsky.social · 3mo ago

First look at the JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER exhibition at Tate Britain. Lots of interesting artworks to see, blissfully cool in the gallery. I’ll be going back for another visit! #Art #ArtSky #London

‘…These things never die out. You can pay and pay but you never get rid of it. You think you’ve buried it all in the past but there’s someone knows somewhere, there’s a record kept somewhere, nothing’s ever wiped out.’ #BookSky 💙📚 #CeliaDale jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/19/o...

Other People by Celia Dale

Over the past few years, Celia Dale has become one of my favourite rediscovered authors, largely thanks to Daunt’s reissues of her darkly compelling stories of suburban deception, A Helping Hand, S…

jacquiwine.wordpress.com

The acclaimed illustrator, Krystyna Turska, won the Kate Greenaway prize in 1972, and yet only a few bare facts remain of her life. This post is about my search for her. open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

The Vanishing of Krystyna Turska

Searching for the life of a forgotten illustrator and a magical book forty years on

open.substack.com

My take on The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) by Elizabeth Jenkins. Hoping that (having just finished Anita Brookner) Hermione Lee might write her biography next.

Elizabeth Jenkins (2): The Tortoise and the Hare

An author who really should be better known.

akennedysmith.substack.com

New on the blog today. I've written about INCIDENTS IN THE RUE LAUGIER by Anita Brookner. I loved this precise, psychologically astute novel in which a young woman's life is cruelly shaped by an ill-advised love affair at an impressionable age. #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/05/05/i...

Incidents in the Rue Laugier by Anita Brookner

I love Anita Brookner. Her insights into the loneliness and isolation that characterise her protagonists’ lives are painfully acute. Every time I read her, I seem to discover a new favourite, and h…

jacquiwine.wordpress.com

A wonderfully insightful review from Alexandra Harris @theguardian.com. I loved Melissa Harrison's The Given World with all my heart. Still letting it percolate. It IS stunning & both deeply familiar & strange. One of those incredible books that reveals something about yourself, to you.

The Given World by Melissa Harrison review – a stunning tale of rural life for an era of ecological crisis

Eerie omens haunt this absorbing group portrait set over six months in an English village

theguardian.com