2010 is ticking on and the publication of my 3rd novel NEVER TELL is looming – April 15th apparently!  Book’s gone to print, cover approved, quotes are in place, I just need to sort out the launch party now…the priority obviously…

Talking about venues to a male friend, he admitted sheepishly that he hadn’t actually read my books: “Well, they’re for women aren’t they?” he mumbled as I fixed him with a stare. (I didn’t really, of course my friends don’t have to read my books. They really don’t. I just don’t talk to them anymore when I find out.) Another male friend once admitted that he felt a bit odd reading LULLABY on the tube, even though it didn’t have a particularly feminine cover. Well, there was a cot and a teddy bear…but it’s all quite dark and scary-looking. Although this probably says more about that friend than those supposedly judging him for reading a ‘girl’s book’, it did make me think about who reads what and how much gender influences us… Women traditionally buy more books than men; and there are lots of books that I would class as ‘male’ books and wouldn’t choose to read, sci-fi etc amongst them, but also the novels of a certain type of middle-aged middle-class novelist dealing with specifically male angst springs to mind…whilst men aren’t ever going to read chick lit, certainly not in public (and nor for that matter, am I – in public or at home, but I’m still the target audience).  And personally, I was never keen on the cover of my 2nd novel BAD FRIENDS: my agent and I fought a battle with my publisher and lost.  One of my main concerns was that it was so specifically female; that no man would ever pick up a book with toothily smiling girls on it.

Recently Martin Amis and news-reader Anna Ford had a rather public spat in the papers about his friendship with her late husband Mark Boxer. During this argument Ford called Amis’s books ‘misogynist’: “As a feminist I don’t enjoy reading him; he may be one of our most distinguished writers, but I think his attitude to women is highly questionable” Ford said (see full article here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/anna-ford-martin-amis-letter). It’s a fascinating subject – and I’m sincerely hoping that the neutral cover of NEVER TELL means that all my male friends and even some male readers whom I don’t know might actually pick up the book in a shop or a library and read it without prejudice!!

And just quickly, you can catch me tomorrow – March 12th – in conversation with my crime-writing mate, Dreda Say Mitchell, at the Wisewords Festival (http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/whats-on/events/special-events/wisewords.cfm) in London’s Women’s Library in the East end, at 5pm . It’d be fabulous to see you there….you can tell me what you think men & women should be reading, and how we cross the divide…