Interview with Nadine Kaadan for Macfest

Last month, I interviewed children's author and illustrator Nadine Kaadan for an online event that was part of the annual Macfest international festival. She was born in Paris, raised in Syria but left during the conflict there and moved to London, where she still resides. It was fascinating to hear how that life experience informs her work, and a whole lot besides...

You can now see the whole thing on YouTube here:

The books cited are:

• Tomorrow, written and illustrated by Nadine Kaadan (2012)
• The Jasmine Sneeze, written and illustrated by Nadine Kaadan (2016)
• The Kind Activity Book, by Alex Scheffler, Nadine Kaadan and Renia Metallinou (2022)
• The Power of Welcome: Real-Life Refugee and Migrant Journeys, by Marie Bamyani, Ada Jusic, Nadine Kaadan, Ramzee and Sonya Zhurenko, illustrated by Ada Jusic (2023)

I also mentioned what I should have called the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2026, and there is also a Children's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2026. I am so old, I still think of them as annual handbooks.

You may also be intereted in a previous post, my family the refugees. And previously for Macfest I've interviewed Shirin Shamsi, Sefi Atta, Fatima Manji and Osman Yousefzada.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E Butler

This gripping thriller, first published in 1993, comprises diary entries written by American teenager Lauren Oya Olamina between 2024 and 2027. Listening to the audiobook read by the late Lynne Thigpen was a little perturbing; I was on the M6 passing Birmingham as we passed into the future.

The basic wheeze feels depressingly prescient. Climate change is hitting the planet and there is growing unrest and violence in the US. To begin with, Lauren and her family do their best to carry on life as normal. But Lauren becomes increasingly conscious of the need to prepare for disaster.

At the same time, this pastor's daughter is working out her own religious ideas, based on the idea that "God is change" and humanity must get out into space if it is to survive. She comes to call this religion "Earthseed", and quotations from her thoughts on the subject open every chapter.

As well as the prescient stuff about the collapse of civilisation, and Lauren's philosophical musings on change, there's a fair bit about the effects of different made-up drugs. The drugs Lauren's late mother used while pregnant have left Lauren as hyper empathetic, so she feels the pain she sees in other - making it hard to fight back when she is attacked. Another drug makes people set things on fire, including themselves. 

That Lauren is a Sharer is a useful complication: it means Butler must find more ingenious ways of dealing with any given threat than simply whacking or shooting it. But I felt the pyromaniac drug made its users a bit generic - the punks in all manner of cod sci-fi who have no more motivation than a delight in causing chaos. That's a shame because this book is otherwise so good on the nuance and contradiction of character. It's a long way from depictions of Lauren's family: her brother's descent into crime, her father being in her eyes a good man for all he beats his children, the coldness of Lauren's stepmother. 

Lauren navigates various difficult situations where people don't want to face difficult truths and find it hard to trust strangers. There are some big action sequences, and a fair bit of violence, but what's epecially compelling is how the tension builds and builds. I found it utterly engrossing.

See also: me on Kindred by Octavia E Butler

The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard

Fallen angels stalk the ruins of Paris. The newly fallen Isabelle is preyed upon by a street gang who sever two of her fingers, keen to steal her magic. The immortal Phillippe, once a Vietnamese courtier now living in reduced circumstances, is involved. 

Soon, Phillippe and Isabelle are caught up in the machinations of House Silverspires, based around the ruins of Notre Dame. The once-grand House has also fallen on hard times. It used to be overseen by the very first of the fallen angels, Morningstar, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances. His apprentice Selene now rules in his place with the help of a mortal alchemist called Madeleine, who has her own shameful secret. Then the House comes under attack from strange, magical forces, which seem to be linked to Morningstar's disappearance...

This rich, imaginative novel was first published in 2015 and winner of that year's British Science Fiction Association award. It's a gothic fantasy set in a beautifully realised nightmare alternative Paris, the Seine running black with ashes. This Paris is, in turn, set within a world of which we only get tantalising hints but promises more adventure to come. The back cover of my paperback edition describes the book as,

"A superb murder mystery, on an epic scale set against the fall out of a war in Heaven."

Yes, there's big stuff going on here, but it's an intimate story, largely told through people's thoughts as they endeavour to navigate multiple webs. The story is relatively slow moving, I thought, allowing us time to explore the details and get to know the characters. A lot of it hinges on the circumspection of people deprived of their agency. Various characters are or have been tortured prisoners. The fallen arrive on Earth with no memory of why they were banished from Heaven. One character is a kind of drug addict. People are bound by allegiances and contracts.

I've seen fallen angels tackled elsewhere, often in gothy / fantasy stuff inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, but this feels very different. The elements of magical war in a period setting reminded me a little of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, but we're dealing here with the aftermath of a war. There's something, I think, of Peake's Gormenghast in the House steeped in history and magic and eccentric characters. But more than anything, I was struck by how much this doesn't feel like a world I've visited before. 

At the end, some compelling mysteries remain - about secrets as yet unrevealed, about the rules of this fantasy world - and we are left on tenterhooks about at least one relationship. My paperback edition includes a short story, "The House, in Winter", set in the same world, and two more novels in the series have been published. 

The Time Team Unearthed - The Art of Adrian Salmon

I've had some late nights reading / poring over this beautiful new book collating the artwork that Adrian Salmon produced over more than 20 years for the "Time Team" feature that used to run in Doctor Who Magazine. The brief was simple: produce a single, sizzling image based on the TV episodes under discussion that particular issue. But original editor Gary Gillatt wanted Ade to use dramatic licence, to show us the things that aren't seen on screen but should be.

The result was that Ade produced a captivating image for almost ever TV Doctor Who story of the 20th century. For this book, he's gone back and filled in the gaps - and added a few extras.

The result is gorgeous, and gorgeously packaged, providing a thrilling, vivid, fast-moving history of last millennia's Doctor Who all from one artist's perspective. It is fascinating to see Ade's style develop, and the commentary explains how this was in part down to changing the tools he used (he names the specific makes of pens) and in part due to influences of other artists and an effort not to get bored.

There are loads of details I'd not noticed before - the Sandbeast in his image of The Rescue, the way the artwork for Resurrection of the Daleks mirrors what he did for Earthshock, or the tiny Doctors visible in what he did for The Power of Kroll and Time Flight. The new material is great, too, my favourite probably The Myth Makers with another tiny Doctor. But also, cor, The Evil of the Daleks. And also, woo, The Massacre... 

I'm delighted, too, that the book contains so many sketches, drafts and alternate takes. As the commentary says, some of this material has been a job to track down, and Ade has helped restore some artwork by hand painting new colours. The effort is well worth it. Kudos, too, to editor William Brooks for pulling the whole thing together.

Some of the stuff contained here is from the same period when I employed Ade for cover artwork for the Bernice Summerfield range of audio plays and books - I could tell exactly when just by looking at the style of art. In those days, it was a thrill to receive by email his thumbnail pencil sketches and discuss with him which of two or three options worked best for a particular new title. I've always been particularly, er, drawn, to his pencil sketches - and have failed more than once to convince my masters to employ him to illustrate a novel or novelisation just in pencils. One day...

But while we discussed the various options for any given cover, I don't think we ever talked about Ade's approach to his art, or how he put it together. So this book has been a revelation. How illuminating to learn his approach to colour, and what makes an image pop. The art of the art, as it were.

As Ade says, there's more of his artwork out there, as the "Time Team" was born anew to look at 21st century episodes. He also produced a wealth of other Doctor Who related artwork - I remember the unused cover he did for Short Trips: Zodiac in 2002 (not least because that book included my fiction debut). So I hope there's a second volume.

(A collected Cybermen strips next with new instalments, please and thank you.)

The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of 10 novels to feature the “Baker Street Irregulars” — not the street gang who assisted Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four but four modern-day schoolchildren (and their dog) who solve mysteries by applying the methods of the (to them fictional) Holmes.  

Published in hardback in May 1978 and later reprinted in numerous editions, The Case of the Missing Masterpiece was the first original novel by Terrance Dicks since the last of the Mounties trilogy, War Drums of the Blackfoot, two years previously. The Mounties series had been conceived and commissioned by Richard Henwood at Target Books; when he moved to Blackie & Sons as group publishing director, he invited Terrance to Glasgow to meet with his team and come up with a new line of adventures.

The result was originally called “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as per the title page of the surviving manuscript in Terrance’s archive. By the time of publication, that had been changed to make the link to Sherlock Holmes more explicit.

In the book as published, the gang is referred to, once, as “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as well as “The Magnificent 3½” and “The Frightful Four” (p. 21), which may mean those were other working titles, too. One is clearly a reference to The Magnificent Seven (1960), Terrance a big fan of westerns; the other is clearly a reference to Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, which is also a range of adventures involving four children and a dog. That gives us a sense of what Terrance was stirring into the mix: a mash-up of Holmes, westerns and Blyton.

The book begins with a prologue in which two villains we can’t see because of their stocking masks — but who in stature resemble Laurel and Hardy — steal a painting from a posh house, and brutally cosh the man who tries to stop them. They bind and gag the poor man but, notably, the Laurel-like burglar then goes back to remove the gag so the man doesn’t choke. It’s an intriguing bit of kindness.

The story proper then begins in what Terrance calls an ordinary London school, as if that’s something to which all readers will relate. It’s not a very racially mixed London school judging by the names and descriptions — something Terrance would be better on in his later books. But I love the description of the chaos of the school yard, the kids,

“all fizzing like shaken-up Coke bottles” (p. 11).

Amid this, Dan Robinson sits quietly reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. Tall, skinny, bookish and a loner, Dan is rather modelled on Terrance as a schoolboy. When the book is taken from him by a bully and ruined, Dan immediately fights back — and calls the bully a “moron” and “stupid cretinous spastic stinking twit” (p. 14). Later, Dan also pulls at his eyelids to affect being Japanese (p. 79). This is our hero!

When the fight is stopped by a teacher (“Potty Benton”), the bully challenges Dan to a wager: he can have a new copy of the tattered Hound of the Baskervilles if he can solve the real-life case of the stolen painting, in the week that they’re off school. Dan accepts.

He’s joined in his task by three friends. Best mate Jeff Webster is a stocky, sensible boy. Liz Spencer, we later learn, works on the school paper and is the daughter of a journalist. To begin with, we are told that,

“Liz was a keen supporter of Women’s Lib. She was a tough, wiry girl, who had dealt out many a thick ear as a practical demonstration of her principles.” (p. 17)

From this, I suspect Liz was named after Lis Sladen, who’d played plucky journalist and women’s libber Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who, a character Terrance helped to create. Finally, there’s Mickey Denning, younger than the others, dead keen to help and liable to get into trouble. When he goes to spy on the villains later on, he is quickly caught — fulfilling the kind of plot function of Jo Grant in Terror of the Autons.

The four friends start by visiting the house from which the painting was stolen — which is open to the public. As luck would have it, the eccentric Sir Jasper, who owns the place, is also an aficionado of Holmes and gamely recreates the burglary and his being coshed on the head for the benefit of the children. He also shares with them the words of a rude song involving his own name, “Oh Sir Jasper, Do Not Touch Me!”, which isn’t exactly suitable for children. Today, they’d be on to the police about him.

Then Terrance does something brilliant: on the basis of their conversation with Sir Jasper, Dan tells the others what is going on, as a cliffhanger. We have to read the next chapter to discover — always the best bit in a Holmes story — how he’s put this together from a series of logical deductions.

This is swiftly followed by another great moment, when Dan declares that instead of acting like characters in a mystery story, they’ll go straight to the police. Again, the details of routine police work seems a bit odd for a children’s story — we’re told it consists of dealing with flashers, knicker nicking and dog mess (p. 45). But then there’s another great twist: Mickey goes off on assignment to investigate a clue, and spies two men who turn out to be brothers. That doesn’t mean anything to him but it does to us, as readers, because we’ve already heard that the Hardy-like villain from the prologue is working in league with his brother.

Things move swiftly. At one point, Dan and Jeff are trapped on the roof of the villains’ headquarters, the villains climbing up to get them. Then, the villains get hold of Dan’s address and lay siege one evening when he’s home alone. It’s all brilliantly tense — and the solution is ingenious, even if the police arrive very quickly. Still, it seems nuts that the police then leave Dan in the house alone for the rest of the night, assuming the villains won’t return. Also, why don’t the police insist on speaking to Dan’s parents, who would surely come home when they heard what had happened?

Next morning, the nice detective Dan has met, Inspector Day, gives the boy a stern talking to.

“It’s not like in books. It isn’t suspecting, it isn’t even knowing whodunnit that counts. It’s proving it.” (p. 110)

He advises Dan and his friends to give up the case and lie low. Of course, they do no such thing and — by somehow identifying a splash of mud on the side of a van briefly glimpsed as it sped past — they head by train to the Essex marshes for a final showdown.

This is clearly based on the real-life village of Althorne, the battered old houseboat that the villains use as a hideout just like the one where Terrance and his family had regular holidays. Terrance may well have written this section of the book there, his own children fizzing like Coke bottles around him. (I think the nature reserve as described in Doctor Who and the Three Doctors is the same spot.)

There’s other stuff of this sort: Dan’s room at the top of his old, terraced house, complete with office and sloping ceilings, is very much like the top floor of Terrance’s house in London, including the office where he worked. Mickey’s large Cockney family is very much like Terrance’s family, on his mother’s side. 

By peppering the book with such real details and observations, the more outlandish bits of adventure are kept grounded. It’s obviously a much more relatable story than the Mounties novels, and more real than Doctor Who. It is of its time but a cracking adventure, and leaves us wanting more. 

Art by John Bolton

The back cover promises two further titles: The Fagin Foundation and The Blackmail Boys, which were published in November 1978 and sometime in 1979, the suggestion being that, like the Mounties, this was commissioned as a trilogy. 

But the idea for the Mounties came from Richard Henwood. I think this is something different; it’s very much Terrance’s book: what he wanted to write, rather than what people wanted from him, for the first time since he became a novelist.

For more, see my list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts on them. You might also like my 2015 article “My Immortal Holmes” for the Lancet Psychiatry on the appeal of Sherlock.

Fools, by Pat Cadigan

First published in the US in 1992, and in the UK in 1994, Fools by Pat Cadigan won the Clark Award for best science-fiction novel in 1995. My SF Masterworks edition is from 2019 and features an introduction by Tricia Sullivan, another Clark Award winner.

The blurb on this edition is as follows:

“When Marva, a Method actress, wakes up in the hologram pool of a private club, dressed head to toe in expensive new clothes, and carrying more money than she’s seen in years, it’s clear something has gone very wrong.

The murder she now remembers can’t be good new either.

Finding herself pursued by deadly assassins, and starting to question evert facet of her identity, Marva must venture deep into the Downs of the city to unravel the mystery of what is happening to her. One thing, though, is abundantly clear:

This will be her most difficult role yet.”

That makes it sound relatively straightforward, but the book itself plunges us into a dizzying, noisy world where people can swap memories and so alter their personalities and who they are. There’s also a trade in emotional states such as paranoia, and a whole load of weird subcultures and fetishes, like the “onionhead” couples who beat up people they think have intruded on their own relationships. 

As we navigate all this, and the twisty plot, our narrator’s different personae are indicated by different typefaces. The mystery that unfolds is them trying to piece together the jumbled fragments of memory to suss out who they really are. 

The book is divided into three sections, and for much of Part 1, “Fool to Remember” (pp. 1-156) I struggled to keep up with all the mind-switching, and the densely rich cyberpunk setting. I think that’s rather the point — we’re as much lost as the protagonist.

In Part II, “Fool to Believe” (pp. 157-251), our protagonist receives a set of memories to change her persona, enabling her to go undercover in the mean streets of the Downs. Code words and getting hit can trigger a switch to the primary persona, so we flick back and forth between the two  personalities as things get more tense and dangerous. It builds and builds, and pays off really well.

Part III, “Nobody’s Fool” (pp. 253-299) is almost a coda, picking up on events some time later, but reveals things are not quite as we’d thought. It’s difficult to say more without spoiling things.

Along the way, there’s lots of stuff about the logistics of swapping and stealing memories. For example, there are mindwipes available for purchase to free people of difficult memories. But there are also predatory kinds of mindwipe, and the narrator likens this “mindsuck” to a kind of living death:

“A mindsuck is interred not in a grave but in a special quarantine to allow the development of a new mind and personality. Sometimes the new person is a lot like the old one. Most of the time, however, it’s only spottily reminiscent of the person that has been, as though the suck has freed an auxiliary person that had always been there, just waiting for the elimination of the primary personality. There was still a lot of controversy between the behaviorists and the biologists over that and plenty of theories but no clear-cut explanation.” (p. 161)

More than anything, Fools sparked my own vivid memories of the 1990s when I read loads of science-fiction of this kind, eating up the shared consciousness stuff in books by Philip K Dick and the VR puterspace that was prevalent in the Doctor Who New Adventures. Small details here and there are evidence of the time in which it was written: there’s a character told he can’t smoke in a theatre (p. 87) and a reference to “net-mail” (p. 89). It’s a story set in a near-future that is now a 30-year-distant past.

In her introduction, Tricia Sullivan asks why this and Cadigan’s other work haven’t been made into blockbuster films when “so many lesser works [of science-fiction] have” (p. xi). I’m not sure how you’d make this kind of story work on the screen given that it’s all about being in the head of the main character, or characters (but all in the same head). 

But I think it could work on audio, with different actors playing the different personae inside the same head.

Me on some other Clarke Award winners:

• Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer (winner 2025) 
• Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman (winner 2023) 
• The Animals in that Country, by Laura Jean McKay (winner 2021)
• The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell (winner 2020) 
• Rosewater, by Tade Thomson (winner 2019) 
• The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead (winner 2017) 
• The Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (winner 2016) 
• The City & the City, by China Mieville (winner 2009)

(I’ve read much more of them, but don’t seem to have posted my thoughts. What a villain.)

New short story in What The World Needs Now, ed. Martin Edwards

I have a short story in the forthcoming anthology What The World Needs Now: Mystery Stories Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach, edited by Martin Edwards and with an introduction by Rupert Holmes. 

It’s being published by Level Best Books to raise money for autism charities in the US and UK. What The World Needs Now will be published on 30 June in the US and 7 July in the UK, and is available to preorder on Kindle at Amazon:

• What the World Needs Now on Amazon.co.uk
• What the World Needs Now on Amazon.com

I’ll share the title of my story and more details in due course. Blurb for the book as follows: 

What the World Needs Now is a book of brand new mystery short stories written by leading crime writers from around the world, inspired by the music of Burt Bacharach, to raise funds for autism charities in the US and UK.

Burt Bacharach is popular music’s closest equivalent to Agatha Christie, a hugely successful and innovative composer whose work is loved by millions across the world and continues to influence countless songwriters to this day.

Edgar and Diamond Dagger award-winning author Martin Edwards has put together a collection of hugely entertaining new mystery stories, each taking a title (and often much more than that) from a Bacharach song as the starting point. The result is a fascinating anthology that will appeal to mystery lovers everywhere.

Charles Todd, Mark Billingham, Ragnar Jonasson, and Abir Mukherjee are among the bestselling contributors to a book that is not only unique but dedicated to a truly worthwhile cause. 

All proceeds from What The World Needs Now will be donated by the publishers to autism charities in the US and UK.

Martin posted last month that other writers include Sarah Hilary, Rhian Waller and me. 

It’s been a delight to get to know Martin — and go for lunches — as I’m a big fan of his work. I’ve previously posted about his epic The Life of Crime and he is consultant on the British Library Crime Classics, including the following ones I have wittered about:

• Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand (1944)
• The Widow of Bath, by Margot Bennett (1952)  
• The Man Who Didn’t Fly, by Margot Bennett (1955)
• Someone from the Past, by Margot Bennett (1958)