nick
Nick McLoughlin grew up in Derby, where his debut novel Slings and Arrows is set. He is an alumnus of the renowned Faber Writing Academy.
After university, he trained to become a teacher but instead escaped to the French Alps to go skiing. He lives in a converted cowshed on the side of a mountain with his wife and two children.
When he is not reading or writing, Nick enjoys trail running in the forest around his home and coaches a local football team.
My novel
Slings and Arrows
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It’s January 1982, and Britain will soon be at war with Argentina. But that’s not why Terry’s life is falling apart. Forty-five and recently redundant from the only job he’s ever had, he and his wife Pat are forced to sell their home and move into a static caravan.
The only chink of light is the unlikely success of the White Hart darts team, but Terry’s teammates face problems of their own: Phil suspects his wife is having an affair, while Tom’s is depressed about their inability to conceive. Then Terry’s son reveals some surprising news, and Terry makes a visit to the doctor that leaves him with no choice but to consider what matters most in his life.
Slings and Arrows is a funny and moving novel about love, family, friendship – and darts.
Reviews
my latest reading
The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
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I feel somewhat unqualified to write about this book as I have read it just once. Though I love to reread, and a greater understanding of an author's intentions and ideas usually comes with further inspection, generally one go through is enough to feel that one has, at least, a handle on a novel, a grasp of its truth. The Good Soldier resists this. That is not to say that the language is difficult, or that the themes are in any way complex. It is just that the novel is a masterpiece of literary deception, its narrator quite possibly the most unreliable in all of English literature.
He begins, 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy - or, rather, with an acquaintance as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.' It would be correct to say that John Dowell then goes on to describe the relationship he and his wife Florence enjoy (suffer?) with Edward and Leonora Ashburnham; the passions and the troubles. But this would be a woefully inadequate description of the peculiarities of the individual members of this wretched quartet, and the ways in which, according to our narrator, they act upon one another. And are we to believe him? Is the story, as he claims, a sad one? The saddest? Or are the tragedies that unfold less fateful than we are led to believe?
Ford, though he disliked the title, considered The Good Soldier to be his best novel. Graham Greene, Julian Barnes and many other eminent writers returned to it time and again. It is wonderful, it is baffling. I loved it.
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For a fascinating and brilliant discussion of the novel head to the ever wonderful podcast Backlisted - episode 212.
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