The crowds of children and teenagers clustered around the book stands at the Salon and waiting patiently in line to have books autographed testified to the excitement amongst young readers in France.

Every summer evening, we village kids used to meet down […]

It is also a city where things, despite the grandiose scale of the public buildings and sweeping boulevards and windswept quays, are still lived on a small, intimate and human scale, in the back streets and neighbourhoods where Parisians actually live.

These are the handicapped beggars, most with limbs missing, some displaying bare feet so deformed they couldn’t possibly walk on them, some with arms that end at the shoulder with vestigial hands, some with no legs below the knee.

It’s the season for Midsomer Murders. In our own bleached midsummer, that mythical corner of England that’s forever sunny, green Midsomershire is one of the great pleasures of my slowed-down writing life.

I arrived in Australia as a French-speaking five-year-old, without a […]

AUDIO: Sophie Masson reads her short story “Saint-Simon and the Stranger”.

In our modern society, to be left bereft of the magic and beauty, the robust humour and deep wisdom of fairytales and their older cousins, myths and legends, is to be open to every withering blast of nihilism.

“So what seems to be the trouble?” The psychologist spoke […]