In The Garlic: Your Informative Guide to Spain

I wrote In The Garlic with my friend and colleague Theresa O’Shea who lives in the south of Spain. We wanted  to share our knowledge and experience of this country in a way that was accessible and fun. 

In The Garlic is about what makes Spain tick. It’s a celebration of the quirks, the diversity and the sheer vibrancy of Spain and its people. In The Garlic is a must-have book for all expats in Spain – and indeed for anyone who visits regularly or simply has a passion for the place.

Here’s an interview where we explain how the idea for the book was born.

Learn more about In The Garlic and read excerpts »

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 “How many books do you read about life in Spain that somehow seem to take the fun out of it?  Or else, they seem to have been written by someone who has been here too long, and their curiosity has gone.  Or worse still, they have fallen into that trap of thinking they have somehow morphed into Spaniards themselves and have lost that essential ‘outsider’s eye’.  So, what a refreshing surprise to read In The Garlic.” 

 “An A to Z romp, In the Garlic can be as addictive as Wikipedia.” Read more

 

Fiction is my great passion and what I’m focussing on at present: specifically, finishing my first novel.  Several of my short stories have been published recently, one for the seventh time: Black Dress, a chilling piece of flash fiction.

You can read it here.

Fat Girl was a finalist in the Guildford Book Festival Competition 2010 and featured in the competition anthology.

A Rose Between Her Teeth was selected for the Writers Abroad Anthology 2010 which was published for National Short Story Week.

Ecuador appears in the Winter 2011 issue of Barcelona Ink magazine.

 

My non-fiction writing falls into two broad categories: Spain and Catalunya, and the English language.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s,  I wrote for a number of magazines and guide books, about Spain in general and Barcelona and Catalunya in particular. 

In The Garlic started life as a weekly column in the sister papers Costa Del Sol News and Costa Blanca News. More recently

I wrote a series of columns for the Barcelona Metropolitan looking back over 35 years in my adopted city. In 2010 I guest-blogged on the Spanish language for Macmillan Online Dictionary.

My first piece on the English language appeared in Verbatim Magazine back in the 1990s.  A long piece on puns and paragrams, Words of a Feather, was published in March 2002 in The Vocabula Review.

I then went on to write a guest column, Love Your English, for this online journal between 2003 and 2005.  Words of a Feather was featured in the anthology Vocabula Bound Vol 1 published in 2004 by Marion Street Press Inc.

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