Cornflower Books

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

   

    The winner of The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, announced this evening at The Borders Book Festival, is Robert Harris for An Officer and a Spy, his retelling of the Dreyfus Affair, which has beaten very strong competition.

    I haven't read the book, but Barbara has and says she doesn't know when she's enjoyed a historical novel more!

Book of the day - Bodies of Light

 

     Fans of Sarah Moss's writing - and I am most certainly one - will be very glad to know that she has a new novel out:

    "Bodies of Light tells of the coming together and falling apart of a family of idealists in Victorian Manchester. Ally's father paints beautiful women while her evangelical mother visits the slums and campaigns against child prostitution, teaching Ally and her sister May [Moberley] to live for others. While May likes to pose for the artists in her father's circle, Ally devotes herself to her mother's ambitions, working hard to join the first generation of female doctors. But bitterness and tragedy divide the family, and Ally leaves home to escape the subtle terrors of her childhood and begin a new life in London.

    Bodies of Light is a profound and provocative book about family and a radically modern novel with a 19th. century setting. It is a gripping story told with rare precision and tenderness."

    Readers of Sarah's last novel, the splendid Night Waking, will recall the character of May Moberley from that book; Sarah's fourth novel, which is in progress, continues the story.

    Cover illustration is by Timorous Beasties.

Soon to be read

   

    I spent about two hours this afternoon writing a longish post on the books I'll be reading over the next couple of weeks, only to press 'save' and find that Typepad was down again, and my carefully crafted piece had vanished.

    So, to begin again, but more briefly this time, here's my 'soon to be read' pile:

     Going Back by journalist and broadcaster Rachael English is a debut novel which sees Elizabeth Kelly leave Ireland to return to Boston where she spent the summer of 1988. "Can she reconcile the dreams of her twenty-year-old self with the woman she has become?"

    Writing the Garden by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is subtitled 'A literary conversation across two centuries', and is a collection of writings on the art of gardening by the likes of Vita Sackville-West, Elizabeth von Arnim, Edith Wharton, Beverley Nichols, Penelope Hobhouse and Margery Fish. Perfect for this time of year.

    The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin I have already introduced. I'm reading it now, and so far it's rather sweet and fun.

    The Steady Running of the Hour by Justin Go is another debut, this one a time-slip tale of an unclaimed inheritance, "part historical tour de force, part heart-rending love story," a breathless race from London archives to the battlefield of the Somme and the fjords of Iceland to piece together the events of a long-ago love affair and uncover vital proof of lineage. The author talks about it here.

    The White Russian by Vanora Bennett is "a sweeping, heartbreaking novel of illicit passion and family secrets set amongst the Russian émigré community in Paris in 1937". Evie comes from New York in search of art and adventure, but her grandmother's sudden death leads her on a quest to discover a mysterious man from her family's past. "With the world on the brink of war, she becomes embroiled in murder plots, conspiracies and more as White faces Red Russian and nothing is as it seems."

    Last but by no means least, The Stories, a collection of Jane Gardam's short fiction. Some of these I've read before, some are new to me, all come from the pen of a literary star whose work I love and admire. As the blurb says, "Jane Gardam shakes out life and finds diamonds in its folds." I can't wait.

    

    With the ongoing Typepad problems I hardly dare ask you to tell us what you're reading this weekend, but if you find you can leave a comment - and especially if you have something good on the go - please do let us know.

Reckless

   

    William Nicholson puts such thought into his novels. He's not 'just' a skilled storyteller with a screenwriter's ear for dialogue, his books are layered with themes, people and episodes which link one to another, although each stands on its own, and those common elements have so much heart behind them - emotional honesty, compassion - that the reader surely can't fail to respond to that openness in the writer himself.

    His latest, Reckless (which as I write is a Kindle bargain) moves from the 1940s to the early '60s, the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War. Rupert Blundell is strategic adviser to Lord Mountbatten, Chief of Defence Staff, and as his confidant and wise counsel he has a part to play in the high stakes game of diplomatic and military manoeuvrings, but it's his personal life which preoccupies Rupert, and a relationship which develops from unlikely beginnings.

    Elsewhere in London, Rupert's young family friend Pamela Avenell is in search of 'life', and falling in with Stephen Ward's coterie, this beautiful but naive girl ultimately finds herself questioning her ambitions.

    International politics, real people and events provide the setting for a most touching love story, but it is in his fictional characters' personal predicaments and development that William Nicholson excels, and where his romantic idealism proves irresistible.

Books in brief: Hue & Cry

   

     Just to follow on from last Saturday's post, I loved Hue & Cry, the first of Shirley McKay's Hew Cullan mysteries set in 16th. century St. Andrews. It's the perfect mixture of Town and Gown - St. Andrews is the oldest university in Scotland and the third oldest in the English-speaking word - so as we walk among the colleges which sit by the ruined cathedral, above the harbour, and with their feet in the stoor o' the burgh, as it were, so we learn about life for the students and their tutors, and the merchants and tradesmen they live among.

    There's a compelling mix of domestic and social detail, legal matters and all things medicinal, not to mention the mores and philosophical thinking of the time, and within this context is the ingeniously plotted murder mystery in which our sympathetic young lawyer hero Hew plays detective and advocate. The author's extensive knowledge of the period and gift for language colour the book beautifully, and in the central character we're given a man of intellect and compassion whose personal story alone should be worth following. I'm greatly looking forward to reading the other books in the series.

Where's your reading taking you?

      This coming week sees the publication of Friend & Foe, the fourth book in Shirley McKay's series of mysteries featuring young lawyer Hew Cullan, set in St. Andrews during the reign of James VI. The arrival of that book reminded me that despite having had them on the shelves for ages I've still to read the earlier ones, so at long last I've made a start.

 

Click to enlarge

     Hue & Cry is the first one, and it begins in St. Andrews - a place I'm very happy to visit either in real life or on the page - in 1579. Hew has returned to Scotland from studying in Paris, to find that his friend, university regent Nicholas Colp, is accused of murdering a boy who was a private pupil of his. Hew investigates what appears to be an open and shut case, and in so doing he uncovers "a dark tale of duplicity and passion amidst a world of religious piety and the chilling austerity of university life."

    The book has been described as "not only a gripping mystery that holds the reader to the very last page, but also a marvellous portrait of St. Andrews in the sixteenth century," so I'm greatly looking forward to getting deeper into it, and to seeing the present day town through fresh eyes when next I'm there.

    Where's your reading taking you this weekend? The past, the present, the future? Close to home or far away?

                                            ~~~~~

    On an unrelated note, I was in a charity bookshop today and I happened to find a copy of Told by Eileen, a children's novel written by my great-grandmother's cousin Alice Massie. I didn't buy it as I already have one, but that's the first of Alice's books I've come across 'in the wild', and I was very pleased to find it. I'll continue to look out for her work.

Book of the day - An Appetite for Violets

    "In the dark heart of 18th. century England: a mistress, a maid, a mystery ..."

    Martine Bailey's An Appetite for Violets will be published later this month and it sounds like one to look out for:

    "Irrepressible Biddy Leigh, under-cook at the foreboding Mawton Hall, wants only to marry her childhood sweetheart and set up her own tavern. But when her elderly master marries the young Lady Carinna, Biddy is unwittingly swept up in a world of scheming, secrets and lies.

    Forced to accompany her new mistress to Italy, Biddy takes with her an old household book of recipes, The Cook's Jewel, in which she records her observations. When she finds herself embroiled in a murderous conspiracy, Biddy realises that the secrets she holds could be the key to her survival - or her downfall ..."

    The novel is billed as "an utterly compelling story of food, obsession and mystery, introducing a brilliant new voice in historical fiction, " and Maria McCann, author of As Meat Loves Salt and The Wilding (on which there's a post here) says of it, "I adored this novel: a delicious addictive mix of confectionery, skulduggery and crime, sprinkled with dark secrets and sauced with piquant comedy."

The Walter Scott Prize 2014: the shortlist

    Historical fiction (see yesterday's post) is in the news again today with the announcement of the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize, the judges describing their deliberations as "the toughest choice, from the strongest longlist, in the Prize’s five year history":

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Harvest by Jim Crace
Fair Helen by Andrew Greig
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
The Promise by Ann Weisgarber

    I am particularly pleased to see Ann Weisgarber's book there for - as I said here - there is so much to enjoy and admire in it. I made reference yesterday to the craft of writing historical fiction, and Ann's novel is a textbook example, economical, exact, beautifully judged in terms of the telling of the story and the recreation of the real events which form its setting. If you haven't already read it, I'd urge you to seek it out.

This and that

   

    I've said before that I always pay close attention to what Ann Patchett recommends in her Parnassus Books posts because she makes a compelling case for them. Today's is no different, except that the book in question is Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index, a work which - on the face of it - could be a hard one to 'sell', but as I've read it and admired it I was especially interested to see what Ann had to say about it. Do read Ann's post and note her suggested leap of faith vis-à-vis recommendations.

   

    On the subject of recommendations, I'm pleased to see Kate Clanchy's novel Meeting the English up for another award: it has been longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. I was very taken with the book when I read it last year - as you'll see here - so good luck to Kate.

 

   

    Another book for which I have a high regard is Eleanor Catton's Man Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries, which is out in paperback today. "Highly original, meticulously constructed, thematically convincing, this is a richly evocative mystery," I said in my review, and here's my summary of what Eleanor had to say about the book when she came to Edinburgh last summer.

 

    If you fancy having a crack at writing historical fiction yourself, there is a masterclass on the subject taking place in London next month. Sarah Dunant and Celia Brayfield "will share their knowledge and experience of creating or recreating historical characters, of evoking period settings, of finding inspiration in archives, constructing a compelling narrative without sacrificing accuracy and finding voices for characters that are true to their time and place"; but if you can't attend the event, there is a book on the subject.

Books for the incurably curious

    The shortlist for the 2014 Wellcome Book Prize has been announced and it includes Elizabeth Gilbert's cracking novel The Signature of All Things (which I wrote about here). The prize "aims to stimulate interest and debate about medical science through books and reading", and that book certainly takes things botanical to a new level - it is wonderfully engaging and entertaining.

    The other shortlisted books are Wounded: From Battlefield to Blighty, 1914-1918 by Emily Mayhew, “ a homage to the courage and determination of the men and women who cared for – and saved the lives of – the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who were wounded at the Western Front”; Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise, which “brilliantly exposes the phenomenon of false allegations of lunacy (and the dark motives behind them) in the Victorian period”; Creation: The Origin of Life / The Future of Life by Adam Rutherford, "an account of the synthetic biology revolution"; Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, "an investigation into the phenomenon"; and Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity: A Dozen Kinds of Loveby Andrew Solomon, "a book about how parents relate to children".

    The winner will be announced on 29th. April.

Cornflower Blues 2013 - the best of the best

  

    We've had the books of the year parts one and two, and now to conclude, here are the best of the best in fiction and non-fiction.

    Hermione Lee proves the art of literary biography is alive and well in her superb life of Penelope Fitzgerald, and Kate Atkinson has given us a tour de force in her complex, highly original novel Life After Life.

    Thank you, ladies, for such rich reading.

Bargain of the day

    One of today's Kindle Daily Deals is John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk. It was my top novel of 2012, and this post explains what makes it so special.

    Among the current monthly deals for Kindle are The Outlander by Gil Adamson (another superb book - post here), and Neil Gaiman's wonderful, multiple prize-winning The Graveyard Book (post here).

Future reading

   

     The next book in my reading queue is Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald and I'm looking forward to starting it over the weekend, but Dame Hermione is in the bookish news today with word that her next biographical subject is to be Sir Tom Stoppard. There's no publication date in prospect yet, but I'm sure that that book, when eventually it comes, will make fascinating reading.

                                                    ~~~~~

    

    Blackwell's the booksellers have set up Giving Trees in their shops and online so that underprivileged children can receive a book this Christmas.

    For a small sum, you can either choose a book in the store for a child whose request is on the special tags hanging on the Giving Trees, or place your 'order' through the website so that a suitable book is gift-wrapped and delivered to a child in time for Christmas.

    I've bought a book by this means, and I hope that for the young person who receives it it will go some way to opening the door into the magical world of reading; there could hardly be a better gift.

                                                    ~~~~~

    In the post this morning - all beautifully wrapped and girded with an actual crimson ribbon - was The Crimson Ribbon by Katherine Clements who has been described as "the vibrant new voice of historical fiction". It won't be out until March, but it sounds like another to look forward to, "an extraordinary and mesmerising story of two women's obsession, superstition and hope".

    It begins on May Day 1646: "The Civil War is raging and what should be a rare moment of blessing for the town of Ely takes a brutal turn. Ruth Flowers is left with little choice but to flee the household of Oliver Cromwell, the only home she has ever known. On the road to London, Ruth sparks an uneasy alliance with a soldier, the battle-scarred and troubled Joseph. But when she reaches the city, it's in the Poole household that she finds refuge.

    Lizzie Poole, beautiful and charismatic, enthrals the vulnerable Ruth who binds herself inextricably to Lizzie's world. But in these troubled times, Ruth is haunted by fears of her past catching up with her. And as Lizzie's radical ideas escalate, Ruth finds herself carried to the heart of the country's conflict, to the trial of a king."

    Elizabeth Poole was a real person who appeared before the Army Council in the days before the trial and execution of Charles I and spoke of visions she had received from God. Her testimony didn't influence the outcome of the trial but her words were heeded, and why this was so is at the basis of the novel as Katherine Clements has sought to explain it using research, conjecture and imagination. Katherine came across the character in Antonia Fraser's biography of Oliver Cromwell and was intrigued by this woman who was given an audience with some of the most important men of the day. Research revealed "a dark, seductive world of illegal printing presses, extreme spiritual obsession and a mysterious scandal," and so for Katherine, Elizabeth's story "proved impossible to resist".

The Signature of All Things

 

    I'm not going to say very much about the plot of Elizabeth Gilbert's wonderfully engaging historical novel The Signature of All Things because to do so would be to spoil its leisured unfolding, but I will say that in Alma Whittaker it has one of the most unlikely and unusual heroines of this or any other genre!

    Alma is born in Philadelphia in 1800, the daughter of a renowned botanical explorer who has become a very wealthy man. Growing up on the family's White Acre estate, her privileged existence is also one of scholarship, for Alma is a cerebral girl for whom the life of the mind - in part compensating for a lack of emotional sustenance - is everything. She becomes a scientist, a natural philosopher, happy peering into a microscope or devouring the new thought contained in the books of her father's unique library, and when her interest in botany develops into a study of the little known field of mosses, a whole new world opens up to her.

    I'll say no more than that about Alma's life story except that it takes the reader far and wide, through almost a century and across the globe, into the questions of evolutionary theory and life itself, and down deep into what lies beneath our feet; and its portrayal of an intellect and an obsession, of human strengths and frailties, is infused with such joie de vivre that you will turn the final page with a satisfied smile. Full of warmth and wit, researched with such breadth and depth of understanding and attention to detail, this is quite a book!

    Here's Elizabeth herself to tell you more:

And a couple more

 

    Since we were talking yesterday about bargains for the Kindle, and comments seemed to indicate an appetite for more, here are a couple of books which I haven't yet read but about which I've heard great things, and both are currently available at very low prices.

    Kate Forsyth's Bitter Greens was reviewed recently in The Good Book Guide (which I heartily recommend, by the way) and although it was firmly on my radar before that, phrases such as "breathtaking in its imaginative virtuosity" and "utterly original, a book of mesmerising power", had me pressing the 'buy' button.

    It's a new interpretation of the tale of Rapunzel, but it features a real-life character, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, a writer of historical fiction who was exiled to a convent by Louis XIV and while there wrote the version of Rapunzel that we all know. Kate writes about the story behind the book here, and talks more about it in this video.

    

    The Somnambulist by Essie Fox was one of Channel 4's TV Book Club Best Reads of 2012, and you can see Essie talking on the programme about her Victorian Gothic mystery in this short clip.

    "Very evocative, brilliantly researched, and plot-wise it's very, very clever," said Meera Syal in her summing up, and here's the gist:

    "When seventeen-year-old Phoebe Turner visits Wilton's Music Hall to watch her Aunt Cissy performing on stage, she risks the wrath of her mother Maud who marches with the Hallelujah Army, campaigning for all London theatres to close. While there, Phoebe is drawn to a stranger, the enigmatic Nathaniel Samuels, who heralds dramatic changes in the lives of all three women.

    When offered the position of companion to Nathaniel's reclusive wife, Phoebe leaves her life in London's East End for Dinwood Court in Herefordshire - a house that may well be haunted and which holds the darkest of truths..."

Out in paperback - Motherland

    Out today is the paperback edition of Motherland by William Nicholson, and as it's one of my top novels of the year so far, I wanted to shout about it a bit more, so here's what I had to say back in March:

 

    2012. Alice Dickinson - whom readers first encountered in The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life - goes to France to meet the grandmother who has only just learned of Alice's existence. "You come from a long line of mistakes," Pamela Avenell tells her, "and one true love story".

    It's that love story which is at the heart of William Nicholson's superb new novel, a book whose characters link it to the loose Sussex trilogy - The Secret Intensity ..., All the Hopeful Lovers and The Golden Hour - but which also stands alone. It's a masterly piece of work from a writer whose gifts include an unsurpassed ear for dialogue, a fluency in the telling of a story which keeps the reader turning the page while yet wanting to linger in and savour the moment, and an empathic insight into the hearts and minds of each of his characters. You can tell that I loved every word of it.

    In 1942, Kitty, an army driver stationed in Sussex, meets Ed, a Royal Marine Commando, and his best friend Larry, a liaison officer attached to Canadian Army Combined Operations. Kitty falls in love with Ed, but both Ed and Larry fall in love with her - sanguine, accepting Larry wishes his rival well, and then the two men take part in Operation Jubilee, the catastrophic Dieppe Raid - in which the casualty rate was almost 70% - and Fate plays her hand.

    Setting the book in England during the Second World War and in India shortly after it, William Nicholson uses real events to test his characters and real people to play opposite them. It's a winning combination, never stilted or contrived, but plausible and convincing, and in his Author's Note he quotes his sources and acknowledges his debt to the work of his wife, the social historian Virginia Nicholson, and in particular to her book Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in the Second World War.

    If you're not already acquainted with William Nicholson's work, don't lose a moment, and read him at the earliest opportunity - he is that good.

Bargains

     

    One of today's Kindle Daily Deals is James Runcie's Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death, the first in his Grantchester Mysteries series. "I am completely smitten," I said when I read the book last year - you can find the full post here, something of the background to the novel here, and a post on the second in the series here.

    William Nicholson is a writer I admire greatly, and his The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life hooked me from the off, so I've just snapped up the two 'loose sequels', All the Hopeful Lovers and The Golden Hour, at a mere 56p each in the Quercus e-book sale.

    Lastly today, another Quercus bargain, Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg. This elegant novel is based on real events and real people, and is set on the remote Scottish island of St. Kilda in the 1830s - there's a post on it here.

Simon Sebag Montefiore @Edbookfest

   

    My last event of this year's EIBF was Simon Sebag Montefiore talking about his new novel One Night in Winter, and had I been experiencing 'festival fatigue' today after the end of a fantastic fortnight, his talk would certainly have perked me up - what he had to say was gripping, horrifying and fascinating in equal measure.

     Based on actual events which happened in Stalinist Russia in 1945 and which Simon uncovered during his research for his non-fiction book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, the novel is centred on an exclusive school and the bizarre and dangerous game played by its senior pupils who are all the children of government leaders. When one of these 17-year-olds is shot by a classmate who then turns the gun on himself, Stalin takes an interest in what has been going on and orders an investigation resulting in the arrest and imprisonment - for as long as 6 months - of some 26 young people. During their incarceration, the children were interrogated about their families, their private business and their views of Stalin and his leadership, and their 'confessions' could and did destroy their parents. What they revealed and how they survived the interrogation is covered in this novel which is at heart about family and love.

    Soviet Russia at this time "was like Edith Wharton with the death penalty", any faux pas resulting not in a snub or social banishment but in execution, and in a society which was hierarchical, the book looks also at what Simon called "the hierarchy of love", the range of relationships carried on in a place where jeopardy is supreme, and where "everything was secret but nothing private".

    Simon talked very entertainingly about his research, not just for this novel but for his work generally. While we may think of archives as staffed by obliging people who will help find material and do what they can to aid scholarship, some of the archivists Simon encountered in his Russian researches are of an altogether different stripe. When working on Young Stalin he had privileged access to documents and people because his book Catherine the Great and Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair had put him in favour with the powers that be, but as those powers had 'taken agin' him' for Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, subsequent access had been denied. Still persona non grata, one particularly difficult archival guardian dropped a kitten on Simon's head from the upper level of an old palace - a cruelly original way of showing him the door!

    A historian's lot is often not a happy one, it seems, as Simon told us that when working on his book Jerusalem: The Biography, he was stoned by both Israeli and Palestinian factions, thereby establishing his own "state of perfect neutrality". Against these real difficulties and dangers, the challenge of writing historical fiction, of interweaving hard fact and accurate detail - for readers are sophisticated and spot inaccuracies - with invented characters with whom one can do as one likes sounds like rather a freeing experience; the results, if today's talk was anything to go by, quite compelling.

Eleanor Catton & Hannah Kent @Edbookfest

    The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize and tipped to win (I've read it, and it's mightily impressive). Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, a debut novel, the subject of an international bidding war, out this week and high on my TBR pile. The authors of these books came all the way from New Zealand and Australia respectively to talk to an eager audience at EIBF.

    Eleanor's book is set on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island during a gold rush in the 1860s, and it was the drama of that landscape, which Eleanor visited often as a youngster, which captured her imagination and inspired her story. Hannah's takes as its subject Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland, and an exchange visit she made to Iceland as a teenager planted the seed that would grow into a work praised by Madeline Miller as "gripping ... beautifully written ... outstanding."

    The Luminaries is a murder mystery, a ghost story, a psychological drama, a book of extraordinary complexity and richness written in perfect 19th. century style. In discussing her influences, Eleanor talked persuasively about her desire to "defend the adverb", how psychology changed the landscape of the novel forever, and how Agatha Christie's books taught her how to keep the reader reading. In Burial Rites, which tells Agnes's story from when she is found guilty of murder, sentenced to death and waits out the months until her execution at a farm in the north of the country, Hannah has used several narrative voices and fragments of letters, aiming by these means to explore the ambiguity, depth and humanity of her subject, contrasting that with received opinion which paints Agnes as simply and starkly "monstrous and evil".

    Both books are very well plotted, and on the subject of plotting generally, Eleanor talked about what is seen as a distinction between literary and genre fiction, i.e. that in the case of the former, plot is secondary. This fascinates and enrages her, she says, as she feels plot is every bit as important as structure, and that novelists could learn a lot from watching high quality television drama such as Breaking Bad which provide lessons in suspense and in keeping character and plot alive and developing. Eleanor wanted her book to be entertaining: "entertainment isn't necessarily low brow," she said. In Hannah's case, her plot was formed by actual events, although her research into them was gradual and laborious. She was researching and writing concurrently, "finding the dots and then joining them," so the suspense "just happened" as she waited to discover what came next, but the effort she put into understanding and shaping her characters shaped the plot, too.

    Hannah told us that her book is "a dark love letter to the natural landscape of Iceland", reflecting in some ways her own experience of living there, of the slow descent into winter, of the place and its culture. Eleanor, when asked whether her book could have been shorter (it is 832 pages), talked of wanting to do justice to the 19th. century style she'd adopted and to her large cast of characters by giving them space to evolve. She employs a structural conceit, too,  making each part half the length of the one before, thus "a golden spiral", a shaping force, and she admitted that she didn't know whether the ambitious task she had set herself was even possible until she had completed it. I can tell you that she's done it in fine form.

A busy week

    As posts are coming thick and fast here - and I'm sorry to bombard you but there's a lot to keep up with - I thought a brief recap would be in order, beginning with last Friday's A poem a day. I've been turning to The 20th Century in Poetry every morning and reading just one poem, so from Thomas Hardy in 1900 we've moved on to Flannan Isle by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, The Ballad of Jimmy Governor by Les Murray, 1901 by Noël Coward, Kipling's Bridge-Guard in the Karroo, Story of Lilavanti by Laurence Hope (Adela Florence Nicolson), Masefield's wonderful Sea-Fever (for John Ireland's setting, do listen to Sir Thomas Allen's recording), and on to today's poem, Autumn Morning at Cambridge by Frances Cornford. So far, so good.


    My Edbookfest event on Saturday was all about cover design - how best to tell the potential reader what's inside the book. We learned that boys won't pick up a book with a girl on the front (until they get to a certain age and it's a certain type of girl), that humans require Vitamin 'S' - 'S' for 'Story', and that the design process, over several editions, is a constant process of refinement and audience-targeting.


    If you're a lover of food in novels, Sunday's post gave a link to a special edition of The Food Programme on 'cooking and crime', or eating with the detectives. Much there to whet the appetite for certain books or just plain make you hungry.

 

 

    On Monday I posted details of the Cornflower Book Group's next book. Our September read is Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam (whose Edbookfest event - a delight - I attended last week), and I hope lots of people are getting their hands on a copy ready to join in with our discussion.

 

    I 've posted only one review this week but it's of a cracker of a book, Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season. However, I have just finished another treat of a novel, and I'll write about it in due course, but for now, look out for the fun, sweet, warm-hearted, mad-in-a-good-way Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore.

 

    If you haven't already done so, there's still time to enter the draw to win a book bag, and I'm so enjoying all the suggestions of books as travelling companions which you're leaving in the comments there.

 

    It was back to the Book Festival yesterday to hear about two very different books (and a controversial opinion on historical fiction!), and as I have more events in prospect, I'm off now to sharpen my pencils and get ready to report.