Cornflower Books

The Promise

    There is so much to enjoy and admire in Ann Weisgarber's novel The Promise (which I introduced here) that I'm just going to urge you to read it, and say little more than that.

    It is an exercise in economy and restraint: there is not a superfluous word in it, nor a misplaced one. It takes loyalty, love and longing and makes of those a very moving story of subtly shifting relationships among its three main characters, and it sets this in a real place during real events - the hurricane which hit Galveston Island off Texas in 1900 and caused huge loss of life and destruction.

    If you read that earlier post you'll see that it's about a woman fleeing the shame of a scandal who marries a widower she knew in her youth. Life in Oscar's rural home on the island is a far cry from Catherine's middle class Ohio upbringing, and her cultivated tastes and fine manners are out of place with the more rough and ready way of life on the dairy farm and in the simple wooden house. And then there's Nan, Oscar's blunt and practical housekeeper to contend with - Nan who made a promise to Oscar's late wife that she would take care of the couple's little boy, who feels she is a curse on any man she's ever cared for, and for whom Oscar is more than just an employer...

    In a dual-voiced narrative, the reader hears two sides of the story, and Ann Weisgarber lets our sympathies lie with both. "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant" is the line of Emily Dickinson's which forms an epigraph, and in a beautifully balanced process or progress of give and take, accommodation and understanding, generosity, withdrawal and personal sacrifice, her characters' relationships are shaped and re-shaped over secrets kept or discovered, truths told or withheld; and then nature takes her devastating course.

    This is a fine book, understated and sure in dialogue and idiom, spare but telling in its details, powerful in its emotional acuity. For more on the background to it, take a look at Ann's website which includes photographs of Galveston before and after the hurricane, music which features in the novel, and stories which inspired it, but then do read the book itself.

World Book Night 2013 & a Cornflower Books giveaway

    Tonight is World Book Night, and 20,000 volunteers will be giving away special WBN editions of 20 books "to people who don't regularly read or don't have access to books".

    Among the writers taking part in WBN events this evening is Alexander McCall Smith (he'll be at Edinburgh Cental Library at 7pm), and he had this to say about the mass giveaway:

    "In a world that sometimes seems over-burdened with conflict, World Book Night stands out as a precious beacon. It has two messages: one is that reading is sheer joy and the other is that the act of giving is intrinsically good..."

    I am pleased to see that the majority of the books given away tonight will go to prisons, shelters for the homeless, hospitals, community centres and so on - if those books open eyes, light up minds and brighten lives in some way, that will be a great thing.

   

    I can't let the evening pass without having my own giveaway, so I have bought two copies of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, one for myself (because despite having seen the film twice I have never read the book!) and the other to send to a Cornflower Books reader. Please do throw your name into the hat for this, even if you've already read the novel or have a copy on the shelf because in that case, and in the spirit of World Book Night, you could pass it on to someone else. Everyone is free to enter, no matter where in the world you are, and to do so just leave a comment on this post naming a book which is of particular importance to you - it doesn't have to have changed your life, although perhaps it did in some way, it just has to be special to you for one reason or another (and you don't have to give the reason if you'd rather not). The draw will be open for a few days, so please do have a go.

Red Joan

 

     I have been a fan of Jennie Rooney's since I read her first novel Inside the Whale (post here), and then her second, The Opposite of Falling, which is every bit as good. Now with her third book she confirms her place as a writer to watch, one whose talent extends from her storytelling skills to her dexterity with detail and to her mastery of the subjects - often complex or multi-faceted - with which her novels are concerned.

    Her latest book is Red Joan, as gripping as it is thought-provoking, its narrative expertly shaped, its characters as plausible in terms of their weaknesses as for their strengths.

    It is the story of Joan Stanley, a grandmother now in her eighties who has lived - for the past fifty years - an unremarkable life. But she is visited one morning by members of the security services, and in the five days of questioning which ensue, it is clear that the secrets she has kept for so long are now to be made public, and in a very big way. Relating what happened to her in Cambridge in the 1930s and '40s, both to the MI5 officers and to her increasingly incredulous QC son, Nick, Joan relives a past which saw an impressionable and idealistic girl fall under the spell of two Russian-born cousins, charismatic and manipulative both, and then for a physicist whose work was of the highest priority and of world-changing significance. Drawn into a dangerous game of espionage, Joan's motives were noble enough, but did she fully understand the consequences of her actions?

    Inspired by the story of Melita Norwood, "The Spy who came in from the Co-op", the book borrows elements of that by way of background, but where it differs and diverges is in its clever use of shifting loyalties and moral imperatives, and of how emotion can colour ethics like pigment clouding clear water.

Bargain of the day - The Lady of Sorrows

    Today's Kindle deal is Anne Zouroudi's The Lady of Sorrows, the fourth in her Mysteries of the Greek Detective. So far, I've read only the first in the series (I loved it) and I'm greatly looking forward to the rest, but as you'll gather from that post on the book, Anne's central character is no ordinary policeman. Each novel is based on one of the seven deadly sins, and as such - and given the 'nature' of Hermes, the detective - I doubt they'd have to be read in order.

    In The Lady of Sorrows, "Hermes Diaktoros visits a remote island which is home to an ancient icon famed for its miraculous powers. But something about the Virgin troubles him, and Hermes calls on an old friend to confirm his suspicions that the icon is a fake.

    Ready to hand the matter over to the authorities, Hermes intends to leave – until the island’s icon painter is found dead at sea. Did he die of natural causes or by a wrathful hand? What secret is a dishonest gypsy keeping? And what haunts the ancient catacombs beneath the bishop’s house?

    The inimitable Hermes must deal with forgery, betrayal and superstition, and the consequences of all-consuming rage."

The Walter Scott Prize

    The shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been announced today:

Toby's Room by Pat Barker

The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

The Streets by Anthony Quinn

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twang Eng

Merivel by Rose Tremain

    Hilary Mantel won the inaugural Walter Scott prize in 2010 with Wolf Hall; since then, the winners have been Andrea Levy's The Long Song and On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry. Of this year's shortlist, all I've read so far is the Anthony Quinn which is very good indeed but to my mind lacks something of the finesse of his earlier book Half of the Human Race (which I wrote about here). On a superficial level, is not the paperback cover for the Rose Tremain very lovely?

    The winner will be announced at the Borders Book Festival in mid-June. Who's your money on?

Island Wife

    Judy Fairbairns's memoir Island Wife: Living on the Edge of the Wild is a book of such warmth and with such spirit to it that from the first page the reader is welcomed in and stays, very happily, until the last.

    It's the story of Judy's family life, from the early days as a young bride helping her husband Alex farm the flat lands of Norfolk, to the family's move north to Scotland to own and run an estate on a Hebridean island. But it's also Judy's own story, and a frank and clear-sighted one when it comes to how easy it is for a woman to lose her way when her children are grown and the 'job' she has done selflessly and wholeheartedly for so many years exists no longer.

    Tapsalteerie (17th. century Scots for topsy-turvy) - and not its real name, I daresay! - is the island estate Judy and Alex take on, its 1200 acres and 6 miles of coastline including a hill farm and a large but somewhat ramshackle house which they run as a small hotel. Here they bring up their five children, establish a groundbreaking whale-watching business, become part of the local community adapting to the rhythms and customs of island life, and laugh and love through the good times and the bad.

    But then they reach the point where with great reluctance they must sell the estate, move somewhere smaller and cut their pattern according to their cloth. With her children leaving home and Tapsalteerie gone, Judy is redundant: "The rest of the day stretches out before me - not like a ribbon, but like a leash". It is at this point that she seeks direction and meaning more than she has ever done, and that part of her story is a sad one, but it's a time of transition, and of regeneration in a way, and Judy eventually finds her path and moves on to the next stage and a new career as an artist (and now writer); as she says,

    "We women can do all that is demanded of us, with devotion, dedication and enthusiasm. All we need are moments [of inspiration], and the singular courage to walk our dream out into the light. That, and a chance meeting with an older woman, one further down the track of life, one who has stepped out of her brown dress, and donned a peacock one."

    The book is funny and touching and moving; it's vibrant, honest and full of wisdom gleaned from experience, and above all it's a great pleasure to read.

Prizes, prizes

 

    More prize news with the announcement this morning of the shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize):

 

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

May We be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

NW by Zadie Smith

    The winner will be announced on Wednesday, 5th. June.

    (Of those shortlisted, I've read only the Kate Atkinson so far, and to my mind it certainly deserves its place on the list.)

 

    Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has gone to The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, but I'm delighted to see that one of two other finalists is Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child - post on it here.

 

Monday miscellany: BOYBN, Rebus, Blackfriars and more

    It happens only once every ten years, but this evening the literary journal Granta announced its latest Best of Young British Novelists. For the purposes of perspective, have a look at the 1983 list and read the related article.

   

    It may be only mid-April, but Christmas shopping planning has started for me with the announcement of the release of Ian Rankin's next Rebus novel, Saints of the Shadow Bible, in November - Mr. C. is already rubbing his hands in anticipation, and I'm glad to have at least one present 'done'.

 

 

    Just arrived today and out early next month is Kate Clanchy's Meeting the English, "a bright story about dark subjects". 

   " 'Literary giant seeks young man to push bathchair. Own room in Hampstead, all found, exciting cultural milieu. Modest wage. Ideal 'gap year' opportunity....'

    So it is that Struan Robertson, orphan, genius and just seventeen, leaves his dour native town of Cuik, and arrives in London in the freakish fine summer of 1989. His job is to care for Phillip Prys, silenced and paralysed by a massive stroke, because, though two teenage children, two wives, and a literary agent all rattle round Phillip's large house, they are each too busy with their peculiar obsessions to do it themselves. As the city bakes, Struan finds himself tangled in a midsummer's dream of mistaken identity, giddying property prices, wild swimming and overwhelming passions. For everyone it is to be a life-changing summer."

 

    Blackfriars is a new digital-only literary imprint from Little Brown and Virago, "created with the aim of discovering and nurturing new talent (or talent that has been away for a while)". It will be launched in June with three titles including The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan, " a heartrending novel set in belle époque Paris, inspired by the real-life model for Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, Marie van Goethem, and a notorious criminal trial of the era".

 

 

    Lastly today, a tongue-in-cheek look at current cover trends, though what they don't say in that article is that on the back of the Life After Life jacket is a dog!

Where's your reading taking you?

   

    Via the pages of Elanor Dymott's novel Every Contact Leaves A Trace I am in Oxford in December 2007, in Worcester College in the snow, where lawyer and old member Alex Petersen is trying to make sense of the strange events leading up to the murder of his wife Rachel in the college grounds some months earlier.

    I'm finding this book completely engrossing, and I'll say no more about it than that for now as although I have a hunch as to 'whodunnit', there are so many secrets hinted at and questions left thus far unanswered, that two thirds in the mysteries are deepening.

    Helpfully, the book includes a map of the college (shown in part here), and it would appear that it is there not just so that the reader can grasp the layout of the setting, but because it has some significance to the plot itself. We shall see ....

    While I cross the Quad, hunched against the cold, or look up at the figure watching from the window on the spiral staircase to the Old Library, his features obscured by a flurry of snow, where's your reading taking you just now?

The Uninvited Guests

   

    I'm always interested in epigraphs, and that of Sadie Jones's delicious Edwardian comedy of manners The Uninvited Guests is from Byron's Don Juan: "Their table was a board to tempt even ghosts / To pass the Styx for more substantial feasts".

    The events of the book do indeed take place before, during and after a feast - a twentieth birthday party for Emerald Torrington at her family's country house, Sterne.

    The house is large and rambling, but also crumbling, costing money which the family has not got, so Emerald's stepfather goes off on one last attempt to raise funds to save it, leaving his wife and her children to entertain the guests arriving for the birthday party. But just as events are about to get underway, a group of strangers turns up at the door. Survivors of a train derailment nearby, they have been sent to take shelter at Sterne until such time as the railway company can make further arrangements for them, and shocked and dazed by their ordeal they seem barely aware of where they are let alone what's to become of them.

    So the evening progresses, the family and their friends beginning the birthday celebrations while in another part of the house the uninvited guests drink tea and quietly wait. But all is not as it seems ....

    I'll give you no more plot than that, but what I will say is that this is full of threaticality and eccentric set-pieces and uses its exaggerated edge to great effect. It is vivid and mad and funny - with its gothic overtones from 'the insubstantial' to that most useful and atmospheric of devices the dark and stormy night, its villain and unlikely heroes - and it's beautifully written, every sentence just so. I caught something of the rhythm of Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt in the narrative, but it's its own book: stylishly satirical and arch as you like, a caricature of drawing room comedies and melodramatic romances, a ghost story as farce. It's very well done and great fun!

Cornflower Book Group - May, 2013

 
    "Immensely craftsman-like ... a fascinating book," Times Literary Supplement.

    "Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiancée Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth has lifelong repercussions, and Elliott Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a part, as he wanders in and out of the story, observing his characters struggling with their fates."

    W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 novel The Razor's Edge is to be our CBG book for May. It is said to be one of his finest books, and "one of the most interesting". Selina Hastings in her biography The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham goes on, "In it he engages with the three topics which always most fascinated him, sexual passion, the mores of society and the nature of goodness, in this case as illustrated by the division between the material and spiritual worlds .... From publication the book made an enormous impact. There were many adulatory reviews - 'sheer delight' said Cyril Connolly, 'Mr. Maugham's best novel since Cakes and Ale' - and sales were immense."

    There are two film versions, the first (1946) starring Tyrone Power and the second (1984) with Bill Murray. I shall read the book first - I've posted the opening passage here, by the way - and then perhaps watch one or other of them.

    There is still plenty of time to read Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April for discussion from Saturday, 27th. April (I've just finished my re-read and it did not disappoint), and then we'll go on to talk about The Razor's Edge from Saturday, 25th. May. Everyone is most welcome to join in whether you've read along with us before or have just found us, and the book itself should be easy enough to find in various formats and in libraries as well as shops. This will be my first Maugham and I'm greatly looking forward to it; I hope that it will be a welcome re-read for some and a new discovery for others, but above all an enjoyable and interesting book for anyone who picks it up.

The journey of a book

   

    Last week's post From book to ...? has generated some wonderful stories of trails signposted by a work of fiction leading to great discoveries. On a similar theme, Rose has most kindly sent me pictures of the copy of Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April which she has just bought for our Book Group read and discussion later this month, because as you can see it's not a common or garden edition (such as my own green Virago) but has some history attached.

    Over to Rose:

"I sourced my copy via Amazon, ultimately via Better World Books UK* – a distribution set-up based in Dunfermline. You will see what a very old edition this is (and it originates from a Public Library in Derbyshire) – even Elizabeth’s surname Russell – ‘Russell’ being her second marriage to the 2nd. Earl Russell following on from being Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin – is on the spine!"

    Rose's book came from Swadlincote District Public Library (note the rainy weather warning in the rules above), and here are photographs of the library taken in both the 1930s and the 1960s, though sadly that handsome building has since been demolished.

    The book itself is a 1924 Macmillan edition (it was first published two years earlier), and as Rose says "those were the days when Macmillan & Co. Ltd were represented, not only in Chicago and Dallas and London, of course, but Bombay, Calcutta and Madras!"

    Here is an illustration of trees and the view from the garden of the magical San Salvatore, the Italian castle in which four very different English ladies spend the month of April.

    So, a copy of a novel set in Italy written by an Australian-born British novelist who was married first to a Prussian count and then to an English Earl, occupied a space on a shelf in a Derbyshire library, and years later has come into the possession of a London reader who bought it from a company which started in America but whose warehouse is in Dunfermline in Fife, just across the Firth of Forth from the Edinburgh home of Cornflower, on whose blog the book was chosen as the April book group read ...

 

*"We get asked a lot about 'being American'. And it's true that the adventure all began over on the other side of the Atlantic when 3 friends from uni started selling unwanted university textbooks online to support a local community centre. The idea kind of took off - and now Better World Books is an award-winning, ground-breaking, all-singing, all dancing social business on the far side of the Pond. The story of how it all began can be found here.

Better World Books UK launched in 2008 - with the aim of adapting a fantastic concept and creating an equally exciting and inspiring operation here. Our all-star team is mostly locally recruited and we have found some fantastic charity partners in the UK and Ireland including READ International, the National Literacy Trust, and the National Adult Literacy Agency. We still work closely with our friends and colleagues in America - and enjoy plenty of transatlantic banter, although we don't think they'll ever understand our love for cups of tea..."

Wodehouse on Thirkell

    "Talking of books, as we so often do when we get together, ought I to be ashamed of confessing to you a furtive fondness for Angela Thirkell? You told me once that she bullied you when you were a child, and for years I refused austerely to read her. But recently Wild Strawberries and Pomfret Towers have weakened me. I do think she's good, though if we are roasting her I will add that August Folly was rotten and I couldn't get through it."    

    P.G. Wodehouse to Denis Mackail (i.e. Angela Thirkell's brother), as quoted in P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters edited by Sophie Ratcliffe. DM and AT "were not close, and Wodehouse learned later that Mackail did not appreciate hearing compliments about her."

    I recently read Angela Thirkell for the first time, enjoying three of her books - including Wild Strawberries - one after another, though as you'll see here, my favourite was High Rising. Happily, Virago are to be re-issuing Pomfret Towers in November.

Mind the gap

               

    A while ago we had a post called Mind the gap? which was about physical space on the bookshelves, but today's 'mind the gap' is more to do with time and/or mental space - the gaps between books in your reading life.

    As another topic in our reading habits series, my question is how much time do you let pass from finishing one book to starting the next? Do you always go straight on without a pause? Do you allow a few hours/days to elapse while you digest what you've just read? Does it depend entirely on what you've been reading? Do you perhaps switch to some non-fiction after a heavy diet of fiction, or turn to another genre for your next novel - i.e. a gap in terms of style or subject matter? I daresay no-one reads to any set pattern as such, but I wondered whether you could identify trends and leanings like those in your own literary life.

    I often have a biography or other work of non-fiction on the go which I pick up between novels because I find its change of voice, pace and emotional pitch is welcome, rather like switching to a good documentary when you've had enough of television drama. Sometimes I'll take months to finish that book, but it's there on my bedside table whenever I need it as a (usually) restful alternative to the fiction which makes up most of my reading. Catherine Horwood's Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present was my most recent ongoing book, and although I enjoyed it greatly it took me a couple of years simply because it was performing that occasional gap-filling function; you might also call it a thirst-quencher or a refresher for those times when the world of fiction gets a bit too hot or dry.

    So then, do you leave gaps, do you have a change of pace with a gap-filler, or do you forge straight ahead to more of the same?

Boy reading

    I've been, this morning, at the excellent S.J. Peploe exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (more on it on the other blog), so it seems appropriate to post this picture (one of my favourites) here. It dates from the early 1920s and is of Peploe's son Willy in school uniform (and how many times must I have sponged marks off 'that' blazer and washed 'that' tie, for my son Will went to the same school). Willy P. evidently stuck in at his reading because another picture in the exhibition shows him as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford.

    As always, I had a look at the novels (many of them art-related) on sale in the gallery shop and found a good group including Dorothy L. Sayers's Five Red Herrings which is set in an artists' colony in south west Scotland, and Jane Harris's terrific Gillespie and I (post on it here).

From book to ...?

    There was a lady on the radio the other day talking about the Bach Double Violin Concerto and telling how she first encountered the piece - through the pages of a book. I think she said she was still at school when she read Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night and came upon the scene where Lord Peter takes Harriet to a concert at Balliol at which the concerto is performed:

    "Masters, undergraduates, visitors; they sat huddled closely together on the backless oak benches, their elbows on the long tables, their eyes shaded with their fingers or turned intelligently towards the platform where two famous violinists twisted together the fine strong strands of the Concerto in D minor .... Peter, [Harriet] felt sure, could hear the whole intricate pattern, every part separately and simultaneously, each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together."

    The scene affected the young reader to such a degree that she went at the first opportunity to a record shop to listen to the piece (this was long before the days of Youtube, etc.), and she has loved it ever since.

    I thought that was a charming story of a happy discovery, and I wondered whether anyone had had a similar experience, not with a piece of music necessarily, but with something you'd read about in a novel which you then made a point of finding out more about. Perhaps you were drawn to visit a place which featured in a book, or maybe you took up a craft or read up on a subject because its rendering in fiction attracted you to it.

    From book to ... what? Has literature opened up some new world for you?

Writers' portraits - Naomi Mitchison

    Naomi Mitchison by Percy Wyndham Lewis (Scottish National Portrait Gallery).

    I wonder how much Naomi Mitchison is read nowadays - I rarely see her mentioned. I had a copy of The Corn King and the Spring Queen at one time but fear I sent it - unread - to the charity shop during a purge of the shelves a while ago; I'd probably make a better fist of reading it now.

    Here is the author on Desert Island Discs in April 1991, aged 93, where she is described by the host Sue Lawley, as "radical, energetic and versatile" and a woman who "devoted her life to new ideas"; her choice of music ranges from Wagner to "Ye canny shove yer Granny aff a bus". Her literary career encompassed around 90 books across several genres, but as she says in the interview, she could write anywhere and at any time (including on London Underground's Circle Line). Here is an affectionate word-sketch of her, and below a 1974 portrait by Clifton Pugh.

Click here and scroll down beyond this one for the earlier posts in the Writers' Portraits series.

Extras

   

    The Point of the Paperback is a very interesting article by Nichole Bernier on paperback publication and what it can do for a book (and my thanks to Madeline Miller for the link), but one passage caught my eye particularly and so I thought I'd canvass opinion on it; this appears towards the end of section 3:

 

    ' “Often by the time the paperback rolls around, both the author and publicist will have realized where the missed opportunities were for the hardcover, and have a chance to correct that,” says Simon & Schuster’s Sarah Knight. “Once your book has been focus-grouped on the biggest stage — hardcover publication — you get a sense of the qualities that resonate most with people, and maybe those were not the qualities you originally emphasized in hardcover. So you alter the flap copy, you change the cover art to reflect the best response from the ideal readership, and in many cases, the author can prepare original material to speak to that audience.”

    Enter programs like P.S. (Harper Collins) and Extra Libris (Crown Trade and Hogarth), with new material in the back such as author interviews, essays, and suggested reading lists.

    “We started Extra Libris last spring to create more value in the paperback, to give the author another opportunity to speak to readers. We had been doing research with booksellers and our reps and book club aficionados asking, What would you want in paperbacks? And it’s always extra content,” says Crown’s O’Shea. “Readers are accustomed to being close to the content and to the authors. It’s incumbent on us to have this product to continue the conversation.” '

 

    How do you feel about extra content at the back of the book - an interview with the author, an essay on, say, what lies behind the book or how they came to write it, a list of books for further reading? I welcome it as I'm an eager consumer of supplementary material (I never overlook an author's note* or even their acknowledgements, as they can tell me much), but as we discovered in the comments on this post, many readers are content with the story alone and need nothing more. How about you?

 

*I've just finished Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (I loved it, and I'll write about it soon) and I noticed that in her acknowledgements she points readers towards her website to find out more about the writing of the book. She rightly attaches a spoiler alert to the link to the page where she goes into the background to the book, so don't read it if you've not yet read the novel itself, but it's an interesting piece and she gives a lengthy list of sources used in her research.

The Cazalets

    Good news for fans of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles: the fifth and final book in the series, All Change, is to be published in November this year, and will pick up the family's story in the 1950s.

    The earlier books are currently being serialised on Radio Four (so far they've passed me by), but here is a short interview with the author who last week celebrated her 90th. birthday, and here is the current set at a bargain price.

What it takes to be a writer

    "People ask what it takes to be a full-time writer, to make it your livelihood, and the only honest answer is the doggedness to be alone in a room for a very long time, climbing without a rope."

    From Nature Cure by Richard Mabey.