Cornflower Books

This and that

 - I've had a reader request: can anyone think of a novel with a similar theme to that of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones? I haven't read the book - I must be one of the few who haven't - nor have I seen the film, so I can't claim much knowledge of it myself, but if you can think of any book which compares to it, please let us know, or tell us what you think of that novel itself.

- Fans of Linda Gillard will be glad to know that she has a new book out. After the great success of her last novel House of Silence (post on it here), Linda has once again decided to self-publish in e-book form, and if you follow that link you'll see that you need only a free 'app', for PC or Mac, etc., not a Kindle or other device per se, to read it. Untying the Knot, which Linda says is her most romantic novel yet, features an army wife, a traumatised war hero husband, the 16th. century tower house on a Perthshire hillside which the couple were restoring: a ruined castle, a ruined marriage, but now Fay realises the biggest mistake she has made is divorcing Magnus, and Magnus is marrying again ...

- I'm pleased to see that among the current Richard and Judy Autumn Reads are two Cornflower favourites: Peter May's The Blackhouse, a superbly dramatic story set on the Hebridean island of Lewis (post here), and Michelle Paver's brilliantly chilling 1930s Arctic ghost story Dark Matter (original post here, recent Edinburgh Book Festival post here). Both books are now out in paperback.

The history girls

   

    In an article in the press today novelist Sarah Gristwood, author of The Girl in the Mirror, writes that historical fiction has become "a highly lucrative publishing phenomenon" [D.J. Taylor made a similar point about his books of that genre substantially outselling his contemporary fiction when I talked to him earlier in the year]. Female buyers seem to account for most of the sales, and according to Sarah Gristwood the attraction of books of this type is that they are "respectable, almost intellectually improving [...] wonderfully exotic and simultaneously comfortingly predictable"; she terms them "guilty pleasures".

    I read historical fiction, and although I haven't thought much about why it appeals to me, I suspect one reason may be to do with the detail - typically there's lots of 'stuff' in these books for the mind's eye to look at and for the imagination to conjure with in the same way that a historic house or stately home is a rich source of interest and perhaps inspiration, its scale and lavishness often a contrast to that of our own more pared-down modern lives.

    I'm interested in sounding out the Cornflower readership on this subject, so if you have a moment, would you be so good as to leave a comment here telling us whether you're a reader of historical fiction or not, and if you are, roughly what proportion of your reading it makes up? You may also care to indicate - if it's not obvious from your name - whether you're male or female! Thankyou.

Arma virumque cano - of arms and the man I sing

 

    As the EIBF closes its Charlotte Square gates this evening for another year, here's a final post on the festival, but not from me this time - the following has been kindly written for us by Mr. C. who attended an event featuring Sir Tommy MacPherson and Richard Bath entitled A True Hero Tells His Tale. Here are his impressions of that memorable hour spent in the company of a local hero whose exploits are the stuff of legend:

    Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, according to Doctor Johnson; but rarely can this feeling of inadequacy have been so amply justified as in the presence of Sir Tommy Macpherson. His autobiography, Behind Enemy Lines, is a wonderful book about an extraordinary man. A boy of 18 on the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined the army and was eventually taken prisoner in North Africa in 1941. After a number of failed escape events he eventually got clean away in 1943, whereupon he was recruited by the Special Operations Executive and dropped in occupied France just before D-Day. Far from being a secret agent, part of his role was to raise morale by being an obvious rallying point for the Resistance, so as he went his merry way blowing up bridges and ambushing the German army he proudly wore his officer's uniform (including, of course, the kilt). On one occasion he learnt that the local garrison was to be relieved, with a gap between the departure of the old troops and the arrival of their replacements. He had two small pennants made, a Union flag and a French tricolor, attached them to the wings of his car and drove into the middle of town, where after destroying the Wehrmacht fuel dump he strolled across the main square to enjoy a glass of wine with the mayor. Later, as the Resistance and the Allies fought to hamper German divisions racing north to attack the Normandy beachhead, he drove unarmed in a Red Cross vehicle through  a force of 23,000  nervous and trigger-happy troops to negotiate the surrender of their commanding general.

    Apart from Sir Tommy Macpherson's exhilarating, terrifying adventures and great personal charisma - he is the most decorated living British soldier holding three Military Crosses, three Croix de Guerre, a Légion d'Honneur and a papal knighthood - it was salutary to recall that the freedoms we enjoy, including the freedom of expression and debate which the Book Festival embodies, rest on the bravery of a generation which is slipping away like the autumn leaves, of brave young men just out of school, who saw their duty and did not shrink from doing it.

Good lines: on Barbara Pym

 

    "Truly, as the novelist Shirley Hazzard has said: 'We may now say Barbara Pym and be understood instantly.' 'To say that a moment is "very Barbara Pym" ', Alexander McCall Smith writes, 'is to say that it is a self-observed, poignant acceptance of the modesty of one's circumstances, of one's peripheral position.'

    "It would seem that we are still glad to turn to the author who advocated small, blameless pleasures, to provide us with good books for a bad day."

From Hazel Holt's introduction to Civil to Strangers, a new edition containing that early novel as well as three novellas and Barbara Pym's only written comment on her writing career, Finding a Voice, the text of a radio talk broadcast in 1978.

Have you read ... Norah Lofts?

    I got an email today from The History Press to tell me that now available in e-book form as well as in paperback are several historical novels by Norah Lofts. That name was a whisper from the past as I'm sure my mother had - and most likely still has - several Norah Lofts books, but she's not an author I've ever read, nor even seen mentioned for many a year.

    Keen to know more, I looked her up and discovered that she was certainly prolific, and that her Suffolk Trilogy comprising The Town House, The House at Old Vine and The House at Sunset, first published in the late 1950s and early '60s, follows the history of a specific house and those who lived in it. According to this site, on which you can see a picture of the house which is believed to have been the inspiration for the books, these are meticulously researched historical romances beginning in the late fourteenth century and ending in the mid-twentieth, but click here and you can read a very comprehensive article about them.

    So, have you read Norah Lofts?

Canonical

    I mentioned Canongate Books' pop-up shop last night, and part of the shop's purpose is to launch The Canons, a collection of twelve classic titles from the backlist which have been given a fresh design and new introductions.

    Two of the books particularly caught my eye, firstly The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane (author of the marvellous The Wild Places - post on it here) who says, "Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most of them focus on the goal of the summit. Nan Shepherd's aimless, sensual exploration of the Cairngorms is bracingly different."

    Originally published in 1977 more than forty years after it was written, this book describes in "intense, poetic prose" the landscape Nan Shepherd knew so well and whose "essential nature" she sought to capture in words.

    The People of the Sea: Celtic Tales of the Seal-Folk by David Thomson is introduced by Seamus Heaney, and he remarks "Readers will be carried away on successive waves of pleasure ... these stories have an irresistible holistic beauty".

    In the late 1940s, David Thomson, whose Woodbrook you may know, "explored the western fringe of Europe from the Shetland Islands to the coast of Kerry" and came "only just in time to hear the last remnants of pre-Christian culture". He was in search of the legends of the selchies or selkies, creatures who transform themselves from seals into humans, and in this collection of Celtic myth and folklore, he tells the stories he was told there.

    I've been browsing through both books today, and passages in each have grabbed me and made me want to go on reading; for now that pleasure will have to wait.

A held breath

 

    If every first novel I read was as accomplished as this one is, it would say much for the future of publishing. The Song of Achilles is by Madeline Miller, a classicist who is also trained in drama, particularly in the adaptation of classical tales for a modern audience, and her background shows in her writing. Here is someone with a complete grasp of her material, but crucially that's teamed with the ability to present it in such a way that the reader is held in awe and admiration. It's a book of clean lines, spaciousness, an airy quality which forms a compelling contrast to the strong characters and dramatic events it portrays. This deft pairing of subject and craftsmanship is enormously impressive, and makes the book stand out as something original and fresh and beautiful (you won't be surprised to hear it's on my 'best of the year' list).

    It's the story of Patroclus, exiled to Phthia and the court of King Peleus and his son Achilles. This awkward boy is befriended by Achilles and they become steadfast, constant companions, sent to the mountain home of the centaur Chiron to be tutored in the arts of war and medicine. When Helen of Sparta is abducted by Paris, son of Priam of Troy, the warriors of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy, and the two young men leave their peaceful life to take up arms. While Achilles has been trained for the battlefield, it's as a healer that Patroclus comes into his own, the long years of war set to test them both and reveal their fates.

    A tender love story, a book not without humour, a moving re-telling of an archetypal tale, there is a scene in which Achilles' mother, the cruel, possessive sea goddess Thetis, appears to Patroclus in the early morning on the mountain Pelion: "The strangeness began as a prickling of my skin. First the quail went silent, then the dove. The leaves stilled, and the breeze died, and no animals moved in the brush. There was a quality to the silence like a held breath. Like the rabbit beneath the hawk's shadow ..."; the book itself has that feeling of stillness, imminence, foreboding. If this were a painting it would be an expanse of calm white grounding areas of intense, vivid colour, its simplicity drawing the eye, the skill of its making a magnetic charge; as a book, it's one that cannot be put down, its imaginative power lingering long.

Literary pin-ups

 

    After Postcards From Penguin and Postcards from Puffin - iconic book jackets, 100 to a box (pictures here and here), coming soon is Postcards from Penguin Modern Classics: One Hundred Writers in a Box. Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Modern Classics imprint, this collection includes photographic portraits of writers such as Camus, Steinbeck, Nabokov and Waugh (and, I should think, some of this lot - scroll down to the slideshow).

Getting ahead of ourselves

 

    As if I - and most of you - didn't have more than enough to read, I still keep an eye on books which are in the pipeline, and though they may not be out for some time, I add them to my wish list and look forward to their eventual arrival. 

    Due for publication next May is the detective novel Sidney Chambers And The Shadow of Death, the first of a series of six Grantchester Mysteries written by James Runcie (who is, of course, the son of the late Lord Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury), featuring a clerical sleuth, Canon Sidney Chambers, and his friend Inspector Keating. Isn't that a black Labrador on the cover? This looks like a book for me!

L'écrivain

 

    One of the most impressive books I read in 2009 was Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel (if you haven't read it and want to know more, there's a post on it here). When I saw that the author was coming to Edinburgh to talk at the Book Festival about his 2005 novel Monsieur Linh and His Child, published in English this year, I was very keen to hear him and to learn something of what lies behind his work. A professor at the University of Nancy (he told us that the somewhat sniffy attitude of his colleagues to his successful writing career - they believe that "the best authors are the dead authors" - had led him to move from teaching literature to teaching film studies!) he has written a film script, a play and a novel in the last year alone. In conversation with James Runcie*, he spoke mainly in French with an interpreter there to translate, but what a pleasure he was to listen to.

    Philippe Claudel read the opening pages of Monsieur Linh and His Child, a book which his interviewer described as "full of resonance and with a fantastic twist", its themes loneliness, mourning, and the redeeming power of love and friendship. Straightaway it was obvious that the language is very simple and pared down, but very powerful; ecomonical in all things, the novel has only three characters, an unnamed location, and is in effect "a closed universe". Asked whether he "writes long and then reduces down", Philippe Claudel mentioned his novel Grey Souls, a book brimming with characters and plot, after which Monsieur Linh was for him an exercise in refining, like a craftsman chiselling away at a piece of sculpture to reach a stark minimum. The other challenge with this book, as with his earlier novels, was to use beautiful language to describe dreadful events or to express the emotions they engender, but ironically here the book also shows how useless language per se ultimately is as the two main characters, Monsieur Linh and Monsieur Bark, do not share a common tongue but nevertheless forge a strong bond without speech.

    James Runcie asked whether there was a moral purpose behind his writing - the expression of hope and grace as well as suffering; is he, then, an optimistic writer? Philippe Claudel said his work was not a form of preaching, but humanity is at the heart of what he does, and despite portraying characters injured by life, compassion and redemption figure too. In a novel where the protagonists are dispossessed, marginalised people, thrown up by turbulent events like so much flotsam and jetsam on the shore, he shows how a deep and tender friendship can be a source of healing.   

 

*For a glimpse of James Runcie's work click here.

Life and times

    I've hot-footed it back from Charlotte Square to bring you news of one of this morning's Book Festival events: Alexandra Harris, author of the marvellously eclectic and stimulating Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, and Kathleen Jones whose biography Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller draws on previously unseen material to shed new light on her subject's short life.

    In her introduction to the speakers, Claire Armitstead commented that both their books are engaging and structurally unusual, and said that she had first read Romantic Moderns (which won the Guardian First Book Award last year) in manuscript and found that "it zinged out of the box in all sorts of ways"!

    Alexandra Harris then gave us a whistle-stop tour through her book which, though it is aimed at the non-specialist reader, grew out of a doctorate, but in essence harks back to her childhood when she spent time discovering small English towns and the countryside around her, and later when she began to be drawn to people who responded imaginatively to places close to home, people such as Virginia Woolf, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash. Studying art and literature at university, she found that this 'homeliness' or 'ordinariness' was largely a neglected field, but her researches in the more remote and dusty corners of the Courtauld Library yielded many good things. There isn't space here to go into everything Alexandra had to say - her field encompasses such diverse subjects as Powell and Pressburger films, garden design, food, art, architecture and literature of the period, but click here for more on her book, and better still, read it - the vivacity and enthusiasm she exudes in person do come across on the page!

    On then to Kathleen Jones who, with reference to Michael Holroyd's recent remarks on the death of literary biography, said her aim was to write a biography that was "vivid and alive and read as a novel". She chose a somewhat experimental form for her book, using the present tense for parts of it, avoiding the all-knowing authorial voice, and describing a life lived moment by moment, its subject's decisions seen in the light of the knowledge she had at the time. With access to huge amounts of family material which had never before been made available to biographers (the discovery of this "treasure trove" was one of the most exciting moments of her life, she said), Kathleen has been able to re-define Katherine Mansfield, finding the truth hidden behind the myth, that myth created largely by Mansfield's husband John Middleton Murry who controlled publication of her work and effectively constructed the Katherine Mansfield we know today.    

    Two fascinating speakers and much food for thought as well as ideas for further reading - an excellent event enjoyed by a very appreciative audience.

Britain's oldest literary prize

 

    Based at the University of Edinburgh, administered by the senior staff in the department of English assisted by a reading panel of postgraduate students, the James Tait Black prizes are the oldest literary prizes in Britain. They date from 1919 when they were founded by Mrs. Janet Coutts Black in memory of her husband James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house A&C Black Ltd, and since 2007 they have been awarded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I was at this evening's prize event, chaired by Sally Magnusson who remarked on the "exhilarating summer's reading" she's had in preparation for tonight.

    On the shortlist for the fiction prize were:

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

La Rochelle by Michael Nath

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

and for the biography prize:

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin

A Life in Pictures by Alasdair Gray

E. M. Forster: A New Life by Wendy Moffat

Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling

    And the winners were - Tatjana Soli for The Lotus Eaters, a novel about the Vietnam war from the point of view of a female photographer, which "reads cinematically and shows the war from the inside", and Hilary Spurling (who also today got a new grandchild!) for Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China, described by Sally Magnusson as "unputdownable".

Have you read ... Barry Unsworth?

   

    "The historical novel should do three things: make tangible the period in question; reflect it into the modern world; and, like all novels, entertain. Barry Unsworth is a master of all three concerns." TLS

    Long on my wishlist, a Barry Unsworth novel is at last on my desk with the arrival of his new book The Quality of Mercy. This begins in the immediate aftermath of the events of his Booker prize-winning Sacred Hunger, and opens in the spring of 1767 where it follows two of the main characters from the earlier book, Sullivan, an Irish fiddler, and Erasmus Kemp, the son of a disgraced Liverpool slave-ship owner.

    Sullivan has absconded, escaping trial for mutiny and piracy while on Kemp's ship, and is on his way to the village of Thorpe in the East Durham coalfields, there to visit the family of Billy Blair, a dead former shipmate, and tell them how he met his end. Kemp, meanwhile, wants to spend some of his sugar and slavery fortune investing in coal-mining and steel; tipped off about an investment opportunity in East Durham, he, too, makes his way to Thorpe...

    I've heard such praise for Barry Unsworth's work that I'm greatly looking forward to becoming acquainted with it at last. Have you read him?

Ghostly tales

 

    At the Book Festival today I heard John Harding and Michelle Paver talk about the art of writing ghost stories, John with reference to his novel Florence and Giles (which on the strength of the event I'm going to read forthwith), and Michelle, of course, to her superb Dark Matter which was a huge hit with me last year.

    A few words first on what lay behind the books, and while John Harding admitted that his motivation was based on the perceived need for branding and ease of marketing (if you're known as a writer of a particular type of books, it's helpful to continue in the same vein), Michelle Paver said she loved reading ghost stories and just decided to write one, not before, though, writing her tenets on suitably ghostly mauve paper!

    On now to influences, and for John, the seeds of his book were sown in childhood with his reading of Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden - large, spooky houses, primeval fears, unseen presences, all informed his own writing. At 21 he read Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, and it remains the most terrifying story for him, and in Florence and Giles he uses a similar set-up but tells the tale from the children's point of view to create not a sequel or a pastiche, but a gothic thriller all its own. Michelle acknowledged her debt to M.R. James whose ghost stories she studied at a forensic level of detail. Both writers look for a realistic and highly atmospheric setting, characters about whom one cares, and a strong emotional response to the writing; what they seek in others' work they give in their own.

    Michelle had travelled extensively in the Arctic, and seeing the long-abandoned mining communities and trappers' huts in Spitzbergen/Svalbard and experiencing the shortening days dwindling to continuous darkness, she knew she had her setting for Dark Matter, which was, she said, "a very intense write". Her period is the 1930s, chosen carefully for various reasons including the lack or limitations of communications technology: isolation could be absolute. John, too, chose a time and place - a secluded mansion in New England in 1891 - in which one could be cut off and frighteningly alone. Both writers' background reading sounded impressively comprehensive.

    While Michelle read up on the slang of her period with particular references to language as a marker of social class, John invented words and a distinctive way of speaking for his 12-year-old character Florence. Denied an education by a guardian who believes girls don't require one, Florence has taught herself to read, and like Shakespeare, she coins words as she needs them, switching nouns and verbs, developing a type of verbal shorthand in which to express herself. John read an illustrative passage and left the audience wanting more (you'll get a taste of it in the short video here); indeed, he said that he found it hard to leave Florence's voice behind when he had finished the book and he is considering a follow-up.

    In a genre characterised by certain conventions and a subtle, suggestive way with creeping dread, Michelle recommended Edith Wharton (for example The Demanding Dead) and The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, in addition to M.R. James, for those looking for further reading, but I'd say try Michelle's and John's books themselves because given the fascinating discussion I heard them in today, where these writers are concerned it's not just the ghost story that is in good hands.

Edited to add: with reference to my comment below, click here for an article by Susan Hill on what makes a good ghost story.

Cast your vote

 

    It may be a little early in the morning for this, but here's a point to ponder: can one legitimately - that is reasonably or logically, rather than in the more strict sense of lawfully - vote for a book in a 'best of' poll if one has not read everything on the list in question?

    Don't worry, you needn't answer, but if you're not tied up and bound by that knotty moral problem, you may care to cast a vote in the TV Book Club 'best of series' poll, and possibly win £100 worth of book tokens - full details here.

    Of the books on that list, I've read only Deborah Lawrenson's The Lantern, which, as you'll see here, I loved (and yes, I have voted for it!).

A romantic writer

 

     My first Edinburgh International Book Festival event of 2011 was one so richly enjoyable that it will be hard to surpass. Salley Vickers was in conversation with James Runcie, and that was such a happy combination, a perfect pairing of subject and interlocutor, that an hour sped by and all present would have gladly stayed for more. At the end, James Runcie likened the event to a car journey with a very good friend which has as its destination a place with the most perfect view. Well put, I think.

    I have twelve pages of notes from the discussion which began with reference to Salley Vickers' most recent book, the short story collection Aphrodite's Hat (now in paperback - post on it here), but which ranged widely from the significance of art and theatre to her writing to the danger of self-exposure inherent in loving and being loved. The 'buried' life, the hidden life and its underlying mystery, the life as yet unlived, these are themes she returns to and ones to which her background as a psychoanalyst gives her particular insight, and which contribute to her being, in James Runcie's words, "a curious, sympathetic, wise writer".

    On the subject of modern fiction, when a member of the audience commented that she is very good at endings, Salley Vickers replied that it takes courage to leave the characters and end the book, that there is a sense of mourning - both for reader and writer - when the world in which one has been living is finally left, and in her opinion many modern novels have unsuccessful endings, but she agrees that she leaves the reader with a feeling of hope, and notes - generally - a prejudice against optimism in fiction today. She describes herself as a romantic writer in the tradition of Keats, not Cartland, and is avowedly affirmative about the human heart, the hopeful spirit and the positive sides of life.

    As to the business of writing itself, she says that if you write against your gender, you can take more risks and harness your imagination and unconscious rather than your experience. For this reason, she loves to write from a male point of view, and cited Henry James and Anthony Trollope as being marvellous when writing about women, and George Eliot as being particularly good on men. Her own writing is organic, unplanned; she says Miss Garnet's Angel began life as a short story but in effect "wrote itself", and that her novels begin with a voice which attracts or repels other voices, and come to "a pre-destined ending spun out of the nature of the characters"; as with a good dinner party, things naturally unfold.

    Mr. C., who hadn't read any Salley Vickers at all, came to the event with me. He left quite full of it, stimulated and enthusiastic, so glad that I had persuaded him to join me. Testament to the impression made, he is now reading Aphrodite's Hat.       

Good lines: rich neologisms and defamatory epithets

 

    "I haven't read the Urquhart translation [of Rabelais]," said Maria. "I stick to the French."

    "But what you are missing! A great monument of scholarship and seventeenth-century English! And what rich neologisms! Slabberdegullion druggels, lubbardly louts, blockish grutnols, doddipol joltheads, lobdotterels, codshead loobies, ninny-hammer flycatchers, and other such like defamatory epithets! How on earth do we get along without them?"

    How indeed?

From The Rebel Angels, part one of The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies.

Back in print!

 

    It would be nice to think that Penguin had read this post of mine and taken my hint there, but I doubt that's the case! Whatever the prompting behind it, I'm so glad to see that they have now brought back into print Robertson Davies' wonderful novel The Cunning Man. To find out more about the book click here, and to read our thoughts on his Fifth Business have a look here. I have just begun the first part of Davies' The Cornish Trilogy, and it's a pleasure to hear that distinctive authorial voice again.

Words and pictures

    If you're a fan of Alexander McCall Smith's novels, particularly the 44, Scotland Street, Corduroy Mansions and von Igelfeld series, you'll be very familiar with the work of the books' illustrator Iain McIntosh. I love the way his beautifully simple, characterful pictures match the text, pointing up a significant moment, drawing out a detail, furthering the whimsy just a bit, so I've chosen an example from the latest Scotland Street volume, Bertie Plays The Blues, just for the fun of showing it.

        Struggling with their newborn triplets, art gallery owner Matthew and his wife Elspeth find themselves in need of domestic help, and a local agency's name causes Elspeth to remark, "Have you noticed how everybody calls themselves solutions? There are kitchen solutions, office solutions, travel solutions and so on. Lots of solutions."

    'She was right, thought Matthew. Perhaps his gallery could be called Art Solutions or even Wall Solutions. One did not associate solutions with the art world, but he saw no reason why one should not. Perhaps when they had decided to paint the Sistine Chapel roof they had called up Ceiling Solutions, or Renaissance Solutions. He allowed his thoughts to drift for a moment. We've got this ceiling, you see, and we were wondering ... Could you give us a quote?'

                                                    ~~~~~

 

    I'm currently reading the second of Jane Duncan's My Friends novels to be re-issued by Millrace Books. A few months ago I greatly enjoyed My Friends the Miss Boyds and found it a distinctive and refreshing book (there's a post on it here), so I'm delighted to now have My Friend Monica which encompasses a later period in Janet Sandison's life, a wartime friendship and Janet's marriage to Twice.

    I mention this in a post to do with illustration as Millrace have again used a striking design by Kate Baylay for the jacket. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the future.

Writers' tools

    Novelist Emma Darwin, author of The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy, has posted what looks to my uninitiated eye to be a very useful piece on the mechanics of structuring your novel, and she's even given a link there to a generic novel planning grid.

    On this general topic, I know that a lot of Cornflower Books readers do write, so perhaps the odd post with similar useful links to tips and books and so on might be helpful.