Cornflower Books

A few things

    - Understatement of the day: an email to me beginning, "Dear customer, as you've shown an interest in books ..."

    - Most delayed book of the day: The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kaufman ("a weird and wonderful modern fable" about which I've read many good things) was sent to me by the publisher back in July and has just arrived having been languishing in a neighbour's house for four months!

    - Request of the day: a student reading for an MSc in Publishing at Edinburgh Napier University has asked whether anyone who is a member of a book group (it doesn't have to be our one) would care to answer a few questions on the kind of books they like reading, what attracts them to a book, etc., for a project she is doing. If you'd like to take part in that short survey, please email me in the first instance (click on the link under 'About' in the right-hand sidebar and mark your message 'Publishing Survey') and I'll put you in touch.

    - Note of the day: re. the book group, and thanks to MelD for highlighting this point in her comment, I do make an effort to ensure that books chosen for the group are available free, i.e. in libraries. Every month I check the catalogues of several library areas in Britain to make certain that my chosen title is there and thus in circulation generally, I always dismiss books which are obscure or fairly recently published and thus unlikely to have percolated through the library system, and without beginning to search abroad (because that would be never-ending) do my best to pick something that 'everyone' can get hold of. I also always direct readers to The Book Depository, too, because while of course their books aren't free, they are discounted and delivery (both within the UK and internationally) is free, so if your local shop or library doesn't have the title in question, it is obtainable easily and at reasonable cost no matter where in the world you are. More than that I cannot do.

    - Satisfied customer of the day: my friend Sophie to whom I passed my copy of Ann Patchett's State of Wonder. She has just finished it and is "speechless"; "what an extraordinary story", she says. I knew she'd like it!

    - 'I was there' moment of the day: in the paper this morning is an obituary of Ramaz Chkhikvadze who "caused a sensation" when he appeared as Richard III at the Edinburgh Festival, the performance (without subtitles) given entirely in Georgian. I was there, and it was astonishing - although I was pretty young at the time, I can still recall it and the actor's amazing presence. It remains the most memorable theatrical experience I've ever had.

Cornflower Book Group - January 2012

 

    Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Lady Audley's Secret has never been out of print since its publication in 1862 and has been described by the critic John Sutherland as "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels". 

    Thanks to Oxford University Press I have an advance copy of their new edition which will be out in early January, and from which the blurb is as follows:

"When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley's past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael's nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems [shades of My Cousin Rachel?]. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert's darkest suspicions really be true?"

    I thought this book sounded just the thing for a leisurely read by the fireside over Christmas and into the New Year, and to get us into the spirit of it straightaway I've posted the opening passage here. Being a classic which is available in many editions, copies should be easily obtainable in libraries, shops and online (including through Amazon US and with free international delivery from The Book Depository), while the e-book version is free. If I set the discussion date as Saturday, 21st. January, that will give us more than eight weeks to get hold of it and take our time over it it, so please do join in with the group read, whether you're a first-timer or a regular, as the more, the merrier!

How to find your next great read

   Listen to today's edition of The Book Café on BBC Radio Scotland - available on iPlayer and as a podcast - and see what the show's guests (including me!) had to say.

   Speaking of great reads, come back later for news of a book which I hope will be a great group read ...

Cornflower Book Group - The Secret History

 

    Donna Tartt's The Secret History is the Cornflower Book Group's 46th. book, and for me, one of the best. It's a first novel, but so accomplished that it could easily be taken for the work of an experienced practitioner; that said, I felt it could have done with pruning (there were too many scenes which were spiral-repeats of earlier ones, I thought) and I wasn't convinced that a good enough case was made for the first death - the reliance on absence of sentience and a sufficiently altered mental state due to Dionysiac ritual seemed underdeveloped and thus weak - or for the all-pervading influence and significance of the benevolent, cultivated Julian Morrow, facts which were stated but not illlustrated as such. But then, read the book in the light of its two epigraphs (lines from Nietzsche and Plato), allow yourself to be drawn in, and quibbles apart, it does a fine job of interpreting those themes in fictional form and carrying the reader through to the end.

    I found much to admire in the novel. The setting, the relatively closed community of Hampden College and within that the small group of students, set apart by their manner, their subject of study, their whole modus vivendi. Richard is the outsider, the balancing force; he admires the others, and displaced as he is, craves membership of their élite clique - he wants to belong. For their part, the others find Richard refreshing, though that stems from an affected curiosity, and a staged ignorance of the world outside their own, but then he becomes useful to them. I found the individual characters well drawn and their complexity original and strangely compelling; their whole milieu and the academic discipline to which they were dedicated gave a richness to the book which was powerful in both a structural and a more superficial sense. The narrative drive was strong, the pull of the plot in the "hermetic, overheated atmosphere", the external drama and the internal struggles of conscience over self-preservation, too, and all this made for a dark, clever book, one of flair and real technical skill.

    For those who had read the book before and were re-reading it for the group, how did you find it second time round? If you were coming to it, as I was, for the first time, what did you make of it? Did you find the characters' amorality (and snobbery) off-putting, or was their predicament so well-constructed that, in the spirit of the book's events, there was no other plausible way for them to act? Was Richard's absorption by the group probable or likely? Have you read Donna Tartt's second book The Little Friend, and if so, how does it compare to her first, and if you haven't read it, would you be inclined to do so now? (I certainly would).         

Edited to add: The Secret History cake is here.       

                                           ~~~~~

By the way, and on a purely personal note, this is Cornflower Books' 1,000th. post. Thankyou for sticking with me thus far.

Who do you think they are? - the answers

    Well done to everyone who correctly identified some of the authors the other day, but four remained nameless. Here they all are then, from top to bottom, left to right:

Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, John Steinbeck (author of a memorable CBG book)

Saki, Raymond Chandler & cat, Rudyard Kipling

Kahlil Gibran (so now you know what the author of The Prophet looked like!), Evelyn Waugh (we've read him, too), R.K. Narayan (another CBG author).

Words and more words - and can you help?

 

    My cover picture there of Mark Forsyth's book The Etymologicon isn't as clear as it might be, but the subtitle says it all: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, and what lover of words could resist that?

    Mark is the author of The Inky Fool blog, and in the book he looks at etymology in an associative way, taking a word full circle through inter-connected chapters, linking terms through their original or common usage, veering off at tangents, and all in a dizzyingly stimulating manner! I've been dipping into the book (which begins, incidentally, with 'book' - though not in the sense you might think - and eventually returns there, some 233 pages later) and finding it as addictive as does Matthew Parris, and I foresee that the quiz questions at the back will be just the thing for the post-Christmas lunch lull, but I'm finding it funny and fascinating and full of facts that take you off along highways and byeways. Here are a few examples:

    Why do guns (Mons Meg, Brown Bess, etc.) have girls' names? As Mark Forsyth explains, 'gun' is itself a girl's name. And what has 'gun' to do with the invention of bluetooth technology? You'll have to read the book to find out!

    Did you know that if you trample, tootle, wrestle or fizzle, you are being frequentative (see also gruntled/disgruntled).

    What is the origin of the phrase 'before you can say Jack Robinson'?

Lots of fun and interest, but one thing I would have liked is an index, both for general use and for returning to specific passages - I happened upon a reference to James Murray the founding editor of the OED, and cannot now find the section, but to digress a moment on that subject, may I strongly recommend Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary by K.M. Elisabeth Murray.

 

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    Still on the subject of words and expressions, the following question has come in from Lesley, and as it's not one that I can answer I hope you may be able to do so:

"Late in Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, R.H. Dana reports on a conversation among some sailors, and one sailor says that he came home and found his wife gone. He says she was 'off, like Bob's horse, with nobody to pay the reckoning'."

Where does that phrase come from? With what is it associated? Has it anything to do with 'Bob's yer uncle'? Lesley says that as far as she knows, the latter didn't gain currency until several years after Dana's book was published, and she also mentions that 'off like Bob's horse ...' turns up in a 1912 novel by Mary Rogers Bangs, but again there's no clue as to its origin or derivation.

    Can you help?

Book of the day - a love letter to the novel

 

        "A hymn to fine literature."

        " ... a declaration of love for the art of the novel and its effects on human history."

        "An Agatha Christie-style mystery bolstered by a love story worthy of Madame de la Fayette."

Reviewers' comments on A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé drew me to the book. Due out in the UK in early January, it's a literary thriller, and here's the gist:

"Ivan, a one-time world traveller, and Francesca, a ravishing Italian heiress, are the owners of a bookstore that is anything but ordinary. Rebelling against the business of bestsellers and in search of an ideal place for their literary dreams to come true, Ivan and Francesca open a store where their passion for literature is given free rein. Tucked away in a corner of Paris, the bookshop offers its clientele a selection of literary masterpieces chosen by a top-secret committee of like-minded connoisseurs. To the owners' amazement, after only a few months, the little dream store proves a success. And that is precisely when their troubles begin. At first, both owners shrug off the anonymous threats that come their way and the venomous comments concerning their store circulating on the internet, but when members of the supposedly secret committee are attacked, they decide to call the police. One by one, the pieces of this puzzle fall ominously into place as it becomes increasingly evident that Ivan and Francesca's dreams will be answered with envy and violence."

Lifting the curtain - how a novelist presents the past

 

    Back in September I was asked to write a profile of novelist Sara Sheridan for Solander, the magazine of The Historical Novel Society, and despite the fact that Sara was getting married later in the week we were due to meet and had a thousand things to see to before the big day, she very kindly gave me her time and we had an extremely stimulating conversation about her work. With the permission of the editor, and as it has now been published, here is that profile:

 

    To spend an hour or two in the company of Sara Sheridan is, as Emily Dickinson has it, to “dwell in possibility”. Such is her energy and enthusiasm for her work as a novelist, her knowledge of history, and her clear vision of the projects she has in prospect, that hearing her talk is enough to inspire the listener and excite keen anticipation for her forthcoming books.

    Her two historical novels published to date are the tip of the iceberg of her research, and have themselves led her down other highways and byways to ideas and subjects for several more books, all either at the planning stage or with the writing well in hand. But as we shall see, this is no dilettante-ish dipping in and out of different centuries or toying with unconnected themes; instead, Sara has a sharp focus as to the time period with which she wants to work and the windows through which she gives her readers a view of the past.

    The Secret Mandarin (2009) and Secret of the Sands (2010) represent years of rigorous research in archives both physical and digital, general and specialist, but Sara’s gift is to take all that factual material and, like a master craftsman building a wall without mortar, judge by its shape and heft – its practical use or dramatic import - where each piece best fits into the overall construction of the novel. As a result, her books are striking for the strong foundational effect of their historical detail coupled with the soaring superstructure of character and plot which Sara achieves through her skillful handling of narrative drive.  

    ‘Effortless’ as this may sound, Sara learned her trade by trial and error, putting in the writing miles, although she didn’t set out to become an author. After a degree in English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and jobs which were never going to turn into careers, Sara was looking for a new direction when a friend suggested she write a novel. For this avid reader who had always loved books, it sounded like a good  - if risky - path to follow, the way marked clearly enough that she bravely gave up her then job and income and decided to devote a year to the project. The result of that dedication and self-discipline was Truth or Dare (1998), a contemporary novel which takes Northern Ireland’s Troubles as its setting. Sara’s bold move was vindicated firstly when she sold the book very quickly, and then when it reached the UK Top 50, was shortlisted for a Saltire Award and was voted into the Top 100 Scottish Books: a career was launched.

    Her next book, Ma Polinski's Pockets (1999) also looked to the influence of the past on the present, being the story of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor whose mother’s ghost comes to haunt her. After her third book The Pleasure Express (2000) set in Hong Kong at the time of the handover, but like her earlier ones, drawing on an important and extensive historical background, Sara turned her attention to full-scale historical research, and though the fruit of that was some time in ripening, The Secret Mandarin, written in between other commercial projects, was worth the wait. It’s the story of the botanist and plant hunter Robert Fortune and specifically of his undercover journey through China in 1843, but it’s told from the point of view of Robert’s sister-in-law, Mary Penney, a former actress who has brought disgrace on the family by having an illegitimate child, and who is banished from London by the Fortunes in the hope that her exile will diminish the taint of scandal. When events take an unforeseen turn, Mary ends up accompanying her brother-in-law on his travels to collect plants and provide occupying British forces with intelligence, and the two undertake a long and arduous journey which will have surprising consequences.

    While Robert Fortune’s mission to find tea plants - Camellia sinensis – and transport them from China to India for the Honourable East India Company is a matter of fact, his headstrong relation Mary is a construct of fiction. Sara cites Truman Capote’s coining ‘faction’ – a mixture of reality and fiction – in justification, and she freely admits that as a novelist she puts the needs of a good story first. “History is about emotion,” she says, “about using your imagination and filling in the gaps in an authentic way; but it’s much more flexible, more open to interpretation and subject to bias than we might initially think.”  She’s out to tell a tale and to entertain, “lifting the curtain”, as she puts it, on what lives were like, and using a fictitious character “to filter [a real one] and make him palatable”. Sara is firmly of the opinion that writing the story with Fortune as its main protagonist would not have been nearly as successful –  putting Mary at its heart, giving it her voice, makes the book a compulsive read, for she is an engaging character and her plight a very real and believable one.

    In a note at the end of Secret of the Sands, Sara quotes Edith Wharton: “Slavish accuracy must necessarily reduce the novel to a piece of archaeological pedantry instead of a living image of the times”, but there is nothing dry and dusty about this book – other than the Arabian desert in which it is set – instead, it’s a rich and vibrant story where again a strong factual basis has been imaginatively and very successfully interpreted so that, like The Secret Mandarin, it’s an excellent piece of escapist fiction. Set in 1833, it follows a real figure, Lieutenant James Wellsted, whose posting with the British Navy to survey the coastline of the Arabian peninsula is, he hopes, a route to fame and fortune. As he submits an account of his travels to publisher John Murray in London, so events divert him from his planned course and he is sent into the interior on a mission to rescue two brother officers.

    While back in Britain slavery has been abolished, here in Oman it is big business, and by a strange twist of fate, Wellsted finds himself the protector of Zena, an Abyssinian slave girl, and the travelling companion of the two ruthless men who captured her. What follows will be a test of loyalty, allegiance and ingenuity, and as in Sara’s previous novel, an adventure and romance played out in the harshest of conditions.

    What draws the reader in is the book’s easy, unselfconscious style which incorporates that necessary mass of detail to ground every fact and establish completely plausible situations or to provide characters’ motivation, so it is a pleasingly complete book and a very good story indeed.

    Both books were “research heavy”, with Sara’s passion for history – inspired by her school history teacher whom she still talks to from time to time over a cup of tea – fuelling her need to know all the facts, even though many points included in scenes as she writes them will later be fined down or done away with entirely in subsequent drafts. Political detail in particular may well be telescoped, she says, as it is the characters’ emotional ‘temperature’ and their predicaments about which the reader really cares, and the conditions and minutiae of their daily lives about which we want to know.

    As to period, Sara is interested in the 1830s and ‘40s, partly because of the very sketchiness of resource material then. This was a time before the census as we know it, before photographs as such, pre-birth certificates, but archives yield facts which if carefully followed can lead to the fleshing out of a personality or the authentic reconstruction of an event, while the leeway afforded by the comparative absence of hard information allows the novelist to bring their own style and means of expression to something which did actually exist. One senses that for Sara the thrill of discovery is a major attraction of the historical novelist’s job, and the possibilities which open up to her from these finds are the source of that infectious energy and enthusiasm which she exudes.

    “A writer’s job is to inspire people”, Sara says with conviction, and her books bear that out. Her handling of the dramatic form, of the business of story-telling, is such that she draws her readers in and holds them with her, capturing their imagination, and setting her books in the context of the British Empire – from the late Georgian/early Victorian period which saw the beginning of the empire and which she has used for The Secret Mandarin and Secret of the Sands to the 1950s and empire’s end in which she has set her next book, shows her particular focus and some of the issues on which she has a firm grasp; in this way, form and function combine to make a strong end product.

    That forthcoming book, due out in June 2012, is Brighton Belle, the first in an evocative crime series set in the south coast town of Brighton in the 1950s and featuring Mirabelle Bevan, an ex-secret service employee who draws upon her wartime surveillance skills to uncover a major money-laundering scam involving Nazi gold. “Spilling the beans versus keeping them tightly canned!”, is how Sara describes the creative tension behind it. Then from austerity Britain, Sara will move back in time to Brazil and London in the 1820s, and beans of a different kind, with a novel about the chocolate industry deliciously entitled The Melting Point. Telling the story of how cocoa beans went from South America to Africa and thence to England, this book will feature Maria Graham or Callcott (1785-1842), travel writer and biographer of Poussin, another author published by the house of John Murray whose archive, in the care of the National Library of Scotland in Sara’s native Edinburgh, has proved a rich seam to be mined.

    From the artefacts brought home by her antique dealer father when she was a child, to a chance mention of a dusty document found by an archivist today, it is these links to the past and their relationships to real people which inspire Sara and inform her writing, writing often done, she reveals, in bed with her laptop! To put herself in the right cultural environment for her work she will often read the fiction of her characters’ period, the novels they themselves might have had on their shelves, and as for her off-duty reading, she has the 1920s Daisy Dalrymple mysteries by Carola Dunn currently on the go, and credits T.C. Boyle’s Water Music for inspiring her to try her hand at historical fiction.

    Sara’s involvement in numerous projects beyond her writing (she sits on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland, for example) means that as in that speculative early year, she has to be disciplined about making careful use of her time, but whatever her working methods, it’s her enthusiasm for her subject-matter and for the way in which she can lift that curtain to reveal the past and its people that spurs her on to do what she does, and that’s what her readers find so irresistible.

Who do you think they are?

    We've had the splendidly hirsute Robertson Davies, and a selection of the ladies, but here are a few more portraits from One Hundred Writers in One Box: Postcards from Penguin Modern Classics, some well-kent faces, others less familiar. Can you name them?

(Dark Puss, is that you there in the middle?).

Lightbulb moment no. 2 - on editions

    Today must be my day for 'hang on a minute!' moments, as something which is likely very obvious and widely known (certainly within the publishing world) has only just occurred to me, so apologies if I'm being dim, or realisation is dawning with the slowness of an energy-saving bulb of the most feeble kind, but I wanted to check a point:

    We are all familiar with the situation where a novel that is published in both Britain and the U.S., say, has different covers and sometimes even different titles in the two countries, but what of the text itself? Surely it must occur that the British editor and the American editor (I'm talking about the case where two quite separate publishers have bought the book) suggest or require different changes and thus their edits may result in a different text - perhaps even substantially so. Is this the case, or is there some quirk of the publishing process - some rights convention by which publication in any country after the first one requires the 'original' text to be adopted - which thus avoids potential discrepancies? Someone please enlighten me.

                                                ~~~~~

(Lightbulb moment no. 1 is of equal relevance to this site).

Book of the day - and more on the way

   

    Today's arrival - though it's not due out until early February - is The Whores' Asylum by Katy Darby, "high drama and thrilling mystery mix in [this novel], a fantastically atmospheric and enjoyable gothic romp for fans of Sherlock Holmes, Sarah Waters, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell."

    Set in Oxford's seedy Jericho in 1887, it concerns Stephen Chapman, a brilliant young medical student, who is persuaded to volunteer at a shelter devoted to reforming the fallen women of the city. Stephen's closest friend Edward knows what it means to fall in love with the wrong woman, and he fears for Stephen, but not even he can foresee the macabre events which begin to take place around them.

    "I present to the public a story as extraordinary as it is cautionary, as appalling as it is, ultimately, uplifting, having at its heart the primacy of those two noblest of all emotions - Love, and Hope, and their final triumph over Death. The principals are no more, but the story lives on to instruct, affect, and warn all those whom it may touch."

                                                 ~~~~~

    News now of some books to come later in the new year, begining with the much-anticipated sequel to Wolf Hall. As you'll perhaps have heard, Hilary Mantel's plans have changed, and as this article explains, she now has enough material for a trilogy, of which volume II - Bring up the Bodies, concerning Anne Boleyn's downfall - is due in May (if you click on the link there you can sign up to be notified when the book is available).

    All of us who enjoyed Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches (post on it here) will be glad to know that the second book in the All Souls Trilogy will be out in early June. Shadow of Night sees Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont in the London of 1590 discovering that the past may not be a safe haven. "Reclaiming his former identity as poet and spy, Matthew falls back in step with a group of radicals known as the School of Night who share dangerous ideas about God, science, and man."

    Lastly today, Sue Gee's next novel is due out in late June. As yet untitled, it spans almost four decades in the lives of an English family, beginning in 1947 when after fifteen years in India, Will and Flo Sutherland return to England to start a family. "Through the post-war austerity of the fifties, the rebellious liberation of the sixties and the national unrest of the seventies, the Sutherland family tackle and embrace their rapidly changing world."

A few miscellaneous links

 

      I'm catching up after a couple of days away, so here are a few miscellaneous links:

 

  -  Happily, our route down to the Forest of Bowland took us through St. Boswells, so The Mainstreet Trading Company made the perfect place to stop for refreshments and a little light book-buying. I also came away with a Love Your Indie loyalty card to be used in participating bookshops (full details here).

  -  In case you haven't already seen them, here are the shortlists for the 2011 Costa Book Awards.

  -  Although I've yet to read any of her books, I follow the blog of Canadian crime writer Louise Penny, and here's a recent post of hers on the publishing process, a subject I'm always interested in knowing more about.

 -  Jojo Moyes' article on the changing face of children's literature prompted a nostalgic moment over breakfast this morning. I don't have a copy of Moorland Mousie on my shelves, but I do still have all my old Pullein-Thompson, Pat Smythe and Ruby Ferguson books, and some of them were read and enjoyed by my daughters (but not my son - though he is nowadays the only one of the three who rides).    

What hobbits read

    If you've been over to the other site this morning you'll have seen that I'm not at home. I'm in the area of northern England believed to be Tolkien's inspiration for The Shire, and I can certainly attest to the quality of the food, but what of 'Hobbit reading matter'? Here are the books on my bedroom shelves -

    There's a Dictionary of Medicine, a Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, among others of that ilk, some recent-ish novels,

Who's Who 1957, and various 'dusty' things such as the ones above. For now, I'm sticking with The Secret History (I'm still only half way!).   

In with the bricks

    Reading various interviews with Ann Patchett around the time her latest novel State of Wonder* was published, I noted that she had plans to open a bookshop in her home town, Nashville. Along with her business partner Karen Hayes, a former Random House rep., her idea was for a not-too-big, not-too-small independent shop that would be a focus for the community and sell the books its owners love and want to recommend.

    Parnassus Books is now taking shape, and to help with start-up costs and to build customer loyalty right from the off, they have come up with a scheme by which a 7-tiered founders' club gives members various privileges from single book discounts to a '20% off' shoppping spree, after hours buying and more. All very enterprising, and if I lived anywhere near, I'd join (I have signed up for emails as I'm interested to follow their progress).

    What makes a good bookshop, one that you want to return to again and again? The following are obvious attributes/elements, but not always present, in my experience at least, and are surely all the more crucial in these tough economic times:

- a pleasant place: light and airy, or cosy but well-lit, with places to sit down and space to browse comfortably,

- stock which looks as though it's been carefully chosen by book lovers, rather than lifted from a retail outlet which doesn't purport to be a bookshop per se,

- knowledgeable staff: people who know books and are passionate about them - and are good with customers!

    Optional extras:

- author events,

- book groups,

- coffee shop (like this one, or this).

    Anything else? What, apart from the above, might draw you in to our fantasy bookshop? Financial incentives such as a customer loyalty scheme or privileges like the Parnassus Books founders' ones? Well-chosen non-book items like stationery, 'gifts', homewares, etc.? Art exhibitions or musical evenings? Writers' groups? London's Big Green Bookshop branches out in other innovative ways, too. Food for thought ...

See also: All pace slackened to a page's turn - a post on 18 Bookshops by Anne Scott.

 

*Stop Press! Many thanks to Linda for alerting me to the fact that the Kindle version of State of Wonder is available for today only at the bargain price of £1.29.

The game's afoot ...

   

     Keen as I am to read Anthony Horowitz's new Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk, Mr. C. got to it before me, and rightly so, as he has been an avid and attentive reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work since he was a boy and has a detailed knowledge of the canon. Would the book win his approval? Over now to the man himself to tell us what he made of it:

 

    The immortal Sherlock Holmes was first brought back from the dead by his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who miraculously retrieved the great detective from his plunge into the Reichenbach Falls in response to an outpouring of popular grief. Since then hundreds if not thousands have tried the same trick. He has been portrayed by some wonderful actors (Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, and, most recently, Benedict Cumberbatch). Like Harry Potter, Holmes became a global superstar on a scale which attracted both criminal plagiarism and respectful tributes from his admirers.

    The literary quality of these offerings has been decidedly mixed, and many Holmesians will have approached Anthony Horowitz's new book with some wariness. I did. I am delighted to have been proved wrong. I found the book hugely enjoyable, written by someone who marries real talent of his own with a remarkable 'ear' for the world of London fogs and Baker Street Irregulars, of sinister opium dens and rough pubs, and vice hiding between virtue. I won't say anything about the plot, but Horowitz's denouement pulls off the feat of being shocking and contemporary while reflecting the moral nuances of the best of the original stories. I read it straight through in two sittings (it would have been one but for the tiresome need to sleep, work etc.) and warmly recommend it.

Artistic leanings

   

    Whenever I'm in a shop attached to an art gallery or museum I make a point of looking at the novels they have for sale alongside all the non-fiction that you'd expect them to stock.

    Today in the small shop at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art (No.2) they had - unsurprisingly - the excellent Gillespie and I* by Jane Harris (post on it here), winning its shelf room because it features a painter who is a fictitious member of the Glasgow Boys, together with Life Class by Pat Barker, her novel about the effects of the Great War on a group of artists from the Slade School, and The Hayburn Family by Guy McCrone for which, frustratingly, I can find only the briefest of synopses, but if I remember correctly it has to do with the scion of a wealthy Glasgow shipbuilding family preferring to make his way as an artist rather than joining the business as is expected of him.

    Only three novels about art and artists then, as far as I could see, but if they had space for more I'd hope they'd stock Earth and Heaven by Sue Gee (quite masterly) and Francesca Kay's An Equal Stillness (such an impressive debut), to name but two others.

*On the subject of art, any thoughts on the design of the paperback cover compared to that of the hardback jacket shown above?

Remembrance

    Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen

    Written at Craiglockhart, September - October 1917.

A round of applause

    I've spent all day today on work for Mindroom - all, that is, but the last hour which was devoted to getting the computer to 'recognise' the printer so that I could see the fruits of my labour in hard copy, and it did finally work, thank goodness - but I've no time or energy left for a long post. Instead, let's have a round of applause for some literary prize-winners:

    The Wellcome Trust Book Prize, which celebrates 'medicine in literature', has gone to Alice LaPlante for her first novel Turn of Mind, "a tale of a family’s secrets exposed by murder and a brilliant mind in terminal decline" - full details here - so many congratulations to her (and yes, I was rooting for Ann Patchett's State of Wonder because I was so taken with it, but as it is the only one of the shortlisted books I've read, I can't really 'compare and contrast'!).

    Meanwhile, the Dylan Thomas Prize has gone to Lucy Caldwell for her book The Meeting Point, "a beautifully written novel that manages to address the momentous subjects of love and loss, and faith and betrayal, with a calm and quiet grace". Annabel Pitcher's My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece which I was talking about (and from which David Tennant was reading) last week was also on the shortlist, but didn't take the prize.

    And finally today, lots of us here are big fans of Linda Gillard's books, so it's great to see that her popularity continues to grow as Amazon have selected her recent House of Silence (post on it here) as one of their Kindle Top 10 Best of 2011 in the Indie Author category, and well-deserved that is.

Book of the day - once upon a time ...

    I saw that The Mainstreet Trading Company were tweeting their 'book of the day' earlier (it was a new omnibus edition of His Dark Materials - I'm tempted ...) so I thought I'd follow suit with two books from the TBR pile, both ones which stand out. Over on Cornflower you'll find some non-fiction which should appeal to all those interested in plants, textiles, spiritual matters, history, travel and biography, but here we have a novel.

    The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey will not be out for a wee while yet, but it sounds like a book worth waiting for. Here's the gist:

    "November 1920. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on making a fresh start for themselves in a homestead 'at the world's edge' in the raw Alaskan wilderness. But as the days grow shorter, Jack is losing his battle to clear the land, and Mabel can no longer contain her grief for the baby she lost many years before.

    "The evening the first snow falls, their mood unaccountably changes. Mabel surprises herself by throwing a snowball at her husband; then, in a moment of tenderness, the two build a snowman - or rather a snow girl - together. The next morning, all trace of her has disappeared, and Jack can't quite shake the notion that he glimpsed a small figure - a child? - running through the spruce trees in the dawn light. And how to explain the little but very human tracks Mabel finds at the edge of their property?"

    Based on a Russian fairytale, The Snow Child is going to be a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime next Spring; meanwhile, Ali Shaw, author of The Girl with Glass Feet, says of it,  "This book is real magic, shot through from cover to cover with the cold, wild beauty of the Alaskan frontier. Eowyn Ivey writes with all the captivating delicacy of the snowfalls she so beautifully describes."

    I'm so looking forward to reading it.

Sally Gardner

 

    I'm delighted to welcome my special guest Sally Gardner to Cornflower Books today. I knew when I read her first novel I, Coriander that hers was a special talent, and her subsequent books - most recently The Double Shadow (which I wrote about yesterday) - have confirmed my impressions.

 

    Sally's here today not just because she's a brilliant writer but also because she's a severely dyslexic one, and as I've long been interested in that subject through my involvement with the charity Mindroom, I wanted to know more about her experience of dyslexia and how it affects her creativity, so she has kindly written the following piece, one I find both illuminating and inspiring.

    Over now to Sally:-

    Dyslexia for me has been a gift, one that took a long time to unwrap. It was not delivered neatly packaged with a note saying the contents would miraculously disappear by a certain date. I am still dyslexic. I will always be dyslexic. But when I at last managed to peel off all the wrapping paper and the impossible sticky tape, I found, inside, was not one gift but many. The ability to draw, to write, to be a teller of tales.
    This shouldn't have come as much of a shock to me as it did. After all, I had told myself stories for as long as I could remember. When small, and when taller, and when finally five foot four, I had, through living in my head, amassed a whole world of characters and stories. It was a vivid imagination that proved to be my saviour throughout my education. This talent for telling myself stories stopped me from accepting that I would amount to nothing.
    I went to art school and studied theatre design, then worked in the theatre for fifteen years. It was there that I learned about telling a story - what makes an audience sit on the edge of its seat, what makes it nod off. I saw that you mustn't give all your tricks away at the very beginning, that you should keep your surprises well paced.
    After I had my children I became an illustrator of children's picture books. Never did I think that I would go on to write novels. The Double Shadow is my fourth to date. I was very lucky to find an editor who saw that I was more than just a bundle of badly spelled words.
    'Everyone,' she said, 'has a voice. And then there is Nina Simone.' 
    I think in a way I am blessed. In this age of computers I have found my voice which I doubt I would have managed with pen and paper alone. On my Mac I can cut, paste and write and rewrite, only to rewrite it and write it again until I am satisfied. Today I do something that as a child I was constantly told not to do - daydream. The difference is that now my daydreams are published.
    I believe we fail too many creative children in this country, whether they are dyslexic or not. If a child is interested in a button, you can teach him the world. Teach him the world and don't expect him to be interested in a button.  We are looking the wrong way down the telescope.
    I'm not saying that all dyslexics are creative but I strongly believe that a dyslexic child who isn't crushed by the age of sixteen stands a chance of discovering what and where his talents lie. It is a lucky child indeed who manages to unwrap his parcel before the last school bell rings.