Cornflower Books

Books to give away!

 

 

    About 18 months ago I read A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness and, as you'll see from my post on it, I loved it and it made my 'best of the year' list in the romantic novel category (though it's certainly a love story with a difference!).

    I said then how much I was looking forward to the second volume in what will be a trilogy called, appropriately, All Souls, and happily the new book, Shadow of Night, will shortly be available as it's to be published on 10th. July.

    Thanks to the kind people at Headline I have two copies of the hardback to give away. As the publishers will be doing the posting the draw is open to UK residents only, but I hope lots of you will throw your names into the hat because the first novel was such a great read and the second one promises to be just as enjoyable, as novelist Manda Scott writes:

"Deborah Harkness has done us proud with her magnificent, enthralling, engrossing sequel to A Discovery of Witches. Her weaving of time and ancient lore, of modern science and alchemy, of vampires, daemons and all-too-mortal humans is magical, wonderful and utterly addictive. You won't be able to put it down, so set aside a weekend and be prepared for some very late nights ..."

    Here you can see a brief clip of Deborah talking about Shadow of Night, and you can visit the book's website (soon to appear there will be clips of the walking tour of Elizabeth London which Deborah recorded recently), but to enter the draw to win a copy, please leave a comment telling us what magical power you'd most like to have (e.g. invisibility, time-travel, flight, telekinesis, etc.) or what you'd particularly like to do with supernatural abilities.

    The draw will be open for a few days, so do have a go - this should be fun!

Make or break - a reader's report

   

    "Stanley Unwin [chairman of publishers Allen & Unwin] believed that the best judges of children's books were children, so he handed [the manuscript of] The Hobbit to his ten-year-old son Rayner, who read it and wrote this report:

Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lived in his hobbit-hole and never went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves perswaded him to go. He had a very exciting time fighting goblins and wargs, at last they got to the lonley mountain; Smaug, the dragon who gawreds it is killed and after a terrific battle with the goblins he returns home - rich! This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.

    The boy earned a shilling for his report, and the book was accepted for publication."

And thereby hangs a tale in more ways than one, as you'll see if you read the excellent J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter from which that passage comes.

Matters arising

    Our book group discussion on The Optimist's Daughter raised a couple of things I wanted to address at greater length. Dark Puss asked about our next book, and I've yet to choose it (although I do have some strong candidates in mind), but I thought we should have a break over the summer, taking July and August off and reconvening in September. I'll get the next title up as soon as I can, so keep an eye out for it - it will appear in the left hand sidebar and the post itself will be found any time in the Book Group books category, should you miss it in the normal course of things, but before I make my choice, would you tell me whether you'd like something short and 'undemanding' that you can easily fit in with your summer reading, or something longer that you can really get your teeth into, but which can be read at as slow a pace as you'd like given that we'll have around ten weeks to do it. Which would you instinctively prefer: long or short?

    Secondly, to take up a point raised by Barbara in her comment on our Eudora Welty book I gave a link to a short clip of the late John O'Donohue. Here is a wise man of great intellect whose books I've never read, though I was aware of them, but when Pamela referred to one the other day I went off to find out more about their author and ended up listening to a long, unedited interview with this philosopher, poet and former priest which I found quite fascinating. Would that there was more of the same. His books live on, though, and I wondered if you'd read any, for example Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace or Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger To Belong (which inspired John Barry's album of the same name). 

Reading chair

    This is where I did my reading yesterday, in a 'fishing garden' by a Hampshire chalk stream,

and it's hard to think of a lovelier or more peaceful spot.

    I saw deer, heard the cuckoo, and sat in perfect stillness in that meadow full of wild flowers alive with butterflies, bees and damselflies.

    I did read! I got far on with the quite excellent J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter, which was relevant reading, in fact, as on Sunday I'd been in Oxford where Tolkien spent so much of his life.

    A highlight of that bit of my brief trip was meeting Simon for tea at the Ashmolean. It's always a great pleasure to see Simon, and we had a good old bookish chat over some very welcome refreshments before I had to be on my way again, but I had a minute to pop into Blackwells on my walk back through town and - with Tolkien in mind, as I'd just started the biography - noticed this book which has now gone on my wish list.

    If I had another day or two in that chair by the river, think of the reading I'd do ...

Cornflower Book Group - The Optimist's Daughter

 

    "Poignant, wise and economical" says Helen McNeil in her introduction to Eudora Welty's 1972 novel The Optimist's Daughter, and the book is all those things. Beautifully observed, and showing the sharpest ear for dialogue I've come across in a long time, it's a sad story with moments of great humour, thoughtful, moving - almost a writers' template, or at least a measure of high quality prose.

    Laurel has come home to Mount Salus as her father, the highly respected Judge McKelva, is having trouble with his sight. Attending the hospital consultation with the Judge and his new wife, the much younger Wanda Fay, Laurel finds it hard to understand her father's actions in marrying again - "what happened to [the Judge's] judgment?". As events run their course, and the family home becomes the focus for recollection and resolve, Laurel gains a new understanding of her upbringing and that reconciliation allows her to move on.

 

    I can see why Anne Tyler says Eudora Welty is, for her, "the model for how all writers ought to be," and I was greatly taken by the book's voice, its contained domestic setting, its perfectly judged detail, the depth of understanding of human nature it shows and the far-sightedness behind it. I loved the Judge, a man of presence and delicacy and "capacity for patience", though like Laurel and others I was baffled by his taking up with the dreadful Wanda Fay. I loved the book's Southern lilt, and lines and passages good enough to make me stop and savour them, for instance, Laurel remembers as a child arriving in West Virginia: "At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that."

    For me, then, this book has been a wonderful discovery, and the first of what I hope will be a great deal by or about Eudora Welty. How about you?

Edited to add: for what to eat with The Optimist's Daughter click here, and the photograph of Eudora Welty reproduced as a postcard (above) comes from this set.

Just arrived - The Silver Dark Sea

 

    All those of us who loved and admired Susan Fletcher's novel Witch Light (originally published as Corrag - post on it here) will be very pleased to know that Susan has a new book out in early July. 

    The Silver Dark Sea is "a profound tale of love, loss and the lore of the sea ... The islanders of Parla are still mourning the loss of one of their own. Four years since that loss, and a man - un-named, unclothed - is washed onto their shores. Some say he is a mythical man from the sea - potent, kind and beautiful; others suspect him. For the bereft Maggie, this stranger brings love back to the isle. But as the days pass he changes every one of them - and the time comes for his story to be told ..."

    Araminta Hall, author of Everything and Nothing, says of the book, "Susan Fletcher is the most wonderful writer, so poetic and dreamy, but with The Silver Dark Sea she tells us such a fierce and vibrant story. I couldn't put the book down - especially towards the end - and it completely filled my head. I feel like I could draw a map of the island of Parla."

    I have a number of compelling-sounding books jostling for position to be read soon; this novel joins them.

A very smart cover

    I flagged up Jess Richards' debut novel Snake Ropes a few days ago, but today I wanted to give you a closer look at the cover - which is by Dan Funderburgh - as it's very striking and rather beautiful, and a snippet of the text to get the feel of it.

    Here's the book's opening:

"The tall men in boats are coming. I see them through the window, close to the beach. My little brother is sat on my lap. Him puts hims hands on the table, leans round and looks up at me. Hims brown eyes have my reflection inside.

    I smile at him, stroke the curls on the back of hims head where they need a wash. I say, 'Sorry Barney. I've got to get you hid, them're coming.' Him grips on my neck hard, buries hims face in my hair and I carry him across the room. Him is so warm and I want to hang on to him, but I put him down by the cupboard door, and hims face trying to look all angered makes we want to laugh, but I dun."

    The book features crows who become statues and sisters who get tangled in each other's hair, keys that talk and ghosts who demand to be buried - intriguing stuff, well matched, by the look of it, by that great design.

Writers' portraits - Eudora Welty

   

    Eudora Welty by Mildred Nungester Wolfe, 1988.

    You can read the story behind the painting here, and listen to a short talk on it and on Miss Welty's work here.

    Speaking of her work, we are of course reading The Optimist's Daughter for Saturday's Book Group discussion, and although I'm not very far on yet, I was drawn in completely from the first page. As you'll hear if you listen to that talk above, Warren Perry comments on Eudora Welty's compassion, humanity and sensitivity - qualities which I think are evident in the portrait as well as on the page. This "average person who happened to be an exceptional writer" must have been fascinating to know, and I'd love to read her book One Writer's Beginnings, and What There Is to Say We Have Said, her correspondence with William Maxwell (another of our CBG writers). On a different level, I'd like to take a look at One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place which I heard Ann Patchett recommend with great enthusiasm.

In the Springtime of the Year

 

    Susan Hill was appointed CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List on Saturday, so it seems appropriate today to talk about a book of hers, not a new one, but a novel first published in 1974 and lately re-issued, In the Springtime of the Year.

    Just as in the more recent A Kind Man, no particular period or setting are specified here; there are clues as to the when and the where - this is rural country, and early twentieth century, perhaps - but that deliberate sketchiness means the reader's attention is directed towards the central characters and the relative simplicity of the plot, and that is done to great effect. It's a piece whose mood is all-important, its emotional pitch always contained even though its subject-matter is at one extreme of the human experience. This is a book about love, loss, and above all grief - a meditation on life when it seems devoid of meaning. It is done in as honest, direct and unsentimental a way as you could find, I think, and it's perhaps all the more moving because of that.

    Married just a year, the sudden death of Ruth's forester husband Ben destroys her world. Locked into sorrow and isolated by her mourning, she walls herself up in her solitude, allowing only Ben's younger brother Jo to breach her seclusion with his natural compassion and unforced fellow feeling. The days pass and the seasons change but still Ruth can do nothing but wait "for something to come from outside and shake her alive", though eventually it will take another stark and tragic event to break the pattern of Ruth's despair and renew her sense of purpose.

    Spare, level, lyrical prose pares the story down to its essentials, and that close but subtle examination of all planes of the state of grieving makes this a meaningful book and a memorable one.

All shall have prizes

    Some recent literary prize-winners you may have missed hearing about:

Betty Trask Awards: (among others) Scissors, Paper, Stone by Elizabeth Day and My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher (post on it - including extract read by David Tennant - here).

Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography: How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay by Frances Wilson.

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award: Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor.

Ondaatje Prize (we talked about it here): The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya.

Carnegie Medal & Kate Greenaway Medal for Illustration: A Monster Calls (based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd) Patrick Ness & Jim Kay.

Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry.

Ferney

 

    James Long's novel Ferney has just been published as an e-book. I read it about three years ago and loved it, but in case you missed it in its previous incarnation (if I may put it that way), here's my post on it:

    I've read several novels recently which are the fruits of an enormous amount of research and background reading on the part of the writers, and on the whole such books are very satisfying. The balance has to be right, of course, too much plain fact can sound didactic, it has to be incorporated into the narrative appropriately and with ease, but when it's done well it adds another dimension to a story. Ferney is the latest of this clutch of books (The Behaviour Of Moths and Our Horses In Egypt are others very much worth reading) and in it are centuries of English history glimpsed, as it were, through a gap in the curtains, but playing a major part in the story.

    The book begins with Mike and Gally Martin buying Bagstone Farm, a ramshackle old cottage in Somerset. Gally, plagued by nightmares and seemingly irrational fears, feels that this is the place for her to settle down in - it seems like 'home'. Mike, anxious to please his troubled young wife, agrees despite his many misgivings which are made all the more acute when the couple meet a neighbour, the apparently ageless and mysterious Ferney.

    What then transpires is an enthralling story, and one which James Long pulls off beautifully. The strange attraction of the house - for Gally at least -, the even more curious familiarity and ubiquity of Ferney are explained as an extraordinary love affair is described.

    Originally published in 1998 when it acquired a loyal and notable following, the book fell out of print until a few months ago. Re-issued now and with a sequel* in the offing, this is a clear candidate for the 'most enjoyable reads' list, and makes me want to visit its setting, the real West Country village of Pen Selwood, forthwith.   

*The Lives She Left Behind - due out in September!

Books of the day - no.2: Crappit Heids for Tea

    "Sutherland is one of the most ruggedly beautiful and sparsely populated parts of Scotland. In the nineteenth century, the Duke of Sutherland set about improving his landholdings to make them more productive, first by undertaking agricultural improvements and then by building lodges for sporting tenants as sheep farming faced a downturn.

    In the 1870s some 3,000 acres of land were reclaimed from moorland at Shinness; a lodge was built and some 25,000 acres of land allocated for grouse and grazing, together with fishings on Loch Shin and its rivers.

    One of the first keepers at the estate was John Fraser. In the 1970s his daughter Iby wrote down some recollections of her childhood in which she provides a fascinating picture of life in and around the lodge during the early part of the twentieth century. In addition to her descriptions of everyday life - from cooking and gamekeeping to medicine, schooling and games - she also writes of events which had a profound effect on communities everywhere, including the coming of the motor car and the First World War ..."

 

    In Crappit Heids for Tea: Recollections of Highland Childhood, Iby's account of life in rural Sutherland will at last reach a wide readership. Although I've only just received a finished copy, this is a book which I feel I know very well indeed as I was one of those who edited Iby's manuscript for publication, and in the hours I spent poring over her text I came to love her very natural voice on the page and the easy way in which she reminisces about her early years.

    Compiled by Chris Fletcher, and with an introduction by Dr. Anne-Marie Tindlay of Glasgow Caledonian University which sets it in context, the book combines Iby's memoir with an essay by Iby's contemporary Ann Gray on life at Colaboll Farm on the Shinness Estate. I found the whole thing engrossing to work on and I learned a great deal in the process, and I'm thrilled to see it now in proper book form. I shall be dipping into it and posting a few extracts to give you a flavour of Iby's style, but for now, a word on the lady herself:

Iby (short for Isobel) was born at Shinness Lodge in 1904. She went to school in nearby Lairg and then took an MA (Hons) degree in English at Edinburgh University, following that with a teaching qualification - quite an achievement for a young girl in those days. She spent most of her working life as Infant Mistress at Lairg school where "generations of children benefited from her good humour and her infectious love of learning". Iby passed away on 30th. December 1994, shortly after her 90th. birthday, but her lifelong love of the wildlife and landscape of Scotland can be seen clearly in this book "where she records through a child's eyes and with great affection the day-to-day duties and activities of her family and acquaintances 100 years ago".

(Books of the day - no.1 is here).

Miscellany

Carrots and sticks:

        Judging by many of the writers I follow on Twitter, getting down to work is the hardest part of the job for them, and staying at work comes a close second. As we touched on this subject the other day with Ann Patchett's productivity trip, I was interested - and amused - this morning to see this piece about various writerly 'carrots and sticks'.

 

A golden rule of literature:

    Rowan Pelling writes, " ... while in real life only 4 per cent of the population of Europe have red hair, in novels 75 per cent of heroines are flame-tressed, because this is apparently the best way to suggest a female character is spirited and idiosyncratic." I have a flame-tressed daughter ... 'spirited' is right.

 

 

60 years in 60 poems:

    Mark the Diamond Jubilee in poetry by exploring '60 years in 60 poems' through sound recordings and film footage at Jubileelines. Beginning with Dan Stevens reading Winged Back by Dannie Abse (1953), you can choose to hear each poem read or read the text yourself, click on the arrow pointing right to see pictures, then click on them for sound or film, go back and scroll down for more years of the Queen's reign represented in poetry.

Books on Britannia

 

    Visiting the royal yacht Britannia yesterday I spotted this small collection of books in a passageway in the crew's quarters. They include a number of novels with a nautical or military theme - Hemingway, Bernard Cornwell, quite a bit of crime such as P.D. James, Ruth Rendell and Michael Innes; Evelyn Waugh is represented by Brideshead Revisited and Men at Arms and Hardy by Far from the Madding Crowd, then there's Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War, M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (click there to see a very attractive new cover), and Linda Gillard's Emotional Geology.

 

    No books (not even this one) were visible in the Queen's rooms, but here in Prince Philip's cabin we can see a couple of sailing manuals.

 

    Music-wise, the grand piano in the State Drawing Room (once played by Noël Coward) had, appropriately, a copy of Rule Britannia open on the music stand.

Painter of Silence

 

    Having read Georgina Harding's first two novels, The Solitude of Thomas Cave (a book group choice) and The Spy Game (there's a post on it here), I'm familiar with - and an admirer of - her style. She has a way of letting a story unfold in an unforced manner, and her books are marked by a stillness and clarity, a studied calm underlying a depth of restrained emotion that comes through strongly in the latest one, the Orange prize shortlisted Painter of Silence.

    This begins in the early 1950s with an unnamed young man, without possessions or identification, collapsing on the steps of a Romanian hospital. It is soon clear that he is both deaf and mute, and as such, as he is nursed back to health, he becomes in a way a blank canvas onto which others can project what they may wish him to be. As his strength returns, one nurse, Safta, eventually brings him paper and pencils and encourages him to draw, and slowly and painstakingly his past and his memories begin to appear on the page.

    The images which take shape with such deft and purposeful strokes are of a place which Safta recognises: her home, Poiana, a manor house deep in the country which she left before the war. The young man, Augustin - known as Tinu - was her childhood friend, the son of a servant, and growing up beside him "in the days before she herself learned to speak, little Safta had come to know him with a quick intuition as if he was the silent side of her self". This closeness continued until late adolescence when the outside world intruded and war changed everything. As Augustin convalesces and he communicates to Safta the things he has tracked her down in order to tell her, so we see their life in pre-war times and we have a glimpse of a future for each of them.

    There is a limpidity and a delicacy to the book that you'll recognise from Georgina Harding's earlier work, and she makes powerful use of the contrast between that muted softness and her subject matter - dislocation and loss, an outsider who is an observer of both the horrors of war and of the lesser hurts of ordinary life. That Augustin is locked in by his sensory impairment makes his experiences and their eventual expression all the more intense, and this is a fine book whose understatement and restraint lets it speak and ensures it will be heard.

Good lines: spring green

 

    "As they stood at the top of a field for a moment, looking down, Ruth and Jo saw, first, the haze of green like an openwork shawl laid over the tops of all the trees, where the buds were unfolding into first leaf. Ruth thought that she could never have seen so many different shades of green; the emerald of the larches that fringed the beech woods, and the yellowish green early poplars, ash green willow leaves and the pale, oaten-olive tinge of the young wheat. The grass was green, dark as moss in the shadow of the banks, and clear as lime, high up in the full sun, and when they went into the wood, the light was pond-green and, at their feet, the polished green blades of bluebells."

From In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill.

Writers' dogs

   

    We have posts here on writers' portraits and their houses, but a letter in the paper this morning prompted me to start a new category for a bit of fun: writers' dogs (though if you're very good to me I might stretch it to include the odd cat).

    Here's the text of this morning's letter which is from Mr. Graham Chainey of Brighton:

"Only two people could tame Wessex, Thomas Hardy's snappy terrier [see this article]. One was Hardy, the other was T.E. Lawrence, or Private Shaw as he was in 1923 when he first visited Max Gate, Hardy's home. According to Nellie Titterington, the parlour maid: "Wessex was very fond of Lawrence, who could pat him and speak to him and had a wonderful power over him." While everyone else trying to retrieve something dropped on the floor would be bitten, Lawrence would not.

When the dog died, Lawrence told Mrs. Hardy: 'Few dogs appeal to me, but Wessex gained my very definite respect.'"

    There's a great deal more about Wessex in this post and this one (on famous Fox Terriers) from which you'll see that he was quite a character, though no dog of mine would be allowed to get away with some of the behaviour which Hardy evidently tolerated, but as Claire Tomalin says in her biography Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man, Wessex was one source of the tranquillity the writer found in later life, so perhaps we'll allow a little indulgence.

 

    Edited to add:

    Mr. C. has just emailed me to say that Emily Bronte's mastiff, Keeper (that's her own drawing of him), joined her funeral cortege then slept outside her empty bedroom for the rest of his life. That's so sad!

    Thanks to this post I discover there is a book on the subject: Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte.

More to be read

    This week's selection from the arrivals pile looks to be particularly wide-ranging:

    The Limpopo Academy Of Private Detection is (astonishingly) the 13th in Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, and Mma Ramotswe has an unexpected visitor who may be able to help her with resolve a worrying and difficult situation. I'm already well on with this book and laughing out loud as usual.

    The Harbour by Francesca Brill is set in Hong Kong in 1940 where, with the war in Europe a world away, a young American journalist is keeping her readers entertained with society gossip. Stevie becomes involved with a British soldier sent to investigate suspicious activity inside the colony, and when the Japanese army seizes the island, the two are faced with terrifying challenges.

    Gold by Chris Cleave "explores the extremes of human capacity - from the peak of athletic condition to the nadir of ill health ... it is a novel about ambition and failure, about what drives us to succeed and what we choose to sacrifice for success". Interestingly, as part of his research for Gold Chris spent time in velodromes and on a bike, but also a fortnight shadowing doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

    Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou is "part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, and also a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place". Its focus is the 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of northern London, the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment, and it seeks to explore and re-imagine this landscape to "celebrate the poetry in everyday life and the past beneath our feet".

    Sound by T.M. Wolf sounds quite intriguing. It's "a poignant love affair with an atmospheric setting" but the story is evoked using the form of a musical score, with the reader 'hearing' the book as it is read. It is a complex layering of dialogue, thought, heartbeats and a hip-hop soundtrack, and its unusual form makes it "a novel in stereo, while everything else is in mono".

    Snake Ropes by Jess Richards is "a terrific story, quirky and wildly original" - so says Joanne Harris. It combines unusual language and vivid imagination and is reminiscent of Angela Carter and early Margaret Atwood, with myths and subverted fairytales woven through it and rich imagery colouring a take about an island off the top of the map where boys are disappearing ...

Hilary Mantel on Front Row

 

    On last evening's edition of Radio 4's Front Row, Mark Lawson was talking to Hilary Mantel, the entire programme being devoted to the interview which is now available to listen to on iPlayer.

    Entertaining and enlightening as ever, Hilary Mantel reveals that before Wolf Hall brought her a new level of fame, a typical reaction on the part of those meeting her for the first time and learning she was a novelist was, "should I have heard of you?"

    She talks of journeys by public transport giving her mind necessary "moments of vacancy", valuable in terms of the ideas that being away from her sources and the manuscript itself typically generates. Answering Mark Lawson's point about whether there can be real tension in a book such as Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring up the Bodies in which the reader, already apprised of historical fact, knows what is going to happen, she says that it is seeing the turning points which determine a fate - and they are on almost every page - that is as powerful in terms of suspense as not knowing what that fate is to be. 

Have you read ...

 

    ... Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader?

    "Had the dogs not taken exception to the strange van parked in the royal grounds, the Queen might never have learnt of the Westminster travelling library's weekly visits to the Palace. But finding herself at its steps, she goes up to apologise for all the yapping and ends up taking out a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, last borrowed in 1989. Duff read though it proves to be, upbringing demands she finish it and, so as not to appear rude, she withdraws another. This second, more fortunate choice of book awakens in Her Majesty a passion for reading so great that her public duties begin to suffer. And so, as she devours work  by everyone from Hardy to Brookner to Proust to Samuel Beckett, her equerries conspire to bring the Queen's literary odyssey to a close."

    An utter treat!