Cornflower Books

Maeve Binchy

   

    I'm so sorry to hear the news this morning that Maeve Binchy has passed away. I wrote a short piece about her back in the very early days of Cornflower (when it was just one site), and I think it's fitting to re-publish it here in tribute to a lady who, through her books, has delighted millions; I called the post "Happybrow":

    "I've just taken a quick birl around a few websites and alighted on Maeve Binchy's. It's a pity she doesn't write a blog - it would make compulsive reading, I'm sure - but even a few brief words on her 'About' page made me smile. I love Maeve Binchy's books. Her voice is unmistakeable, her warmth palpable and as she is a consummate story-teller, her books are great treats.

    Her work is not highbrow, nor is it lowbrow, but it is something we should all have more of and which we could call 'happybrow': unfurrowed by care and dark thoughts, bearing only laughter lines! Literary types might dismiss the idea that it is a legitimate function of books to entertain and uplift readers, but those are two of the reasons I read and I believe them to be valid ones. There are many other writers whose work could have that happy tag (and I intend to post about another such megastar soon) but I've long been a fan of Maeve's so she gets the spotlight today.

    We have friends who live near her in Ireland and who kindly drove me past her house just so that I could see it and send appreciative vibes in her direction. Their daughter once wrote to ask her for some information in connection with a school project and she got the most charming and helpful letter in return. I know many writers are similarly pleasant and obliging, but it does bear out what the public persona suggests, and as such restores one's faith that 'nice' and 'normal' can overlap with 'rich' and 'famous'.

    So thankyou, Maeve, for the pleasure you give to so many through your writing and your lovely self."

    Here is a short video clip of Maeve Binchy sharing some writing 'secrets', and another with her thoughts on what makes a page-turner.

The Heritage Collection

 

    This neat bundle of books was in the pile waiting for me on my return from holiday. It's the first group to be published as part of John Murray's new Heritage Collection, paperback reissues and ebooks designed to bring a new audience to "forgotten classics by great authors of the past".

 

    George Bernard Shaw's work is represented by two novels: An Unsocial Socialist features Sidney Trefusis who is "determined to overthrow a society riddled with class and sexual exploitation. But when he goes to work as a gardener at a girls' school he meets his match in the form of Agatha Wylie, a new kind of woman ... Galloping, exuberant, and irresistibly entertaining, a brilliant satire on social prejudice."

    Then comes  Love Among the Artists, the story of three wayward geniuses (two pianists - one said to have been suggested by Beethoven - and an actress of great self-made charm) which offers "shrewd insight into the nature of the artistic temperament with its needs for a kind of commitment that overrides the everyday claims of the heart."

    

    The second pair, which like the others is due out in mid-August, comprises what is "widely acknowledged as one of the greatest novels in the Irish comic tradition. The Crock of Gold by James Stephens is a wise and beautiful fairytale for grown-ups. Fantasy, satire and delicious humour propel the magical narrative through a world peopled by policemen, philosophers, tinkers and leprechauns. Yet, the intent of it all is serious. Or is it?"

    Last of the bunch is The Return by Walter de la Mare, a darkly thrilling tale, and one of de la Mare's finest occult stories, which tells of Lawford, "a dull suburban man who falls asleep on a grave and wakes up possessed by the spirit - and face - of somebody else. Denounced by his family and friends as an impostor, Lawford's struggle to free himself of this possession leaves him a thoroughly changed man", while the book encompasses domestic trauma, unrequited love and philosophical reflection.

    This series will continue later in the year with The Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett by Compton Mackenzie and The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley.

Reading al fresco, Hebridean style

    How about that for a reading seat?

A stone-roofed shelter, a grassy bank for a cushion,

a river at your feet, moor and mountain as far as the eye can see.

    We were on the island of Lewis last week, and that's me there in the top picture, book in hand and thick jacket on as it was quite brisk on Friday evening when that was taken. I'm sitting in what's known as Lady Mary's seat, a favourite spot of Lady Mary Matheson's; her husband Sir James Matheson* bought the island in 1844, and this vantage point is near their summer residence. I'm told her ladyship used to like to sit there reading, often with a dram to hand, but I didn't linger as there was a nip in the air and the midgies were gathering, though I did stay put long enough to read the passage in Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot which mentions the estate itself.

    Lots more reading was done last week (I'll report soon) but all of it indoors - the weather was mostly wild!

 

*Somewhat tangentially but coincidentally, Sir James came from Shinness.

Friday reads

   

 

    I was whizzing through John Boyne's First World War novel The Absolutist this morning until all progress stopped due to my Parcelforce saga, but I should finish soon and then I'll start Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (a book about horses and a down-at-heel race track), which comes garlanded with laurels from a National Book Award to an Orange Prize long-listing. In non-fiction I'm still greatly enjoying Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings and planning to follow that with The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane, though The Inklings is tending to divert me off down another bye-way, so we'll see.

    As to what I've recently finished, Francesca Segal's The Innocents was a very good read indeed, as was Suzanne Joinson's A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar of course (post on it here), and if you haven't already seen my conversation with Suzy, do take a look and read Loretta's comment because apart from the fun of talking to Suzy, it's reactions such as Loretta's which make having a book blog so worthwhile.

    What's everyone been reading recently? What do you recommend? What is next in your book queue? If you have a moment, please let us know.

Forwards or backwards?

 

    I'm reading Francesca Segal's The Innocents - and enjoying this modern day version of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, set in North London's close Jewish community, very much indeed - and I've just come upon the following passage:

    " 'So what do you mean you're "up to" 1899 and The Kreutzer Sonata? Do you always read chronologically?'

    She nodded. '1889. Always. I've always done it. I like to evolve with the author, I don't want to know their future before they do and if I'm really reading a writer, like, committed to reading their whole oeuvre, then I want to move through their life with them and their work. If I love someone I want to walk beside them from the first to the last.' "

    That's Ellie, a famous model and aspiring writer, talking about the reading she does while hanging around on photo-shoots, and it brought to mind this post on Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit in which as you'll see she talks about reading 'archaeologically' as opposed to chronologically, beginning with a writer's final or most recent work and reading back to their beginning.

    Have you ever done either (I have not, I think) and if so, what did you discover from the experience? Do you feel inclined to embark on a writer whose work is new to you by one of those methods or the other, or would you rather just dip in with their best or most famous book to start with and see where you go next? Do you feel that 'order read' matters little (except where books in a series are concerned, or where a central character such as a detective features again and again and of necessity develops - at least in terms of plot - with succeeding books)?

To be read: Elza's Kitchen

 

    "For years, Elza has managed to get by. She has her own little restaurant in the Hungarian city of Delibab, cooking quality versions of her country's classics and serving them with a smile. But lately her smile has become tired, she is weary of cooking for the same customers and the loveless affair with her sous-chef is now an irritation.

    With her country in a state of transition from communism to capitalism, Elza embarks upon her own change. She decides to woo The Critic, one of the harshest, most powerful culinary columnists in Europe. But as relationships in the kitchen sour, the food threatens to turn with them, and not even Elza's strained composure can prevent the chaos that seems fated to engulf her.

    Serving up all the heat, sensual delights and rich atmosphere of the restaurant itself, Elza's Kitchen is a wonderful celebration of culture and cuisine. Resisting the comfortable pattern of her old life, Elza finds that true joy - and love - can be hidden in the most surprising of places."

    Marc Fitten's second novel - Valeria's Last Stand was his first - sounds just the thing for a lazy evening with something to nibble on, perhaps, or to have to hand in the kitchen while you stand and stir a risotto. It's not just the content which appeals, as I like that cover, too; and speaking of exteriors, here's an amusing post on what might result were designers to use stock photos for book jackets.

Pitch perfect

   

    Pitch your novel idea to the literary agents of Curtis Brown at a Discovery Day to be held at Foyles bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road in September.

    Registration information is here, and to help you make the most of your six minute presentation and one-to-one feedback session, there's more about what to expect on the Curtis Brown Creative website.

To be read: The Fishing Fleet, Husband-Hunting in the Raj

 

    I have on my shelves a number of books by Anne de Courcy - Society's Queen: The Life of Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, 1939: The Last Season and The Viceroy's Daughters - and I've greatly enjoyed them all, so I'm delighted to have her latest, The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj. 

    Using unpublished memoirs, letters and diaries rescued from attics, Anne tells the story of the young women who, from the late 19th. century, when the Raj was at its height, left Britain for India in search of a husband.

    Known as 'the Fishing Fleet', "for these young women, often away from home for the first time, one thing they could be sure of was a rollicking good time. By the early 20th. century, a hectic social scene was in place, with dances, parties, amateur theatricals, picnics, tennis tournaments, cinemas, gymkhanas with perhaps a tiger shoot and a glittering dinner at a raja's palace thrown in.

    With men outnumbering women roughly four to one, romances were conducted at alarming speed and marriages were frequent. But after the honeymoon, life often changed dramatically: whisked off to a remote outpost with few other Europeans for company and where constant vigilance was required to guard against disease, they found it a far cry from the social whirlwind of their first arrival."

    Illustrated with photographs which bring out both the exoticism and outlandishness of the country and customs the women were discovering, and the lavish and sometimes bizarre efforts at keeping British traditions alive in a very foreign environment, the book promises to be as well-researched and engrossing as Anne de Courcy's other work.

City of deadly spires

 

    If you're a keen reader of detective fiction and have an hour to spare, may I suggest you watch the very comprehensive, entertaining lecture Dons, Deaths and Detectives: Oxford in Crime Fiction by Professor Colin Bundy.

    For those in the market for a quick summary of the talk, the professor gives an outline of the Oxford crime canon, beginning with what are seen as the founding books: An Oxford Tragedy (1933) by J.C. Masterman, still regarded by some critics as perhaps the best of the bunch, Gaudy Night (1935) by Dorothy L. Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey), and Death at the President's Lodging (1936) by Michael Innes (Inspector Appleby), all Golden Age novels using a college as the equivalent of the country house or hermetically sealed setting, all written by Oxford insiders.

    The donnish detective 'type' (that winning combination of the erudite and the analytical) continues post-war but diversifies somewhat in pursuits, preoccupations and locations, see for example Professor Gervase Fen in The Case of the Gilded Fly and The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin, the Ambrose Usher books of Jocelyn Davey (the character said to be based on Sir Isaiah Berlin), and the Hilary Tamar novels of Sarah Caudwell - "elegant, witty, subtle and complicated" - here's a very good article about Sarah Caudwell by fellow crime writer Martin Edwards; he mentions, inter alia, her book The Sirens Sang of Murder, "a saga of sex, international tax planning, and witchcraft", a must-read for the Cornflower Book Group, surely ...

    The sub-genre goes on with the Kate Ivory mysteries by Veronica Stallwood, Jumping the Cracks and others featuring private investigator Sam Falconer by Victoria Blake, the parody Landscape with Dead Dons by Robert Robinson, and as an example of historical Oxford crime fiction the "very fine" An Instance Of The Fingerpost by Iain Pears.

    Writers such as Antonia Fraser, Hazel Holt and Val McDermid have all brought their main characters to Oxford at least once, but in terms of series the best known is, of course, Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse. Although we have all the Morse novels I have never read them, preferring to keep in my mind the television versions and John Thaw's portrayal of an intensely romantic figure rather than the more misogynistic man of the books. The donnish detective character then continues in the Morse spin-off Lewis with Detective Sergeant Hathaway following on in the spirit of Innes's Inspector Appleby.

    What makes Oxford such a popular setting for crime fiction? It's a place of inward-looking buildings and institutions, protected and picturesque, and having their own customs and rituals; its proximity to London is helpful in terms of plot, it's a seat of power with a population that is increasingly multi-cultural and highly intelligent; it's seen as a 'gilded' place, mystical, nostalgic, mysterious and very appealing, and when a crime is solved and order is restored, that act of restoration is itself a source of reassurance in a troubled world.

For that and more talks in the Oxford crime series click here.

Pictured above is Magdalen tower, "yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers", (Dorothy L. Sayers's Harriet Vane, quoted by Professor Bundy).

Cornflower in conversation with Suzanne Joinson

    It's a great pleasure to have Suzanne Joinson, author of A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar, as my guest here today. When I met Suzy back in February and heard about her book, I knew straightaway that it was one I was going to enjoy and that she would be the perfect interviewee, and I'm glad to say I was right on both counts as you'll see from my short post on the book and from our conversation here:

 

    Reading the novel I noticed recurring themes which create patterns in the narrative - there's motherhood, for example, and escape, surfaces and what's beneath them, displacement and belonging, travelling, moving towards or away from something ... and then there are what you might call motifs such as the many references to birds and feathers, bicycles, words and making a mark; did you start with those ideas in mind and then find characters and events with which you could work them out on the page, or did you just find that they were emerging in the natural course of things as you told your story, almost as though they were present subconsciously but only discernible later?

     Looking back through early notebooks I can see now that I collected a lot of ingredients, as it were, of the story but I don’t think it was conscious. Whenever I got stuck I wrote a list of things that inspired me: seagulls, bones, bicycles, maps, bird-bones. I drew lots of maps because they are fun to draw. I collected images that somehow seemed important to the story but I didn’t know why, and I ‘freewrote’ pieces of prose that were very much trying to capture certain feelings – isolation in the desert, trying to get home, terror of looking after a new baby, worry for a sister – but were not tied into specific scenes. Then, when writing the first full draft I forgot about all of that and just got on with the story. It was quite a revelation to me to discover what a huge role the subconscious plays in weaving and knitting things together. Amazing, really. I picked up a trick from reading a book called The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene by Marie-Francoise Allain. She was a young French writer (beautiful, of course) and she convinced him to open up for the first time about his writing process. She asked him about first drafts and he answered: “So a book is put together little by little, in a painstaking fashion while the unconscious is simultaneously at work....I re-read my morning’s work just before bedtime, to stimulate my unconscious – or my subconscious if you prefer – in the hope that it will sort out the problems. In practice the unconscious, faced with secondary difficulties (stylistic or structure in any given chapter), accomplishes its task like a good parent, one who has first inspired the book and now sees it through to the finish”. In my experience, this is true.

    Then, as you say, linkages between the two stories presented themselves – motherhood, escape, fleeing, tension between movement and home – and it was a big job working out how these worked in relation to each other. Was it opposition, reflection or parallel stories? Ouf, it was hard work.

    You've obviously done a great deal of research for the book by travelling yourself, both in remote regions - where things were not exactly peaceful, as you relate in this short video - and closer to home. The novel has a very strong visual force, it brings clear images to mind, and I wondered whether your research involved photography as the primary method as well as note-taking? I ask that because it reads as though you used that very direct medium - you've certainly captured something of its immediacy on the page - though perhaps your own visual memory is acute and your skill at translating those pictures into words even more so!

    I’m hugely drawn to photography, both practising it myself and photographic theory and history - particularly women photographers - and so you are right, and well-spotted! I took lots of photographs in Kashgar, lots of photographs of Eastbourne. I try to photograph every day out and about, noticing things, framing things, thinking visually. I also draw – pretty badly – but I enjoy it.

     For reasons of tying in with later events in the plot the historical strand of the book is set in the early 1920s, and yet it has the feel of an earlier period about it - the 1870s, say (some of Isabella Bird's writing came to mind as I was reading it). In a book which is partly about being adrift, you've given to that half of the narrative a suitably floating, fluid sensation. Was that 'timelessness', that relatively unfixed mood, deliberate? Either way, it's a very effective means of underscoring the isolation of Evangeline, Lizzie and Millicent and the vast distance between them and the 'modern' world, and thus giving them freedom from so many of the constraints of society at home. 

    Yes, the timeless quality that you pick up on actually comes from the biographical detail of the English missionaries although by the final edits much of that earlier biographical detail had been taken out of the main thrust of the story. I wanted them to feel not particularly rooted in ‘England or Englishness’ because they had moved a lot as children, drifting around the continent with parents whose families were half French and half English. So, what I was hoping to achieve was a sense of dislocation, and that they were products of a post-Victorian era and yet geographically rootless.

    When asked about the progress of the Guide she is writing Evangeline says, "I have these ideas, and memories and images, but it's a problem ... sorting it into a meaningful whole." Was that Suzy the author speaking through her character?! Please do tell us a bit about the whole writing process - your routine, if you have one, whether you plan everything in advance in broad outline or in greater detail, or whether it's much more following an idea and seeing where it leads. Whichever method you adopt, do you tend to need just a draft or two before you have the finished work, or does it require much more refinement than that, and if so, how do you know when to stop?

    Someone else highlighted that line too. Maybe it was me speaking through and the pesky subconscious was up to its tricks again. My writing process with this book was very disjointed. I wrote it not knowing if it would get published whilst doing a challenging job that required a lot of international travel. I wrote early drafts in hotel rooms and airport lounges. I wrote on maternity leave when I had my first – then second! – baby, battling through sleep deprivation and nappies. Then I moved on to the endless revisions. I realised that if a book is ever going to get finished then you have to write when you’re knackered, when you’re sad and when you just want to watch TV or hang out with friends. Consequently, I have a rubbish social life.

    Writing involves actual writing and also working out your process and that took me a very long time with A Lady Cyclist. This book I’m working on now I’m hoping things will be quicker and smoother but I’ve already realised that a different book requires a different process (damn!). Instead of the inconvenience of childbirth this time I have the distraction of publicising my first book, of promotion, events, talking about myself non stop and it’s all so noisy. Instead of wondering if this book will ever get anywhere I now have an agent and an editor. I even have a New York Editor! I now have Amazon rankings to obsessively check. A whole new world of intrusions, some welcome, some less so.

    I have learnt a few things that seem to work for me though. The first is that I write an ‘exploratory draft’ rather than a first draft. This is freer, (the words ‘Chapter One’ freak me out) and it involves scrapbooks and photographs and drawings and dreams and writing anything I want. It’s very creative and lovely and sets my brain into a certain groove so that I am open to stories and writing. I try to combine that open-creative head-space with the technical research that I am doing for my book so that the two things move forward hand-in-hand. It’s a difficult balance, but I like it. I realised, recently though, that I’d stretched this period for too long – it’s so seductive – and that I needed to crack on with a ‘first draft’ which is real. This is where I am at now and it’s the word count-obsession phase, the whacking out of a draft and a story. Once I get to the end of this draft I will then start what is in fact the real story – what happens in relation to language and the architectural form of the novel and begin editing properly. This is possibly a very laborious way to go about things. I don’t know how else to do it, though. We just have to find what works, I guess.

    This is your first novel, and yet success with an earlier project (your non-fiction piece, Laila Ahmed) meant that agents approached you, rather than the other way round, and so the path to publication was perhaps smoother than it is for most new writers. What advice would you give to anyone embarking on writing a novel with the serious aim of eventual publication, or to someone who is sending out their finished work and finding they are hitting only brick walls?

    Several things. Firstly, you wouldn’t write an opera, film, or put on a sculpture exhibition or a photography exhibition or any of these things in isolation, would you? Nor would you do a PhD without tutorial supervision. Find a form of framework that works for you which involves getting feedback from somewhere. One mistake that many writers make is sending their novel out to agents at too early a stage. They are, understandably, sending it out for validation. It’s such an insane undertaking to write a book that will probably take you some years and so psychologically you need someone to tell you that it is ok. You don’t need to hear it’s wonderful, perfect or finished, but you need to know there is potential, which is another word for hope. So find a way of getting someone, somewhere to pat you on the head and say ‘well done’ or ‘keep going’, enough to give you sustenance to get you through the next long leg. It might be a writer’s group, online forum, Arvon course, writing retreat, MA, local community group, just one person whose opinion you trust or you may even pay someone for a critique, whatever works. Just do this BEFORE you send your manuscript to an agent.

    Secondly, it might appear that I had a smooth path to publication – my husband called it a path strewn with rose petals – but I have in fact been writing since I was fifteen, did a BA in Literature and Creative Writing, wrote short stories, attempted novels and poems for years then an MA in Creative Writing and the book has just come out and I’m at the grand age of 37. That’s 22 years of slog. Keep going, never stop and make your writing as good as it possibly can be.

    Your second novel is under way - may we know a little about it, what stage it has reached and when it is likely to be published? Or are you, like many writers, superstitious and wary of saying too much too soon?

     I’m not going to say much, not for superstitious reasons but because I realised that by talking about it the essence of the book is draining away. I believe that when you are working on a big project – whatever it is – in order to keep the momentum and energy up you need to keep quiet and just get on with it. Talking about it bleeds away the edges. So, I will just say it’s a novel. It’s about flying and Palestine with some photography. And I’m thinking a lot about chalk, light and sculpture. Will stop now!

 

 

    My thanks to Suzy for submitting to my questioning, and for discussing aspects of the novel and of the writing process in such a stimulating way. I'm already looking forward to her next book, and of course wishing her great success with this one.

Bargain of the day - The Wild Places

 

    I have a copy of Robert Macfarlane's new book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot waiting here as a treat kept for a special occasion (delayed gratification again), and it's the cause of this degree of anticipation because the last book of his I read - The Wild Places - was just so good. That book happens to be today's Kindle bargain at a mere £0.99, and I'd suggest you snap it up if thoughtful, elegant, eloquent writing about the natural world is as much your cup of tea as it is mine. 

    Here are my impressions from back in early 2008:

"The books I've been reading recently have all been heavily populated. They have contained action and introspection, dialogue and drama, and the overall effect - felt once I take a step back - is of crowded reading. The Wild Places has been the perfect antidote to those densely peopled stories as it's almost empty of humankind. It is an open space of a book, and there's a freedom about the writing which is refreshing to encounter. Macfarlane journeyed around wilderness areas of Britain, following W.H. Murray's urging: "Find beauty; be still" and creating "a prose map" of landscapes described with a poet's store of language.

     Exploring mountains and shores, woodland, rivers and islands, he walked usually alone, often at night, sleeping in the open, bathing in lochs, rivers, rockpools even, and the acute sense of place he discovered and describes makes this a very valuable and very beautiful account of fast disappearing country. His references to geology, history, physics and literature (he is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge) are never intrusive and always illuminating, and his empathic response to the land and the elements which shape it is eloquently set out.

    At each location, Macfarlane collected a memento in the form of a stick, a feather or a stone - a "mineral postcard" - which would recall what he'd experienced and observed, but it's his hoard of gathered reflections and perceptions which are so powerfully but gently expressed here that will endure.

    A line from John Muir quoted at the beginning of the book is telling: "I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in". Whether out or in, Macfarlane is the best of guides and companions, and he deserves a wide readership."

    There's a little bit more about The Wild Places (and some pictures of a beautiful place) in this post, and if you're in the mood for yet more Macfarlane, his earlier book Mountains of the Mind is also available today for under a pound.

Writers' portraits - the young Virginia Woolf

 

    Simon is writing persuasively (when does he do otherwise?) about Virginia Woolf today and specifically A Room of One's Own, and as it happens that just last night I read a passage referring to her I thought I'd post it.

    But before we get to that, what do you think of the picture? It is of the two-year-old Virginia with her mother Julia Stephen and I found it on Read, Seen, Heard where Kihm, who describes himself beautifully as an unfocused generalist (join the club!), comments on what that small girl had ahead of her ...

    To the quotation then, and this appears in Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings. It is the academic Hugo Dyson* recalling his visits to Garsington Manor when he was an undergraduate and his hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell filled her house with members of the Bloomsbury Group and other writers and artists of the day. At Garsington he had encountered "all the people whom secretly one would have most desired to meet - and, as so often happened to a shy, insignificant person, when one did meet them one was filled with a kind of terror. They were kindly enough, but I found them alarming. They weren't, most of them, my weight. I do remember finding Virginia Woolf immensely beautiful and immensely frightening; and one of my fears - I don't think I was quite alone in this - was that she would speak to me one day (but she never did)".

*I'll digress a moment to the meetings of The Inklings, the Oxford discussion group at which the likes of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis met to talk and read their work aloud, and to report Dyson's reaction to Tolkien's reading another instalment of The Lord of the Rings: "Oh god, not another elf".

A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar

 

    As I said last week, I'm greatly looking forward to having Suzanne Joinson here as a very welcome guest on Saturday (the 14th.) when she'll be answering my questions about her newly published novel A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar. We'll be talking about various aspects of the book and what lies behind them and touching on the writing process, too, and I hope you'll find our conversation interesting and illuminating.

    I wanted to preface Saturday's post with a short piece about the book itself in order to prime the pump, and I'll quote the blurb from the cover of my proof to give you an idea of what it's about:

"A secret notebook. An unlikely inheritance. A collision of worlds." That really does encapsulate the two interwoven plot strands - three lady missionaries in the remote city of Kashgar, East Turkestan, in early 1923, and Frieda in present-day London. As Evangeline English travels the Silk Road with her sister Lizzie and the formidable Millicent, representative of the Missionary Order of the Steadfast Face, her plans to write "A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar" along the way are disrupted by a birth, a death, and revelations which cause her to question much about her life. Years later in London, Frieda encounters a Yemeni man adrift in the city, and his strange presence and the sudden knowledge that she is heir to a dead woman she has never heard of will eventually bring her closer to making peace with her past and finding a new future.

    There's great strength in the writing here, it's very vivid and compelling, and once the reader has settled into the two starkly different worlds of the book, they'll be drawn on to keep turning the pages. The book's themes - about which we'll talk more anon - are beautifully played out, and Suzy's light touch where her material is concerned is assured and effective; she gets her pacing right, too, letting her tightly folded stories gradually unfurl in pleasing form and using some beautifully crafted lines to achieve this.

    That's the novel in a nutshell, but please do come back on Saturday when I'll be in conversation with Suzy and we'll have the chance to say a lot more about it; meanwhile, you may like to follow her on the other stops of her current tour.

Bargain of the day - Night Waking

 

    Today's Kindle bargain is Night Waking by Sarah Moss, a snip at £0.99 (and a good price in paperback, too). One of my 'books of the year' last year, I referred to it again the other day when flagging up Sarah's new non-fiction work, Names for the Sea, her account of a year spent in Iceland, but if you haven't come across the novel before, here's my piece on it:

Adèle and LizF, by way of comments on earlier posts, were urging me to read Night Waking, and I'm so glad I acted on their recommendation because it's quite superb.

    Historian Anna Bennet and her husband Giles Cassingham are spending the summer with their two young sons on an otherwise uninhabited Inner Hebridean island which has been in the Cassingham family for generations. Ecologist Giles is there to monitor the puffin colonies while Anna is trying to get on with writing a book, but the demands of her boys are such that she's struggling. Toddler Moth is funny and endearing, but his constant night waking and need for Anna are intensely wearing, while precocious Raph is worryingly obsessed with disasters and the destruction of the planet, and his endless questions and preoccupations are a cause for concern.

    While planting trees in the garden of the Victorian family house, Anna discovers a baby's skeleton. It is not prehistoric, apparently, which raises the question why that burial place was chosen rather than the graveyard by the old village church. With the police involved and suspicions as to concealed pregnancy or births on the wrong side of the blanket, the mystery of the baby's identity and strange resting place is yet no nearer to being solved, and the unsettling find adds to Anna's own disturbingly ambivalent feelings towards motherhood.   

   Alongside the contemporary story is another narrative in the form of letters from May Moberley, an English girl and trained nurse who, in 1878, was sent to the then populated island by the Cassingham family on account of the high infant mortality rates. Her attempts at gaining the trust of the Gaelic-speaking women, to the point at which she can assist with childbirth and advise on the proper care of the newborn, are ill-judged and unwelcome, and she makes little headway. How May's account of her time on the island becomes relevant to Anna's family life is very neatly and beautifully worked out.  

   Should you think this is a dark book, or another of those 'harassed mother at the end of her tether' stories, it is neither - and so much more! It's very amusing in a blackly comic fashion, and it's so multi-dimensional, so highly accomplished, that while it does concentrate on a mother torn between career and family, a mother so sleep-deprived she can't think clearly, its true scope is very much wider. Read it and you'll see.

    I haven't read Cold Earth, the first novel by Sarah Moss, but I must do so now as Night Waking was both impressive and enjoyable in equal measure; she is clearly a writer to watch.

Monday miscellany

   

    Another miscellaneous post for Monday, catching up with bits and pieces which may be of interest.

    My goodness me, that Dickens passage gave rise to a wealth of wonderful comments! To answer a few, I don't know why I've never read him - it's certainly not down to deliberate avoidance. There have always been many of his books on our shelves, but for some reason I have yet to read them (and they are on this 'list' - with which I've yet to make any progress, I admit). No, he wasn't studied at my school, and nor was Scott read (we did, as far as I recall, no Scottish literature and no Scottish history), but we did read a lot of Shakespeare, much poetry, Austen and Hardy. (By the way, and in case you haven't seen them, the Dickens commemorative stamps are now available.)

    I gave a brief introduction to Jane Rusbridge's new novel Rook yesterday. It won't be published until the beginning of August, but you can be in with a chance of winning one of five copies of the book by 'liking' and sharing this Facebook post or re-tweeting @circusbooks' tweet on it. Get in quickly, though, as the competition closes at 5pm today.

    

    Next, Sandy at Scone: Alexander McCall Smith will be launching Sunshine on Scotland Street, the latest in his very popular 44, Scotland Street series, in the lovely surroundings of Scone Palace on Thursday, 2nd. August at 7pm. Ticket details here.

 

    Any more entries for our Shadow of Night draw? Get your comments in as I'll be picking the winners soon, and if you haven't read the first book in the series - A Discovery of Witches, which is tremendous fun - then this clip of the author Deborah Harkness leading a walking tour of the book's Oxford locations might whet your appetite.

 

    Speaking of walking tours, currently in progress is The Sillitoe Trail, a literary journey through the Nottingham locations of Alan Sillitoe's 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning via app, web, and so on - more details here.

Flying in

   

 

    Many thanks for all the comments re. Dickens etc. with which I'll be catching up properly soon (the tennis will be keeping me glued to the other screen for part of today).

    We were talking the other day about books we were particularly looking forward to reading, and here's one that falls into that category. Jane Rusbridge's second novel Rook flew in yesterday, and having been very impressed by Jane's first book The Devil's Music (I wrote about it here), I've been keenly anticipating the new one. Here's the gist:

"Nora has come home to the Sussex coast where, every dawn, she runs along the creek path to the sea. In the half-light, fragments of cello music crash around in her mind, but she casts them out - it's more than a year since she performed in public. There are memories she must banish in order to survive: a charismatic teacher with gold-flecked eyes, a mistake she cannot unmake. At home her mother Ada is waiting: a fragile, bitter woman who distils for herself a glamorous past as she smokes French cigarettes in her unkempt garden.

In the village of Bosham the future is invading. A charming young documentary maker has arrived to shoot a film about King Cnut and his cherished but illegitimate daughter, whose body is buried under the flagstones of the local church. As Jonny disturbs the fabric of the village, digging up tales of ancient battles and burials, the threads lead back to home, and Ada and Nora find themselves face to face with the shameful secrets they had so carefully buried.

One day, Nora finds a half-dead fledgling in a ditch. She brings him home and, over the hot summer months, cradles Rook back to life.

A mesmerising story of family, legacy and turning back the tides, Rook beautifully evokes the shifting Sussex sands, and the rich seam of history lying just beneath them."

    This book is another addition to the 'to be read soon' pile, given Jane's obvious talent and the blurb quoted above, and crucially it's also passed 'the Harriet test', that is, when my younger daughter casts her critical eye over new arrivals and gives a quick appraisal (and one with which I'm usually in full agreement) along the lines of "that looks really good/worth reading" or conversely, "who on earth sent you that?"!

What Dickens did

    I've referred here before to the book The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser. When I picked it up this evening for an idle browse, it happened to fall open at Germaine Greer's piece, an essay in which she describes how as a child she became a compulsive reader, "gobbling up one book so that I could gobble up another." Her reading was then a displacement activity, she says, and a book her "fantasy interlocutor", her friend.

    She read on indiscriminately, "gorging on print, reading rubbish with the same appetite as I read the best", and then she brought home a badly foxed copy of Bleak House (chosen for its length), and read:

'London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foothold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since day broke ...'

 

    "By the time I finished that first paragraph I was reading in a different way, letting the phrases swing me along, bouncing through arcs of history, spinning as a hawk's eye to a point of view at once lofty and minute. The rhythm of the writing imposed itself on the rush of my compulsion. I knew that this was an appetite that would not sicken. I would be reading this book for the rest of my life. Dickens had rescued me ... I knew real pleasure at last."

    That's quite a reaction, quite an effect, and not one I can say I've ever experienced (but then ... I've never read Dickens!!!).

 

Illustration from The Pleasure of Reading by Katie Lester.

How do you begin a novel?

   

    Following on from yesterday's post and the link to the How to Get Published conference, I've been delving into the Writers & Artists site, a great resource for anyone interested in writing and publishing. Have a look, for instance, at the interviews with authors page which includes inter alia a short Q&A with Alexander McCall Smith and a longer conversation with Suzy Joinson.

    One question which comes up almost every time authors are put under the spotlight is "where do you get your ideas from?", or to put it another way, "how do you get started?". I find the genesis of a novel quite fascinating, learning what snatch of overheard conversation or glimpsed image, say, sparked a train of thought which eventually resulted in a complete book. It's a seemingly magical process based on that indefinable, intangible 'inspiration' and underpinned by a great deal of time, effort and talent, but every writer starts somewhere, even if that is with a blank sheet of paper and a similarly empty mind. Novelist Katie Hickman (author of The Aviary Gate - post on it here - and The Pindar Diamond) describes the process in her piece How do you begin a novel? and gives what sounds to me like very good advice.

Mount and away!

 

    Back in February I had the pleasure of meeting Suzanne Joinson and hearing about her debut novel A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar which will be published tomorrow. I've now read the book and enjoyed it greatly and I'll be talking about it at greater length soon, but meanwhile Suzy herself is about to hop on her bike - a 1964 BSA - and set off on a tour of the blogs. Practising 'the art of wheeling', as it's described in Maria E. Ward's Bicycling for Ladies (1896), she'll be with us at Cornflower Books on the 14th. of July but she has several stops along the way as you'll see from her full itinerary, so pop in and join her on her travels if you can, and be sure to catch her back here in ten days' time. To whet your appetite you might like to watch this short film in which Suzy talks about the book.

 

                                               ~~~~~

   

    Now, calling all as yet unpublished writers! Suzy will be parking her bike in central London this Saturday (the 7th) as she takes part in what looks like a terrific, information-packed day-long conference. If you're a writer who is hoping to get your work noticed and you're looking for clear, constructive, practical advice, then the How to Get Published event is surely a must for you if you're within striking distance of the Wellcome Collection in Euston Road. Click here for full details (and to book) and you'll see that the speakers include a senior publishing executive, high profile literary agents and editorial consultants, with Suzy and fellow author Kerry Wilkinson giving the benefit of their experience too.

On the wish list ...

   

    The list of books I'd like to read grows ever longer as I collect additional titles from here and there. This morning, for instance, I read a review of Tom Service's Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras - the title says it all, really, and it sounds like a fascinating and very accessible study.

    Then this post from The History Girls had me rushing to bookmark The Knot by Jane Borodale, "the perfect book for the green-fingered reader": a sixteenth century herb garden, a manor house, a scholar, "great anguishe of mynd"...

    Having enjoyed Clare Leighton's Four Hedges so much (I quoted from it here, here and here), I was looking at the website of its publisher Little Toller Books, an imprint of The Dovecote Press, to see what else they have. H.E. Bates' Through the Woods is now in my sights; a portrait of a woodland through a year, and a magical cover image by the wonderful Nicholas Hely Hutchinson.

    What's on your wish list - real or notional? What have you spotted recently that you'd especially like to read?