Cornflower Books

Book of the day - A Private History of Happiness

 

 

    "One evening, as I took a red and gold dish of bulgur wheat, beetroot and roast squash out of the oven for the family, I was happy and that's why I wrote this book."

    That's George Myerson, author of A Private History Of Happiness: Ninety-Nine Moments of Joy from Around the World, and I must say that I love the idea of his book:

    "[This] is a moving and compelling anthology of quiet yet powerful moments of everyday joy, drawn not from grand literary works, but from private letters, journals and poems. From the bliss of lingering in a warm bed on a winter morning, to a bracing springtime walk by the seaside [or a moment in an orchard], it offers the reader a wealth of delightfully fresh perceptions of where and how happiness may be found.

    Arranged by themes such as Friendship, Nature, Creativity and Morning, these 99 moments of bliss are followed by a brief commentary that sets the extract in context and encourages further reflection. Drawing on a wide and international range of literary sources, from Ptolemy to Blake, from Tolstoy to Mary Berry*, George Myerson reveals that small, unpretentious joys have been shared by human beings across cultures and over thousands of years. In A Private History of Happiness, he invites us to discover the happiness in our own lives that can be found in the here and now."

 

*this one, not that one!

Book of the day - Bellman & Black

    "On an August day, spurred on by his young friends, a boy takes aim at a rook with his newly crafted catapult. An impossible shot, but one that reaches its target. The boys watch in awe as the shot strikes home and the black bird falls from the branch. For the first time, death creeps into William Bellman's life. Over the oak tree, rooks begin to gather, arriving from all directions to congregate on its branches and stare at the boy. Will races home and tries desperately to forget the disturbing experience.

    A man, lost in beareavement, weighed down by tragedy and in a drunken fog, encounters in a graveyard a figure dressed in black. Not a mourner, something quite different , something perhaps not even real. They converse and an extraordinary bargain is struck.

    In London, a curious shop opens its doors - the first mourning emporium for the capital of an empire, providing everything from coffins to umbrellas. The bereaved flock to Bellman & Black, death after all never goes out of fashion. And William Bellman believes the past can finally be forgotten.

    Rooks, however, don't forget."

    Yes, it's Bellman & Black, the long-awaited second novel from Diane Setterfield, author of The Thirteenth Tale.

Friday reads

 

 

    We have a winner in our book bag draw, and that is Martina, so the bag will be on its way to her in Australia soon, and meanwhile thanks again to everyone who entered and listed their travel reads.

    What are you all reading just now?

    I'm in the early pages of Jane Gardam's Crusoe's Daughter (our book group book for September) and it's off to a great start. I'm also dipping into a lovely collection of short essays, Simple Pleasures: Little Things That Make Life Worth Living, and reading my daily poem (today's was A Runnable Stag by John Davidson). And speaking of poetry, sad news this morning of the death of Seamus Heaney; I've posted his Blackberry picking here.

    Back to the book group for a moment, and I have ideas for books for both October and November - I'm still swithering over one of them but hope to be able to post about them early next week so that we can all get ahead if we wish.

    Finally, please come back later for 'book of the day'; I was going to include it here, but I think it deserves a post of its own ....

Out in paperback today ....

         

    Out in paperback today, and great reads all:

Peggy Riley's  Amity & Sorrow (there's a post on it here, and one on Peggy's Book Festival event here).

Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway (post on the book here, Tracy's guest post on her quilting here, and her EIBF event here. This novel has been chosen by Richard and Judy as one of their book club titles for Autumn.

Maggie O'Farrell's Instructions for a Heatwave (post here).

Writers' portraits - Robertson Davies

    This post will just scrape in before the 28th. of August is over, and the date is important because it is the 100th. anniversary of Robertson Davies's birth, something I confess I would not have been aware of but for this short piece this morning.

    Happily, I still have lots of his books left to read, but those I have read - including Fifth Business with our own book group - have been marvellously rich reads, distinctive of voice, strong in narrative pull, and fascinating in content and ideas. If you've yet to discover his work, do try him soon (his three great trilogies, for example, Salterton, Deptford and Cornish, or The Cunning Man), and as Martin Chilton says in that article, take one on a long journey* and you may find, as he did, that the miles pass very pleasantly.

    For more of the man himself, here is a television interview from the 1970s, and here is his Paris Review interview from which come a few bons mots with which to end:

On the work-in-progress - "I hope it turns out well. But with novels, like cakes, you never know."

On writer's block - "I might enjoy a wee block, just to have time to catch my breath."

On endings - "...if the story is any good, it must have an inevitability."

On clarity - "I am a writer much given to light and shade, and I firmly believe that to know all is to despise all."

On selective details - "there must be a few tricky bits in my books or they wouldn’t be books by me."

                                                ~~~~~

    *Speaking of journeys, I asked you the other day which books you'd pack as good travelling companions, and you gave such a wealth of suggestions that if we took them all, no journey would have a dull moment. I'll be drawing a name out of the hat tomorrow (Thursday) so if you haven't entered and would like a chance of winning that EIBF book bag, leave a comment on that post now.

Books in brief

   

    Amidst all the hectic festivalising over the last fortnight and more there has been some reading, too, so here are a few words on three books, beginning with the latest from that most relaxing, uplifting of writers, Alexander McCall Smith.

    Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers is the ninth book in the 44, Scotland Street series, and if you're familiar with any of the other eight, you'll know the form. Written as a daily serial in The Scotsman newspaper, the book follows the lives of a group of residents of Edinburgh's New Town, and with wit, whimsy and the author's trademark charm, follows them hither and yon as their creator's fancy takes him. To give you a token plot strand or two - trouble in the ranks of the Scottish nudists, karma as a 'promoting factor' regarding one's Edinburgh address, the delights of The Penguin Café Orchestra, and 'gender-neutral' birthday presents for 7-year-old boys. Joy!

   

    Changing the mood and the tone to something rather more bittersweet and wistful is The List of my Desires by Grégoire Delacourt. I gave a short introduction to it here, and having read it now I think that makes it sounds rather more up-beat than it is. It's a sad story about happiness; it concerns love and longing, appreciating what we have, and seeing what's right in front of us, and in part it's about having the courage to step into your dreams. It's a quick read but one which will make you think.

   

    The other day I mentioned in passing Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan and I called it "fun, sweet, warm-hearted, mad-in-a-good-way". It's a bizarre but lovely mixture of old books and typography, modern technology, a quest, a code, a secret society, a lot of Googling (i.e. an illuminating look inside Google HQ itself), the weirdest book club in the world and the search for .... something which I cannot reveal. Suffice to say, it is a treat and I loved it!

Simon Sebag Montefiore @Edbookfest

   

    My last event of this year's EIBF was Simon Sebag Montefiore talking about his new novel One Night in Winter, and had I been experiencing 'festival fatigue' today after the end of a fantastic fortnight, his talk would certainly have perked me up - what he had to say was gripping, horrifying and fascinating in equal measure.

     Based on actual events which happened in Stalinist Russia in 1945 and which Simon uncovered during his research for his non-fiction book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, the novel is centred on an exclusive school and the bizarre and dangerous game played by its senior pupils who are all the children of government leaders. When one of these 17-year-olds is shot by a classmate who then turns the gun on himself, Stalin takes an interest in what has been going on and orders an investigation resulting in the arrest and imprisonment - for as long as 6 months - of some 26 young people. During their incarceration, the children were interrogated about their families, their private business and their views of Stalin and his leadership, and their 'confessions' could and did destroy their parents. What they revealed and how they survived the interrogation is covered in this novel which is at heart about family and love.

    Soviet Russia at this time "was like Edith Wharton with the death penalty", any faux pas resulting not in a snub or social banishment but in execution, and in a society which was hierarchical, the book looks also at what Simon called "the hierarchy of love", the range of relationships carried on in a place where jeopardy is supreme, and where "everything was secret but nothing private".

    Simon talked very entertainingly about his research, not just for this novel but for his work generally. While we may think of archives as staffed by obliging people who will help find material and do what they can to aid scholarship, some of the archivists Simon encountered in his Russian researches are of an altogether different stripe. When working on Young Stalin he had privileged access to documents and people because his book Catherine the Great and Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair had put him in favour with the powers that be, but as those powers had 'taken agin' him' for Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, subsequent access had been denied. Still persona non grata, one particularly difficult archival guardian dropped a kitten on Simon's head from the upper level of an old palace - a cruelly original way of showing him the door!

    A historian's lot is often not a happy one, it seems, as Simon told us that when working on his book Jerusalem: The Biography, he was stoned by both Israeli and Palestinian factions, thereby establishing his own "state of perfect neutrality". Against these real difficulties and dangers, the challenge of writing historical fiction, of interweaving hard fact and accurate detail - for readers are sophisticated and spot inaccuracies - with invented characters with whom one can do as one likes sounds like rather a freeing experience; the results, if today's talk was anything to go by, quite compelling.

Paula Byrne @Edbookfest

   

     Paula Byrne's latest book is The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, and in it she takes a series of objects owned by or associated with Jane Austen and uses them to shed light on her life. She talked briefly about this type of 'microbiography' or 'partial life', contrasting it with the traditional 'womb to tomb' work which would not have been appropriate in the case of this subject as so much has already been said and nothing new has been unearthed.

    Speaking with great verve and passion, Paula gave a most lively lecture on some of the objects she covers in the book, using them to set Jane Austen's life in context and correct what are frequent misapprehensions about her. She illustrated the overlapping areas between the author's life and her novels - what she said would have any fan rushing back for a re-read - and was at pains to show that far from the very confined, limited existence she is often thought to have had, Jane Austen was engaged with the world, went about the place, and of course, translated what she saw and heard into prose of genius.

                                                ~~~~~

    Has anyone read Paula's previous book, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead? I like the sound of it.

Eleanor Catton & Hannah Kent @Edbookfest

    The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize and tipped to win (I've read it, and it's mightily impressive). Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, a debut novel, the subject of an international bidding war, out this week and high on my TBR pile. The authors of these books came all the way from New Zealand and Australia respectively to talk to an eager audience at EIBF.

    Eleanor's book is set on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island during a gold rush in the 1860s, and it was the drama of that landscape, which Eleanor visited often as a youngster, which captured her imagination and inspired her story. Hannah's takes as its subject Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland, and an exchange visit she made to Iceland as a teenager planted the seed that would grow into a work praised by Madeline Miller as "gripping ... beautifully written ... outstanding."

    The Luminaries is a murder mystery, a ghost story, a psychological drama, a book of extraordinary complexity and richness written in perfect 19th. century style. In discussing her influences, Eleanor talked persuasively about her desire to "defend the adverb", how psychology changed the landscape of the novel forever, and how Agatha Christie's books taught her how to keep the reader reading. In Burial Rites, which tells Agnes's story from when she is found guilty of murder, sentenced to death and waits out the months until her execution at a farm in the north of the country, Hannah has used several narrative voices and fragments of letters, aiming by these means to explore the ambiguity, depth and humanity of her subject, contrasting that with received opinion which paints Agnes as simply and starkly "monstrous and evil".

    Both books are very well plotted, and on the subject of plotting generally, Eleanor talked about what is seen as a distinction between literary and genre fiction, i.e. that in the case of the former, plot is secondary. This fascinates and enrages her, she says, as she feels plot is every bit as important as structure, and that novelists could learn a lot from watching high quality television drama such as Breaking Bad which provide lessons in suspense and in keeping character and plot alive and developing. Eleanor wanted her book to be entertaining: "entertainment isn't necessarily low brow," she said. In Hannah's case, her plot was formed by actual events, although her research into them was gradual and laborious. She was researching and writing concurrently, "finding the dots and then joining them," so the suspense "just happened" as she waited to discover what came next, but the effort she put into understanding and shaping her characters shaped the plot, too.

    Hannah told us that her book is "a dark love letter to the natural landscape of Iceland", reflecting in some ways her own experience of living there, of the slow descent into winter, of the place and its culture. Eleanor, when asked whether her book could have been shorter (it is 832 pages), talked of wanting to do justice to the 19th. century style she'd adopted and to her large cast of characters by giving them space to evolve. She employs a structural conceit, too,  making each part half the length of the one before, thus "a golden spiral", a shaping force, and she admitted that she didn't know whether the ambitious task she had set herself was even possible until she had completed it. I can tell you that she's done it in fine form.

Edna O'Brien @Edbookfest

    Edna O'Brien at 82: a luminous quality to her presence and her prose, elegant, erudite, perceptive, witty and wise, she charmed the EIBF audience, and was in turn delighted that so many (for it was a sell-out) had come to hear her. She has described herself as "ravenous for life" and "never lacking in energy or appetite", and this was evident in her recollections of a life lived, much of which she has written about in her memoir Country Girl.

    Chairing the event, journalist Ruth Wishart described Edna O'Brien as "a weaver of magical prose, a consummate wordsmith", and in both the extract she read from her book and in her account of the process of writing it - "grounding memory, giving it its physicality" - she showed not only her eloquence but the depth of her thinking and feeling.

    "Injuries and wrongs are very good for fiction," she said, recalling the painful events of her past, but she also credited her parents for giving her the gifts of stories and storytelling, even though her childhood lacked books (in the village where she grew up there was a single copy of Rebecca, loaned out by the page - but not consecutively), and the absence of the printed word didn't stifle the young Edna's latent creativity. Fueling both her imagination and her romantic sensibilities were a disparate collection of influences, she told us, beginning with "Our Lord - the unattainable, heroic, sacrificial," then moving on to Count Dracula, "all sweeping black", as portrayed by a group of travelling players which came to her village in rural Ireland, and then she dicovered Heathcliff: "not a practical man who paid the rent and grew potatoes...".

    Navigating what she referred to as the minefield that is biography, she has compressed "80 years of turmoil" into her book, concentrating on "attachment, love, betrayal, debt - our inner life is racked by these concerns". On writing itself, "I leave the real world outside the door when I write," she says, and "keep the child within as far as any creative work is concerned, but keep the parent there as well".

                                                  ~~~~~

    The Love Object: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien will be published in early October.

Samantha Shannon & James Smythe @Edbookfest

 

    Billed as "Dystopian Dramas for a New Age", Friday's EIBF event featuring Samantha Shannon and James Smythe might have looked dark and even drear on paper, but was in fact a light-hearted, often hilarious discussion which would open anyone's mind to the world of books, or the parts of it they had yet to discover.

    Samantha was there to talk about The Bone Season (for more on it click here, and I must just mention in passing that it had sold out in the Festival Bookshop even before the event), while James was introducing his new novel The Machine in which a woman tries to 're-build' her psychologically damaged husband in a possible near future. While Samantha's book imagines a future based on an alternate history of Britain (everything changed in 1859), James took our present concerns with global warming, war and the economy and used them to threaten his society. Both are 'genre' books, but James commented that readers are very willing to buy into new worlds such as we see here, and Samantha made reference to the fact that hers is a grounded fantasy with a strong sense of realism. From urban dystopian fantasy to modern gothic horror, Samantha - quoting Isaac Asimov on science fiction - talked about these and others as "flavours" to be applied rather than definitive genres in themselves.

    The Machine is concerned with the mind and with what makes us who we are. Beth's husband Vic suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving with the army in a war, but a machine has extracted his bad memories; however, it has taken more than that, and now although this machine has been banned as too controversial and its side-effects too harmful, it is the only device Beth can use to reconstruct the husband she once knew. Samantha's book features the depths of the mind as well, seen and reached by clairvoyants. For The Bone Season she has constructed a hierarchical system of voyants, each with plausible limits, and so the world of the book is presented on both a physical and a spiritual level. Inspired by the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell, she has layered fantasy with reality to great effect.

    James talked very interestingly about the difficulty of reaching readers (including some very close to home!), no matter what sort of book one writes, and both writers described their paths to publication, James's through what he considers to be a poor first novel, and Samantha's after her early work was rejected - something she found very painful and off-putting. Asked what advice they would give to their younger selves in the light of these experiences, they urged perseverance, resilience and openness to constructive criticism - and not reading the 'bad' Amazon/Goodreads reviews!

A book hunt

    I wrote the other day about the proof copies of Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things which are to be found in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden this weekend. I popped into the Botanics this morning and managed to find one (though as the hunt itself is fun I won't give away its location), but of course I left it there for someone else to read in that quiet spot or take home with them.

    If you're in the area, the books should still be there tomorrow, so pay a visit and see if you're lucky.

A busy week

    As posts are coming thick and fast here - and I'm sorry to bombard you but there's a lot to keep up with - I thought a brief recap would be in order, beginning with last Friday's A poem a day. I've been turning to The 20th Century in Poetry every morning and reading just one poem, so from Thomas Hardy in 1900 we've moved on to Flannan Isle by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, The Ballad of Jimmy Governor by Les Murray, 1901 by Noël Coward, Kipling's Bridge-Guard in the Karroo, Story of Lilavanti by Laurence Hope (Adela Florence Nicolson), Masefield's wonderful Sea-Fever (for John Ireland's setting, do listen to Sir Thomas Allen's recording), and on to today's poem, Autumn Morning at Cambridge by Frances Cornford. So far, so good.


    My Edbookfest event on Saturday was all about cover design - how best to tell the potential reader what's inside the book. We learned that boys won't pick up a book with a girl on the front (until they get to a certain age and it's a certain type of girl), that humans require Vitamin 'S' - 'S' for 'Story', and that the design process, over several editions, is a constant process of refinement and audience-targeting.


    If you're a lover of food in novels, Sunday's post gave a link to a special edition of The Food Programme on 'cooking and crime', or eating with the detectives. Much there to whet the appetite for certain books or just plain make you hungry.

 

 

    On Monday I posted details of the Cornflower Book Group's next book. Our September read is Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam (whose Edbookfest event - a delight - I attended last week), and I hope lots of people are getting their hands on a copy ready to join in with our discussion.

 

    I 've posted only one review this week but it's of a cracker of a book, Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season. However, I have just finished another treat of a novel, and I'll write about it in due course, but for now, look out for the fun, sweet, warm-hearted, mad-in-a-good-way Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore.

 

    If you haven't already done so, there's still time to enter the draw to win a book bag, and I'm so enjoying all the suggestions of books as travelling companions which you're leaving in the comments there.

 

    It was back to the Book Festival yesterday to hear about two very different books (and a controversial opinion on historical fiction!), and as I have more events in prospect, I'm off now to sharpen my pencils and get ready to report.

Courtney Collins & Rosemary Goring @Edbookfest

 

    My EIBF event yesterday featured two writers, each one taking real people or events as the raw material for their fiction. Courtney Collins was there to talk about her debut The Burial, described as "a dark, swooning upgrade of the Australian gothic genre", while from closer to home, Rosemary Goring's book After Flodden features a young woman's search for her brother in the aftermath of that infamous battle.
   
    Courtney's book is on my TBR pile and so I was very keen to hear her talk about it and read from it - she chose an early passage that was intense, beautiful, atmospheric and dark; Rosemary's novel is new to me but very much 'of the moment' in that the 500th anniversary of the battle is just days away. Although clearly very different in period, subject matter and style, both books aim "to put flesh on a woman", in Courtney's case the circus rider, bushranger and horse and cattle rustler Jessie Hickman, in Rosemary's a fictional character, Louise Brenier, a pivotal figure one of whose functions is to correct an imbalance, for as Rosemary said, "women play a great part in war but you never see them; in the aftermath, they pick up the reins."

   Critic Allan Massie describes After Flodden as "a tremendous Romance, the work of a wild and turbulent imagination, a tale of blood, slaughter, treachery, devotion, and adventure", while Elizabeth Gilbert says of The Burial, "this extraordinary novel - propelled by the dark, rich talents of a truly brilliant writer - dazzles, staggers and amazes".

    Courtney grew up in Australia's Hunter Valley, where Jessie herself lived, and her familiarity with the place, its landscape, its folklore even, led her to choose that real woman - about whom not much hard fact is known - as her central character. Her difficulty was in how best to tell her story, from which point of view? In what Jackie McGlone, the event's chair, described as "a daring magical realist twist", Courtney eventually settled on the voice of Jessie's dead baby, and this unorthodox solution helped ease what Courtney described as "the creative tension between the facts of Jessie's life and the writing of fiction per se".

    Rosemary then set her book in its historical context, describing the background to Flodden and its effect on the fortunes of Scotland. Disastrous for the Scots, it saw the death of King James IV and the loss of 10,000 men in two hours, and through her research Rosemary wanted to better understand why this happened. Though working with real events, it's fiction, not history, she's writing, and so she says, "I use facts like a trampoline - to bounce away from". Interestingly, both writers were keen to reject the label "historical fiction" for their work. Rosemary explained that she was not a fan of the genre, while Courtney thinks place, rather than period, is key to her book; neither wanted to be pigeon-holed, but while Courtney described her novel as "a project of empathy with Australia's [dark] past", Rosemary admitted her dislike of the 'hist.fic' tag was based on snobbery: "it's a lazy label and too easily thrown around," she said.

    Whether or not these books are assigned to a category, what was evident from what their authors had to say was, as Courtney put it, "[one's] faith in fiction acts like a force - to find the way to the truth."

Would you like a book bag?

    At the Edinburgh International Book Festival this morning I bought one of the Guardian book bags especially to give away. It's 100% cotton and measures approx. 37cm. x 42cm., with handles long enough to go over your shoulder, (and a Guardian books logo in green on the other side).



    I am happy to send this anywhere in the world, so we'll have a draw and if you'd like to throw your name into the hat, then please leave a comment telling us which book or books you would pack if you had a long journey in prospect. It could be something you've read before or have long wanted to read, and for the sake of argument let's pretend that weight and bulk are not an issue, so I'm asking you to choose one or two books to pop in your bag to be good companions as you travel. Please have a go!

                                             ~~~~~

    If you're in the Edinburgh area and haven't seen yesterday's post on the other blog, do have a quick look as it has news of a chance to pick up a proof copy of a very promising-looking novel at a well known city location.

 

Edited to add: many thanks to all who entered the draw; it is now closed, and we have a winner.

The Bone Season

 

    If I were to offer you a dystopian fantasy novel and your inclination was to politely decline it, I would understand your reluctance as my bookshelves are as short on that genre as yours would be. But before you pick up your usual reading matter, let me tell you about the book I've just read.

     The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon is set in London and Oxford in 2059, and features a young clairvoyant called Paige Mahoney. Paige works in the criminal underworld, gathering information by breaking into people's minds, and thus "she commits treason simply by breathing". When she's attacked and kidnapped one day, she finds herself transported to Oxford, a city kept secret for 200 years, a penal colony controlled by an otherworldly race, and there she is assigned to Warden, her master, keeper and trainer - and her enemy.

    What follows is a gripping story that leaves the reader in awe of Samantha's imagination and creativity, and wrapped up in a fast-paced study of power-play and ingenuity on a fantastical scale tempered by some very human emotions. The world of Scion and Sheol I which Samantha has built here is marvellously detailed in its construction. It combines plausible futuristic elements with a rich Victorian and Edwardian heritage - much of that based on fact and detail that's real, not imagined. The combination is a winning one.

    There are other lovely touches such as chapter names echoing the titles of John Donne poems, a walk-on part for Lord Nelson, Warden's fondness for a gramophone playing 1930s and '40s songs, and candlelit Oxford colleges ... it's a brilliant construct, and this book is just the first in a planned series of seven, so there's lots more to look forward to.

    I shall be very interested to see how Samantha's writing develops over the series; her world will, I'm sure, become even more detailed and fascinating as she proceeds, and while her story-telling is already compelling I think her pacing will evolve, and I hope the back-story of Paige and of Scion will further emerge. As to the characters, Warden is intriguing and ... (I'll leave you to discover what else besides), Paige's crime syndicate boss, Jaxon Hall, is deliciously over-the-top (Samantha hopes for Benedict Cumberbatch in this role in the film of the book which is to be made by Andy Serkis's company), and Paige herself is clever, resourceful and independent, if occasionally touchingly naive. Samantha's research into topics such as Roman augury and soothsaying, Victorian clairvoyance and street slang allows her to ground her fantasy world in a recognisable reality, and I think the book is all the stronger for this - it's a great read.

    For some visual cues to The Bone Season, have a look at this Pinterest board, and to hear from the author herself, listen to today's Woman's Hour, then read the epigraph (below) and let your own imagination take you into Samantha's amazing one.

    "Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere." Charlotte Brontë

Cornflower Book Group - September, 2013

 

    We've read 60 books, we've had a break over the summer, now it's time to begin our autumn reading.

    I hope that everyone who has read some or all of the Cornflower Book Group titles and taken part in our discussions so far will be keen to get going again and start a new book. For anyone not already familiar with the group and the way it works, it's a very informal set-up, open to all, involving reading one book every month and then sharing your thoughts on it - briefly or at length, just as you wish - by way of comments on the discussion post. Ours is a friendly group, and while our opinions on a given book will of course often diverge, when we disagree we do so in a good-natured, respectful manner.

   

    To begin the new season I've chosen Crusoe's Daughter* by Jane Gardam, a novel first published in 1985 and said to be the book of which its author is most proud (though she self-deprecatingly qualifies that by adding, "I don't know about proud..."); it's also the one the critics call her finest. It tells the story of Polly Flint and the 80 years she spends in a house by the sea on a bleak coast, the world of books her solace and obsession, and you can read the opening passage here.

    On Saturday, 28th. September, I'll put up a short post on the novel to get our conversation going, then it's over to all of you to join in and have your say. If you haven't taken part before but feel like doing so now, you'll be most welcome, and of course I hope all 'old hands' will return with renewed vigour and enthusiasm.

 

    *(For the benefit of anyone overseas whose local shops or libraries don't have Crusoe's Daughter, you can order it post-free here; it's also available as an e-book.)

Cooking and crime

   

    Today's Food Programme on Radio 4 was Feeding the Detectives, a delicious taste of food in crime fiction, the novels featured including Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series and Anne Zouroudi's Mysteries of the Greek Detective. You can listen to the programme on iPlayer or via the podcast, and there's a post on The Feast of Artemis, Anne's latest book, here.

Charlie Fletcher on cover design @Edbookfest

    We often discuss book cover design on these pages, so it was with particular interest that I went to a talk on that very subject at EIBF today.

    The paperback cover image for Charlie Fletcher's novel Far Rockaway was the subject of a design competition for illustration students at Edinburgh College of Art, and the panel at this afternoon's event comprised Charlie himself, his publisher Anne McNeil of Hodder, Jonathan Gibbs, head of illustration at ECA, and the winning designer Astrid Jaekel. Together they gave us a fascinating look at the creative process and what goes into achieving the perfect pairing of book and cover.

    We were shown many examples of jackets for novels by writers such as Enid Blyton and David Almond, Cressida Cowell and Charlie himself, each collection highlighting the variations from hardback* to paperback, perhaps a film tie-in, a design for the US market, say, and later editions of old favourites. With every change, the interface between book and readership is being refined, the target audience more directly reached - that certainly is the intention.

    In the case of Far Rockaway, a novel which intercuts a narrative set in real life contemporary New York with scenes of fantasy involving characters from books such The Last of the Mohicans and Stevenson's Kidnapped, the cover had to combine these disparate elements and appeal to boys and girls alike. Charlie read the first chapter (and I think the audience could happily have heard a great deal more for we were gripped from the off), and we could then appreciate the challenge inherent in the instruction he'd given the ECA students: "illustrate that!"

    Astrid showed us the beautiful, ingenious papercut she'd made initially in response to the text and to the need to interpret it in simple and striking manner, a piece inspired by the drama of the book and the movement and elements of nature in the story, and then she explained that when her design was chosen, several more versions or roughs were made until the Hodder designers then shaped the final one into what you see above. This successful collaboration of the creative and the commercial worlds has resulted in a design which pleases both author and publisher, and which should attract a readership which will be enthralled by the book.

    Asked how publishers decide on jacket designs in the typical, more conventional process, Anne McNeil said they use "a mixture of intuition, experience and consumer insight". She commented that Charlie's work transcends genre, he can't be pigeonholed, and finding an image to complement his stories is a creative challenge. The initial brief is all-important, and everyone must work to that brief to come up with a design which tells the reader what's inside the cover.

    To end, Charlie talked about the creative process within the act of reading itself, as the reader's own imagination provides the images to accompany the story as it goes along. For this reason, photo-real covers "deprive the reader of being involved in their own reality of the book", and likewise Charlie would always advise reading a book before seeing a film version. "Humans need Vitamin S," he says, "S for Story."

 

*You can see the hardback jacket for Far Rockaway here .

A poem a day

    Poetry is under-represented on this blog and in my reading generally, and I thought to address that by buying the doorstop-sized The 20th Century in Poetry edited by Michael Hulse and Simon Rae, an anthology which presents - in chronological order - over 400 poems written in many parts of the English-speaking world during the twentieth century. "From war to peace, from industry to strikes, from artisans to technology, here is history seen as never before, through the poets' eyes."

    "Our aim has been to allow the poems to tell the stories of the century, both public and private," say the editors, "...[and] to offer pleasures, both simple and complex ...". I'm going to be working my way through, perhaps reading just a poem a day, but taking my time.

    The book begins, of course, in 1900 with The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
    The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
    Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
    Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
    The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
    The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
    Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
    Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
    The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
    Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
    In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
    Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
    Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
    Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
    His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
    And I was unaware.

 

There is a commentary on the poem here.