Cornflower Books

Good lines: in London town

 

   "One day, we go to the square in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, where the booksellers are. To our surprise, we find none of the quiet reverence one associates with reading.

    The shops are adorned with brightly coloured signs that enchant me: ships, water nymphs, Moors' faces, bishops' mitres, snarling dragons and Saracens' heads. As for the shopkeepers, they have the same stentorian voices as the vendors at Cheapside or Leadenhall. You'd think you were at the vegetable market, save for the Latin mixed in here with the English.

    'What do you require, my good sir?'

    'The Mirror for Magistrates! New illustrated edition!'

    'Freshly printed! Never before published!'

    'Buy my map of the New World!'

    'Chronicles and homilies!'

    'Come on! Come on! Take a look at my book! All you need to conjure the perils and pitfalls of the sea!

    'Read my Book of the Courtier! With engravings! Custom and decorum, all explained!'

    It is the same at the Royal Exchange, between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street, where all the world's merchants meet to discuss their business. On the first floor there is a row of shops: apothecaries, armourers, bookshops, jewellers, mercers and haberdashers, all vaunting their wares - a fashionable garment here, a love potion there, wigs and fragrant musks; one sells beard brushes, another handbells; there are coat linings, purses, the finest Toledo blades ... I forget.

    The place I find most entertaining is the area around the Exchange. Here is a mosaic of fruit sellers, hawkers and chimney sweepers, apprentices dallying gaily with housemaids, and clerks scurrying hither and thither, all in a commotion, a monstrous choir of carters thundering past, their singing often audible above the racket, shouts from tavern gardens, farriers' hammers, carpenters' mallets, the din of smithies, barking dogs and the laughter of all those who, like myself, feel infinite pleasure at this monumental symphony."

    From the wonderful Tregian's Ground by Anne Cuneo, out on 7th. April.

Edited to add: here is Francis Tregian on writing.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the shortlist

    The shortlist for this year's Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has just been announced, and here it is:

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
The Lie by Helen Dunmore
Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre
In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds
Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut
A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie
The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling

    Chair of Judges Alistair Moffat said of the list, "[these] seven fantastic novels represent the diversity and breadth of style that the genre of historical fiction now encompasses – from the poetic to the experimental, and from satire to adventure, writing set in the past can challenge, excite and innovate in a hundred different ways."

    It's worth noting also that the judging criteria include "originality and innovation, quality of writing, and a strong narrative," and for the purposes of the Prize, "‘historical’ means that the majority of the events described in the books must have taken place at least 60 years before publication. This definition comes from the subtitle of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley;  Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since". So now we know!

    Click here to see which of the longlisted books didn't make the cut.

Monday miscellany

    -    In relation to our forthcoming book group reading/discussion of Jane Eyre, many of us wondered how we would respond to the book now, coming back to it later in life, having first read it in our teens. The almost inevitable change in perspective we will bring to it is very interesting for many reasons, not least as Diane Setterfield says, "To reread is not only to circle back in time to a book, but to rediscover yourself and measure the distance – and the closeness – between who you are and who you used to be".

    -    The Romantic Novel of the Year Award has gone to Joss Stirling for her Young Adult novel Struck. It's the first time a YA book has triumphed, but regardless of genre, a prize is no surprise when you realise that Joss Stirling is actually Julia Golding who is very good both on the page and in person, as you'll see here.

    -    On the subject of literary prizes, I intended to write about The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize when it was awarded back in November and somehow the post never materialised, but the book which won sounds as though it would be of interest to many of us, so better late than never ... Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton, was commended by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, biographer herself and one of the judges for the prize: "Mary, Madeline and Pamela Wyndham’s connections – familial, sexual and social – place them at the heart of a Britain which was brought to an end by the First World War. Through their love affairs and marriages, their house-parties and their patronage, the three sisters dominated a milieu where high society, high finance, politics and the arts were interconnected. Biography has been called the “higher gossip” – this book, ingeniously structured and written with fluency and wit, demonstrates how enjoyable, and how historically illuminating, high gossip can be."

Bargain of the day - The Living Mountain

   

    Just a quick post to say that one of today's Kindle 'deals' is Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland.

    It's a marvellous evocation of a place, and a superb piece of nature writing - as you'll see from the brief passage quoted here.

Reading in the rain

   

    As rain is the theme over on the other site today, I thought I'd continue it here with links to posts on some 'rainy' books and poems:

    The Rain Tree: A Memoir by Mirabel Osler

    The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith

    Who Loves The Rain by Frances Shaw

    A Thunderstorm in Town by Thomas Hardy

    History of the Rain by Niall Williams

    Like rain it sounded till it curved by Emily Dickinson

 

    And see also.

Prizes, prizes

    In talking about the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction the other day I said I was sorry not to see Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss on the longlist. Honour has been restored somewhat by the novel's inclusion on the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist, and if you follow that link and watch the short video you will hear chair of judges Bill Bryson remark that "it's the quality of the writing that really sets this book apart".

    Anyone who has read Bodies of Light will be glad to know that its 'sequel', Signs for Lost Children, will be out in early July.

 

    In other literary prize news, the Bailey's Prize longlist includes the superbly written The Offering by Grace McCleen. I described this as "a beautifully crafted, fluent work of intensity ... a bleak novel but one of great integrity", and while at times it's harrowing reading, the author's talent is undeniable.

    Also on the Bailey's list but towards the lighter end of the emotional spectrum is Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, a large-scale 'portrait' on a small-scale canvas. I was about to say that Anne Tyler is the consummate prose pointilliste, but I see that Susan Hill got there before me!

The space that stories grant us

   

    Another short passage from Ann Morgan's eloquent Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer :

    "The space that stories grant us, by allowing us to bail out some of the emotional and logistical paraphernalia we carry with us in the real world, makes extraordinary things possible. With our minds free of everyday concerns and the volume turned down on our interior monologues, we have the scope to engage in creative activity of our own, as our imaginations construct the fictional worlds sketched out by the words before our eyes."

In memory of The Tinker

    Sad news today of the death of Len Chester, fondly known to so many of us as The Tinker, father of Dovegreyreader.

    I'm proud to have a specially signed copy of Len's book Bugle Boy, published in 2007, and here's my post on it from that time, lest we forget:

    "In this book are just a few events noted by a young boy who became a man long before his time and who lost his youth in the service of his country."

     These words are from the preface to Len Chester's Bugle Boy, his account of his life as a boy bugler in the Royal Marines. Joining the service in 1939 at the age of only fourteen, under five feet tall, a lad with little or no experience of the adult world let alone a world at war, Len served at Eastney Barracks, Portsmouth, before being based at bleak Scapa Flow in Orkney and then becoming part of the dire and dangerous Arctic Convoys.

     Len's beautifully easy conversational style marks him out as a natural story-teller, and I could happily read him for hours, so engaging is he. He brings wit and warmth to a subject which is harsh and often tragic and in doing so he achieves that most important of objectives: to make us aware of, and remember, the people and events of which he writes.

    As H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh remarks in his Foreword to the book, "Future historians may concentrate on the broader issues of the war, but it is reminiscences like these which will give them the opportunity to include the human dimension", and a very human story this is.

 

    My thoughts are with Lynne and her family.

Thought for the day

   

    "Ensconced as we are in our individual hall of mirrors, our literary preferences reflected endlessly back to us in slightly altered form, it can be tricky to see a way out. If your default frame of reference for selecting a book is that it looks like, sounds like or is like something you've read before, or that someone you like likes it, how do you begin to navigate your way through literary terrain that has few familiar landmarks, where book jackets don't give off the signals you're used to and where hardly any of your contemporaries may ever have ventured?"

    From Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer by Ann Morgan.