Cornflower Books

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the longlist

    The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is one in which many of us take a keen interest; here's this year's longlist:

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd

A Petrol Scented Spring by Ajay Close

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

Dictator by Robert Harris

Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt

Death and Mr Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis

Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea

End Games in Bordeaux by Allan Massie

Tightrope by Simon Mawer

Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn

Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar

    The shortlist will be announced at the end of March, and the winner at The Borders Book Festival on 18th. June.

Looking forward to reading ...

   

    Catalogues from Profile Books and Serpent's Tail for the second half of the year have just arrived and two titles particularly caught my eye.

    From Susan Hill, who needs no introduction but is here described as "grande dame of English supernatural fiction", comes The Travelling Bag, "a chilling collection of new ghost stories. In the title story, in the warmly lit surrounds of a club off St. James's, a bishop listens closely as a supernatural detective recounts his most memorable case, one whose horrifying denouement took place in that very building.

    "This is Susan Hill at her best, with a characteristically flesh-creeping and startling collection of new tales of thwarted ambition, terrifying revenge and supernatural stirrings that will leave readers wide-awake long into the night."

    Look for that one in September.

    Out in June comes The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry, "a sumptuously imagined novel of passion, ideas and friendship.

    "Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890s, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other - but not in the usual way. Cora Seaborne is a well-to-do London widow and amateur naturalist who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, where William Ransome is the local vicar. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. As the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart.

    "Dazzlingly written and woven through with rich historical detail, this novel is most profoundly a celebration of love and the many different guises it can take."

Ideas, and where to find them - 2

    "In the course of our studies, we often had to go to museums to gather ideas for our work [...] Looking for old stories demands great effort, but it is well worth it, for it puts one's imagination to work and brings contemporary people in contact with the mystical-ritualistic world of [the past]. It is a kind of dialogue with what has been, from which new stories emerge."

    Kristi Jōeste, from Ornamented Journey by Kristi Jōeste and Kristiina Ehin.

    More Ideas, and where to find them here.

Harper Lee

    Thank you for what you gave us. May you rest in peace.

Summertime, and the living is easy

 

    Tove Jansson's The Summer Book is a bargain at 99p for Kindle today, and in case you haven't come across it (or its sibling The Winter Book), here's the gist:

    Anyone familiar with Jansson's famous Moomins will recognise the humour in these stories which are a series of essay/sketches like a collection of watercolours, but with a sudden stab of the bold and brilliant. They are profound and funny, and following the adventures of the child Sophia and her elderly grandmother on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, they cleverly capture the cantankerousness of both youth and old age: "Wise as she was, [grandmother] realised that people can postpone their rebellious phases until they're eighty five years old, and she decided to keep an eye on herself."

    Sophia and grandmother discuss everything from whether God has secretaries, to the plight of halved worms and the frailty of moss (step on it three times and it dies), and all the while the island's vulnerability and isolation focus the stories inward. In her introduction, Esther Freud says the book's allure "is the allure of summer itself for [Scandinavians] who spend so much of the year in the dark." It is equally appealing to the rest of us.

Fairy Tale Fashion

    The exhibition Fairy Tale Fashion is currently on at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City - I'd love to see it but doubt I shall. However, there's an accompanying book coming out soon which "[examines] the history, significance and imagery of classic fairy tales through the lens of high fashion and explores the pivotal role of dress in the exploration of power, transformation and identity in fairy tales".

    Follow the link above to see some of the exhibits and hear the curator Colleen Hill talk about the show which in addition to clothes also exhibits artwork by Rackham, Dulac, etc. which helped establish "a fairy tale aesthetic". It sounds fascinating.

    The picture here is The Storyteller from the stunning Wonderland by Kirsty Mitchell.

Charlotte Great and Small

    To celebrate the 200th. anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte this year, Tracy Chevalier has curated an exhibition at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. You can see pictures of some of the exhibits here, or watch the video above and hear Tracy talk about how she has juxtaposed many of the tiny objects of Charlotte's life with pieces which reflect her great ambition.

R.I.P. Margaret Forster

    I am sorry to hear the news of the death of Margaret Forster today. As I said in this post about her last book My Life in Houses (which I strongly recommend), I have long admired her work, and she was a good, solid writer.

    Her husband Hunter Davies is reported as saying that she was never interested in publicity or money: "She had an agreement with her publisher not to do literary lunches or do any broadcasting, and she actually didn't care whether the books were published or not. Her fun was in writing them and if the publisher didn't want to publish it, so what? She'd move on to the next one."

    A rare and refreshing attitude.

Bargain of the day

   

    I'm always glad to have another chance to bring a good book back to centre stage, and the Kindle daily deals often give me that opportunity. Today you can bag a bargain in the shape of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows which was a huge hit when it came out around eight years ago.

    At the time I called it "an utter joy of a book, beautifully judged, witty, lively, almost Mitfordesque in places, sparky, and extremely touching."

    Here's the rest of my post:

    In early 1946 the popular writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, a Guernsey farmer, who happens to have acquired a book she once owned. So begins an extraordinary correspondence between Juliet and the various members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society to which the shy but dependable Dawsey belongs, and in which the details  - both funny and tragic - of the German occupation of the island come to light.    
     So enamoured is Juliet of her new pen-friends and the life that they describe that she determines to write her next book about the island in wartime and she takes up residence there to begin her research. She soon realises that the person who should be at the book's heart is the one islander she has yet to meet: the spirited, much-loved Elizabeth McKenna, transported to a concentration camp for her bravery and defiance in the face of the enemy, leaving behind her infant daughter Kit  - to whom Juliet becomes close - and the secret of the child's paternity. 

    Written in epistolary form (and it does bear comparison with Helene Hanff's wonderful 84 Charing Cross Road), the book is both a love story and an unemotionally honest picture of its subject matter, but yet it has a light touch and is full of distinct and engaging characters such as Isola Pribby with her passion for the Brontes and her homemade potions, John Booker the wine-loving valet who's a fan of Seneca, Jonas Skeeter and his dim view of Marcus Aurelius : "...[he] was an old woman - always taking his mind's temperature...." and Clovis Fossey, who is much taken with poetry since joining the Society, and writes "Mrs. Maugery lent me a book last week. It's called The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. They let a man named Yeats make the choosings. They shouldn't have. Who is he - and what does he know about verse?"

   
     Sadly, Mary Ann Shaffer died [in 2008]; her legacy is this simply lovely book which has been a great pleasure to read.