Cornflower Books

As lovely reviews go ...

   

    ... this one's hard to beat -

    "Beatrix wrote to Norman Warne just after Christmas with obvious pleasure, 'Did you ever happen to see a review of the Tailor in The Tailor and Cutter, the paper which the mouse on the bobbin is reading?' She had given a copy to her old Chelsea tailor, who in turn, had shown it to a traveller from the trade journal telling him how Beatrix had sketched his shop. The 'beautiful review', as Beatrix called it, appeared appropriately on Christmas Eve. It read:

    ... we think it is by far the prettiest story connected with tailoring we have ever read, and as it is full of that spirit of Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men, we are not ashamed to confess that it brought the moisture to our eyes, as well as the smile to our face. It is got up in choicest style and illustrated by twenty-seven of the prettiest pictures it is possible to imagine."

    I so agree!

    That passage is from Beatrix Potter: The extraordinary life of a Victorian genius by Linda Lear.

Gin helps

   

    My recent visit to Oxford coincided with the Oxford Literary Festival, and I was able to go to a couple of events including a rare appearance by Philip Pullman, timed to mark the 20th anniversary of publication of Northern Lights.

    In conversation with Nicolette Jones, children's books editor of The Sunday Times, Philip Pullman talked most entertainingly about the writing process, his influences, and the extraordinarily rich concept that is the daemon.

    He revealed that he doesn't have the readership in mind at all when he writes as he feels that identifying them even in general terms as 'children' or 'adults' might exert a subconscious control which he doesn't want, and he's glad of his wide audience as no-one is excluded from the world he has created; related to that he commented that there is no right way to read his books, and how you understand or respond to what he has written is entirely up to you; "that is," he says, "as it should be".

    It's well known that Paradise Lost inspired the His Dark Materials series (that's the origin of the title, for one thing), and Philip Pullman recalled loving Milton's work, as a teenager, with a "physical admiration and passion, not just an intellectual appreciation". On the subject of his well-known atheism, he termed himself "a cultural Christian", not exclusively atheist, whose work is informed by his deep knowledge of the Bible and of growing up with a clergyman grandfather.

    In beginning Northern Lights with the words "Lyra and her daemon ...", he opened up a deep seam of material which he has mined to great effect. His use of the daemon - the soul, the spirit, the physical manifestation of the inner self - arose out of his observations of children (he used to be a teacher) and the changes adolescence brings. The onset of self-consciousness, of a realisation that certain talents will never be ours, of withdrawal in certain circumstances, all these things occur at the same time as a broadening of our mental horizons, and a reconciliation with who we actually are - hence the daemon's changing as the child grows and develops but 'settling' on adolescence: we may think we are a lion, when in fact we are a poodle (to use his own example), but the sooner we accept that and live comfortably with it, the better.

    As to the writing itself, he's well on with the next book in the series, The Book of Dust, and says it may be out next year. To this end he continues his habit of writing three pages every day. If the work is going well he stops at three pages, giving himself a 'springboard' into the next day, and if it's going badly he still fulfils his quota. "Gin helps," he says, if he finds himself lacking inspiration, and if he does dry up in the middle he recommends simple dialogue of the ' "Hello," "oh, hello," "how are you?", "I'm fine, thanks," " nature to fill the page!

    Asked about his own daemon, Philip Pullman reckons it's a corvid of some kind, a magpie, a raven or a rook: "... a bird which steals things. I hear things, read things, see things, then 'steal' them and use them myself".

The nicest book of the year

   

    A few words on The Runaways (also known as Linnets and Valerians) by Elizabeth Goudge, which is as the post title says, the nicest book I've read all year.

    Quite simply, this was a delight - a story of 'setting right', of coming into one's own, of happy endings. It's about four siblings who find themselves at the home of their rather marvellous Uncle Ambrose and who thus become agents for change and a power for good prevailing over ill will, so that all becomes well with their somewhat magical world in the village of High Barton.

    It's full of delicious food, beautiful gardens, quirkily characterful houses, and a charming collection of people (and animals), all vividly drawn and described, but it's its warmth and joyousness which make it special.

    A book to lift the spirits and gladden the heart.

Delightful!

       Just a quick post to follow up on this one from a few months ago and to say that I am at long last reading a novel of Elizabeth Goudge's - The Runaways (also known as Linnets and Valerians) - and it is a joy, every page a delight!

        Thanks to everyone who left a comment on that earlier post; they show in no uncertain terms that EG was a writer who touched people's hearts and made a deep and lasting impression on her readers, and even at this early stage I can see why that is.

Snow

    Faber have recently published an edition of Walter de la Mare's poem Snow illustrated by Carolina Rabei. I haven't seen the book, but the trailer is delightful enough to make me seek it out.

Judith Kerr & Matthew Kneale @Edbookfest

    Subtitled "mother and son on creative inheritance", this afternoon's Edinburgh International Book Festival event featuring author and illustrator Judith Kerr and her son Matthew Kneale - novelist* and lately non-fiction writer - was billed as an exploration of creative heritage: "what travels with us from childhood to form the adults we become - a sense of self, memories, imagination, creativity?"

    As is the way of these things, the discussion ranged widely, but at its centre was the early life of both authors, Judith's as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and Matthew's in a house where writing was the family business. Fondly remembered and the subject of many charming anecdotes was Nigel Kneale, Matthew's father, renowned writer of science fiction and screenplays, who would work in his room at the top of the family's large home, his wife remembering the feeling that "there was always something being made", his son recalling both the background noise of typing, and his father's tendency to analyse television drama as the family watched, something which Matthew credits with developing in himself a strong sense of structure in fiction.

    Family influences work in both directions, for Judith said that she would never have become a writer and illustrator of picture books had she not had children - they provided much of the inspiration, and discussing her work-in-progress with her husband over lunch each day proved very helpful, while Matthew credited his father's gift for storytelling as a formative example, and his mother talked of her son's "instinctive respect for writers" when he was a young boy.

    Having writer parents made Matthew aware that "you could do that and get away with it", but witnessing the frustrations his father had with what he felt were poor treatments of his screenplays, he himself opted for writing novels. Given that both his parents wrote at home, Matthew was asked about his own preferred workplace, and he revealed that he gets more done away from his flat; walks around Rome (where he lives), time spent writing in longhand on a park bench, in cafés or the library is when he is most productive. Interestingly, on the subject of writing methods, Matthew said that he always works first in longhand as it induces the necessary calm state.

    Judith, who at a very sprightly 91 is still writing and whose latest book is Creatures: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Judith Kerr, described her modus operandi as beginning with the story and letting the illustrations grow out of it, complementing it rather than referring directly to it, but equally, she said, a detail in a picture can then produce a further idea for the text. Similarly, Matthew comes up with a situation and plot first and then finds the characters to "catch up" with it: "think of something inadequate," he said rather self-effacingly, "and make up the gaps". Sounds simple, doesn't it?

    Today's event was an hour spent in the company of two delightful, entertaining people; I'm so glad I was there.

    

*Author of one of my favourite books, the brilliant English Passengers.

Oxford books

    This happens to be Independent Booksellers' Week, but I don't need that or any other excuse to visit a bookshop, so when I was in Oxford I went, of course, to Blackwell's, and there I bought two books of local interest:

    Penelope Lively's The House on Norham Gardens is set in North Oxford, and is described by Philip Pullman as "one of the best books by one of the best writers for children." It begins by describing the location:

    "... As you go south [the houses] are growing. Getting higher and odder. By the time you get to Norham Gardens they have tottered over the edge into madness: these are not houses but flights of fancy. They are three stories high and disguise themselves as churches. They have ecclesiastical porches instead of front doors and round norman windows or pointed gothic ones, neatly grouped in threes with flaring brick to set them off. They reek of hymns and the Empire, Mafeking and the Khyber Pass, Mr. Gladstone and Our Dear Queen. They have nineteen rooms and half a dozen chimneys and iron fire escapes. A bomb couldn't blow them up, and the privet in their gardens has survived two World Wars.

    People live in these houses. Clare Mayfield, aged fourteen, raised by aunts in North Oxford."

   

    My second purchase is non-fiction, Chiang Yee's The Silent Traveller in Oxford:

    "In 1940 the Chinese writer Chiang Yee arrived in Oxford as a refugee from the London Blitz, his lodgings having been bombed. He came to Oxford, he writes, "in rather a turmoil". What was meant to be a brief escape turned into a five-year stay, an affectionate relationship with the city, and the fifth in the hugely successful "Silent Traveller" series. Looking at the city and its historic university with the curiosity and openness of a complete stranger, Chiang Yee paints a revealing picture of Oxford's particular atmosphere, its rituals and traditions. He mixes with undergraduates and dons, visits pubs and restaurants, witnesses Union debates and punting on the river, all with a gentle astonishment and perceptive eye for detail. Chiang Yee explores the colleges and other student haunts, but also the city and its surrounds, from Port Meadow to Headington and Hinksey. First published in 1944, The Silent Traveller in Oxford evokes a wartime city of shortages and blackouts. It also captures an earlier age of university life, when students drank sherry and scaled college walls to escape prowling Bulldogs. Throughout Chiang Yee draws parallels between Oxford and his native China, comparing the seasons, architecture, and the nature of learning itself. Illustrated with the author's own sketches, this book is both an atmospheric account of 1940s Oxford and a charming "Oriental" view of one of Britain's best loved cities."

Bargain of the day - The Runaways

 

    Following on from last month's Elizabeth Goudge post, her children's novel The Runaways, also known as Linnets & Valerians, is one of today's Kindle deals, priced at £0.99.

    "[...] this is a splendid tale about four children who run away from a dreary relation and find their formidable great-uncle, a passionate educator of the young, living on the edge of Dartmoor. His household is as eccentric as that in The Little White Horse, and features protective bees as well as Greek lessons, delicious meals and lashings of common-sense.[...] Good battles evil in a most thrilling adventure, and Goudge's joy in country life and children's imagination makes this one to add to the shelves of any child of 8-12*," says Amanda Craig.

    Geranium Cat, meanwhile, calls it "an enchanting book", and it was on the strength of her review that I have bought it.

 

*Or any adult, by the sound of it!

Publishing Lives

 
   A new series of Publishing Lives begins tomorrow (Monday) on BBC Radio 4 at 1.45pm, and in the first episode Robert McCrum looks at the life of Kaye Webb of Puffin Books.

    "For three generations of children," says Valerie Grove in the preface to her biography So Much To Tell, "the words 'Editor: Kaye Webb' on the title page [of a book] guaranteed quality within".

    As one of those children, I shall be listening with great interest.

Cornflower Book Group - Tom's Midnight Garden

   

    Reading my notes on Philippa Pearce's much-loved children's book Tom's Midnight Garden, I'm struck by how straightforward it seems but how complex is the thinking behind it.

    It was first published in 1958, and the contemporary part of the story is indeed of its time - urgent communication was by telegram! This has a certain nostalgic charm. But beyond the simple device of a lonely boy's finding his way into a garden which no longer exists, of making a friend there, and of his growing attachment to both place and person coming to dominate his thoughts and actions - strong and appealing in itself - is the concept of time, and the intricacy of the author's use and examination of it.

    A clock striking thirteen, and seeming thus to mark an extra hour in the day; the clock that is always there, even when its surroundings change, "time in, time out"; the time past that is not a fixed or linear time for Tom in that he can visit the garden at all seasons and hours of the day, and can go and back and forward within the garden's time, unlike in his own, where "Time was marching steadily onwards in the way it is supposed to go: from minute to minute, from hour to hour, from day to day". The ticking of the clock sounds to Tom like a human heart, "alive and beating", and by extension his life in the garden and his friendship with Hatty is so much more real and vivid and absorbing for him than the contained, mundane hours spent in his aunt and uncle's flat. But time itself is both friend and enemy, each second taking him closer to his next longed-for visit to the garden, but also to his eventual return to his own home, the loss of his nocturnal adventures and the companionship of Hatty.

    "Tom thought again: Time no longer - the angel on the grandfather clock had sworn it. But if Time is ever to end, that means that, here and now, Time itself is only a temporary thing. It can be dispensed with, perhaps; or, rather, it can be dodged. Tom himself might be able to dodge behind Time's back and have the Past - that is, Hatty's Present and the garden - here, now and for ever. To manage that, of course, he must understand the workings of Time."

    In the end, Tom comes to understand that as Hatty - now Mrs. Bartholomew - tells him, "... nothing stands still, except in our memory." He cannot live in the past, but has a secret he can hug to him, memories to sustain him, and will return home content.

    I found it a very touching book, a satisfying one, clever and thought-provoking. I can see why it has become a children's classic and has earned a place on many people's 'favourites' shelves, and also how it could be re-read and enjoyed - and perhaps appreciated differently - at any age or stage in life.

    What did you think of it?

    While you're gathering your thoughts, do go and have a virtual slice of cake.

Cornflower Book Group - January, 2014

    

 

    The Cornflower Book Group read a well-known children's book last year in December/January, and at this dark time of year (at least in the northern hemisphere) when many of us are inclined to settle down round the fire and pick up something familiar to read, I thought another children's classic might not go amiss, so I've chosen the Carnegie Medal-winning Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, first published in 1958.

    "Lying awake at night, Tom hears the old grandfather clock downstairs strike . . . eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen . . . Thirteen! When Tom gets up to investigate, he discovers a magical garden. A garden that everyone told him doesn't exist. A garden that only he can enter . . ."

    If you have already read the book I hope you will welcome a re-read, and for anyone coming to it for the first time, its should be a most pleasant discovery. Philippa Pearce's books are marked by their "extreme sensitivity and consummate writing skill", and this is her best known, the critic John Rowe Townsend commenting: "I have no reservations about it. If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children's literature since [the Second World War] . . . it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book."

    That's good enough for me and - I hope - for you, too, so please seek out a copy and read it ready for discussion from Saturday, 25th. January.

    The book should be easily obtainable in paperback, there is a Kindle edition, and an audiobook, libraries should have it, US Amazon stocks it, and there may already be a copy on your children's bookshelves! I always mention The Book Depository in these posts because they offer free worldwide delivery, so in case of any local difficulty getting hold of it, they may be a solution.

    If you haven't read along with the group before you are more than welcome to join us. It's open to everyone and is all very informal and good-natured - there are no rules, no commitments, you simply read the book and leave a comment on it in the discussion post, and you can be as brief or as expansive as you wish, picking up others' points in subsequent comments if you want to answer them in the 'thread' format. I apologise for being a bit later than usual with this selection, but it's a short enough work for us to read and digest by the due date, so despite the busy-ness of this time of year, I hope you'll feel moved to pick up Tom's Midnight Garden, perhaps in the post-Christmas lull, and above all, I hope you'll enjoy it.

Bargain of the day

    One of today's Kindle Daily Deals is John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk. It was my top novel of 2012, and this post explains what makes it so special.

    Among the current monthly deals for Kindle are The Outlander by Gil Adamson (another superb book - post here), and Neil Gaiman's wonderful, multiple prize-winning The Graveyard Book (post here).

Age-old stories

    "A faun carrying an umbrella; a hobbit who lives in a hole; a mysterious name - Lyra; an ill-treated schoolboy with a scar and a secret. Children's fantasies may be said in some sense to begin with resonant images - certainly they often do so in the authors' myths of origins. However, they also begin in an author's reading practices, in his or her own experiences, in the influences which, acknowledged or not, shape and articulate their own vision and help define what it is and, sometimes more importantly, what it is not."

    That's the opening of the chapter 'The magical Middle Ages in children's fantasy literature' by David Clark, from Magical Tales: Myth, Legend and Enchantment in Children's Books, a book which I am finding quite fascinating and which is leading me off down all sorts of highways and byeways, remembering books and stories I read as a child, discovering others I haven't read yet and very much want to; it's a many-branched signpost, and it provides a clear illustration - if one were needed - of the cross-pollination of ideas, of how an 'old story' can by re-interpretation become something new, and of how the chain of influence and inspiration stretches from folklore, myth and legend, through the earliest written literature to that of the present day.

Magical Books

    If you should be in Oxford up to the 27th. of October, and you have time to take in a small exhibition, then do visit Magical Books at the Bodleian Library.

    The website to which I've linked there gives a comprehensive summary of themes and images of many of the exhibits, but among them are Shakespeare's First Folio, a dinner plate which inspired Alan Garner's The Owl Service, C.S. Lewis's map of Narnia, and an alethiometer commissioned by Philip Pullman and based on that which Lyra reads in His Dark Materials. Papers belonging to the 'Oxford School' of fantasy writers, i.e. Tolkien, Lewis, Garner, Susan Cooper, and Pullman are on display next to many very ancient books from the library's collection in which appear the myths and legends on which the modern authors have drawn for their own work.

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.

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 .

Muddy Lizzie and friends

    Here's Lizzie Bennet as you've never seen here before, I imagine. This is a needle-felted figure from the Cozy Classics version of Pride and Prejudice, one of a series of board books which introduces children from 0+ to classic stories told in a mere 12 words, each one illustrated with these marvellous figures.

    If you're sceptical, do read this review. "Would it be possible to abridge great works of literature to create an early reading experience that was interesting to both babies and adults?" asks Helen Brown; the answer, as you'll see, is 'yes'.
   
    (Click here for a time lapse video of the making of Mr. Rochester!)

Good lines - on play and small things

   

    "[Mary] Norton's sense of theater includes not only drama and characterization, but props and setting. The incongruity of her tiny characters and their use of human-sized jetsam is never lost sight of. She makes us look at the most mundane object with fresh and speculative eye. It is her capacity for 'making do' and improvisation that captures the charm of childhood, when play is serious business. Clifton Fadiman, in an article in Holiday magazine, claims the spirit of play as explanation for the British preoccupation with the small, the snug, the understated. English folklore and literature abound with little people: fairies, pixies, goblins, elves, dwarfs, sprites, spriggins, Lilliputians, Hobbits, Borrowers. There must be something about an island nation that engenders a genius for the miniature: the Japanese can make a landscape in a dish; the British excel in literary microtomy. It is almost as though everyone on 'this little isle' has a private world into which he can withdraw and explore - himself perhaps? Surely his relationship to others."

From How the Heather Looks by Joan Bodger (and see also this post).

Good lines - on childhood reading

 

 

    "I suppose that an American's approach to English literature must always be oblique. We share a language but not a landscape. In order to understand the English classics as adults, we must build up a sort of visual vocabulary from the books we read as children. Children's literature is, in some ways, more important to us than it is to the English child. I contend that a child brought up on nursery rhymes and Jacobs' English Fairy Tales can better understand Shakespeare; that a child who has pored over Beatrix Potter can better respond to Wordsworth. Of course it is best if one can find for himself a bank where the wild thyme grows, or discover daffodils growing wild. Failing that, the American child must feed the 'inward eye' with the images in the books he reads when young, so that he can enter a larger realm when he is older. I am sure I enjoyed the Brontë novels more for having read The Secret Garden first. As I stood on those moors, looking out over that wind-swept landscape I realized that it was Mrs. Burnett who taught me what 'wuthering' meant long before I ever got round to reading Wuthering Heights. Epiphany comes at the moment of recognition."

    From How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books by Joan Bodger.

Bookish news

     

    A new novel by Sally Gardner is coming in early November: "Set in the Hundred Years War, Tinder is a re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale The Tinderbox, and is at once cruel yet deeply enchanting with overtones of Markus Zusak, Margo Lannagan, Angela Carter and Lewis Carroll.  A young soldier, a captive princess, witches, wolves and Death all come together in this exquisitely written novel with stunning illustrations by David Roberts."

    Sally's fourth novel The Double Shadow is reviewed here, and here is her guest post on the subject of dyslexia and creativity.

    

    Next, a marvellous idea: a cologne for a character!

    Louise Penny, author of the bestselling Inspector Gamache novels, has been working with a perfumer at Floris to create a cologne, Eau de Gamache, such as her well-loved character would wear. Click here and scroll down to find out more about it, but if it is really "earthy, warm, inviting, fresh ..." I'll be after some myself.

 

 

    Ladies' choice:

    As part of Virago's 40th. birthday celebrations, ten famous female authors choose their favourite books from the catalogue (I'm glad to see Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent among them - it was the CBG's first book). 

    Also marking that birthday is the release of the free ebook Virago is 40: A Celebration containing specially written pieces inspired by the number 40.

     

    This year's Manx Lit Fest is shaping up well already with some big names guaranteed to draw the crowds. "Andrew Taylor*, one of the most renowned crime and historical novelists in the British Isles and author of The American Boy and the Lydmouth series; Matt Haig, whose new novel The Humans is drawing widespread acclaim from peers and reviewers, and Isle of Man-based author Alan Bradley, whose Flavia De Luce** crime novels – about an 11-year-old girl who solves crimes in 1950s England – have been optioned for television by Sam Mendes."

    *Click here for a post on The Anatomy of Ghosts, and I can also recommend Andrew's latest novel The Scent of Death.

    **We are of course big fans of Flavia's at Cornflower Books.