Cornflower Books

Joan Aiken's centenary

    Joan Aiken was born 100 years ago today, 4th. September, and what better way to mark that anniversary than by directing you to this post by Lizza Aiken, Joan's daughter.

    The Manderley Press collection of stories Lizza mentions, Tales of London Town, is out now and can be found here.

    London readers may be interested in the launch event at Hatchards on 17th. October (keep an eye on their events page for details nearer the time).

    Here is our book group post on The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

Stewkey Blues

    I've just finished D.J. Taylor's collection of short stories, Stewkey Blues, and am strongly tempted to read it all over again right away, so much did I enjoy it, but as I've already promised it to Mr. C. that will have to wait.

    Set in his native Norfolk, the stories have more than just location to bind them together; they are linked by the author's keen-eyed observation, his gift for an illuminating epithet, his economic, character-defining vocabulary, and his understanding of the telling behaviours which reflect our sense of ourselves and of others. 

    Thematically, a common ground is how things are, were, or might have been: what circumstance or event was the 'grit in the oyster' - the formative experience, for better or for worse. There are moments of self-revelation or sudden clear-sightedness, where anxieties, weaknesses or sore points make themselves felt or shed an affirming or consolatory light. Some are set in the recent past with skilled use of cultural references to enrich them. Throughout the book you'll find types to recognise or even identify with, and many of those small moments which time reveals to be major personal turning-points.

    Here's a short passage from Forty Years in which a man attending a joyless school reunion sees his year-group in all their 1978 glory:

    'To look at them as they stared out of the photograph - by turns hopeful, stolid, anxious, expectant, bored or half-amused - was to get a terrible sense of - what exactly? Life working its purpose out? Promise unfulfilled? Some vast, ineluctable pattern whose real implications were still waiting to make their presence felt? It was difficult to tell.'

    If David's work is new to you, there's an interview I did with him a few years ago here, a post on his wonderful novel Ask Alice here, and one on the equally good Kept here.

Tree-time

    If you're not already familiar with Everyman's Library handsome hardbacks, they are quality books from the outside (acid-free paper, attractive jackets, ribbon markers) in.

    We have several of their Pocket Classics on our shelves but it's one of the new ones I've just been reading: Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest, edited by Fiona Stafford (author of The Long, Long Life of Trees). This contains an interesting mixture of tales old, new, funny, serious, folk-based, contemporary, spanning cultures and centuries from Ovid to Austen, Grimm to Carter. Topically, there's the beautiful and heartening The Man who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, but there's also a deliciously dark and unsettling tale about the felling of a tree, The Apple Tree by Daphne du Maurier. Another favourite of mine was a sweet and lovely story, The Outlaws by Ursula Moray Williams, and the one I loved most was The Gold of Fairnilee by that master of the genre Andrew Lang, but whatever your taste you're sure to find something that appeals.

    As Fiona Stafford says, "Within the leaves of this book, the old oaks, ancient woodlands, dark forests and warm groves of Europe flourish beside the great tropical trees of India and New Zealand, the wooded valleys and swamps of America and the African savannah. There are individual trees so real you can feel the bark through the pages and still smell the wood after the trunks turned into logs. There are trees that glow bright in memory, turn dark in nightmare, pale in the aftermath and green in the words of skilful storytellers ... All have the power to take root in readers' imaginations."

It has now turned noon ...

    "... and the day slides slowly from the roofs of the sloping village. It freezes harder than ivory; one can almost see it in the air as though the light was being stretched on nails. A clear cold radiance hangs over the landscape and a crow crosses it on creaking wings. The rich earth, with all its seeds and humming fields and courtships, is now closed and bound in white vellum. Only one colour remains, today's single promise, pricked in red over the ashen world - seen in a flitting robin, some rosehips on a bush, the sun hanging low by the wood, and through the flushed cottage windows the berries of the holly and the russet faces of the feasting children."

Laurie Lee, "A Cold Christmas Walk in the Country", from The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories edited by Jessica Harrison.

Mid-November reading

    A look back through the reading journal at mid-November books over the past ten years is to be reminded of many good things. The links all lead to posts.

    The Dig, John Preston

    Reflections, Dianna Wynne Jones

    My Life in Houses, Margaret Forster

    C.S Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath

    The Magic Apple Tree, Susan Hill

    The Secret History, Donna Tartt

    A Game of Hide and Seek, Elizabeth Taylor

    The Ivington Diaries, Monty Don

    Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri

    I, Coriander, Sally Gardner

Well-seasoned

   

    It so happens that I was in Oxford over the weekend for a family celebration, staying at the always wonderful Old Parsonage Hotel (mentioned many times on the blog - e.g. here).

    Jeremy Mogford, owner of the hotel and its excellent sister establishments, The Old Bank, Quod, and Gee's*, sponsors an annual short story competition in association with the Oxford Literary Festival; its theme is always food and drink, and this year's judges are Philip Pullman and Mary Berry.

    You'll find full details here but to summarise, entries can be fiction or non-fiction, must be unpublished, and no longer than 2500 words. The closing date is 15th. January, 2017.

 

*I've stayed at or eaten in all these places often and recommend them most highly.

Recent acquisitions

   

    Postmen all over the country must be finding their bags weighed down with Persephone Books' latest releases, if my Instagram feed is anything to go by. I daresay no one reading here will be unaware that Tirzah Garwood's autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield, and Every Good Deed and Other Stories by the much-loved Dorothy Whipple have just been published, and doubtless many of you already have your copies and are well into one or other of them as this is book post of the best kind.

                                                        ~

    Ian Rankin's latest Rebus novel, Rather Be The Devil, will be out next week; Mr. C. read it in an afternoon and promises a review, but for now says it does not disappoint.

                                                        ~

    Diana Athill is still going strong at 98 and is about to publish A Florence Diary, an account of a trip she made just after the war:

    "In August 1947, Diana Athill travelled to Florence by the Golden Arrow train for a two-week holiday with her good friend Pen. In this playful diary of that trip, Athill recorded her observations and adventures - eating with (and paid for by) the hopeful men they meet on their travels, admiring architectural sights, sampling delicious pastries, eking out their budget and getting into scrapes. Written with an arresting immediacy and infused with an exhilarating joie de vivre, A Florence Diary is a bright, colourful evocation of a time long lost, and a vibrant portrait of a city that will be deliciously familiar to any contemporary traveller."

                                                        ~

    When Pete Brown's The Apple Orchard: The Story of Our Most English Fruit came out last month I read an associated article and snapped up the book. Here's the blurb:

    "An orchard is not a field. It's not a forest or a copse. It couldn't occur naturally; it's definitely cultivated. But an orchard doesn't override the natural order: it enhances it, dresses it up. It demonstrates that man and nature together can - just occasionally - create something more beautiful and (literally) more fruitful than either could alone. The vivid brightness of the laden trees, studded with jewels, stirs some deep race memory and makes the heart leap. Here is bounty, and excitement.

    Taking us through the seasons in England's apple-growing heartlands, Pete Brown uncovers the magic and folklore of our most familiar fruit, showing its place at the heart of our lives."

Knife, fork, and pen

    A wee reminder there of The Mogford Food & Drink Short Story Prize deadline. It so happens that I was staying in one of Jeremy Mogford's hotels over the weekend, and the prize stories from previous years were all arranged by the bed and displayed in a prominent position in the hotel's library.

    A quick word on this year's judges. As you'll see from the above they include Rick Stein, who is not only a very well known chef and food writer but is shortly to open his own bookshop in Padstow, and Lawrence Norfolk, author of (among others) this wonderful, wonderful book.

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.

Literary links

    -  As winter does its worst, why not take shelter at Hearth, a micro-literary festival at Gladstone's Library in Wales next month.

    -  Jewish Book Week in London later in February will be playing host to many big names, among them Judith Kerr, Tracy Chevalier, Victoria Glendinning, and Howard Jacobson.

    -  If you're a writer yourself and short fiction is your thing, you may be interested in the Mogford Food and Drink Short Story Prize or the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook Short Story Competition; deadlines for both are approaching but there's still plenty of time to enter.

    - Lastly today, a poem I came across recently (which is right up my street).

Hands up, all H.E. Bates fans

    Who else is a lover of H.E. Bates' work but hasn't read any for years?

    If you're a fan you'll be pleased to hear that this year and next Bloomsbury are re-issuing the complete short story collections in ebook format with some of them to come out in paperback, too. I have the first of the set, Day's End and Other Stories, and I'm very much looking forward to reading it and becoming reacquainted with a writer I loved when I was in my twenties but haven't picked up since.

    Often described as the British Chekhov for his mastery of the short form, Bates was also a bestselling novelist with books such as Love for Lydia, Fair Stood the Wind for France, and the Pop Larkin chronicles (beginning with The Darling Buds of May). His work was also adapted for the big screen, the most renowned film being The Purple Plain starring Gregory Peck.

    His stories "often explore country life, the sadness, joy, humour and darkness in what may be seen as a simpler way of life. He writes intimate character studies against vivid rural landscapes and, in so doing, beautifully captures a spectrum of emotions from innocent childhood and early adolescence to wise and experienced old age."

    If you'd like to sample the short stories you can do so at no cost by downloading Castle in the Air, a humorous piece which was lost and unknown to the Bates family until 2013, and for more information on Bates and his work, visit the H.E. Bates Companion, or sign up to the newsletter, link at the bottom of this page.

Mollie alert

    Persephone Books have just issued their latest 'Biannually' - you can get it if you subscribe to their mailing list, and it's always well worth reading. Amongst other things it features their newest titles, one of which is Mollie Panter-Downes' London War Notes, her 'Letters from London', published in The New Yorker during the Second World War.

    As a great admirer of Mollie's writing I've already ordered my copy, and it will join the two collections of her short stories which Persephone publish, that is Good Evening, Mrs. Craven and Minnie's Room, and her utterly superb novel One Fine Day.

    If you don't already know this marvellously subtle, elegant writer, I urge you to discover her without delay.

The Beat Goes On

   

    Mr. C. writes:

    "I hope you get as much fun reading these stories as I had writing them" says Ian Rankin in the introduction to The Beat Goes On, the complete set of short stories about Edinburgh detective John Rebus. Mission accomplished: both for hardened Rebus fans and for newcomers, this collection is so evocative you can almost smell the malt tang of the Caledonian Brewery and see the grey, glittering city with its dark passions and moral ambiguities. There are tales of high society and low life, tales of bitter depravity and macabre humour, all illuminated by Rebus's glowering intelligence as he pursues a very personal ideal of justice through the bars and drawing rooms and suburban bungalows and grim estates of Edinburgh. A dangerous book to have on the bedside table - you just want to keep reading on and on into the wee small hours of the night - and a dangerous book to lend: make sure you get it back.

Looking forward to ...

    ... a new BBC series, The Secret Life of Books. I haven't seen a transmission date for this, but it's to be on BBC Four and will be "examining original texts, manuscripts, letters and diaries to uncover the story behind the creation of six classic books". Presenters include Simon Russell Beale on Shakespeare's First Folio, and the excellent Dr. Alexandra Harris (see this post) on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

    ... The Golden Age of Murder (to be published in May, 2015) in which Martin Edwards looks at how Agatha Christie and her contemporaries revolutionised crime writing: "This ground-breaking study of detective fiction from between the wars captures how the social and political turbulence of the times impacted on authors and the appetites of their readers. Martin’s revelations about many of these colourful and turbulent writers, whose risky private lives inspired their more daring novels, provide a whole new insight into the generation of authors who created the prototypes for books we all still love today."

    ... discovering some of the books you've mentioned in the book bag post. Among them,  Madeleine L'Engle's journals, Edith Pearlman's short stories and William Trevor's (the only book of his I've read so far is The Story of Lucy Gault, which I loved), and Charles Palliser's The Quincunx (which happens to be here on the shelf). Many thanks for a wealth of suggestions for future reading, whether at home or away.

A literary prescription

    For the treatment of 'high-quality literature' dependency: take Jane Gardam's short stories at regular intervals.

    For the treament of 'high-quality literature' deficiency: take Jane Gardam's short stories at regular intervals.

    Possible side effects: sudden-onset intolerance for the work of lesser writers. If this occurs, consult your bookseller and take more Jane Gardam.

Good lines: on short stories

   

     "I have always preferred writing short stories to writing novels. Not that there is much similarity and not that a writer can usually get away with writing only one or the other (Katherine Mansfield almost did). Stories of all lengths and depths come from mysterious parts of the cave. The difference in writing them is that, for a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder."

    Jane Gardam, from her introduction to her collection The Stories.

                                                        ~~~~~

    For more on Jane Gardam click here, here, and here.

Soon to be read

   

    I spent about two hours this afternoon writing a longish post on the books I'll be reading over the next couple of weeks, only to press 'save' and find that Typepad was down again, and my carefully crafted piece had vanished.

    So, to begin again, but more briefly this time, here's my 'soon to be read' pile:

     Going Back by journalist and broadcaster Rachael English is a debut novel which sees Elizabeth Kelly leave Ireland to return to Boston where she spent the summer of 1988. "Can she reconcile the dreams of her twenty-year-old self with the woman she has become?"

    Writing the Garden by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is subtitled 'A literary conversation across two centuries', and is a collection of writings on the art of gardening by the likes of Vita Sackville-West, Elizabeth von Arnim, Edith Wharton, Beverley Nichols, Penelope Hobhouse and Margery Fish. Perfect for this time of year.

    The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin I have already introduced. I'm reading it now, and so far it's rather sweet and fun.

    The Steady Running of the Hour by Justin Go is another debut, this one a time-slip tale of an unclaimed inheritance, "part historical tour de force, part heart-rending love story," a breathless race from London archives to the battlefield of the Somme and the fjords of Iceland to piece together the events of a long-ago love affair and uncover vital proof of lineage. The author talks about it here.

    The White Russian by Vanora Bennett is "a sweeping, heartbreaking novel of illicit passion and family secrets set amongst the Russian émigré community in Paris in 1937". Evie comes from New York in search of art and adventure, but her grandmother's sudden death leads her on a quest to discover a mysterious man from her family's past. "With the world on the brink of war, she becomes embroiled in murder plots, conspiracies and more as White faces Red Russian and nothing is as it seems."

    Last but by no means least, The Stories, a collection of Jane Gardam's short fiction. Some of these I've read before, some are new to me, all come from the pen of a literary star whose work I love and admire. As the blurb says, "Jane Gardam shakes out life and finds diamonds in its folds." I can't wait.

    

    With the ongoing Typepad problems I hardly dare ask you to tell us what you're reading this weekend, but if you find you can leave a comment - and especially if you have something good on the go - please do let us know.

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.

Judge the jackets

    Here's the competition I promised you this morning.

    Take a close look at all the 'jackets' for the e-single short stories I was talking about - you'll see them enlarged in the post below this one - then come back here and tell us which is your favourite and why.

    You can tweet your entry if you'd prefer, so either use the hashtag #judgethejacket or mark it @Cornflowerbooks to be sure I see it, but whether you enter via a comment or a tweet, I'm looking for something short and sweet.

    Now to the prizes, and Bloomsbury have very kindly offered a selection from which you can choose. The winner will get their choice of a hardback (or trade paperback) and a paperback from the following lists of books all out this month, and the runner-up will get a paperback.

    Hardbacks/trade paperbacks:

    For crime and thriller fans there's The Hanging by Lotte and Søren Hammer, the first in a new six part series featuring Danish detective Konrad Simonsen. "On a cold Monday morning before school begins, two children make a gruesome discovery. Hanging from the roof of the school gymnasium are the bodies of five naked and heavily disfigured men. Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen and his team from the Murder Squad in Copenhagen are called in to investigate this horrific case - the men hanging in a geometric pattern; the scene so closely resembling a public execution. When the identities of the five victims and the disturbing link between them is leaked to the press, the sinister motivation behind the killings quickly becomes apparent to the police. Up against a building internet campaign and even members of his own team, Simonsen finds that he must battle public opinion and vigilante groups in his mission to catch the killers."

    A Girl Like You by Maureen Lindley begins in 1939 in rural California. Thirteen-year-old "Satomi Baker is used to being different, being half American, half Japanese. When war is declared, Satomi's father Aaron is one of the first to sign up and is sent to the base at Pearl Harbor. He never returns. The community which has tolerated its foreign residents for decades suddenly turns on them, and along with thousands of other Japanese-American citizens, Satomi and her mother are sent to a brutal labour camp in the wilderness ... At Manzanar, Satomi learns what it takes to survive, and what it means to be American. But it will be years before she will discover who she really is under the surface of her skin."

    Kate Manning's My Notorious Life by Madame X has been described as a cross between Call the Midwife and The Crimson Petal and the White! "Axie Muldoon, the headstrong daughter of Irish immigrants, grows up to become the most successful – and controversial – midwife of her time. She rises from the gutter to the glitter of Fifth Avenue high society, and discovers that the right way is not always the way of the church or the law, and that you should never trust a man who says ‘trust me.’ But what if that man is an irresistible risk-taker with a poetical Irish soul? As Axie’s reputation grows she finds herself on a collision course with the crusading official who would be the righteous instrument of her downfall. It will take all of her power to outwit him and save both herself and those she loves from ruin."

     

Paperbacks:

    Juliet Nicolson is well known as a social historian, but in Abdication she has turned to fiction, using her extensive knowledge of the period as background to a novel set in the mid-1930s. "After the recent death of George V, England has a new king, Edward VIII. But for all the confident pomp and ceremony of the accession, it is a turbulent time. When nineteen-year-old May Thomas arrives in Liverpool, her first job as secretary and chauffeuse to Sir Philip Blunt introduces her to the upper echelons of British society – and to Julian, a young man of conscience whom, despite all barriers of class, she cannot help but fall for. But hidden truths, unspoken sympathies and covert complicities are everywhere, and the threat of another world war becomes increasingly inevitable..."

    Canada by Richard Ford has one of those 'no punches pulled' opening lines: 'First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.' "It was more bad instincts and bad luck that lead to Dell Parson’s parents robbing a bank. They weren’t reckless people, but in an instant, their actions alter fifteen-year-old Dell’s sense of normal life forever. In the days that follow, he is saved before the authorities think to arrive. Driving across Montana, his life hurtles towards the unknown; a hotel in a deserted town, the violent and enigmatic Arthur Remlinger, and towards Canada itself. But, as Dell discovers, in this new world of secrets and upheaval, he is not the only one whose past lies on the other side of the border."

    Last but not least, Lance Weller's Wilderness: "Thirty years ago, Abel Truman found himself on the wrong side in the Battle of the Wilderness, one of the bloodiest clashes of the American Civil War. Its aftermath took him to the edge of the continent, the rugged coast of Washington State, where he has made his home in a driftwood shack with his beloved dog, waiting for the scars of war to heal. Now an old and ailing man, Abel must make one heroic final journey over the snowbound Olympic Mountains. But as Abel sets out, violence follows him in the shape of the memories of those he has lost, and the savagery he witnessed, as well as two men who are darkly tenacious in their pursuit. Hypatia is a freed slave who finds herself walking unwittingly into the hellish heart of the Wilderness. Ellen is a white woman, married to a black man at a time that is as dangerous as it is unforgiving. And Jane is a young Chinese girl, who is newly, cruelly orphaned, and clinging on to life. Abel's epic journey leads him to each of them as he encounters compassion amid brutality and tenderness within loss."

    What a great range of books from which to choose your prize, so please get on and 'judge the jackets' - this is open to everyone, no matter where in the world you are, just comment or tweet, tell me your favourite e-single short story 'jacket' and why you particularly like it, and I'll pick the winners soon.

Family Snapshots - and a competition to come

    Here is a good idea from Bloomsbury: a series of family-themed short stories issued as e-singles so that you can read them individually, or pick and mix and put a few together to make your own collection. The writers include such stellar names as Jhumpa Lahiri, T.C. Boyle, and Elizabeth Gilbert, and others who may be less well known just yet but who have already made something of a splash.

    "Each story in this series offers a poignant glimpse of family life – the ties we cling to; the ties we try to sever; and the ties that make us who we are... and each gives us a fresh, empathetic and moving insight into the meaning of family."

    From Lucy Wood there's the story Of Mothers and Little People which I've quoted from here in a post on her book Diving Belles, which has just won a Somerset Maugham award.

    Jhumpa Lahiri's very fine collection Unaccustomed Earth is represented by Only Goodness in which siblings' paths diverge. Their parents believe both children are destined to succeed, but only one will fulfil their expectations.

    In Elizabeth Gilbert's The Finest Wife, Rose, a lady with a colourful past, meets some 'old flames' in very surprising circumstances.

     In T. C. Boyle's The Lie, the father of a young baby decides he could do with a day off work. He calls his employer and makes an excuse for his absence, but his lie will have huge consequences.

     George Saunders's Home sees a war veteran return to what passes for his family - this is black comedy and a wry look at dysfunction.

    Jon McGregor's story Which reminded her, later (from This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You - post on it here) is about the strains on a relationship when a couple take in an unexpected guest.

    Just as individuals do, families come in all shapes and sizes; their dynamics are wide-ranging and on wildly differing scales, their habits, rules and ways of being are many and various. These stories illustrate all those things and more, and do so with originality, wit and a keen, observing eye.

                                                    ~~~~~

    Now, I promised a competition, and that's what we're going to have, so please come back here later to play 'judge the jackets' and win some first-class prizes!

    See you anon.