Unknown knowns
When I began writing my story collection The UnAmericans I was blissfully ignorant of all things publishing-related. I’d never considered the difference between a commercial or independent press, or publishing stories in magazines versus small journals – reading was, at that time in my life, a completely personal and haphazard experience. I’d wander into a...
Barbara Taylor: Out of the system
Barbara Taylor’s The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times is a refined and beautifully written scrapbook of a study of the mental health system in the UK. It’s also Taylor’s deeply personal account of her breakdown and, ultimately, after many years of work and therapeutic support, her triumph over severe emotional illness....
A.S. Byatt: ‘The July Ghost’
In my early-to-mid-twenties, I decided it was time to take up reading again. I was newly single, I had a boring job, and I lived at home with my parents. I needed some excitement in my life so I returned to books. I’d read avidly as a child and into my teens, but I wasn’t...
Something brewing
Audrey Magee’s first novel The Undertaking is the story of a marriage of convenience between a German soldier on the Eastern Front and a woman he hadn’t previously met, whose attraction to each other deepens amid the agonies and depredations of war. We glimpse inside her writer’s den. Where are you now? In my study....
A fortunate tyranny
A monstrous pride and an incessant affectation spoil Napoleon’s character. At the time of his supremacy, what need had he to exaggerate his stature? He took after his Italian ancestors: his nature was complex: great men, a very small family on earth, can unfortunately find no one but themselves to imitate them. At once a...
Why read on?
The author of The Following Girls, a tragi-comic novel of shrinking horizons, dangerous alliances and not-so-happy families in 1970s Britain, shares her tips for approaching fiction. Be wary of all rules. When pressed for tips, novelists can become astonishingly dogmatic – usually extrapolating from their own working practice: “never use adverbs”, “avoid flashbacks”, “shun exclamation...
Circus eroticus
It was afternoon. The hustle and bustle downtown masked the nervous coming and going of men in front of the old two-story house on Rua Primeiro de Março. On the façade of dusty drawn blinds, a plaque read ‘SECOND-HAND BOOKS – 2nd floor’. Beneath, in small letters, the line ‘Ring the bell’. The client obeyed...
The meaning
My God, I’m bored! Maurice Levine dawdled along Hempstead Gardens towards home, a journey he had been making every day for over fifty-five years, ever since his marriage to Gina Jacobs. The appearance of number 16, identical to every other house in Hempstead Gardens, was the one sight he could rely upon to arouse in...
By kingmaker’s cunning
We all have difficult friendships. While our friendships can be sources of sustenance and joy, they can also be full of petty jealousies, professional rivalries, and personal slights real or perceived. One such difficult friendship is at the centre of my new novel, a historical thriller set in late medieval England. The friends? Geoffrey Chaucer,...
Terra Australis
To begin with, the legend goes something like this: a nation born from a shipful of convicts. A gaggle of criminals sentenced to transportation who washed up onshore, knowing neither how nor why, who settled largely hostile territories and wound up staying, all while disregarding the indigenous peoples there already. A bit vague as stories...
Hardy perennials
My novel Winter describes a domestic crisis in the life of Thomas Hardy. Hardy is among the greatest of English writers, famous not only for novels like Far From The Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles but also for many beautiful and haunting poems. He was a fascinating and complex man, full of paradoxes....
Platform two
In the course of a life everything is forgotten. I’m certain (though completely unconcerned) that the suicide which took place last Tuesday the fourth of February at 10:23 pm on platform two of Charlottenplatz station in the Stuttgart metro was only investigated for a couple of days: one more number for the statistics and the...
