The legend of Mawther Meg
Sometime in the fourteenth century (during the time of Julian the anchorite), Norwich was overcome by a great plague of beetles. The beetles, which are especially common in the flat, damp lands of East Anglia, are larger in this part of the world. An ordinary deathwatch beetle grows up to a half inch in length,...
A time for reading
It is the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday in March. She has just woken up from a nap. The snow is no longer falling but its brightness is still being projected onto the ceiling of their apartment. It is rather lovely. The cat is watching her from a pouffe opposite the sofa with...
Here or there
Dan proposed to me the evening of his mother’s funeral. After saying goodbye to the last of our friends at the end of the wake, he grabbed a half-consumed bottle of wine and led me to the back of his parents’ yard, down by the compost bin and dying vegetable garden, where we squatted beside...
A shower of stardust
It was long after nightfall, and a soft breeze played over Guillaume’s face. He had positioned his telescope to the portside and aft, to observe the constellations of Centaurus, Circinus, Volans and the Southern Cross. With a yellow glass disc placed over the end of the telescope, the image was more sharply focused. He was...
Suspicious minds, alternative truths
Berlin is a city with drama at its heart, and it’s impossible not be drawn in by the charisma of it. I first arrived there on a three-month scholarship to research the book that would become I Laugh Me Broken but then I found I was unable to leave. I was never quite finished with trying to...
Chloe Lane: To any lengths
Twenty-six-year-old Erin Moore has just been dumped by her gallery-owner boss after his wife discovered them in a compromising clinch in a store cupboard. She heads north from Auckland to spend the Queen’s Birthday holiday weekend at the old family farmstead, where her mother Helen, terminally ill with motor neurone disease, is being cared for...
Lockdown drawings
In March 2020, as the coronavirus took hold and lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey published a sketch of ‘a determined young man’ on social media, with a plan to keep posting a drawing a day until life returned to normal. One hundred and fifty pencil stubs later, he was...
The woman of the wolf
Narrated by M. Pierre Lenoir, 69, rue des Dames, Paris. I do not know why I undertook to court that woman. She was neither beautiful, nor pretty, nor even agreeable. As for myself (and I say this without conceit, dear ladies), there are those who have not been indifferent to me. It is not that...
Mannequins and monsters
Edward Carey’s The Swallowed Man follows the adventures of Pinocchio’s creator Geppetto after he is stranded in the belly of a sea beast. As the woodcarver ekes out a frugal existence, living on his memories and imagination, the tale becomes a magical meditation on fatherly love, loss and regret, and the transformative power of creative...
Antoine Laurain: Imagined reality
Antoine Laurain’s briskly comic new novel The Readers’ Room takes readers inside the rarefied world of a Parisian publishing house, and revolves around a reclusive debut author known as Camille Désencres whose murder mystery Sugar Flowers has made the Prix Goncourt shortlist. Things take a dark turn when ‘Camille’ emails her editor Violaine Lepage to say,...
Author’s lunch
Inviting an author to lunch is one of the publishing world’s great rituals. Authors receive an invitation four or five times a year. Since there are many authors in one publishing house, that means a lot of lunches. Editors feed their authors like fat misanthropic cats they’re hoping to butter up and make purr. The...
Jean-Baptiste Andrea: The child within
Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s A Hundred Million Years and a Day is the fictitious story of fifty-something Stan, a middle-aged fossil-hunter who, in the summer of 1954, is driven to undertake a hazardous expedition to a mountain glacier to discover the whereabouts of a mythical ‘dragon’; a probable dinosaur skeleton embedded beneath the ice. He gathers together...
