dovegreyreader scribbles

Endsleigh Salon update

Second Tuesday in March now a distant memory, a quarter of the year gone already but safe in the knowledge that the next time the Endsleigh Salon gathers we have put the clocks forward, and for the next six months or so we will drive along Georgie's carriage drive in daylight taking in the fabulous views and the gardens which are always spellbinding.
So this was the evening of the 1920s reading theme and you may or may not recall that I had grandiose plans to contrast and compare Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep with The Beautiful and the Damned by F.Scot Fitzgerald. Usual story, ambitious with the dawn, back to basics by dusk, so when it chimed 5pm on the day and I had just two and a half hours to read nigh on seven hundred pages it was clear my plans would come to nought and I would be going empty-handed.
Except we never go empty-handed so as I gazed around the shelves for inspiration it came to me in a blinding flash, Elizabeth von Arnim. More specifically I took along Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim because at this juncture I sensed vague similarities with The Lost Child / Myerson family situation. I hadn't read The Lost Child at this point, nor had I given more than a cursory glance to the mess that was simmering in the press and of course when I eventually did those similarities became differences, beyond the fact that there's no publicity like bad publicity.
Mary Annette Beauchamp aka Elizabeth von Arnim, cousin to Katherine Mansfield, who following her first marriage to Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin and subsequent widow-hood, had the dire misfortune to marry John Francis, 2nd Earl Russell.
Easier to spell but not so easy to live with.
Russell was violently, possessively and overbearingly in love with Elizabeth according to Karen Usborne's excellent biography, Elizabeth, the Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden and the marriage ended disastrously with Elizabeth doing a runner to the U.S. to escape his clutches. Revenge perhaps often a dish best served up in fiction and many including John himself recognised just who Elizabeth had used as her model for the tyrannical husband Wemyss in Vera. Russell was incensed and you can only be thankful the man wasn't in possession of an iPhone because he was very imaginative with his harassment, having already sent Elizabeth a copy of the Bible with every reference to faithless women underlined. There was talk of litigation, publishers Macmillan rubbed their hands with glee and the book fair flew off the shelves as the whiff of scandal started to seep out in 1921.
I've sent my Virago copy off around the group (this is my first edition copy inherited from my mum who was also called Vera) for a considered opinion on my pet theory that this could have been one of the books that inspired Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, there are a few similarities so I'm looking forward to the verdict at April's meeting.
We had a full house plus a brave new soul (the test is whether a newbie returns for more) and the other 1920s books offered for discussion covered a wide and varied range and included The Great Gatsby, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, all by F.Scott Fitzgerald so I was probably wise to change my tack at the last minute. We had a fine nostalging moment when Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables took centre stage and good debates around The New House by Lettice Cooper, The Bolter by Frances Osborne, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon, Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh and a great biography of Colette by Judith Thurman. The pro-Woolf faction tried to persuade the anti-Woolf faction that Mrs Dalloway  was a great book if you read it Woolfishly but I don't think we succeeded.
As you can imagine by the time we'd covered that lot and done our usual amount of tea-sipping, laughing and sidetracking there wasn't a lot of oxygen left in the room and the hotel definitely knew we were in residence. I drive the five minutes home, I know I should walk by the stars and do book-thinking but it's really very dark and look it's all the way down here and a lot more, and badgers run out on you and you tread on hedgehogs and things.
I know there is no point in going to bed for hours because I can never get my mind to shut down after an Endsleigh Salon evening's brilliant and inspiring bookish talk.
The next theme is Intrepid Travellers and I have just the very book lined up.

Old news ....

Some of us have known this for years, but in this day and age when nothing is true without the evidence at least now we have the research to prove it.

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville and prize draw copies

I seem to remember being an early advocate of The Secret River by Kate Grenville, it was one of my best reads of 2006, struck that magical reading chord which has never left me. The sign of a brilliant book for me is that I can still hear the pitch of the plot, sense the mood the book created several years on, so I was mad keen to read Kate Grenville's latest novel The Lieutenant published by Canongate.
I think only time will tell me whether I have enjoyed this one quite as much, I suspect I have but in a different way.
It felt obvious to me from the minute I met Daniel Rooke that Kate Grenville wanted me to place this character of hers on the autistic spectrum and rightly or wrongly I did. All the signs were just asking for me to make the twenty-first century diagnosis that would have been unknown in the 1770s.
The outsider, the unusually intelligent child with a gift for mathematics, minimal eye contact with others, socially isolated from his peers, logic speaking over reason. The final clincher, Rooke's first encounter with a sea battle after he has signed up with Her Majesty's Marine Forces in Portsmouth (presumably now the Royal Marines)

'A sea battle - his first experience of active combat - seemed nothing more than a question of distance, of trajectory, of speed relative to distance...fear took everyone a different way. For Rooke it led back to his old friends the primes. Seventy-nine, eighty-three, eighty-nine, ninety-seven...'

Yet prior to this Rooke has bade a fond farewell to his sister Anne,

'He put his arm round her and hugged her. He would miss his clever sister. She was the one person in the world with whom he had never needed to pretend to be someone else.'

He has witnessed and been devastated by an execution,

'Rooke knew he would not forget. In that afternoon in which feeling had been assaulted by numbness he saw that under the benign surface of life in His Majesty's service, under its rituals and its uniforms and pleasantries was horror.'

This is not a man devoid of feelings and emotions but a man who struggles to express them, so it was with this foundation in place in my mind that I read on. It all added together to make Rooke's voyage to Australia on a convict ship as an astronomer with the First Fleet and subsequent settlement in this new land hugely interesting.
How Rooke copes with the Aboriginal people and their language makes for fascinating reading and feels entirely relevant after my read of Eleanor Thom's The Tin-Kin
So easy to take language for granted and Kate Grenville dissects beautifully the slippery nature of words, the complexities of meaning and interpretation that all gave me cause to think about language itself in greater depth than I may had cause to before.
How I take for granted that a word means what I know it to mean became open to negotiation once I'd read this book because who decided all that in the first instance?
It's one of those big - black - hole - infinity - and - beyond questions that can be quite scary to try and get your head around.
Then I spend an hour rummaging around because I've read a couple of pieces by Kate Grenville recently but where?
It's that Waterstone's magazine again and I learn that this book has also been an endeavour to examine the difficulties of communication between two nations and cultures, replete with possibilities but also deadeningly laden with difficulties and insurmountable obstacles.
This wouldn't be Kate Grenville if there wasn't some conscience-churning material about just who is the savage because in another recent article (the one I can't find) I recall mention of the moment of sickening realisation when Kate Grenville faced up to her own and her country's demons on the subject of colonial dominance. The Lieutenant leaves no doubt that the savage is absolutely not the Aboriginal people with whom Rooke forges unique and tender bonds. He is forced to make eye contact with Tagaran as the search for a shared meaning to the words consumes him and becomes vital, in many ways eschewing and overcoming all my autistic spectrum diagnosis speculation as Rooke arrives at a new understanding of himself and others.
From Kate Grenville's informative Author's Note I learn that the book is based on recorded events surrounding the life of a young lieutenant William Dawes who left the most extensive record of the language of the indigenous people, word lists and speculations about the grammatical structure of language and the story is fascinating.
So now I have recorded my thoughts I return to that first sentence; have I enjoyed this one quite as much, will I still hear the note it strikes in the future, well a few hundred words on and a resounding yes is the answer to that.
The Lieutenant a book that has revealed vast and hidden depths between the word on the page and the workings of my mind, I know it will continue to resonate and Canongate have three prize-draw copies (sorry UK poms only because of copyright) so it can resonate for you too, names in comments and Rocky will wear his hat with the corks for this one.

Sunday Salon - dovegreyreader on wheels

I hope you don't mind but I'm sending you all off on a little trip while I sit here and read the MOST AMAZING BOOK and I'll have the kettle on for when you get back.
There's a suprise because aren't all the books good, but this one is in league of its own and I can't be parted from it for a minute. It's a proof copy of the new Jude Morgan, The Taste of Sorrow, Emily, Anne. Charlotte. The sisters who suffered and the passion that saved them.
Forgive that crease on the cover, I dropped it in my excitement, but fictional Brontes so superbly written I'm beside myself and surely won't be able to keep my thoughts under wraps until this one's published by Headline Review on May 14th. I feel a huge burst of Brontemania coming on, honestly, pre-order it, push little children out of the way to get hold of this one, reserve it at the library now, just don't miss it.
So if you all go out of the gate turn left and head the six miles into Tavistock, almost into town and another toll house. See what I mean about not living in one? This one's taken more direct hits than can be good for it. Turn left here along Old Launceston Road.
Then down Rocky Hill (yes, fancy naming a hill after a cat, we couldn't understand it either) don't miss the man jumping out of the window.
and turning left into West Street and you come to the top end of town, the Tinker lives but a mere spitting distance from here...wave and if he's looking out he'll wave back.
This is a timeless view and we love it, that High Dartmoor backdrop couldn't be bettered and this was the day of the last woolshop visit so we were heading up and over the top and I'm sorry but that means your ears are going to pop.
So heading across town and up onto the moorland road with it comes that lovely feeling of the empty open road when we crest the brow of this hill.
Well, not quite,
Bookhound always has a slight twitch and a flinch over the combination of those horns and his paintwork but they just look in and laugh and give us a wide enough berth and then we do find open road. There's always too much beauty to take in, we never take it for granted and on this day it was the clouds that were looking stunning.
Great Mis Tor (1768 feet apparently) always stark and bare against any backdrop
Have I shown you Holming Beam track before?
I'll admit that this has had it's uses.Years ago when we would wrap up three children and persuade them that a dog walking adventure on Dartmoor in the pouring rain was a really good idea (you know those days, when to stay indoors would not be conducive to sanity). We'd load up the car and drag out the reluctant sleeping dog and of course by the time we got up onto the moors there they all were, children transformed into little snoozing angels and the dog having now changed his mind and going berserk for a run.
Well as long as there's no live army firing going on at the far end (a hazard, 'tis true but you look for red flags) you can safely let a dog out here and drive slowly miles up that track while he runs alongside.
Is that cheating? The dog didn't mind a bit.
To compensate three children now deprived of a walk in torrential rain we'd visit the Dartmoor Pixies and here's a useful thing; did you know if you get caught in one of those rapidly descending Dartmoor mists and end up lost and being pixie-led you must take off your coat and put it back on inside-out and everything will become clear.
We'd also marvel at the full range of rainbow sheep that you can obviously find on Dartmoor if you look hard enough.
But on this day a few weeks ago it was the clouds that held the magic and of course the promise of the wool shop over the other side.
But you know all about that so look here we are on the way home, same day and it's looking a bit misty, you know the drill.
 

Knitting clinic

I've been busy being sociable this week in the wake of those early months of NHS escape when I just wanted to become a bit of a recluse after a working lifetime of talking all day long. The silence has been magical but time to catch up with friends,so being a lady who lunches etc and in between-times trying to sort out this bundle of kittens which has predictably not gone according to pattern.
I love the Noro Kochoran wool, be in no doubt about that, but it is fairly obvious where I've been working on this little waistcoat-gilet thing as the trail of wool/alpaca/silk follows me round.
I'd opted for making the whole a bit longer, not a lot just about six more rows of rib and six of stocking stitch before the shaping starts but that must have slipped my mind as I pounded one-eyed through the right front whilst watching  television with the other eye and most of my brain.
So something of a rib mis-match when I came to join it all up was hardly surprising and something really odd has happened to the left front shaping at the top, it's wide of the mark.
But we don't aim for perfection here I could fiddle the top to size when I picked up for the neck and shoulder so I focused my energy on the much more alarming rib dilemma.
The decision was that, though I'd never done it before, it can't be that difficult to unpick the cast on row, pick up the stitches and sneak in some extra rows at the bottom surely?
So those rows would be upsidedown, would that matter much?
It would only be a few.
Several hours later I was nearly at the complete unravel stage because for some reason the rib just would not fall into sequence and eventually I surrendered and shoved in an alternate knit row to sort of but not completely get me out of trouble.
Is there a knack to this?
A secret that no one has shared with me yet?
If so could you?
Can it be done invisibly?
It still doesn't look quite right and the bottom is now obviously a cast-off not a cast-on and now I see I should have cast off in rib which I can sort, but please if you ever see me wearing this could you not stare at the front right side ?
Chances are I'll have my hand over it anyway because I think I will always know it's there and really I should have just gritted and frogged. Ship - spoil - ha'porth - tar comes to mind, we'll see.
Don't tell me to do it now either because it's all too late, the shoulders are joined, the neck is picked up and all through a very chatty Girl's Night In evening so it is a minor miracle that I have the requisite 107 stitches for this bit, especially as I stopped to help someone do the maths and rotary cut all their quilt lattice strips halfway.
Meanwhile as I was no longer subscribing to Mslexia and newbooks (forget about the new sub to the LRB) I decided that I could at least sample one edition of the new magazine for knitters, imaginatively called er... The Knitter. I'd already resisted Numbers One and Two unopened on the groundless reason that I wouldn't knit what was on the cover but in the end I just had to succumb for research purposes.
So what's the word on the street?
Has anyone else seen it?
I'm intrigued by the instructions for the seamless Moebius Cast-On anyone an expert? Does the method have potential? I can't get my head around it at all, saw something clever going on with a circular needle and stopped because I also have the book about knitting two socks at once on a circular needle and that's scaring me a bit too.
But there was news of a UK Ravelry Day in Coventry on June 6th, can anyone go and enjoy it on behalf of the rest of us?
For once the adverts are informing because I'm like a thing possessed over knitting websites and wool shops so imagine my delight when this pattern caught my eye
and Blacker Designs turns out to be on the doorstep.
Despite the cost (£5.99, eek) I was ready to be impressed by The Knitter and I think I am a bit, patterns, inspiration-a-plenty, nice presentation, glossy pages, smells nice (shallow I know) and there's even a books page recommending The Believers by Zoe Heller and When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson so it's official even though we knew it all along, knitters read.

Bookaholic Confessions

This will have to stop.
The trouble is I see nice books and I want them. I know I get sent a lot and Jim the Post would argue that no, it's not a lot it's all of them, every title that exists,but nothing can replace book purchasing really can it? Tell me I'm not wrong.
I succumbed to three Persephone Books this week, firstly The Closed Door, Dorothy Whipple's short stories. You may or may not recall that Bookhound picked up a copy of The Other Day, her autobiography for me recently, so a bit of  Whippleitis will probably ensue.
Next On the Other Side : Letters to my Children From Germany 1940-46 by Mathilde Wolff - Monckeberg which will perfectly complement my very slow and deliberate reading of Hans Fallada's most excellent novel Alone in Berlin, which I can't recommend highly enough. My thoughts on that will be a long time arriving here but I do find Persephone Books work best for me alongside others from the era so I'm sure that will be a fruitful and ongoing reading project.
Final one of my three and we can't wait to read this one here, The Country Housewife's Book by Lucy H. Yates.
That must be me, I've made marmalade, that counts surely? Incidentally that has been such a success I plan a massive assault on the Seville's next year.
Now vegetarians and those of a sensitive nature may want to look away now.
I'm very taken with Lucy's final chapter ' Hobbies of the Country Housewife' and thrilled to see it includes 'Dressing Rabbit Skins' because we'll have a daily supply of those soon.It seems a shame to waste them while the little bunny's nestling warm and cosy on a bed of pork strips under its blanket of 'good rich short crust'.
Memo to self, grow Jerusalem Artichokes to accompany, Lucy says so.
But just think of the slippers, and...oh er the hot water bottle covers and...er, oh lots of things. The Gamekeeper has always said life's too short to cure a rabbit skin, but not according to Lucy. Then I see Lucy has the answer to the 'mischievous mouse' that is dancing in the loft right above my desk, I must light powdered sulphur and let the fumes permeate, apparently the after-effect creates a 'freshness that is wholesome and acceptable', as long as I can find the dead bodies that is or we're in trouble.
Expect more gems from this little book soon, I plan to live by the Lucy H.Yates Way this summer and see if it still works.
If I appear to have shown incredible weakness in book purchasing which I hope you'll applaud, I have been exceptionally disciplined over Henning Mankell.
The agreement with myself was that I wouldn't go out and buy the whole lot new and gorge until I had hyper-Wallanderaemia. No I would read them in order and I had to buy them second-hand, in charity shops or the book stall in the market. Except I've come to the conclusion that no one gets rid of Kurt because I see them precisely nowhere, nada. Never has a Henning Mankell darkened the shelves of Oxfam, the Ailing Labrador Trust, The Fare and Moal Sanctuary, the Save Our Cats, the Man the Lifeboats or the Rabbit Rescue Centre. I scour the bookstall in the market, Reginald Hills, Colin Dexters, by the million but not a whiff of a Wallender until this week.
There it was, in the Tuesday market number two on my list, Dogs of Riga.
Just see how hard this has been, I've been stuck on Faceless Killers for the last year, so to find number four on my list as well, The Man Who Smiled, was a moment of happy happy joy joy. I lunged and captured in the nick of time because there was an elderly gentleman on a walking frame approaching like lightning and with menace from the gardening stall, and he had 'I Love Henning' written all over him and I wasn't wrong.
'Where did you find those?' he asked with a rather accusatory tone to his voice, and may I say flashing an uncomfortably piercing gaze for a Tuesday morning as he frantically flew through the Reggies and the Colins.
I smiled sweetly and pointed at the Reggies and the Colins knowing very smugly that I'd got the only Henning's...I had a doubting apostrophe moment there, I went for it in the end, please advise.
I hadn't even got as far as inspecting the books for squashed dead flies inside or lingering odours or methicillin resistant staph.aureus bugs clinging to the outside either (nurses spot those a mile off) or anything else which I usually do, spinal check, uber-tattiness check, you know the ticklist.
Those books were not leaving my hand, they were mine.
It was actually a '£2.50 each or three for £5' special offer so I then had to casually find my triplet and eventually I settled on an unread Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train.
I was cock-a-whoop so there was a come-uppance and a face-slapping with a dead Widgeon moment (Lucy would approve...tenderises the meat whilst improving one's circulation) long overdue by the time I got the books home and out of the bag.
It hit me like a brick wall, that overwhelming smell of stale cigarettes.
Any suggestions before Lucy tells me I have to go and harvest something pungent or leave them out under a full moon or something?

Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun

My love for the writing of Irmgard Keum remains undiminished even if the books are devilishly difficult to get hold of in translation. First discovered thanks to a friend's recommend of The Artificial Silk Girl, then I found a copy of After Midnight and now Child of All Nations, first published in German in 1938, subsequently banned by the Nazi regime and now republished by Penguin. and that the sum total of my Irmgard Keun shelf.
Translations by Michael Hofmann never disappoint. He is amongst others responsible for my undying love for the writing of Joseph Roth after all and Child of All Nations must have been uber-challenging  because there is the challenge of eight year-old Kully's first person narrative voice to pin down onto the page.
Kully, the bright sparky child of wandering emigré parents; a child whose education has been in the School of Life rather than the classroom through the early 1930s.
The emotionally needy gambling, alcoholic writer father who harbours deep within a soft, kindish heart. A man who will live by the word of a lie yet can't stop himself giving away the family's last groat to someone whose need appears even greater  than his own.
The ditzy, confused equally needy mother living on her nerves, moved from hotel to hotel and left in hock with Kully as human pawn whilst her husband criss-crosses Europe ostensibly in search of a publisher and funds but also women.
And then Kully with her multi-lingual ease of learning and childlike assessment of a situation, yet with an understanding and experience way beyond her years and who cares desperately for them both.
As a fictional account of an emigre childhood this could not be bettered as Irmgard Keun, through Kully's voice, traces the anxieties and by inference leaving the reader to add in the true analysis of the family's plight as they wander around a Europe on the brink of a catastrophic war.
There are many wonderful moments of humour as this serious world is viewed through the eyes of a child,

'In Bordighera we went first to the station, but my grandmother wasn't there. We needed to find her, because we didn't have any money except for the Bottom Dollar. The Bottom Dollar was a ten-dollar note, which my mother kept in her knickers for emergencies and must never be spent.'

Turning the final page not quite the bereft disappointment I usually feel for a writer who I know I'd love to read more of if I could only find the books in English, because there beckons the most insightful afterword from Michael Hofmann.
Plenty of background information and the observation that, having spent several years travelling around Europe in the company of Joseph Roth there is strong supposition that Irmgard Keun may well have based the character of Kullys' father on Roth. All strongly denied by Keun in her lifetime but as Michael Hofmann points out she, like Roth, was an accomplished liar so we can but suppose and enjoy.
Irmgard Keun's own account of Joseph Roth during those years of exile,

'I felt here was someone who was simply about to die of sadness. His round blue eyes were almost blind with despair and his voice sounded as though buried under tons of grief. Later on, that impression blurred a little, because at that time, Roth wasn't just sad, he was also the greatest and most impassioned of haters...'

Fascinating lives and how good it would to be able to read biographies of both in English translation at affordable prices.
Irmgard Keun's exile in 1936 from Nazi repression and subsequent return to Germany in 1940 under an assumed name all suggests a life about which I'd love to know more,

'There was something about her honesty, her spark, her refusal of indoctrination, her subversiveness that riled them.'

My vintage and antiquated drawer of paper files also yields an Irmgard Keun folder containing more.
According to Michael Hofmann in a Guardian article of a year ago, Keun linked favourably with that cohort of writers from the 1920s and 30s, Jean Rhys, Anita Loos, Rosamund Lehmann, Vicki Baum and later Sybille Bedford,

'clever, fast-moving, important and unburdened with the turgid intellectual purpose of so many men's books of the time...a chronicler of the atmosphere of Nazism's rise..'

I'm in danger of repeating myself I know and I'm beyond thankful for Child of All Nations, but we still need much more Irmgard Keun.

Subscription madness

If only I could lay hands on all these in a shop it would be so much easier and yes, I could probably order them but then there's the general kerfuffle about the twelve mile round trip to collect, and the remembering, so it's time to review and trim my literary magazine subscriptions.
It can all get a bit ridiculous.
I've shed a few that I feel I may have outgrown or need a rest from and picked up a couple of lapsed subscriptions to ones that I miss too much to ignore any longer.
I like Mslexia but it's not quite the right fit for me so I'm resting that for a while, newbooks likewise I stopped about a year ago.
However six months without The Literary Review was more than enough, I was feeling bereft of a regular fix having taken that one since 1996 so in the end I surrendered, rang up and ordered all the ones I'd missed and set that up again.
The Reader comes anyway because I write a little piece (very little just 75 words on a Classic) for them and I don't think I'd ever let that one lapse.
But now I am also very grateful to Canadian John Honderich who recently offered several hundred one-year gift subscriptions to The Literary Review of Canada (thanks for the recommend Kevin) and I was lucky enough to be offered one. My research reveals (I think) that John Honderich was the editor of the Toronto Star for many years and this incredibly generous gesture is about sustaining the magazine and widening the Canadian conversation; fostering an informed debate can only be a good thing for Canada and for the LRC.
My love of CanLit well-known here and with the arrival of my first edition I'm already informed on a subject I had touched on through my reading of Joseph Boyden, the question of the Canadian Aborigine, not easy to make an accurate assessment of that from several thousand miles away here in Devon. I then dived headlong into more Canada, grisly Maritime mysteries about legless castaways, Arcadia in peril, a novel Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas, all about prairie survival in Canada and small-town life in Lancashire (our Lancashire I presume) and the promise that this book will snatch me away and deposit me in a different place and leave me profoundly changed by the experience, so that had better appear in the UK or else.
But as I was going for total immersion in Canadian literature and culture I realised that this was going to end up being expensive in more ways than just wanting all the books yesterday. I would need to redress the balance with some equivalent UK 'compare and contrast' and there was nothing for it but a return to The London Review Of Books.
I love the London Review Bookshop and if I'm in London it's all a must. I can't bear to miss a glimpse of the British Museum courtyard roof just opposite the top of Bury Street.
I usually nip and say hello to Ernest Hecht in Souvenir Press right opposite the museum because amongst other things Ernest publishes all the books that inform my other life, the working one, and he regularly saves my bacon with a book that tells me just what I need to know. In fact when I asked him to recommend a book on Grief & Loss very recently, twenty-six arrived. For anyone who might be needing to know I can't recommend Beyond Grief and A Time to Grieve by Carol Staudacher too highly, two of the most practical, informative and helpful books that I've read on the subject.
Then for old time's sake we have to go to the pizzeria in Coptic Street.
Now a Pizza Express so nothing like it used to be, no string quartet playing in the corner, and no more lashings of mozarella that seemed a mile long when you tried to cut a slice, happy days, but don't miss the LRB bookshop if you are ever Bloomsbury way.
They will send regular e mail updates which will have you gnashing your teeth over all the events you're missing, but it's five years since I last regularly subscribed and I've needed that long to read them all. Handsomely housed in the binder they do make a stately and very useful addition to the shelves and in the end I'd talked myself into a special offer year's subscription within about five minutes of enquiring about the cost.
It'll all be inspiring I just know it and almost essential for those of us out on a limb from the London hub, but please just don't tell me about any more I might like.

Blackmoor by Edward Hogan

Any mention of 'albino' and I am likely to think of one person, and one person only, my French teacher.
An albino with waist-length hair and the characteristic pink skin and the nystagmus which meant her eyes were never still and never quite looking at us.
I'd like to think we would all have coped with any amount of that without prejudice because we were a free-thinking crowd and the hair was quite breathtakingly beautiful but it was all marred by the fact that she was not in the least bit endearing, and sadly we were all typical fifteen year old girls and capable of the worst.
French lessons became a regular journey to hell and back for all concerned.
So when I opened Blackmoor by Edward Hogan and realised it was about

'Beth, an albino, half blind, and given to looking at the world out of the corner of her eye'

I'll admit to feeling slightly queasy as I frantically found myself back in Form 4C and trying to remember my French vocab.
Beth finds herself living with husband George and baby Vincent in a Derbyshire mining community which thankfully makes any classroom prejudice we may have unwittingly harboured look fairly tame. In Blackmoor the neighbours are convinced Beth is 'touched', a bad omen single-handedly responsible for every bizarre and out-of-the-ordinary occurrence that can happen in a village that sits astride a very temperamental and gaseous coal seam.
As readers we are privy to much more information and it becomes apparent that Beth is suffering from post-natal depression and struggling to keep body and soul together and I am giving away no more than the blurb when I tell you that Beth's mysterious death dominates. More family lies and secrets to be unearthed as ten years on, and now living alone with his father, Vincent chips away at the well-concealed past that his father has worked so hard to keep buried. George has effectively erased Beth from their lives and Vincent will need to dig deep.
Three books read in succession about family secrets, The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan, The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom and now Edward Hogan's Blackmoor and all making for a great triplet reading experience. Often the hidden scourge and shame of mental illness to be concealed, unacknowledged grief and loss to be buried in the hope it will just go away and the spectre of the past haunting the present, keeping all attempts at joy and happiness firmly in its shadow.
I might have made that all sound a bit depressing, and 'tis true there are few if any laughs to be had from Blackmoor, but as a three-way reading journey this has all been exceptional. Add in the fact that Blackmoor is an incredible first novel because Hilary Mantel says so, and I always agree with Hilary, and I think we will hopefully hear much more about Edward Hogan.
Shortlisted for the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize 2008, an award for writers under the age of thirty which was eventually won by Nam Le for The Boat placed Edward Hogan in great company on the shortlist, Ceridwen Dovey, Dinaw Mengestu and Ross Raisin to name a few.
If there were few laughs to be had here then that has all been perfectly balanced alongside two books to make me beam and smile, A Very Persistent Illusion by L.C.Tyler and Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans (my thoughts on that and prize draw copies very soon) and can you believe this, my very first read of a book that has had me metaphorically (because I'd hate to put my back out) bent double with laughter, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons ...where on earth have I been?

The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom and prize draw copies

I'm easily scared off a book by dialect.
It took me years to conquer George Eliot's Adam Bede, perhaps it's because the reading slows me down so I have to be in the right mood for some snail's pace progress. But then I coped with The Colour Purple and if we're talking about Scottish dialect I loved Susan Ferrier's Marriage which all felt like enough confidence-boosting positives to launch me on the remarkable journey that has been The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom and recently published by Duckworth.
Years ago I emerged from a few weeks in the company of Susan Ferrier talking like a native Scot and likewise with Eleanor Thom I am now fluent in Ingressive Pulmonic Speech and who'd have thought that.
I've spent a wee while trying to perfect the whole Gaelic Gasp.
This is speech pronounced using an intake of breath, like a gasp which can easily be mistaken for shock, surprise or even  a heart attack or suffocation which is probably worth remembering next time I'm in Glasgow. Identified in speech far and wide from the Maritime Provinces of Canada to Scandinavia apparently and this all helped me greatly in the reading of this book because I will own up that I read quite a lot of the dialect chapters aloud and you'd have thought me born and bred.
But how on earth has Eleanor Thom, managed to write this?
I remember thinking the same about Susan Ferrier, and The Tin-Kin is quite a mix of the auld and the newer versions depending on whether the voice is old or young and with some 'normal' in between making this book a truly remarkable achievement which I hope gets the recognition it deserves.
Dawn has inherited her Auntie Shirley's flat and leaving her violent ne'er do well partner Winston she takes up residence in this home of her own with her young daughter Maeve. Dawn was mysteriously sent to live with Shirley when her mother had a second baby and was well acquainted with Shirley's mysterious little locked cupboard of secrets though never the contents.Once Dawn has found the key and the cupboard gives up its mysteries, her need to unravel Shirley's past deepened right alongside mine and that was all deepened further as I worked to grasp what initially felt like a foreign language.
I had to concentrate hard as I tried to get my tongue around the language and make sense of it because through a series of flashbacks to the 1950s most of the story is told through the voices of a family of travellers, Auld Betsy, Wee Betsie and Jock interspersed with Dawn's increasing understanding of a past in which she has been an unwitting participant.
Then there's the Batchie Woman and her gift of the visions.
As for ingressive pulmonic speech well it's true, I happened to catch a radio programme from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis discussing Harris Tweed and as I listened I heard it, I know exactly what it is now and I'd never noticed it before.
Amongst the major achievements of a book like The Tin-Kin for me was an affirmation of a lost way of life, that of the old travellers, frequently judged and maligned and the victims of astonishing prejudice, yet communities alive to and vibrant with their traditions. Above all Eleanor Thom firmly dispels the stereotypical myth that somehow the children of the travellers were neglected. So they might not have seen too much soap and perhaps they had 'beasties' in their hair and been excluded from school for months on end but these people knew how to love their children and that is all in stark contrast to those around them.
In the end Dawn must do what Dawn must do and to say more would be to ruin, but it has been interesting to discover that the book is based on Eleanor Thom's own family history.
Eleanor's mother's family are Scottish travellers and her grandfather shares Jock's fate (which I won't divulge), and it was whilst exploring photos with them and then talking that a degree of shame about their Traveller heritage was revealed. As well as acknowledging and reclaiming that heritage (I think we are back on the subject of bearing witness once more, it's everywhere I look now) Eleanor Thom has carefully redressed the balance of prejudice and restored a degree of pride.
This a book that requires careful and deliberate reading but pays precious dividends if you do, in fact expect a unique experience and if you too fancy emerging as if to the Highlands born, names in comments because Duckworth's have three prize draw copies of The Tin-Kin ready to send worldwide and Rocky will wear a kilt with a be-jewelled dirk tucked in his sock for this one.

and the winners are...

Rocky has done all the outstanding prize draws today whilst his paw was available so congratulations to the lucky winners.

The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy will be winging its way to
Karin (16), Sandy(19) and Melody(62)

A Very Persistent Illusion by L.C.Tyler to
Gill (1) Lizzy Siddal (8) Book Addict (14) Kathy (29) and Mary (42)

Black Rock by Amanda Smyth to
Meltem Matar (3) Harriet Devine (19) Liz F (31)

Plus still waiting to hear from Vivienne and anmaru who have copies of Daphne waiting for them.
If you could all e mail addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail dot com putting I'm a Winner and the title in the subject line that would be a huge help and your books will be on their way.

A gift for Bookhound

I think it quite possible that there is no sight more destined to gladden Bookhound's heart (apart from the sight of me that is) than this one.
Not the diminishing store of marmalade, but sitting right next to it on the shelf, that tin of paint and a nice new paintbrush which I very generously bought for him a few weeks ago.
I know he was secretly thrilled but just tried not to show it.
Breakfast Room Green is to be the experiment for what is rather Agatha-grandiosely titled The Summer Kitchen. In fact it's a room built by Bookhound (that builder of many rooms) which leads from our ..er...Winter Kitchen onto the garden and houses a big larder and a variety of appliances that come into their own when the Aga is switched off.
Thinking green which I don't very often I also invested in a new little teapot (actually a T-Pod with a nifty little tea-leaf basket inside) for those one-mug-for-me occasions after my last one took a direct hit in the dishwasher. Unlike others who live here I of course know to slide the loaded dishwasher trays in gently and close the door carefully and I would never just aim my foot in the general direction as I walk past and shut the whole thing up with a crockery-jangling penalty kick.
But it's clear that suddenly I'm feeling a real bout of the Greens coming on.
If Breakfast Room Green proves to be our new discovery then we may even let it stray over the Ciara Yellow of the ...er...Winter Kitchen. Now that I've purloined the big table for elsewhere there seems to be far more space in there but we have great and lengthy debates of the 'will it make the room look drab and smaller' variety because in fourteen years we have yet to tire of Ciara Yellow and the warm-glow lift it offers on a dull, grey winter's day.
I suspect I was unwittingly suffering the early symptoms of Greenitis as I perused the fabrics at Cowslip Workshops too because it seemed no big deal to wander way beyond the boundaries of my 'teal blue - yellow ochre - deep carmine red' comfort zone and into the no-woman's land of polka dots and brightness and before I knew it there I was in the green and yellow corner.
This time of year my retina tells me it needs to be swamped with colour and as I walked around with a pile of sensibly safe but very bland greys I suddenly put them all back and went all rebellious and Kaffe-Fassetty bright and that was me done for.
Girl's Night In as of one reached for the sunglasses as I just went for it, but why mess about?
We decided that colour is a quilting maturity thing as they looked on aghast, you'd have thought I was about to do the equivalent of a quilting bungee jump over the Victoria Falls.
Pshaw, we leave such safe endeavours to our sons, no this is much more scary.
Perhaps those in their embryonic quilting state have to move carefully through the safe palette, the pink and green florals, the pastels, the sprigged flowers before they can throw caution to the wind and play daring.
I have some help to hand because Doug Worgal very kindly sent me a copy of a book he edited whilst editor of The Kansas City Star, Quilting a Poem, Original Designs Inspired by America's Most Beloved Poets by Frances Kite and Deborah Rowden.
I'd already half gone there with my homage to Emily Dickinson's poem 1423, and the line which blesses  this quilt, The inundation of the Spring Enlarges every Soul (which I'm sure this will when it's finished, and I promise not to show it here again until it is...sorry did I say that last time too?)
Quilting a Poem is an inspirational stepping-stone book for me because it does what I have been fiddle-faddling around and trying to define for ever and longer. I have spent happy hours reading it and pondering where it may lead my own quilts and my thanks again to Doug for sending it.
Beautiful poems from Edna St.Vincent Millay, Longfellow, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Robert Frost and many more and artfully modern quilt blocks which cleverly capture the essence of the words in fabric.
However I suspect I am going all back-to-front about this.
I should probably read the poem and cut the cloth in that order, not read the cloth and then cut the poem to make it fit.
Can I make the poetry of Ted Hughes fit those fabrics?
Perhaps not but I think Sylvia Plath's Bee Poems might just, we'll see.
Daring is of course good and challenging but dangerous and likely to involve having to redecorate much more of the house to match.

Girl's Night In go out

This is unusual but Girl's Night In went out for lunch this week, just to prove that we can do it.
Three of us have escaped the clutches of NHS employment in recent months so it seemed like a good enough excuse to get the others to take half days and let the organisation run itself and off we trotted to Cowslip Workshops for a treat.
On the way to Launceston (up to the village school, turn left, you know the way by now) I nipped into the Village Post Office possibly almost for the last time, because next week we lose the one we know and love, though not completely.
Hilary will still run the little tiny shop for the newspapers, sweets and emergency birthday cards and it is indeed tiny but warm and cosy and a village institution. When the cat is asleep on the newspapers there really isn't enough room to swing even a hamster round, but all you ever need to know about village hatches, matches, dispatches, scandals and disasters can be heard therin.
We will gain what is known as a Partner Service to be run from the re-vamped Village Shop next door, after a year of being empty now a new and up-market-ish organic farm shop affair that I have to own up I haven't frequented to date.
Anyway, for posterity and all that, here are the hands of Hilary and 'tis across that very counter and through those hands that anything we may have posted to any of you has passed.
Twenty minutes later and Cornwall and Cowslip looking their very best, and as a working farm please just imagine the baaing, bleating and lowing noises going on in the background as I took this picture looking across to Launceston and the Castle.
The Cowslip lunch was delectable and interestingly we managed to do the mental maths and divide the bill up between us with minimal fuss, which I can only put down to us all imbibing Elderflower Presse rather than Elderflower Wine. If you could see the elaborate messes that two practice managers, two practice nurses, a counsellor and a health visitor have got into in the past...well if you put in £5 and give me £2 of that and then I put in a £10 note that makes it right, no hold on, I'll put in a £20 note and you give me £12, you know the sort of thing.
Then it was time to browse in the Cowslip shop and inhale that aroma of mile after mile of new fabric and start gleaning inspiration, thinking out new projects, buying fabric to finish ongoing ones (one of our number has quietly come up with thirty blocks for a very beautiful hand-pieced quilt without us paying much attention month by month) or just stash-buying and knowing something will come to mind eventually (me).
The Fat Quarter Quadrille began as we all stepped around clutching our choices, putting back, picking up again, holding at arm's length just to see. Then doing the ruby-beholder test without a ruby-beholder (or even a cheap substitute Quality Street strawberry wrapper between us) and asking 'what thinkest thou' to whoever was stepping alongside and generally feeling quite relieved that it wasn't our job to tidy the shop at the end of the day.
As for what I bought (because surely you knew I would), more of that tomorrow but I'll give you a clue, it's in here somewhere.

Burford reminder

I have been most remiss but thankfully the Tinker is ever-vigilant on my behalf and reminds that a few years ago he made a tapestry kneeler for Burford Church and here it is.
 

The Wool-Pack by Cynthia Harnett

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant and for the second time in my life (if not the third or fourth) I was completely absorbed cover to cover by Cynthia Harnett's The Wool-Pack, first published in 1951 and the winner of the Carnegie Medal as the outstanding children's book of that year.
It's 1493 and living history as the workings of the fifteenth century Cotswold wool trade are revealed and now I want to go back to Burford and check out all the references. We used to stay there regularly back in the 1980s, would park the car in Sheep Street, probably right outside the very house Cynthia Harnett reveals in her illustrations and  afterword that she used as the family home of the Fetterlock family.
We've wandered around Burford Church, up and down the main street, admired the almshouses, bought my treasured wooden thimble (the one and only thimble) in the woodcraft shop there
and all with the knowledge of this book's location buried too deep in my memory to make the connections at the time, perhaps because we had three small children in tow. I do remember that three of the Levellers ( the Cromwellian ones not the singing ones) took refuge in that chuch and one scratched his name in the lead of the font but only because I bought and kept the postcard.
I have probably appreciated all the wool mentions far more as a grown-up too, the loaded distaff tucked under the arm as the women dropped, twisted and wound up the spindle in the days when spinning wheels were new-fangled, heavy, cumbersome things for the well-to-do. Then the information about the cloth trade, the workers and the weaving all equally interesting.
Tavistock Parish Church has a fine Clothworkers' Aisle added to the original 1318 church in 1445. A bit of digging and I discover that our tin mining Stannary town was also a flourishing centre for the cloth trade, manufacturing cloth from the fleeces of the Dartmoor sheep and this aisle gifted in memory of local wool merchant Maurice Berd by his widow Constance.
Now I'm wondering whether there are more references to the trade around the town, perhaps in old street names, and the fast-flowing River Tavy would certainly offer a plentiful supply of water power for a mill, so I must keep my eyes peeled. And of course, I wouldn't have bothered to find out any of that but for reading this book, amazing that a book like The Wool-Pack can still inspire all these years on.
But alongside all this, the coming-of-age story of young Nicholas Fetterlock who must eventually leave his comfortable carefree country life and learn the trade before he can take on his father's mantle as a Merchant of the Wool Staple.
Cynthia Harnett's illustrations reminded me of those books of history told in pictures we used to have,a particular era and page after page of line drawings...need you even wonder, of course I've still got mine.
Now I'm remembering the hours spent tracing these pictures into school projects, how did we manage before the photocopier?
All that pencilling in on the reverse to make your own variety of carbon paper.
But what a great and invaluable reading experience The Wool Pack has been, in fact I almost wish I had a school project to do on it right now.

6am this morning

Sometimes you open the bedrooom curtains and there's a poem happening right outside the window and quite often when you live here it's a poem by Ted Hughes.

...And the big planets hanging -
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays -

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

Ted Hughes, The Horses (excerpt)

The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan

Was I just in London?
Was it Ireland before that?
Then there was Iceland and Venice and Kansas and brace yourselves because now it's Wales.
In fact, according to that brilliant Gavin and Stacey Islands in the Stream video with Tom Jones for Comic Relief, that'll be Wales in England then...duck everyone...and for anyone who might not know this, that little bit of flawed cartography will likely upset 99% of Wales and the other 1% are asleep and will be upset later.
In fact to make up for even referencing that, it might be WalesLit on and off for quite a while now that I have discovered the Honno Press list, and though today's book is not one of theirs I have a very alluring pile that are.
To add to any geographical confusion that other thing has happened, the one where you pick up and start three really good books which look poles apart and strike me down with a wet cod again if they don't all start speaking to each other.
What starts off as a singelton becomes a triplet reading experience, as similar themes and threads arc and spark across from one book to another and but for my trusty pencil and scribbles it would be easy to end up in a state of utter confusion.
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan (Wales)  quickly made connections in my mind with both The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom (Scotland) and Blackmoor by Edward Hogan (England) and in the end I had myself a sort of three-way reading experience with lines of communication opened up between them and flowing back and forth, as each book informed the other in the way they dealt with similar issues of family secrets, and tragedy. Lies and prevarication created a wall of silence around the unsayable, and in triplicate too, which all seemed to engender barely concealed and oft malevolent forces to be rooted out and exposed.
More of the other two books soon but The Earth Hums in B Flat published by Canongate gets the spotlight today as young Gwenni Morgan tries to make sense of her family and her life in small-town Wales in the 1950s.
Gwenni feels blessed by the gift of flight in her sleep, a gift which her family view more as a curse that will single her out as 'odd' rather than a childhood fantasy to be acknowledged. With a child's innocence and understanding Gwenni sees much that others may miss but likewise misinterprets what she sees too, taking things as children are wont to do at face value.
Gwenni's is a family rent asunder by the understated horrors of war and the stigma of mental illness with the aftermath passing from one generation to the next. Played out within the confines of a small and knowing community where gossip is the currency of division and hatred poor Gwenni has an uphill climb to the truth. Slowly, as the lies and secrets prevail, the book builds towards the revelations for Gwenni and her older sister Bethan which, though we as adults may have more or less gleaned, still retain the power to shock and silence as the full and ongoing implications dawn.
It's the characters who have lingered on in my mind, not only Gwenni but her long-suffering, loving and loyal father and the mother who hates her with a venom that it's hard to imagine, yet somehow, in the careful and sensitive hands of Mari Strachan, I came to understand it all as I turned the final page.
Mari Strachan has written a beautiful and I hate to tell you but unmissable book (sorry, the tbr piles must be teetering already and it's only March) especially if you enjoy a compelling and perfectly wrought child's narrative voice.

Orange Prize for Fiction 2009

I say it every year, repeat it after myself, I am so absolutely not going to trail the prize-lists, but I just can't stop myself my name's dovegreyreader and I'm addicted.
Here's the longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 in case anyone hasn't seen it and congratulations to them all especially (I'm allowed favourites) Kamila Shamsie because I just knew that book would make the prize lists this year.
Links to the ones I've shared thoughts on here, one in green that I happen to be reading and loving right this minute, one in... let's go for purple...for which sadly I was entirely the wrong reader and those in red have been sitting there on the shelf staring at me and I might just have to pick them up now.

Debra Adelaide: The Household Guide to Dying (HarperCollins), Australian, 4th Novel

Gaynor Arnold: Girl in a Blue Dress (Tindal Street Press), British, 1st Novel

Lissa Evans: Their Finest Hour and a Half (Doubleday), British, 3rd Novel

Bernadine Evaristo: Blonde Roots (Hamish Hamilton), British, 4th Novel

Ellen Feldman: Scottsboro (Picador), American, 3rd Novel

Laura Fish: Strange Music (Jonathan Cape), British, 2nd Novel

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Love Marriage (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), American, 1st Novel

Allegra Goodman: Intuition (Atlantic Books), American, 6th Novel

Samantha Harvey: The Wilderness (Jonathan Cape), British, 1st Novel

Samantha Hunt: The Invention of Everything Else (HarvillSecker), American, 2nd Novel

Michelle de Kretser: The Lost Dog (Chatto & Windus), Australian, 3rd Novel

Deirdre Madden: Molly Fox's Birthday (Faber and Faber), Irish, 7th Novel

Toni Morrison: A Mercy (Chatto & Windus), American, 9th Novel

Gina Ochsner: The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Portobello Books), American, 1st Novel

Marilynne Robinson: Home (Virago), American, 3rd Novel

Preeta Samarasan: Evening is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate), Malaysian, 1st Novel

Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury), Pakistani/British, 5th Novel

Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife (Doubleday), American, 3rd Novel

Miriam Toews: The Flying Troutmans (Faber and Faber), Canadian, 4th Novel

Ann Weisgarber: The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (Macmillan New Writing), American, 1st Novel

 

 

 

 

A Jury of Her Peers

In the end I couldn't wait the fifty-six days.
Fifty-six days before I laid hands on the UK Virago edition of Elaine Showalter's brilliant new magnum opus A Jury of Her Peers American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx ?
I don't think so.
So I trawled around and did some price comparisons for the US Knopf edition published in February and eventually The Book Depository came up as the cheapest option, though £17.79 still doesn't feel cheap for a book, but no matter I have it.
Nor did I do what I did with US edition of Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel and send not one but two copies back to Amazon as seconds because, can you believe the shoddiness, the pages edges were all ragged and uncut, missed the guillotine by a mile.
I wasn't having that.
Until of course it dawned with my third copy that this was the intentional and fashionable deckle-edged finish, though by this time Amazon had pulled their entire UK stock as seconds and probably sent the whole lot to a bonfire somewhere.
I felt bad about that for a while but quickly grew to love the quirky deckle-edge.
This the book mentioned by Elaine Showalter at her talk on Susan Glaspell and Dorothy Canfield Fisher which I travelled to London for back in November and finally the first definitive tome on American women writers for me to dip into and read and get ideas for more reading.
I've browsed through and read about the writers I know but my sum total is scant few in fact a bit of a book-famine when you look at the whole.
My old friends Susan and Dorothy of course and Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Louisa May Alcott, and Constance Fenimore Woolson discovered via Elizabeth Maguire's book The Open Door.
Plenty of twentieth century names too but surprisingly no Dawn Powell.
I guess Elaine Showalter's going to get fed up with this because inevitably there must have been some winnowing of the grain from the chaff but still I'm wondering why no Dawn Powell?

"Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out."

That's our Dawn and The Bride's House one of those bleak Ethan Frome-like explorations of the mis-matched marriage as I recall, women's lives and what Tim Page describes as an 'inter-generational stream of consciousness.'
No matter, the introduction to A Jury of Her Peers offers a fine taster of what's to come with Elaine Showalter's eminently readable style and of course the admission that she has inevitably had to make selections, distinctions and judgements and specifically amongst other criteria

'how American women negotiated the act of writing professionally, how they were changed by committing themselves to writing as a vocation, how they reconciled their public selves with their private lives and how changes in the status of women affected their lives and careers'

There is an acknowledgement to the pressures on women to lead private rather than public lives which feels quite relevant to 'that' book I've read this week. Would a man writing about similar themes from a father's point of view have been quite so publically castigated?
I don't know, just a thought and slap me with that wet cod again for even suggesting it, but if Jonathan Myerson had penned The Lost Child might we have been viewing it in a different light ?

Black Rock by Amanda Smyth and prize-draw copies

I'd like to think I'd been astonishingly perceptive in having books by six out of ten of the Waterstone's New Voices 2009 either read or waiting on my shelves. Then you'd all be in awe of my talent-spotting skills and think blimey, she's good at this no wonder she's got a shelf of her own in that shop.
Forget it, the books are only there because the publishers have sent them to me.
That aside, plenty of books don't make the fifty page cut so at least when the list was published I'd already read several and nodded sagely in agreement, coming to the same conclusion, that several of these writers had real promise which possibly bodes well for the others and I for one would be watching out for next novels from them.
You already know about Guernica by Dave Boling and coming up soon my thoughts on Days of Grace by Catherine Hall and The Earth Hums in B Flat by Marie Strachan but today it is the turn of a very remarkable book, Black Rock by Amanda Smyth published by Serpent's Tail.
The cover has something Heart of Darkness-y about it but that might all be about the boat and the river  steering my thoughts erroneously along that route when in fact as soon as I read I sensed a gloriously different cocktail, the combined spirits of women both real and fictional.
Think Jean Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea, a bit of Bertha Mason, a smidgen of Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier from The Awakening , the tiniest essence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper with a hint of The Colour Purple and Alice Walker, throw in a pinch of Toni Morrison all of which hopefully gives you an idea of the flavour of Black Rock which is in the end, lest there be any doubt not in the least derivative and very uniquely Amanda Smyth.
Until disturbing events cause her to flee, Black Rock on the island of Tobago has been Celia's home. Orphaned at birth and raised by her Aunt Tassie, Celia heads to nearby Trinidad to escape the attentions of Tassie's lecherous husband Roman. Rapidly absorbed into first the Shamiel family and son William whose faithful and oft unrequited love for Celia pervades the book, and then employed by Dr Emmanuel Rodriguez to help his beleagured wife Helen care for the children, slowly a new and different life unfolds for Celia as she comes of age and deals with what love and life throw at her and perhaps with these words of wisdom ringing in her ears,

'I believe you follow your life, Celia. You don't lead your life. It's a mistake people make. We're not that powerful or important.'

Early grief and loss suddenly overflows in one of the many incredibly telling moments in this beautifully written book, Celia's first person narrative voice by now one that I was completely in tune with,

'...I looked up through the branches of the trees to the sky and it was black and empty as if there was nothing there. There were no stars and no planets and no piece of moon. Everything was still as if it was a picture I was looking at. And for the first time since I had left Black Rock, I started to cry...At last the river that ran to and from my heart had burst its banks.'

Meanwhile Amanda Smyth utilises her geographical location to full effect as Trinidad drips with heat, freqently with ritual and an underlying sense of menace whilst something altogether unknown, intangible, possibly 'unsayable' hovers in the air.
Thank goodness Amanda Smyth reveals all in the twist at the end, and though I'd pinned down one or two fleeting suspicions I did not spot the 'biggy' coming one little bit, so much so that I had to re-read the page and was quite overcome with that sense of 'how on earth did I miss that'.
I don't often mention endings for fear of giving a single thing away but I've thought carefully and I don't think it's too revealing to say that as you turn the final page you have that overwhelming sense that history can and does repeat itself but that Celia may well be on the brink of bucking those proffered words of wisdom and leading her life as she sees fit, not following the trail that others lay for her and a great tidal wave of hope rushed in.
I just love it when a book does that to me and, if you too could use a great tidal wave of reading hope right now, Serpent's Tail have three prize draw copies of Black Rock (for the UK only this time) ready and waiting to send out to the lucky winners, names in comments and Rocky will oblige.

The Lost Child by Julie Myerson

Can there be a murkier quagmire of opinions currently on the boil than this one, ready and waiting to trap the unwary?
Gobbets of hot air exploding all around, everyone taking sides and me in imminent danger of slipping into this morass right up to my neck and then being pelted with slimy dead fish from all sides?
Common sense tells me I really should just leave this one well alone and let all those people who know about these things slug it out over The Lost Child by Julie Myerson (and just look what the initials of that title say...tlc) but since when has a bit of a slap round the chops with a dead cod stopped me?
Plus on this very day twenty-six years ago, at 8.59am precisely, I too became the mother of a son as the Kayaker paddled into our world (thankfully minus his kayak at that stage) and perhaps a fleeting thought may have crossed my mind, along the lines of what sort of a hand had we been dealt here and just how might we play this one.
Julie Myerson may well have thought likewise and if she had any doubts that this whole motherhood thing might be the toughest assignment yet then she can be left in no uncertainty now.
Forget the gentle card-playing analogy, let's head for the hills because Family Myerson haven't just found themselves between a rock and hard place. Their plight is not in the least unusual because like countless others this family have been tethered to a precarious cliff-face in the teeth of a howling blizzard whilst teenage Son of Myerson strikes out single pitch across the ice field on a rope of his own choosing as teenage sons can be wont to do.
In this day and age it strikes me this is often the only way they can find to go out and become men because they aren't sent out to hunt for the dinner any more (unless they live here that is) .
The pain, the grief and the loss emanate from the depths of Julie Myerson's soul as she recounts her side of this tragic story that I hope she'd rather she hadn't had to write.
I'm trying to be even-handed here because if I learnt one lesson very early on in my lifetime of working with families and listening to other people's narratives it is that people's life stories are multi-faceted, so whilst offering empathy and congruence to what I was hearing I always had to inwardly acknowledge what may have been happening to the others involved.
Though The Lost Child only offers Julie and Jonathan's version of events, Son of Myerson does have a public voice and he is now using it to full (and lucrative) effect and I doubt the Myerson's would expect it to be any other way. He has benefited from what sounds like a warm, loving, caring family home, many would say a privileged one that more than met his needs, one that like most has had its share of up and downs. He's had a good education, he is confident, articulate and intelligent and will doubtless have been raised in an atmosphere where there was food and money on the table, debate was considered healthy and his opinions were listened to. He is far more fortunate than many and with that foundation he has a bright future if he survives his journey through the drug use that he doesn't view as a problem.
So attempting an unbiased reading of this book I readily sensed the boy's (Julie calls him her boy throughout, this feels highly significant) pain, chaos, turmoil and confusion as the drug use apparently escalates in direct proportion to the dwindling school attendance, the fading certainty of A*grades, deteriorating behaviour, an alleged assault on his mother that leaves Julie in A&E nursing a perforated eardrum, a casual girlfriend's pregnancy and rapidly arranged abortion and eventually a life of sofa-surfing after the family finally change the locks on the doors.
That I felt his pain must be to his mother's credit in the writing of this book, but as the mother of sons it was inevitable that I would feel Julie Myerson's pain too.
Whilst researching the nineteenth-century lives of the Yelloly family for her next book, Julie Myerson realised that it was all inseperable from the twenty-first century events being played out in her own home.
If the nineteenth century family was fractured and decimated by disease and early death then Julie Myerson offers a tragic comparison of what is more likely to destroy the family of today, delineating the vortex into which her family descends as Son of Myerson wreaks the kind of drug-induced havoc for which they were not prepared because it only happened to other people.
The ways for a nest to empty have become many and varied down the centuries, but if there is a danger in writing a script for your own childrens' lives during their childhood (and which parent doesn't) it is to forget that in the twenty-first century at some stage the children may take that script into their own hands and rewrite it for themselves, and that might be excruciatingly tough to sit back and watch. The rewrite leaving in its wake that yawning chasm of unmet expectations which for Julie Myerson has translated into a profound sense of grief and loss and every emotion therin. Shock, denial, anger, guilt, bargaining, depression are all played out in a book that I felt Julie Myerson had no choice but to write if she wanted to reach some degree of acceptance and continue being a writer.
There is much cynicism around about motive (is this really a book warning about the effects of skunk cannabis?) and chatter about exploitation (Julie Myerson has written about her children in various guises for many years) but I was left wondering whether Julie Myerson fundamentally needed people to know this truth about her life and her family before she could honestly move forward and write again, will this book prove to be one of those cathartic writing moments for her to gather her resources and carry on?
There is of course a possibility that the book will be read for the Son of Myerson bits alone whilst the Yelloly family story is glossed over and ignored and this would be a pity because, though I didn't feel the Yelloly thread as it stands would have sustained a book in its own right, it is through exploring and drawing close to the grief of that family's tragically consumptive past that Julie Myerson seems able to explore her own past and present as the story unfolds, and it is all beautifully written.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it but I sensed that as Julie discovered Mrs Yelloly's thanks to God in her handwritten pocket almanac for 1850 this became her genuine and fervent wish for her own family too, and there are many more moments like this when the past somehow informs the present,

'raising my beloved child up from her most dangerous illness and blessing us with means to give her sea air. Oh bring me safely through my anxieties and bless all my dear children.'

Or crouched on the floor of the Church finally discovering and reading the Yelloly family memorial after such a painstaking search, Julie could just as easily be speaking to her son as to the elusive Mary Yelloly,

'Right now, crouching here on this floor on a hot, light summer's day, I'm the closest I'll ever be to what is left of you.'

Perhaps Son of Myerson was right about one thing, when he read and by all accounts approved publication of the manuscript and the inclusion of his poems in the book (though now retracting on the grounds that he was seventeen, confused and didn't really know what he was agreeing to)

'To be absolutely honest he says carefully, I wasn't all that interested in the stuff about the Mary Yelloly person...
I'm not saying it's bad, necessarily. But maybe you have to be pushing fifty and female.'

Past fifty in my case and yes, the 'Yelloly stuff' worked fine here, but The Lost Child is going to run and run before it's given up its head of steam and half of me didn't want to add to that and now I have, drat.
This the book that was due for publication in May but, thanks to an interview with Son of Myerson in the national press, Bloomsbury took the decision to bring forward the publication date and take full advantage of the free publicity.
There have been brickbats flying left, right, north and south, with claims and counter-claims, revelatory press interviews, accusations and disapprobation aimed at the Myersons for even considering the publication of such a personal book detailing their son's drug use, allegations of hysteria and insanity directed at his mother by her son and worse.
I'm not even going there and I'm very grateful to have been able to read this book before I then read some of the back story because frankly the public fall-out saddens my heart. The publicity machine giving false voice to a tragedy that might now be better played out behind closed doors with attempts at damage-limiting mediation and a public silence, because though not all families are salvageable from wreckage like this they remain a precious resource to be nurtured and cherished and not solely rich seams to be mined for book material.
This book needs no more help from Family Myerson to sell.
I feel sorrow and sadness in equal measure for everything Family Myerson have endured and for the agonisingly hurtful place they all now find themselves, and lest we forget, younger siblings who have witnessed all this and needed safeguarding too.
Everyone will reach their own conclusions about The Lost Child but I do applaud Julie Myerson's courage in the writing of it and likewise who can fault Jonathan Myerson's unqualified support for his partner, relationships fall on their swords over far less. Son of Myerson could easily have brought his entire family crashing down with him.
Others will doubtless disagree but I was cut to the core by a mother's helpless and frequently unrequited expressions of love for her son and in turn her son's often paralysed and distant emotional response and the huge and ever-widening chasm that grew between them. I've made little mention of Jonathan Myerson's moments of weeping despair and deep sense of failure as a father but it's laid bare in this book for all to see.
Ultimately for all the seeming hopelessness of the current situation I'm rooting for good outcomes for Family Myerson in my writing of the next chapter for them, that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well for Julie, Jonathan and their son and I just hope they take good counsel in the coming months when the LitFest circuit beckons. The potential for those wounds to be picked over and reopened time and again in the interests of book sales and feeding an insatiable public requires careful balancing with a focus on laying some healing foundations for the future, because a family apparently built on this much love is precious and not to be trifled with. Pull it up by the roots and examine it too frequently and it will be irretrievably damaged.
So have I been privy to family exploitation?
Have I been told it like it was ?
Who can tell, only Family Myerson know their versions of the truth but of one thing I feel certain; whilst what was lost was undoubtedly the boy, I feel sure what will be found eventually is the man, and actually isn't that what's supposed to happen?

Three Pilgrims and a Tinker ...an excursion

That title will become clear eventually because we've taken you all on another excursion and this one specifically scheduled before the holiday hordes arrive because it's an odds-on cert that this will be one of Devon's mega-new tourist attractions from Easter onwards.
Access by car is already tricky and restricted, along narrow Fiesta-sized winding country lanes and very limited parking (which you have to pre-book) to reach the National Trust's newest Westcountry venue, so would you like to know where?
More to the point who lived there?
In fact take a peek through Mrs Mallowan's very own keyhole?
If you haven't guessed already we are on our way to Agatha Christie's home at Greenway, high up on the banks of the beautiful River Dart at Galmpton and finally opening its doors to the public just two weeks ago.
We were awash with anticipation let me tell you as we strolled down the drive on a fabulous Spring morning with the Tinker and Offspringette for our visit.
The River Dart in all it's magnificent tidal glory just visible through the trees and, as we rounded the corner, first glimpses of Greenway itself filtered through one of many sumptuously beautiful magnolia trees.
The house was in such an advanced state of disrepair it has already needed many millions to restore with Bookhound of course noticing things like new roof and paintwork whilst I pay attention to curtains and furnishings.
So we were eager beavers to get in the door and look around as we gathered for our timed admission
and I'd like to thank the lady who bounded up to us and offered the following words of wisdom,
'Of course, you know she never wrote a single book here don't you, not a word, this was just a holiday home'
The sharp inward gasp was audible as we watched this extinguishment of our bonfire, and we all looked at each other dolefully as our flames of enthusiasm were suitably doused.
It would have dawned on us as we walked round of course but somehow it seemed as if she had given away the ending of the book, she might as well have told us who murdered Roger Ackroyd and our smiles sagged momentarily.
Dreams of writing desks and old Remington typewriters, fountain pens and ink, were shattered in an instant, though Offspringette feels sure she caught a glimpse of Agatha's fax machine, though on reflection we thought it was probably the National Trust's.
Undaunted and now under no illusions we embarked on our stately progress through Agatha's entrance hall, to Agatha's Library, Morning Room, Drawing Room with Agatha's piano, Winter Drawing Room, Butler's Pantry, Kitchen with Agatha's Aga, Agatha's Bedroom and even Agatha's toilet complete with thunder-box. The family were great collectors though not quite in the Snowshill league, but it was easy to drum up the atmosphere mainly because, at this early stage in Greenway's now very public life, the National Trust have adopted an extremely visitor-friendly approach; artefacts lying on tables, Meissen figures on the shelves, no roped off areas and expensive-looking Persian rugs underfoot (not a bit like ours from Trago Mills) all to retain that sense of a lived-in family home.
Well I love all that me.
I lose myself in the moment and gather in ideas of grandeur as I drift around and whispered to Bookhound that I'd quite like a Morning Room, could he give it some thought and should we now call our sitting room the Winter Drawing Room and be done with it.
As for Agatha not writing a single word here, well I can't believe there wasn't the odd shopping list, and plot-inspiration must have been rife in such peaceful and idyllic surroundings.
I was desperately trying to note the books on the shelves, but we were shepherded in and through the library (complete with murals painted by US servicemen billeted at Greenway during World War II) a little too fast for me to note much, though I did spot a complete set of Charlotte Yonge upstairs and she of course used to holiday regularly in the South Hams at Puslinch. Then a copy of The Three Pilgrims and the Tinker by Mary Borden in Agatha's bedroom which somehow encapsulated our visit nicely and then I discover it's the very same Mary Borden of The Forbidden Zone.
No pictures inside the house obviously but I didn't feel that capturing the view from Agatha's bedroom broke the rules too flagrantly and hope I'm not excommunicated from the National Trust as a result. I'll have to argue that it was far too magnificent to keep to myself and will tempt you all to visit.
The gardens at Greenway have been open to the public for some time and though we didn't venture around them on this trip I expect we will do a return visit in the Summer and do the GreenWay approach by ferry along the river from Dartmouth. The plant and tree collection is quite stunning apparently, the sheltered aspects and the soil offering perfect conditions for a massive collection of camellias, magnolias and all those things ericaceous which would die after a week in our garden.
Just a bit early for the rhododendrons and wondering whether these may also have to be sacrificed in the  national rhododendron cull currently in progress to protect our oak trees from the Sudden Oak Death virus,(no one seems to be using the initials yet, give it time) seemingly every bit as threatening as Dutch Elm disease.
It would be a tragedy.
We were also thrilled to spot Agatha's robin.
Bookhound covetously admitted that much as I would love ten minutes in a bookshop with a trolley, he'd love ten minutes in Agatha's field with a chainsaw and that would be Winter 2011's logs sorted (he likes to work ahead of himself, we have 09's and 10's at the ready)
I also think someone somewhere must have known we had this visit planned because just look what I won at last week's World Book Day literary quiz at the library.
Was this book meant for me or was it meant for me?

and the winners are...

Catching up on prize draws this evening and so the lucky winners of Esther's Inheritance by Sandor Marai are Gillian Davies (19), Lesley-Ann (7)  and Loelia (22)
Now the Daphne draw has stretched Rocky's mathematical capabilities to the limit because we had to take into account the entries on both the Invite post and the dgr asks... post but we have managed it, so copies of Daphne by Justine Picardie on their way to Vivienne, Barbara Sandison and anmaru as soon as we have addresses.
If you could all e mail dovegreyreader at gmail dot com (and put 'I'm a winner' in the subject line) we'll get the books sent out from the publishers very soon.

Imran heads to the US

Calling all US dovegreyreader visitors, Imran's on his way.
Imran Ahmad (yes that lovely cuddly Imran...picture here <<<<< so you'll recognise him) author of that dovegrey favourite Unimagined is heading to a city, town, ranch or petrol station near you very soon so your chance to catch him on his massive Unimagined road trip talking his way around America.
50 days
40 speaking events
12,000 miles
I've told you how lovely he is so now's your chance to find out and I just hope he's got a decent car.

Household wants and a little competition

I've done it again.
Does anyone else buy something out of pure sympathy?
That wistful sense of melancholy over something neglected?
For me it's usually something vintage and craft-associated, for Bookhound it can be anything.
Either a basket full of tangled lace bobbins (that was both of us)
or the tatty old bag of ancient knitting needles, (actually that was Bookhound)
perhaps a tin of old wooden Sylko cotton reels, tools that have probably been lovingly used to create beautiful things and then cast aside in a house clearance.
I don't need them of course but I do get this overwhelming urge to acknowledge something about their history. As you know I've been reading Stella Duffy (and my thanks to Stella for that brilliant dgr asks...) and Stella has given me cause to think about the whole idea of 'witness'.
It's mentioned in The Room of Lost Things and now I reflect on it I'm seeing it as another big theme in the book for me, that witness to the lives of others.
And subtly the thinking transfers itself to inanimate objects.There is something indefinable and abstract about being a witness to the treasures that these things may have been to people, but abstract or not it tugs at my heartstrings.
Often Bookhound can steer me along and divert that witness onto the menu at Costa Coffee, but often he's worse than me and will come home with something homeless and in need of adoption like this vintage quilt found lining a box of tools (£5)
or a Household Wants Indicator
I'm sure you'll agree that no home should be without one of these. We find it so tiresome to run out of isinglass or dentifrice, and gas mantles, don't you just hate it when you're out of those. No more frantic twelve mile round-trip dash to Morrisons for hearthstone either, now nothing need be forgotten with this helpful addition.
Incidentally as it's Persephone Books Tenth birthday this week can anyone name the book published by them and give the quote that features one of these?
In fact, let's push the boat out, a prize for the first person to come up with the correct answer.
Or there was the day Bookhound turned up with an ancient Knitmaster 321 knitting machine and we all know what happened with that.
So each week we browse around the Tuesday Craft Market here in Tavistock.
The Tuesday Market has grown and grown into something quite special and now we have to get down there before the coaches arrive because it's obviously on the tourist trail even in February. We have our favourite stalls, the ones where somehow the owners are very clever at finding the most incredible things and I had looked at these week after week after week for months.
Tiny little baby boots, about four inches long and knitted with consummate skill and attention to fine detail. I can't place them time, wool or pattern-wise or even hazard a guess as to whether they are even English but I fell in love with them on week one, but they were expensive for what they were and it seemed like a folly purchase that I should resist.
For several weeks we diverted to Costa Coffee.
Week by week I checked them, stroked them, invested them with a history, bore witness and offered them as evidence to the skill of the knitter, and then last week it was bargain day on the stall and there they were, mine for £1.
Result.
All I could think was I hope someone as daft as me finds my old hand-knitted socks, or my knitting needles,(omg imagine my Lantern Moons homeless) or my quilting stuff on a market stall in years to come, feels sorry for them and wonders who made them or used them, imagines who turned those heels and kitchenered those toes, bears witness, invests them with a life and imagines them up a history, gives them a loving home for a little while.
It's not just me is it?

A Very Persistent Illusion by L.C.Tyler , but the prize draw copies are real.

It's Comic Relief Day here in the UK again and, with red noses everywhere, today seems like a good day to mention the book that has made me smile the most in recent weeks.
The arrival of a book from Macmillan New Writing is always a treat because who can forget the right old brouhaha when the project was unveiled, authors submit work, receive no advance but have a higher than average open-ended royalties agreement. The nay-sayers were out in force and speculation was rife, this was going to be the RyanAir of publishing, preying on the naive first-time author and I remember e mailing Michael Barnard Executive Director of Macmillan at the time.
Yes me, really I did, just go to the top and exclaim... if you don't tell them how do they know?
I just wanted to say please be assured that as an ordinary reader I just want to read good books, if you find them for us this way then that's great, please ignore the flak and get on with it.
Michael Barnard very politely replied and assured me that he would.
It's another way for writers who may be missing the boat elsewhere to get published and the publishing world didn't like it one little bit.
Time has proved that this is most certainly not the RyanAir of publishing (though I quite like RyanAir actually, I've done a bit of BookCrossing on their planes) and thankfully I can stay out of all that and just enjoy the books. I certainly did that recently with Doug Worgal's Thin Blue Smoke and it's happened again with L.C.Tyler's second novel A Very Persistent Illusion.
I read The Herring-Seller's Apprentice and realised that L.C.Tyler has a very unique writing voice. It's hard to pull off sustained wry humour without it feeling tiresome and repetitious but he does it. I've also revisited the comments on that post and Mike, I think you're still there, that was a welcome reminder and I hope I'm still being true to the cause:-)
A Very Persistent Illusion made me laugh, and smile and nod and smile a lot more by the time I'd finished yet it also left me in no doubt that Chris Sorenson, and people I might meet like him in real life, often have a serious reason for their facade of joviality and humour. So it probably takes even more skill to contain sadness and tragedy within the confines of a book as funny as this and keep the thing afloat but L.C.Tyler managed it for me.
The elephant in the book is Chris's personal family tragedy, slowly hinted at and gradually revealed and it is huge. He has developed some off-beat coping strategies to keep it squashed in its cage with the door constantly threatening to fly off its hinges and let the whole kit-and-caboodle-jack-in-a-box mess shoot out.
When it does, he and we know he'll have to confront it.
Interspersed with some helpful philosophical action from the man himself, a Descartes storyline weaves in and out of the novel offering pertinent advice to Chris if only he can listen.
So if it's been a long cold winter (or a boiling hot summer) wherever you are, and you could do with a smiley read, names in comments for one of five prize draw copies of A Very Persistent Illusion by L.C.Tyler and of course Red-Nose-Rocky will oblige.

dovegreyreader asks...Stella Duffy

Enormous thanks to Stella Duffy for braving the plumped up cushions, the glare of the standard lamp, the snoring cat, and the scones and lashings of clotted cream to answer our usual sort of questions. You might like to make a pot of tea yourself and settle down to a lovely read and do help yourself to a scone while you're here.

Stella I have been completely amazed by what I have called 'your sleight of pen', how you took me through the story of The Room of Lost Things, built up, backtracked, added detail, moved on, then a few steps back again, if this makes sense can you give us an idea of quite how it's done?
If it doesn't make sense we're in trouble so would you like to tell us about anything else to do with this wonderfully engaging book? Where it came from...what you wanted to achieve ....why a health visitor...oh, in fact just tell us everything.

Sleight of pen – nice phrase, I like that. Well, it’s exactly as you describe – I write a first draft, and at the point I start writing it I usually only know beginning/middle/end (maybe!) and a few points in between. And none of those very clearly. In writing the first draft the story begins to show itself – it’s almost impossible to explain this without sounding a bit esoteric and hippy, and I really don’t want to, as I think there is far too much mystification out there about the process of writing (and far too many people making money out of teaching people it’s harder and more muse/art-led than it is, I much prefer to talk about writing as a craft not an art) BUT I do feel that story is a bit like a river – it will find it’s own way. Plot (and character and sometimes style) are the things we use to let the story find itself/show itself/be revealed. So that’s the first draft, which is usually quite a lot longer than the subsequent ones and pretty messy, and can take anything from six months to a couple of years, but – hopefully, once it’s done – has the requisite elements to make up a story. Then the real work begins – backtracking, removing, re-placing, adding detail (in the case of this book removing quite a lot of unnecessary detail!), shifting characters, (again in the case of this book) amalgamating characters … for me, this part can take another two or three or more drafts.

I have had people ask me why I just don’t plan it all out in the first place and save myself this trouble – but that doesn’t work for me. Or it hasn’t in the past, am sure things might change. All writing is about making choices/decisions for characters/plot, I prefer to make those choices as I go along in the first draft because it feels more organic (whether it is or not, who knows), it  certainly feels freer and I’m less likely to get bored! It also allows for the occasional eureka/magic moment to slip in and, in my experience, planning things out in a very detailed manner, cuts the possibility of making mistakes – and I often find it’s the ‘mistakes’, the things that don’t quite work and need attention to make them work (or cutting entirely!), that allows some magic to happen. The magic of getting it wrong and finding a way to make it right. It does mean a lot of work in the re-writing, but that’s fine with me. I like that bit.

In working on The Room of Lost Things, because I’d originally imagined it as a novel with Robert and Akeel at the centre and up to sixteen characters spinning out from them (a sort of cartwheel, where they were the centre, the other characters the spokes, and then the macro-story of the place the outer rim), I had a lot of characters to cut/amalgamate. What I found – or rather, what was pointed out to me! – is that no matter how much I wanted to write a ‘true’ novel (ie, all fiction, but feeling like truth) that can become boring, it can become too meandering, and – at the other extreme – a single character, who pops into the shop just once for a few minutes, and to whom I give three great pages, is bound to make the reader want to know more. In reality, that character would never come back to Robert’s life. In a novel, if it’s a good character and the reader cares, then of course they must come back or the reader feels cheated. Basically, I think I wanted to try to be as ‘real’ as possible, allowing for dead ends and go-nowhere characters and the truth that all of us will meet people who matter, but sometimes so briefly we don’t notice it until later, and maybe even never see them again. Now, either I wasn’t good enough – am not yet good enough – to do this in a novel (and that’s fine, because I hope to write at least another eleven books and ideally learn more as I go along) – or it’s simply not possible in a book. Maybe possible in a film, but not in a book. We’ll see. Maybe one day I’ll try again.

In terms of where did it come from, I’ve said this several times now, but I assure you it’s entirely true – Faisal, the lovely man who owned the dry cleaner’s shop where this one is (sort of) located, I have fudged the geography of the actual junction a little – once said to me, after seeing one of my wife’s plays (she’s primarily a theatre and radio writer) : “You should write about a dry cleaner, we know people’s secrets.” And of course I started to think about how and why – the things left in pockets, the hems taken up or down, the stains. The stains! Like all my ideas, it sat with me for quite a while before I even thought I knew what it could be, but it was always going to be based in Loughborough Junction, and always going to be a “London book”. I love London, I love living in London (apologies to the London-haters), and I particularly love South London (I was born here, though I grew up in New Zealand) and I mind that North Londoners are so rude about South (all that divide is just weird to those of us who didn’t grow up here), and even more so that my own part (yes LJ is real!) and this whole swathe between Brixton and Camberwell and down to Herne Hill has such a bad rep in the press. It’s just a place - there are good people and bad people everywhere. And no, we don’t have a posh café – but we do have more nail bars than you could shake a stick at! Faisal sold the shop earlier this year and I kind of like that, miss chatting to him every now and then, but I quite like that even the shop I thought of as Robert’s shop has now been reincarnated - as a nail bar/hairdresser!

OK, some quick bits about the characters, as you ask -

Helen’s name is Helen Goff. Helen Lyndon Goff is the real name of P L Travers, the Australian who invented the most famous nanny of them all, Mary Poppins. (I like this stuff, the character note no-one ever knows unless you tell them!)

Marylin – the health worker! She’s a health worker because I was looking for a job that someone could do where they went into the lives of other people (as Robert also does), and took the job of a friend, Sarah Martin, who is a health visitor (also the wife of Pete Ayrton who, at Serpent’s Tail, published my crime novels). I also have several friends in mixed-race relationships, and have had conversations with people about their children being (apparently, in a world where colour tends to be the first thing most people see) a different race to them – white mothers with mixed-race children for eg, and about how that impacts on a mother-child relationship, the desire from a white mother that her child should not suffer racism, and the awareness that she will not be able to protect her child from an unkind world. I wanted to touch on that in the Audrey-Marylin relationship (and I did so a lot more in earlier drafts, but it was one of the points that was whittled back …)

Patricia Ryan. I love Patricia. I know no-one like her, have never lived with anyone with Alzheimer’s or dementia, I just really wanted to write about it, from her point of view, knowing what was happening to her. It also gave a nice added side to Robert’s character, his concern for her.

The Poet of the 345 – I once heard a man sing on this bus. Once. I made him into a character who was practically resident on it! And anyway, a bus that goes all the way from Peckham to South Kensington? That’s just a great route!

Dan and Charlie – the witnesses who watch the world around them, named for Dan Leno and Charlie Chaplin (who did both live and work in the area), the watchers.

Hmm, I’m just thinking about getting these answers quoted back at me, some time later in another interview – and it strikes me that this is what I think about the book now, today, what I remember about making it now – when actually I was writing it some time ago now. So I might well answer slightly differently another time. But this is definitely very close to what I think and why I think I wrote these things!!

We are sticklers for the detail here at dovegreyreader and we like to know about your writing day, must the bath be clean and the stairs hoovered before you can sit down to write, are you a 'fountain pen and inker' or a 'tip-tap-typer', the paper...does it need to be special, favourite writing shoes/jumper, these are the things we absolutely need to know.

OK, well … I get up. About 8 ish most days. Not often much earlier, very rarely later than 9am. As I have a Buddhist practice, I try to chant most mornings, I don’t always manage it, but things often seem to go better when I do – Buddhism (like writing perhaps) is a daily practice. It works better with discipline! Then I’ll eat something (toast or muesli – I make good muesli. I make good bread too actually. Very fond of brazil nut bread made with spelt flour. Mmm.) And then I go to my office. We’re both writers and, after seven years in one bedroom flats (in which Shelley wrote on the laptop in the kitchen and I wrote on the computer in the bedroom), we finally bought a three bedroomed house. We were hoping to have children, they didn’t come, so we now have an office each. I go to mine, she goes to hers. At this point, all the manuals/how to write books say I should be sitting down to work. Sadly not. Now I check emails, check facebook, maybe write a bit of my blog (I don’t do it every day, just when moved to), I fiddle, faddle, doodle, make notes, do interviews (like this). I listen to Radio 4 on and off up to the end of Woman’s Hour and sometimes a little beyond. I might edit a bit. I might do some work on one of the many other projects I seem to have on the go at once – a short story, an article, something for the play I’m directing later in the year, if it’s sunny I might do some work in the garden - I MIGHT even get some actual writing done. But most often writing is what happens in the afternoon. I long ago realised I do my best creative work between about 2 and 7pm. There’s no point fighting that, so now I try very hard to make sure that time of day is free (tricky if you’re trying to go out in the evening, or if people will insist on meeting for lunch, but I’m getting a bit better – not very! – at saying no and trying to keep that time clear) and then I work. Of course, all the rest of it is work too. The writing I’m doing in the morning for other projects is also work. The production stuff for the play I’m directing is also work. The answering interview questions (like this!) is also work. But the thing I think is my ‘real’ work, is the making of books. And I do that best in the afternoon. Always, if at all possible, directly on to screen. I can’t type properly, but am very fast with four of my fingers now, and – as I edit so very much – writing by hand followed by typing always feels like a real imposition to me. I started writing books on computer (an old Amstrad back then, took me seven hours to print up my first novel!), so I guess it’s what I’m used to. I can do it if I have to, I just prefer not to.

If I had my way I would work like this seven days a week. I almost never take whole weekends off, maybe one of the days, rarely both, and haven’t had a ‘proper’ holiday (as in doing no work at all) in many many years. Partly I don’t want to leave my work for as long as it takes to have a holiday – partly (as I discovered to my cost when I had breast cancer nine years ago) there’s no sick pay or holiday pay for freelancers! Not only do I want to keep working, I actually need to keep working. Lucky I like it!

As for cleaning, well, yes, the house does need to be clean too. And having cleaned houses for rich people all through my university years and well beyond, we don’t have a cleaner. I’m not sure I’d ever want someone to know as much about me as I knew – and still remember – about the people I cleaned for! I like a clean, clear, blank chunk of hours to work in, with nothing hanging over me. The fact that this almost never happens, I rarely have one day a week like this, let alone a whole week, has nothing to do with the truth that it’s still my preferred way of working!

Oh, and I prefer silence. Perfect blissful silence. That writing in cafés thing is certainly not me.

Apart from your books which of course we will all read now, who else must we read...sorry I think I've pinched Janet Frame off your list but please add her anyway.

Janet Frame then, naturally. The poems as well as the fiction. And while we’re on New Zealand women, how about Marilyn Duckworth and Elizabeth Knox (The Vintner’s Luck is really lovely). Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook. We bought a copy at her launch today and it looks great, some of the material (having flicked through) is from her solo show which I saw and loved last year and I always like a good cookbook with stories. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) and Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban) are still among my favourite novels ever. Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy is a work of genius and disturbingly under-lauded. My friend Serena Mackesy’s Hold My Hand is a great piece of contemporary du Maurier-esque suspense. Which reminds me, I read du Maurier’s The Scapegoat last year – really liked it, not sure why it’s not better known.
And that’s enough to be going on with for this week, perhaps? 

Fell Farm Holiday by Marjorie Lloyd

What a joyous Sunday Inner Child morning I spent reading Fell Farm Holiday by Marjorie Lloyd and published in 1951, though I'm not so sure I was entirely successful in privileging my Inner Child over my Outer Grown-Up. However I sincerely hope the cover artwork for this book is safely preserved  somewhere in a Puffin Museum because it's a true one-off. I loved it then and I love it now.
I've discovered this much about the artist William Grimmond,

"This jobbing artist did so much for Penguin that he might as well have been on the staff. Summarising the correspondence on file at the Bristol archive it would appear that nothing was ever too much trouble; and he never got rich on the proceeds. For instance: when commissioned to produce the cover for the first original Puffin Story Book, Fell Farm Holiday, most artists would have imagined or copied a suitable Lake District panorama. Grimmond took the MS, and used clues in the text to locate the actual farmhouse on which the story was based, and then produced a wonderful watercolour of the scene."
So my morning spent in the company of the Browne children, surely the most perfect children ever to grace the pages of a book?
I suspect twenty-first century children might be sticking their fingers down their throats at Family Browne who shun lying in bed beyond dawn and love nothing more than a marathon trek in the pouring rain.
Read this and you'd think parenting was a breeze, which in fact it is for Mr and Mrs Browne because they are in India, so the children are dispatched from boarding school to Mr and Mrs Jenks, the willing childless farming couple in the Lake District who look after all five of them without a murmur for the entire long summer holiday.
Not just the obligatory set of twins, but in true Bobbsey style two sets, fifteen-year old Pat and Kay, thirteen-year old Jan and Hyacinth and then poor lone 'infant', eight-year old Sally, who is almost surplus to requirements with just the occasional walk-on dogsbody part as in bearer of cakes or peeler of hard-boiled eggs. Food plays a big part in this story and surely that is significant in this post-war time era when rationing was still around (except not in the Lake District it would seem).
But what of the perfect children? Not a single word of dissent doth cross a lip for the entire 150 pages, paragons of virtue all and I wish I could recall what I made of all that when I read this as a child.
Did I vow to imitate?
Did I scorn them in their hob-nailed walking boots?
I don't think I was the scorning sort of child so I was probably a paragon of goodness for about thirty minutes before normal service was resumed.
It is the older children who take off across valley and fell leaving 'the infant' Sally behind to bake, and these children don't just go on a little hike. Dear me no, twenty-five miles plus, uphill for three hours non-stop, carrying food, gaberdine raincoats, getting caught in the mist and sleeping in a house full of strangers (but no one worries unduly) swimming in freezing cold tarns (no parental consent forms signed, no lifeguard, no warnings of pneumonia), hitching lifts sitting atop the churns on the back of milk lorries (not a seat belt in sight) climbing and belaying up the pikes (just a rope, no harness, no safety helmets) Then there is the five-day long expedition with tents, primus and enough supplies to feed an army (bless that little cook Sally) to establish base camp and map Eskdale and with a night spent sleeping under the stars high up on Scawfell Pike. Mr and Mrs Jenks greet this plan with massive enthusiasm the only damper being Mrs J's worry about the scourge of eating tinned food instead of her home-cooked, and doubtless Mrs Browne best kept out of the way in India because she'd have been having a fit of the vapours.
But all this aside I have loved the book all over again and for all those reasons that I may seem to have dismissed it.
Reading now but in the context of post-war 1950s and I'm surmising that perhaps someone had to write a new script for a generation of children who had been born in the shadow of war, with parents who had lived through it.
Fell Farm Holiday can readily be interpreted as a book about restoring a normal equilibrium, instilling confidence and a can-do spirit back into childhood, trusting in the intuition and instincts of children to be safe and indulge their sense of adventure after a war spent cowering in air-raid shelters and facing the grim realities of mass death and destruction.
The 'it's safe to go outdoors' message comes through loud and clear and perhaps there's also a sub-text, a rallying cry to the nation's children; a war has been fought and won to preserve this land for you, now get out there and enjoy it, the worst that will fall on you from the sky is rain.
As you can see far more Grown-Up thinking than Inner Child for this book.
But what of the ending, well blow me down if a telegram doesn't arrive from the parents in India on the very day the Browne's are to go back to school suggesting the children go back to the farm for Christmas too.
Did the long-suffering Mr and Mrs Jenks feel put upon?
Not a bit of it as Mrs Jenks exclaims, beaming broadly
'I've been wondering for a long time how I'll manage my baking days without Sally.'
Now I have to find Fell Farm Christmas because I'll bet little Sally's in there churning out the mince pies and the cake while the others are bound not to get lost in the snow because, even when they forget their compass, Browne children do not get lost ever.
With the children effectively dumped by their parents (and the children seeming not to mind one iota) I had to laugh when, as the they all arrive at the farm for the Summer carrying just rucksacks (having sensibly sent their weighty trunks on ahead,) young Kay informs us,
'we were travelling light, a tip we had learnt from Father'
...out of the mouths of babes and children.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

A perfect book to follow on from Inner Child reading but first you all know how hot under the collar I get about books being published in Canada that I can't get hold of.
It's one of life's great injustices that there is no Canadian Book Depository sending to the UK post-free. I know KevinFromCanada is going to reveal the best ways to buy Canadian books any day soon but when I heard about The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Canadian author Alan Bradley I wanted it yesterday.
How fortunate then that Orion have just published it here in the UK, sparing me a whole lot of anguish and now I discover that we actually got the book before Canada so I'd better stop whingeing.
The book had already won the Crime Writer's Association Debut Dagger, a pre-publication prize for the best first crime novel so I was on its trail and thrilled to discover this is the first of a series of six because it's ace, absolutely top drawer, funny verging on hilarious as eleven-year old detective Flavia de Luce unravels the mystery of the body found in her father's cucumber patch.
Now here's the interesting bit.
Remember all the hoo-ha about Stef Penney's book The Tenderness of Wolves?
How on earth could someone write convincingly about Canada when they had never been there?
Well enter stage east, Alan Bradley who writes as convincingly about 1950s England as to the manor born having apparently not set foot here until he came to collect his Debut Dagger in 2007. Well it doesn't show and thus speaks one who was born into it (though not in a manor) so ringing endorsements to Alan Bradley from this Coronation-year baby.
I was instantly reminded of the set-up familiar to anyone who has read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and the eccentric, remote and emotionally distant widowed father raising daughters in a stately pile  which brought to mind Cassandra Mortmain, but the similarities stop there, Flavia is her own girl and I loved her.
Fiesty and hilarious, Flavia waltzes precociously but not annoyingly so through the adult world with intelligent and logical panache, her risk assessments are those to be expected of an eleven-year old so Flavia boldly strides or cycles forth (on a bike called Gladys) where her instinct leads. Her investigations ably assisted by a dangerous knowledge of the world of chemistry and a fully equipped Victorian laboratory on the top floor of the east wing inherited from Uncle Tarquin. Older sisters Ophelia and Daphne frequently have to resort to desperate measures to keep one step ahead of their little sister and usually fail. Flavia is worryingly well-versed in the chemical constituents of the most lethal poisons and as a

'long-range planner who believed in letting the soup of revenge simmer to perfection'

capable of the most dastardly forms of retribution as Ophelia discovers to her cost with her lipstick.
Not quite the safest lipstick in the world after it's been through Flavia's laboratory.
The first-person narrative is exquisite, page after page had me laughing at the sheer brilliance of the setting and the dialogue and Flavia's unique turn of phrase whilst also thinking what a nightmare she would have been to parent, the variety of child we describe as eleven going on eighteen, no wonder her father stays in his study examining his stamp collection.
But the voice is unique and original and unlike anything else I've read for a long time and I gather each in the series will focus on a lost aspect of English life which will suit all us nostalging types perfectly. This first offering a great foundation on which to grow the next and a perfectly lovely gorgeous read over several grey chilly Winter afternoons.

The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy (and prize draw copies)

So my first 'meeting' with Stella Duffy was the Virago birthday celebration at the du Maurier LitFest last May and I decided that any author who could laugh like that probably wrote good books too and I'd have to read them.
Now I wish I hadn't taken quite so long getting around to it because The Room of Lost Things Stella's latest novel has been such a precious reading experience I now can't wait to read the lot.
This is London in all its twenty-first century glory and I will be interested to hear how non-Londoners react to this book.
You may recall I read the much-vaunted Netherland by Joseph O'Neill and fell flat on my face at all the New Yorkery. I've never been to New York and Netherland for all it's undoubted skill and deftness left me feeling sadly excluded from a city that it must be possible to know something of from the pages of a book. None of which may have been Joseph O'Neill's intention of course so we won't hold that against him.
I am familiar enough with the London of old, far less so with the London of today but I think Stella Duffy has miraculously scraped off the veneer, all the old layers and layers of polish and varnish burrowing beneath the surface to give me the essence of the city through Loughborough Junction. I think the place resounds and echoes with familiarity whether you know London or not.
Robert Sutton has decided the time has come to retire, to hand over the perchlorethylene along with the keys and the premises and move on from the South London dry cleaning business he has run for years inheriting from his mother Alice before him.
Doesnt that sound boring?
Do not be deceived because what plays out is a little microcosm of London lives, ordinary people, many of them from an older generation coping with the influx of the new and holding onto that fading sense of community, lives spread right across the spectrum.
Akeel Khan, the young Muslim who Robert plans to sell the business to, Patricia ageing and coping with her increasing forgetfulness, Dean the wide - boy now feeling the pressures of life flitting 'twixt the Brixton and the Peckham firms, Stefan the dance instructor coping with the homophobic locals, Helen the young Australian Nanny. Then there's the poet come prophet who rides all day on the number 345 bus, Charlie and Dan who live on the old sofa under the arches and wait for it...Marilyn, the HEALTH VISITOR!!!
Not only are health visitors an increasingly endangered species out there in the workplace but they seem to be invisible in fiction too. I only know of two other books with a fully formed health visitor character and not just a bit part, on reflection that literary dearth quite strange because health visitors are actually very interesting people :-)
Robert's shop acting for many as one of the little hubs of day to day life and Robert of course knows and understands far more about his customers than they realise because clothes have pockets and you'd be amazed at what gets left in pockets.
The Room of Lost Things is one of those books to savour not scoff down in a matter of hours and I spent an age reading it knowing full well I didn't want it to end, because the residents of Loughborough Junction had quickly inveigled me into their lives and that old familiar London feeling ruled.
There is a pervading sense of unspoken grief and loss woven into Robert's life, that room of lost things is as much locked inside Robert's mind as it is in reality, the room above the shop where he stores all the pocket finds.
That sense of melancholy barely a fingertip's reach away to me as I read.
The revelation as befits a man who superficially at least appears sanguine and pragmatic was gradual, often unspoken and in the end deeply tragic and on reflection heartbreakingly so, if only for the fact that this was a millstone that Robert had carried around his neck for many years. Stella Duffy handles all this with a precision that quite defies the laws of narrative, that sleight of pen again, you can't quite figure how it's done.
So much more I could say about this wonderful read but you'd be here until tomorrow, though I will add reading it alongside London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins has made for a  brilliant duo, but have no fear, Virago have three copies of The Room of Lost Things ready and waiting to send to three lucky winners here.
Names in comments as usual and Rocky has agreed to be Dick Whittington's cat for the prize draw.
And as if all that wasn't enough, Stella Duffy has very kindly agreed to submit to the penetrating glare of the standard lamp and do 'dovegreyreader asks...' very soon so that's us sorted.

Prize draw entry now closed

Sunday Salon - dovegreyreader recommends...

International Women's Day today and I'll come to that in a minute, but in that way that only those of us who love books can, I got very excited about a bookshop trip last week.
I'll mention for a start that it was the Plymouth Drake Circus Waterstone's and events have progressed since I was in there way back in December.
On that occasion I'd gone in to browse and ended up buying, naturally, and the helpful chap at the cash desk asked me a general question about my reading.
So we got chatting and I mentioned reading ....lots of...blog...dovegreyreader and he was very interested, asked for details so I apparated forth a bookmark with a grand flourish from my sleeve and that was that. In fact it transpires that was Clint the manager.
Then a few weeks later I had an email, would I be interested in having a "dovegreyreader recommends" shelf in the front of the Plymouth store and putting together a regular selection of suggested books ?
Well why on earth not?
Where Kate and Nick and Philip have gone before surely I can just trot along in the slipstream and plough a little reading furrow of my own?
Then I had a slight qualm and a quibble about perhaps helping a multi-national bookseller make money which after an enlightening conversation with Clint I quickly over-ruled, if my local Independent bookshop were to ask me (which they haven't) I'd happily do likewise.
So it's to be a new theme and relevant selection each month, books I've read and loved as always, bit of blog-blurb on cards on the 'dovegreyreader recommends' shelf, front of store. No bias, I'm not beholden to anyone and in keeping with the fact that today heralds International Women's Day I decided to start with Women's Lives for March.
Which reminds me I've got something else to own up to.
I was delighted if not a little surprised to be asked to be one of Devon's Women of Inspiration in conjunction with International Women's Day and to write a piece for this booklet, part of a year-long series of events being organised by Devon County Council to recognise the achievements of ordinary Devon women.
Who'd have thought it as they say.
Well most certainly not Family dovegrey as I dashed into the room in my pyjamas to announce the news, looking not a bit like a Woman of Inspiration, more like a woman couch-slouching around in her pyjamas long after she should have been up and out training for the London Marathon whilst organising a solo trek to the North Pole via an ascent of Kilimanjaro.
But moving swiftly on, here are my March selections for the theme of Women's Lives which (barring any ordering problems ) will soon be on the dovegreyreader recommends shelf at the Drake Circus branch.

The Waiting Years - Fumiko Enchi
No Place for Ladies - Helen Rappaport
The Post Office Girl - Stefan Zweig
The Ladies Paradise - Emile Zola
The Tortoise and the Hare - Elizabeth Jenkins
What Diantha Did - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

As if you needed to ask, no I am not being paid a bean by anyone to do this. This is a little local Plymouth initiative and I've asked for no discounts or freebies at Waterstone's either, no big fat cheques from publisher's marketing budgets, nada, zilch because if I was you'd be the first to know which cruise line I'd booked, which country we planned to visit first, whether we planned to go East to West or West to East and which wool I'd bought and what I was going to be knitting on the way round:-)

and the winners are...

I've roused him from fireside slumbers and borrowed a paw for some more prize draws and with help from Mrs Glosser's Random Number Generator all made a whole lot easier because typepad now numbers the comments. However I can only get e mails if I scroll right back through my control panel comments board and so I'm hoping you'll all forgive the absence of individual messages from Rocky today because he was barely conscious and I'm so engrossed in Cynthia Harnett's The Wool Pack I can hardly bear to drag myself away.
I've put the winning comment numbers in brackets after each name in case anyone wants to check it's really them, just click on the post links below.
So congratulations, the lucky winners of Balancing on the Edge of the World by Elizabeth Baines are
Erika Wilson (23), Linda C(33) and Laura (49, yes Italy!)
and copies of John The Revelator by Peter Murphy will be on their way to Gill (2), Margaret 46(10) and jillbe (15) as soon as you can e mail addresses to us at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com. and if you could put 'I'm a winner' in the subject line that would really help too.
Still time to enter this week's prize draws here and here and more coming up next week.
Right, must dash,15th century Cotswold wool skullduggery beckons.

Govt. announcement - Financial bail (bale) out for the wool trade unnecessary.

...dovegreyreader single-handedly injects sufficient cash into the marketplace to quantitatively ease and shore up the wool trade against the recession. Governor of Bank of England Mervyn King sends personal message of gratitude and now able to re-direct his £75bn of new money currently being printed to other more needy markets ...there is talk of dovegreyreader being enshrined on a high value bank note in recognition of services to the nation's wool economy.
We went here...again.
And there it was, wool...snug and warm, happy and content, cosied up on the shelves and by one heck of a stroke of good fortune up for adoption.
Today.
As you know Spin-A-Yarn love their wool dearly so I had to go through a pretty rigorous assessment and selection process to even be shortlisted, but imagine my delight when they agreed that I had been accepted as a wool-mother.
After a lot of umming and aahing, holding and stroking, shall-I-shalln't-I-ing I eventually decided to re-home 400gms of Noro Kochoran, a wool,silk and angora 50-20-30% mix which is like knitting with smooth spun butter but less messy.
and I made room for some of this Noro Sock Wool to keep it company.
I then decided that the principle of workman-tools-best must apply and so have also taken in a stray pair of Lantern Moon Rosewood needles.
Lantern Moons I now discover are the equivalent of knitting with an Alfa Romeo Mito GTA ( yes I typed 'must-have car' into google) when you've been used to chugging along with a 1960s Ford Cortina even if it did have a go-faster stripe.
All of which gains me promotion to the elite. I have now spent enough to reside in Spin-A-Yarn Loyalty Card 10% discount territory for ever and ever.
The non-knitter might erroneously think that to knit was just well...to knit.
Any old needles, doesn't matter what they are like.
Us knitters know otherwise, and yea though we be in possession of many hundreds of needles these are never sufficient for the next piece of work.
These are the tools of our trade to be upgraded and improved upon at every opportunity (is this convincing enough?) and with Lantern Moons, which are indeed like swapping a Fiesta for a Bentley, and my Brittany birchwoods, my days of plastic Aero's are long gone.
It seemed imperative to get the Kochoran onto the Lantern Moons and settled into their new home right away and I love the little Colinette Prism waistcoat so much I 'need' another one.
This wool really is the such stuff as dreams are made on and I must remember that's The Tempest in case it comes up in next year's book day quiz.

Spread the Word

Very big dovegreyreader congratulations to Natasha Mostert who has won the World Book Day - Spread the Word 2009 poll for her wonderful book Season of the Witch which I loved.

"Season of the Witch must also win the prize for the very best named sisters ever...the enigmatic and alluring Minnaloushe and Morrighan Monk, fictional descendants of John Dee the Elizabethan alchemist..."
This is a great big unmissable gothic-meets-cyberspace read and I was hooked from the first page, and I also see that I was washing the kitchen floor then too, this is getting to be a habit.

Inner Child Weekend , the third

The rest is silence...how could I forget that was Hamlet?
For Whom the Bell Tolls...Spanish Civil War / World War II / Spanish Civil War / World War II?
The name of Clarissa Dickson Wright's autobiography?...um...er...eegghhh...
How did the granny die in Memoirs of a Geisha?
In desperation we put 'swallowed her chopsticks'...wrong.
But at least victory at the library World Book Day quiz last evening stayed 'in the family' as the other half of the Goldfish- Endsleigh collaboration (several people belong to two book groups so we draw lots for our two teams) now hold the crown with 82 /100 to our second place 78.
Hats off to the library it was one of the most enjoyable and challenging literary quizes I have been to, a good time was had by all and there were prizes for everyone, news of mine soon. I didn't really need another book, except for reasons that will become obvious next week I absolutely did need this one and I was more than delighted with it.
But now it's time to find my Inner Child and goodness, the year is going to fly by at this rate, a quarter of the year done already and I have to confess I'm going to lend two of my four library tickets to someone else this weekend and just pick two books this time round.
Perhaps my reading stamina's not what it was but from last month's selection, The Silver Sword by Ian Serrallier didn't hit the mark and  I couldn't cope with The Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett at all.
Was it Erika who said as much in comments? You were right.
It wasn't so much the social aspects, in fact I don't think I got far enough for that to bite, it was Mrs Ruggles, and all because I'd read Magnolia Buildings by Elizabeth Stucley first and loved the warm 'we can do this' mothering style of Mrs Berners.
Magnolia Buildings, according to Marcus Crouch writing in The Nesbit Tradition, apparently seen as

'an updated One-End Street, sincere, humorous, lively, but essentially a peep into the working class world from the outside.'

By comparison Mrs Ruggles would not have looked out of place in Cell Block H, harsh and unsympathetic, and though I'm sure her redeeming qualities would have emerged eventually and of course it was all about poverty and scraping a living out of nothing, but I was just too upset about poor Lily Rose and the Green Silk Petticoat episode to carry on.
Only doing her best, trying to help and ironed the thing to a frazzle,

'Good deed indeed! Well it don't look like it to me...tomorrow you'll come with me to Mrs Beaseley's and explain as it was you and not your mother, who's a careful hard-working, reliable laundress, as spoilt her nice petticoat, and she'll have something to say to you, I shouldn't wonder, and you'll get no jam for tea today, and no cake on Sunday neither. Now then, stop that sniffing, put the kettle on and get the tea.'

For social research purposes two books that would make the most fascinating comparitive study, but that's not my remit. Perhaps this was working class parenting 1930s style and that's fine but I could only read this as a grown-up and weep, and then want to attempt that thesis but who needs to be weeping for that reason over a book on a cold grey February afternoon and do I really fancy a thesis when I've just bought some more wool and have knitting to do.
No matter onwards and upwards and this weekend two books chosen shamelessly for their covers and I have both in the editions I remember reading as a child.
Fell Farm Holiday by Marjorie Lloyd and The Wool Pack by Cynthia Harnett.
Fell Farm Holiday cited as 'a jolly holiday story' set in the Lake District and the parents are ditched which always helps, while The Wool Pack is described as a book for 'middle-aged children'. I quite like the sound of being one of those and possibly this 1953 edition is pre the invention of the teenager, but also the fact that it's about the Cotswold wool trade in and around Burford in the 1490s will ease me nicely into my wool confession ...tomorrow.
Anyone else Inner Child reading with me?

Happy World Book Day & The Endsleigh Salon

Happy World Book Day, and that can only mean one thing, well two actually.
Firstly we can all read all day to our heart's content and feel no guilt. When it's World Kitchen Floor Washing Day, fine, we'll all do that all day but today it's books all the way.
Secondly, there is a title to be defended, a crown at stake, book group pride to uphold as the Endsleigh Salon head off this evening for the annual World Book Day Quiz against all the other book groups in the area at the local library.
We limped stormed to victory last year by about one point thanks to some genius thinking (not mine) on that fiendish sheet of picture questions that is sitting on the table to be completed inbetween rounds for fun.
Fun?
Who said anything about fun?
Good grief no, this was deadly serious, we meant business and, though I can't remember the question, the answer was The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
February's salon a few weeks ago was on the theme of Childhood (but not a children's book) and we had a great and wide-ranging selection of books and some fine discussion as each person extolled the virtues of their choice and quite how it had spoken of childhood to them.
The Changeling - Robin Jenkins (mine)
Spies by Michael Frayn
The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
No Talking After Lights by Angela Lambert
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
The Country Child - Alison Uttley
The Children's Hours - Richard Zimmler (ed)
Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Daphne du Maurier - Margaret Forster

I think you'll agree we had plenty to talk about with this lot plus two people had chosen to re-read Spies by Michael Frayn and with differing views it all reminded me that this was a book I had long been meaning to read.
Next month's theme is the 1920s (a book either written in or about) and I'm completely spoilt for choice but have narrowed down to two,
Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton
The Beautiful & the Damned by F.Scott Fitzgerald.
In the end and if I have time I might just read both (except now I see it's for next Tuesday, I'll have to get a wriggle on especially as it's Inner Child this weekend too) because what an interesting comparison the two would make. Edith Wharton clearly ar her most acerbic and disparaging on the louch New York rich-kids' lifestyle and Fitzgerald struggling with his own demons whilst portraying the same era, a male and female perspective on turbulent times.
That said, I'm finding the plethora of radio and TV programmes being pushed out on the subject of the Wall St Crash of 1929 all quite unnerving at the moment, heavy comparisons to the current economic situation which presumably means we must expect a Grapes of Wrath dustbowl next, it's all too terrifying to dwell on.
Meanwhile do excuse me while I head into the zone and Trimble-ize in readiness for tonight's fingers on the buzzers, your starter for ten, let's hope we're the team that get to sit upstairs, talking of which, what a debacle that all turned into.

Justine is on her way!

I've just heard from Justine, she's stuck in traffic after a hellish day but will be online at about 8.15pm and would love to chat in comments to anyone who is around then, please add any comments or questions on the Daphne post not this one.
Many of you will know that her life has taken some unusual turns in mirroring Daphne's in recent weeks and she's going to be talking about all that and her Daphne year.
Don't miss it whatever you do.

dovegreyreader asks...Justine Picardie

Happy Birthday to us, because after three years of dovegreyreader scribbles a huge thank you to very single one of you who stops by to read, joins in the fun and shares your great reads with all of us, and my thanks to Justine Picardie who is braving the glare of the nation's most penetrating standard lamp to do dovegreyreader asks... today. Scones and jam and clotted cream and a great big pot of Earl Grey for birthday tea (oh yes and Marmite soldiers ) are the very least we all deserve this afternoon.

It's a year since I first read Daphne, I know that year has seen my loving Daphne du Maurier's books all over again and I wonder what that year has meant for you?

Well, it's a whole year since Daphne was first published, and it's been astonishing, seeing the book spread by word of mouth to different readers, and discovering that other people share my passion for du Maurier and Menabilly, the Brontes and Haworth, literary landscapes and literary sleuthing. I've also started blogging -- thanks to  Dovegreyreader! Readers of my blog will have followed some of the ups and downs of my year of living dangerously with Daphne (not to mention the curse of J.M Barrie).

So who's in the Picardie spotlight next?

I'm doing a new book about Coco Chanel, and have been immersed in archives and wardrobes... my favourite places to be, aside from on the sofa with my dog and two sons.

Could you tell us a bit about the writing process and we do always like to know if it's a fountain pen (make, ink colour etc!) raven quills or a laptop involved, special slippers, Balzacian white robe and lots of coffee, must have been for a ten mile walk before can sit down to write,  etc etc.(photos of writing space or special writing jumpers are very good!)

Here's the view from my study where I write on my beloved apple laptop. I appear to have lost the ability to write in longhand -- my handwriting has become so bad that I can barely read it myself. My computer is on an ancient desk that I've had since childhood -- it's a Victorian one, and a bit small, and probably very un-ergonomic, but the desk and I have grown up together. I need tea before I can start in the morning, and at regular intervals throughout the day. My dog Molly sleeps under the desk, and nudges me out for walks. We go up to Highgate Woods, and then back home again, and she has another nap, while I drink more tea.
The other important place is the shower. It's where I've had the idea for each of my books. Obviously, I have more showers than book ideas, but on the rare occasions a book does plant itself in my head, I have always been under a stream of running water.

As if you haven't guessed we are indeed very nosey here at dovegreyreader scribbles so we would love to know which writers inspire you and who MUST we read?

I've been writing a column called Bibliotherapy on the subject, so the long list is over on my blog. But the short version is this, in no particular order.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (by Joan Aiken); Mary Poppins by P.L Travers; Five Children and It, by E.Nesbit; Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote;  I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith; all of Rosamond Lehmann, plus Daphne du Maurier and the Brontes, of course.
I'm re-reading Heartburn by Nora Ephron right now, which couldn't be more different, but is proving therapeutic.

Justine will pop in and out of comments to chat today so ask away, now's your chance. I expect she'll  have to humour the purring footrest who has also cleared his diary of engagements and called a truce on the Rabbit Wars for the duration (n.b. brow wounded in action)  and for one day only he'd prefer to be known as that lesser known du Maurier character, Mr Danvers (it was a tough role but high time someone volunteered)
and don't forget, names in comments for one of three prize draw copies of Daphne and I hope everyone out there has a perfectly lovely gorgeous blogbirthday with us.

 

 

True Murder a novel by Yaba Badoe

Out there in the big wide literary world there seems to be a heavy emphasis on discovering refreshingly different adolescent narrators in fiction, usually slightly left of field, helps to be disturbed and male and preferably a good match for Salinger's Holden Caulfield who seems to be held up as the bench mark. I'm thinking way back on here to King Dork by Frank Portman then to God's Own Country by Ross Raisin and that more recent read John the Revelator by Peter Murphy.
Perhaps it's time to hear it for the disturbed girls, except suddenly I can't think of a bench mark disturbed adolescent girl to advance as a shining example.
There must be plenty, surely?
No worries, enter True Murder a novel by Yaba Badoe and Ajuba, the eleven-year old Ghanaian girl abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her father as he pursues a new life after the traumas of Ajuba's mother's mental illness. Much of that mental illness shrouded in mystery and African culture with a child's perception of the person she adored compensating wildly for the increasingly bizarre behaviour and as children are wont to do with little knowledge of what may pass for acceptable or appropriate.
I'm reminded of that lovely little boy in Matthew Kneale's When We Were Romans,  and I am sure there are more books like this which look at children coping with adults and some form of psychiatric problem. It's a fruitful subject but first know your child and Yaba Badoe gets into the heart and soul of Ajuba the novel's narrator. Had I been less engrossed as I read I may have been pondering James Wood's 'reliable v unreliable narrator' or combination of both but as it is none of that happened until I had turned the final page.
With her limited half-knowledge of what has really happened back in Africa it is fortunate that the school is run by the Derbys a largely unsung couple who quietly hover in the background of Ajuba's life offering her the stability, love and support that the breakdown of her family has deprived her of.
When Polly Venus arrives at the school like a tornado from the US bringing with her armfuls of True Murder detective magazines, a macabre obsession with crime, and murder and death in particular begins. The discovery of some tiny wrapped skeletons in the attic of Polly's house is all it takes to fuel the girls on their own trail of detection and discovery.
What they unearth proves to be far more than they bargained for as they discover more than they ever realised about themselves and others, whilst Ajuba, with so much love to give bestows it with caution and reluctance but then with an intensity borne of inexperience and need and tragedy beckons.
I'm sorry if I say it too often but here's another book I just could not put down.
Gripping from page the first and probably exactly what I needed to read at that moment in time.
Yaba Badoe has perfectly captured the confusion of the pre-adolescent girls, still children, on the cusp of womanhood, the dysfunctional families, the insidious threat of unchecked paranoia and trust me the ending will leave you gasping. The subtle hints throughout the book that something else is due to happen may have slipped my mind as I approached the final pages but ...
I find myself mystified by the brief review in last Saturday's Guardian which felt 'the writing was uneven and the plot failed to convince'  when I had it down as a brilliant debut novel and an ending which certainly convinced me.
True Murder published by Jonathan Cape deserves to do well and I really hope it does.

Esther's Inheritance by Sándor Márai (and prize draw copies)

'Doomed love cannot die.'

I certainly caught the Sándor-Máraitis (and if you knew how long it took me to get those fiddly diddly things over the 'a' you'd be worried for me) that was doing the rounds when Embers first hit the shelves, and now I see that was all of five years ago, seems like yesterday, but this was when literature in translation was starting to appeal to me. Sándor Márai one of Hungary's leading literary novelists of the 1930s, survived the war but communist persecution forced him into exile, first in Italy and then the United States where he eventually committed suicide in 1989.
Somehow post-Embers I'd then missed anything else by Sándor Márai until the arrival of Esther's Inheritance published by Picador.
If I were to try and compare the two, which is dodgy after a five year gap, I'd wonder whether Esther's Inheritance might be a subtle re-working of the themes in Embers. The meeting of old adversaries after many years, shattered lives, betrayals, old passions and for sure they are all there, but this time from the point of view of a female narrator.
Esther lives with old and loyal family friend Nunu on the brink of hardship and nursing a loss that has its origins some twenty years before, when the love of her life Lajos quite suddenly and inexplicably seemed to transfer his affections and married her sister Vilma.
Lajos a man who lacks a moral compass, a con man whose power resides in his complete lack of conscience and seeming detachment from his own emotions, and one who has subsequently stripped the family of their assets. I think we might even cast him as a sociopath these days,

'His charm acted on us like a cheap, wicked spell...my experience of Lajos is that he is the kind of man who begins with lies but then in the middle of his lying grows passionate and weeps, going on to lie more, this time with tears in his eyes...'

Vilma's death occasions an unexpected request to visit the family home from Lajos and everyone gathers and prepares for the event. They have no illusions about him and Esther prepares her emotional defences to repel whatever demands Lajos might make. No one thinks for one minute that this fly-by-night has any other motive but money.
What follows is one of those reads that had me initially whispering at the page and eventually shouting DON'T SIGN IT... as Lajos, with all the guile of  the con man that he is, makes his demands. Esther's final decision pitted against what this reader wanted to happen, and it all became a bit of a battle royal as I turned the pages. In fact it all left me quite shattered as even I, albeit unwillingly, slowly started to understand Sándor Márai's 'moral cripple',

'To be properly creative one needs something else...some special strength or discipline or a mixture of the two; the stuff, I think, they call character...And that quality, that talent, is something that is missing in me. It's like a strange deafness. It is as if I knew the music, the tune being played, precisely, but could not hear the notes.'

It's all mighty quietly powerful stuff and as I emerged licking my wounds I had good cause to reflect on the subtle cleverness of a book that teaches you one of life's useful lessons.
How easy it is to judge a situation from a single perspective, from one side of a story, perhaps decide how someone should sort out a problem (kick him where it hurts Esther) and say so, but walk a mile in their shoes first (doomed love can never die) and then try and say it, and somehow it's not quite so easy.
Sándor Márai gives Esther a voice with which to make her own decisions and then to explain them on her own terms, transforming this from a book that could have been about bitter revenge and retribution into one about the power of thwarted love and an achingly resigned forgiveness, tinged with regrets.
Humiliation it seems can go either way and books like this could probably stop wars.
I was a wrung out dishcloth by the end and you too can be likewise, three prize draw copies of Esther's Inheritance by Sándor Márai and a great read for the lucky winners, names in comments and Rocky will stir his paws and choose.

Sunday Salon - Party invite

One of the great and pleasurable reading experiences for me last year was my Daphne du Maurier revival. Sparked off by Justine Picardie's book Daphne and that was me up and running on a lovely read of some of Daphne's books I'd missed. I read for the first time The Scapegoat , The Loving Spirit, The Parasites and then re-read My Cousin Rachel and took in the very revealing volume of Daphne's letters to Oriel Malet too.
Then there was the Du Maurier LitFest down in Fowey, the Daphne weekend at Port Eliot and the event I did with Justine at Ways With Words at Dartington.
So bearing in mind that it is the dovegreyreader scribbles third blog birthday this week and not wishing to repeat last year's virtual party where certain people who shall be nameless but are called Sally :-) were sick on the blog carpet and had tantrums, I decided that we'd be grown up this year and invite a special guest.
This has all worked out perfectly because on the week that the paperback edition of Daphne is published I am delighted that Justine has agreed to do dovegreyreader asks... answering my usual nosey questions and will also pop in and out of comments during the day to chat and answer any questions you may have. Those who read Justine's blog will know that life has bowled her a few googlies of late so I am extra grateful to her for being here. We plan to plump up the cushions extra plumply and keep a steady flow of tea, scones and cream and of course a virtual birthday cake plus an added bonus, Rocky has agreed to be on virtual hand and purr contentedly at her feet. This usually rapidly converts to a very loud cat apnoea - induced, ninety decibel volume bout of snoring as he eventually rolls over and falls asleep, but we can but try to create the right ambience.
Bloomsbury have also kindly offered prize draw copies of Daphne so we'll be having ourselves a wonderful Daphne du Maurier happy blogbirthday Wednesday.