The Man from the Boys

All fiction is autobiographical. But you move the furniture around. So all fiction is also invented. Real life shot through with fantasy – that is what novels are.

Shahril Sewa interviews author Tony Parsons in Starmag today. 

I very much enjoyed Man and Boy when it came out and bought it as a gift for friends.  Now the third novel featuring Harry Silver, Man From the Boys, is out and I have some catching up to do.

(I love the quote above and will throw it at the folks doing my writing classes, because it's precisely what I'm trying to tell them.)

Best of British?

After the New Yorker's list of twenty American fiction writers under the age of 40 to watch out for last week, Lorna Bradbury in The Telegraph sets herself the challenge of identifying the British equivalents, based on merit and potential :

The List

1 Chris Cleave (b 1973) His first novel, Incendiary, was about a terrorist attack on London and was published on July 7, 2005. The Other Hand (2008), a cross-national thriller set in England and Nigeria, became a word-of-mouth hit.

2 Rana Dasgupta (b 1971) Born in Canterbury, but now lives in Delhi. His first collection of stories was set in a Tokyo airport; his first novel, Solo (2009), was about a 99-year-old Bulgarian chemist.

3 Adam Foulds (b 1974) After writing his verse novel The Broken Word about the Mau Mau rebellion, he wrote his Man Booker-shortlisted study of John Clare, The Quickening Maze (2009).

4 Sarah Hall (b 1974) The author of four novels, the first two of which were set in the early 20th century in her native Cumbria. Her most acclaimed work is The Carhullan Army (2007), about a band of women rebels surviving in a Britain hit by environmental disaster.

5 Steven Hall (b 1975) His debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (2007) – about a man who loses his memory and tries to create a new identity for himself – unusually lived up to his publisher’s hype.

6 Mohsin Hamid (b 1971) The Reluctant Fundamentalist – a literary thriller about a Pakistani man who may, or may not, be a terrorist – came within a whisker of winning the Man Booker in 2007.

7 Anjali Joseph (b 1978) Her debut novel, Saraswati Park, is published next month. Sharp yet lyrical, the novel, which is set in Bombay, shows the influence of Amit Chaudhuri.

8 Joanna Kavenna (b 1974) Wrote seven unpublished novels before her eighth, Inglorious, was published by Faber and won the Orange new writers prize. Described as “Dostoevsky meets Bridget Jones”.

9 Benjamin Markovits (b 1973) Part way through a trilogy of novels about Byron and his circle, this assured writer has also just published an autobiographical novel, Playing Days, about a professional basketball player in Germany.

10 China Miéville (b 1972) Inspired by horror writers such as HP Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock, his science fiction and fantasy books – including Un Lun Dun for young adults – have legions of fans.

11 Paul Murray (b 1975) His second book, Skippy Dies, a comic novel set in a private boys school in Ireland, was recently described in the Telegraph as “gigantic, marvellous, witty…heartbreaking”.

12 Patrick Neate (b 1970) Won the Whitbread (now Costa) novel prize in 2001 for Twelve Bar Blues, a picaresque novel about New Orleans jazz artists. His most recent work, Jerusalem, deals, like his first novel, Musungu Jim, with European encounters with Africa.

13 Ross Raisin (b 1979) This Yorkshire-born novelist’s first book, God’s Own Country (2008), followed the dark story of a teenage farmer’s son living on the Moors.

14 Dan Rhodes (b 1972) After his second book, Rhodes declared he wanted to give up writing. Luckily for us he carried on with Gold (2007), about a Welsh-Japanese woman living in a coastal cottage, and his most recent book, Little Hands Clapping.

15 Kamila Shamsie (b1973) The author of five novels, mainly set in the Pakistan of her birth. Her most successful work is her latest: Burnt Shadows (1999) follows two families from the Second World War in Japan to the aftermath of 9/11.

16 Zadie Smith (b 1975) Wrote the wildly successful White Teeth while still at Cambridge. Her writing has matured since then, most notably in On Beauty (2005).

17 David Szalay (b1974) Winner of a Betty Trask Prize, Szalay’s The Innocent is told from the perspective of a KGB agent in late Forties Russia.

18 Adam Thirlwell (b 1978) Clever All Souls fellow who published Politics at the age of 25 and since then the Milan Kundera-inspired The Escape (2009).

19 Scarlett Thomas (b1972) The End of Mr Y (2007) was a surprise bestseller about a student who discovers a long-lost Victorian novel.

20 Evie Wyld (1980) After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (2009) was a haunting first novel set on the Australian East coat.

And of course, lively discussion is invited and anticipated.

Farrell's Troubles Wins Lost Booker

Troubles by J.G. Farrell, the first novel of his Empire Trilogy,  has been declared the winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize, forty years after it was first published. You may remember reading on this blog that this special prize was awarded by the Booker committee to honour the books that fell through the net when the rules were changed in 1970.

The press release describes the book :

Set in Ireland in 1919, just after the First World War, Troubles tells the tragic-comic story of Major Brendan Archer who has gone to visit Angela, a woman he believes may be his fiancée. Her home, from which he is unable to detach himself, is the dilapidated Majestic, a once grand Irish hotel, and all around is the gathering storm of the Irish War of Independence.

Claire Armistead in The Guardian says :

... to say that Farrell is a predictable winner is to undervalue his extraordinary resurrection and what it says about readers' continuing ability to recognise a great book when they see one. Troubles is a work of characteristic depth and humour, which views the decline of the British empire through the prism of a decaying seaside hotel – pointedly named the Majestic – in Wexford. ... Farrell's gift was the ability to immerse himself so thoroughly in his worlds, whether early 20th-century Ireland or mid-19th century India, that he never seems to preach as he tackles the big issues of race, culture and class.

It sounds as if the finding of the Lost Booker was a very valuable exercise indeed.  If Farrell had actually won in 1970, he would have been the first author to have won the prize twice.

Sadly, Farrell drowned while out fishing, aged 44.

Postscript :

Sam Jordison on The Guardian blog says :

Farrell's portrayal of the fast-decaying Majestic Hotel and England's even more rapidly crumbling rule in Ireland surely adds up to one of the best books of the last half-century, let alone 1970.

Clare Wigfall in KL

(UK) National Short Story Prize 2008 winner Clare Wigfall is going to be working on a new collection of short stories, and a novel for Faber &Faber :

You might be surprised to learn that the novel is set in British Malaya. It will be fictional, but is loosely based on the story of my grandmother who grew up in Penang and about her mother who left her when she was a small baby.

Best news of all though, is that Clare will be here (with baby daughter Elsa Rowan and husband in tow) to research her novel next month.  She told Eric Forbes :

I still can’t quite believe we are making the trip—Berlin is still cloaked under what seems to be a never-ending layer of ice and snow—will spring never come? It will really be surreal to arrive in Malaysia with its tropical climate! Just yesterday I was talking with my husband and saying I wonder what my grandmother would think to know her granddaughter and great-granddaughter are now tracing her footsteps.

And yes, of course, we are going to organise an event where you can all get to meet her.  At the moment e-mails are flying in all directions to get something fixed up - so watch this space for updates.

I think there are some very big fans of Clare's already among those of us who recently attended the British Council's recent workshop as we studied her winning story The Numbers.  

Eric Forbes interviewed her for Quill magazine last year, and you can read the piece here.

What We Did in Our Second Workshop

The second week of the British Council's City of Stories workshops was lead by author Ardashir Vakil, whose first novel Beach Boy won a Betty Trask Award in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread (now Costa).  His second novel One Day was shortlisted for the Encore Award. (Sadly, neither novel was available in the local bookshops.) Ardu teaches creative writing at Goldsmith's College, London.

We were worked pretty hard throughout, with plenty more tasks and readings to keep us busy in between.

We did more exercises to develop character : we took a character from our fiction and described them ravenous with hunger for a particualr food, and then wrote about the last time they had eaten it; we placed our character in a room and described it ,and then wrote about a place where they would like to be; we described their favourite object. We wrote about who we were (Me? A brit dispalced ... a neither here nor there person ... too big, too loud too messy.)

We put stories under the microscope to see how they worked : The Kiss by Chekhov, in which a man's life is changed by a single kiss a mistake in the darkness and Jumpha Lahiri's Sexy (from The Interpreter of Maladies).  We saw how economically character can be brought to life in one or two telling details, and at how so much meaning can be carried in just a few words. ("Less is More" was one of the mantras of the workshops.)

And we looked at a much more complex and skillfully handled story, Five Points by Alice Munro, we looked at shifts of time and how transitions were made. (And now I realise what a bad reader of Munro's work I have been.  You can't hurry them, need to read and reread, and tease them out.)

We spent all day Saturday workshopping pieces of our own writing. It was done kindly and everyone I think took something very useful away from from the experience.

And one of the most fun things we did on Sunday was to go down to Petaling Street, to watch the crowds and record the things our senses took in.

(We sat down to write wherever we could ... and of course a nice beer helped!)

We had to make notes on one particular character who we could use later for our fiction.  (I met this fascinating guy called Jack who was selling bamboo whistles from his motorcyle tricycle.)

We came back to the British Council to share pieces of writing that had inspired us and pieces of writing from our notebooks which we had written over the previous few days.

I'm sad that the whole thing is over - I've come away from the experience feeling re-enthused and validated, and I feel I know how to move forward with the pieces I shared.

My greatest wish is that we could have more workshops of this kind so that more local writers can benefit. My greatest thanks to Ardu and Sarah and to the British Council for providing us with this opportunity - I feel mighty privileged to have been part of it.

Postscript :

Do read Damyanti's excellent take on the two workshops too. She fills in the gaps and says all the things I forgot to say.

Just Girls for Short Story Prize

The BBC announced an all-female line-up for its National Short Story Prize :

• Naomi Alderman's Other People's Gods
• Kate Clanchy's The Not-Dead and The Saved
• Sara Maitland's Moss Witch
• Jane Rogers's Hitting Trees with Sticks
• Lionel Shriver's Exchange Rates

Each story will be broadcast, starting December 4th, and you can sign up to be informed when the downloadable podcast is available so you can listen to it on the gadget of your choice.

More at The Guardian.

The Curious Intimacy of Strangers

The beauty of reading a book by yourself is how the author's imagination interacts with your own, in a way it doesn't if you're watching a movie. There's that curious intimacy of strangers. That's why I think this genre will survive.

Sir Salman Rushdie in an interview with Donna Seaman. The author received the Chicago Public Library Foundation Carl Sandburg Literary Award at a banquet in the Harold Washington Library on Thursday, October 15.

Mantelpieces

There's another excellent interview with Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, this time in The Independent with Boyd Tonkin. And on the same page there is a video of her reading from Wolf Hall which was filmed in my favourite bookshop - Daunt Books in London - so do have an oggle.

And the author has contributed an exclusive short story - The Heart Fails Without Warning - to The Guardian.

Postscript :

Robert McCrum sees similarities between Mantel and this week's Nobel prize winner, and salutes their hard work and dedication in the face of considerable adversity :

Müller suffered horribly under Ceaucescu, and her work has been shaped by political repression. Mantel's early adult life was blighted by a debilitating, undiagnosed illness. Müller committed herself to her writing in great privation and obscurity. Mantel laboured for years on a book (A Place of Greater Safety) that was repeatedly rejected, and finally shoved into a drawer before its belated publication in 1992. Now, after years of quiet dedication, both women have been fully recognised. This underlines a fundamental truism I have always believed about the book world: it's the work, not the life, that matters.

A Novel of the Emergency Years

Got a very nice surprise in the post today. Philip Tatham of Monsoon Books sent me his latest publication - Frederick Lees' novel The Malayan Life of Ferdach O'Haney. The cover art (which shows the Sultan Abdul Samad building and cricketers on the padang in front of the Selangor Club) is just beautiful, and here's the blurb on the back to whet your appetite. :

It is 1950 and the Federation of Malaya is in the throes of the Malayan Emergency. The British are struggling to defeat the communist terrorists and deal with rising nationalism in the colony.

Ferdach O’Haney arrives in Malaya as a young Anglo-Irish man to serve the Federation government, and he is plunged into the nitty-gritty of Malayan Emergency duties in the New Villages and in the communistoccupied jungles of Perak.

Gregarious and bisexual, O’Haney is equally at home in the brothels of Penang and in Singapore’s sleazy Bugis Street as he is in the corridors of British intelligence at Phoenix Park in Singapore and in the manicured grounds of King’s House and Carcosa in Kuala Lumpur. He befriends communist terrorists and nationalist sympathisers, experiences the bloody Maria Hertogh race riots, and comes up against prejudiced colonial administrators. O’Haney meets General Briggs and Chin Peng, the leader of the communist guerrillas, and he reveals new information about the assassination of Sir Henry Gurney.

The Malayan Life of Ferdach O’Haney is a fictionalised account of the author Frederick Lees’ own experiences in 1950s Malaya.

The first part of this novel was actually published in 2004 by Silverfish Books as Fool's Gold.

You might remember I blogged about Freddie as the Englishman who shouted the third Merdeka! You can read more about him, and an extract from the book here.

Boyd's Man on the Run

William Boyd talks about double lives and double dealing and his new novel to Christian House in The Independent, and is profiled by Christopher Tayler in The Guardian.

Ordinary Thunderstorms is an innocent-man-on-the-run thriller which focuses on the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry. Here's a synopsis :

Adam Kindred is "a cloud man" with a problem. He is a climatologist who finds himself wanted for the murder of an immunologist he briefly encountered in an Italian restaurant. ... The dead scientist was developing a miracle cure for asthma, a drug that is set to earn his pharmaceutical company untold riches and the secret of which Adam unknowingly possesses. His life spirals out of control as a cast of assassins, river police and corporate flunkies hits his trail.

It sounds pretty exciting, doesn't it? You can read the first chapter on the Bloomsbury website.

Anglocentric Nostalgia for the Past?

What, then, of the 2009 shortlist? At first glance, it breaths the spirit of the 1970s. Fiercely English, it is strongly inclined to the historical narrative. Every one of these books explores the past in some form.

Taking few risks, it offers JM Coetzee and AS Byatt the prospect of a return visit to the winner's podium. In a recession, it's a list that will transmit a warm glow of reassurance into the troubled breasts of nervous UK booksellers. God knows what they will make of it in Beijing or Kuala Lumpur.

Occasionally, as it has every right to do, the prize turns its back on posterity. This year, Booker is in denial, big time.

Robert McCrum weighs up this year's Booker shortlist in The Observer, and it's very nice of him to consider what we think here in KL, isn't it? (I think we just shrug and say "Fine, just guarantee us some quality reading." You all agree?)

Tim Adams in the same paper makes a very good case for the Booker shortlist this year being symptomatic of the general British desire to escape into the past.

Fiction editor at The Telegraph, Lorna Bradbury, is very happy with the selection:

There hasn’t been a Man Booker shortlist to match this one since 2005, when the shortlisted novelists Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith went on to split the judges so irrevocably that John Banville came out the ultimate winner. ... If the longlist contained the requisite number of outsiders and eccentrics, such as James Lever’s comic novel narrated by Cheeta the Chimp, the shortlist concentrates on quality and seriousness

In an interesting piece at The Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole, reckons that Irish authors William Trevor, Ed O’Loughlin and Colm Tóibín didn't make the cut this year because :

The advance word had hinted at a feeling that there have been quite enough Irish winners for the moment, thank you. .... (And also because) Irishness is losing its gloss.

So much can be read into a shortlist!

Still Edgy After All These Years

Peace of mind doesn't always seem to be the territory of a successful author. This may be I think be for the best (at least for us readers!) since mid-life complacency probably wouldn't auger well for ongoing creativity. Novelist Rachel Cusk, whose new novel (her 7th) is The Bradshaw Variations, is compared to "a highly strung racehorse" by Lynn Barber in The Observer. The author seems to have it all, says Barber :

She is still extremely good looking, at 42, with a slim figure and long, dark, shiny hair. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family, was educated at St Mary's Convent in Cambridge and then read English at Oxford. She published her first novel, Saving Agnes, in 1993 and won the Whitbread first novel prize. There have been seven novels, including her new one, and two books of non-fiction.

but :

... sees herself as embattled, hounded by critics, loathed by other mothers, attacked with slings and arrows from every side. She says that when she cycles to school with her daughters, other women hiss abuse at her from Range Rovers. She used to describe herself as a red-blooded feminist but nowadays admits: "I find that I like women less than I did." She avoids school gates and places where other mothers congregate.

At The Times author Nick Hornby talks to Kate Muir who asks why despite the author's success (Book sales over 5 m. A Sundance-winning film. A new novel out. A happy marriage. ) :

.. he is ... not smug, or at least satisfied? Why does he virtually chain-smoke in our interview, and confess cheerily that he is in therapy once a week? Why does he avoid the glitz of London’s literary salons? Why is he addicted to bucket-sized Starbucks, when he could afford an espresso machine or go to any of the lovely Italianate joints near his office in Islington for a real coffee?

He also talks on video about his new book Juliet, Naked which tackles :

... among other things, ageing and creativity, as well as fatherhood and geekery.

Of Sex, Death and Quantum Mechanics

The Guardian has released its longlist for the First Book Award. It's a pretty eclectic collection, taking in debut works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Claire Armitstead, chair of judges and the Guardian's literary editor says :

This year the longlist reflects the way in which the divisions between genres are shifting and collapsing and shows the energy and imagination with which the best new writers are confronting a world in transition.

The selected titles are :

The Secret Lives of Buildings - Edward Hollis

Direct Red - Gabriel Weston

The Strangest Man - Graham Farmelo

A Swamp Full of Dollars - Michael Peel

The Rehearsal - Eleanor Catton

The Wilderness - Samantha Harvey

The Girl With Glass Feet - Ali Shaw

The Selected Works of TS Spivet - Reif Larsen

An Elegy for Easterly - Petina Gappah

The two fiction choices are Samantha Harvey for her "moving portrayal of an Alzheimer's patient in The Wilderness", and The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw "which tells the magical story of Ida Maclaird, who is turning into glass".

Another book on the list that sounds particualrly interesting : Gabriel Weston's memoir Direct Red chronicles life as a surgeon:

... with eye-opening stories of panic and incompetence that some of us might, in truth, not like to know about (and) addresses some fascinating questions, such as what is it like to cut into someone else's body? Or how do you tell a beautiful, seemingly fit young man that he will be dead in days?

You can read extracts of all of the titles here.

Postscript :

An Elegy for Easterly is a collection of short fiction, and is featured here in The Short Review.

Following the Linggi

I almost missed this very nice piece from Saturday's Star. Our friend Caving Liz makes a journey to find the Linggi River in Negri Sembilan, following in the footsteps of intrepid 19th century British traveller Isabella Bird.

Bird was probably the greatest of the women explorers of her day, and travelled to many other parts of the world. The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither (1883) is an incredible account of a journey made through the Malay Penininsula, and you can learn exactly what places like Malacca, Kuala Lumpur and Kuala Kangsar were like back then. And I love to imagine the lady trecking through steaming jungle and riding on an elephant wearing her long Victorian dresses.

(Should your curiosity to read the book be stirred, you can read it online here.)

Heathrow Stories

Some lovers were parting. She must have been twenty, he a few years older. Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood was in her bag. They had oversize sunglasses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. They were dressed casually in combat trousers and T-shirts. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like passion from afar was revealed at closer range to be unusual devastation. She was shaking with sorrowful disbelief, he was cradling her in his arms, stroking her short blonde hair, in which a hairclip in the shape of a tulip had been fastened. Repeatedly, they would look into each other’s eyes and then, as though thereby made newly aware of the catastrophe about to befall them, she would begin weeping once more. ... People were passing and evincing sympathy. It helped that the woman was extraordinarily beautiful. I missed her already.... We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality, there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having such a powerful cause to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, to the gate let alone to a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Beijing. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to consider it as the high point of her life.

Philosopher and author Alain de Botton has become the first ever writer in residence at Heathrow Airport, writing his new book (to be called A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary) live at Terminal 5, and incorporating passers-by into the story. It's an an appointment that Heathrow's management hope will create a positive buzz about the airport, and de Botton says :

That one of the largest organizations in the U.K. should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet ... On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.

The book (an extract from which appears at the top of this post courtesy of The L.A.Times will be available at the end of September, and Heathrow will give away 10,000 copies to random passengers.

You can watch the BBC's report, with de Botton talking about the Heathrow assignment, on YouTube. Excursions to the airport are of course nothing new for the author, who has been taking groups of tourists there ...

Dan Brown : Mac & Cheese

Viewed through the prism of the media, his record-breakingly popular novels are universally condemned as dishonest tat.

Andew Collins at The Times looks at the phenomena of Dan Brown (the author Steven King has called "the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese") and joins the rest of the world in the countdown to :

... the internationally synchronised publication on September 15 of Dan Brown’s next helping of processed slop.

Golding the Wannabe Rapist?

Some rather unsavoury aspects of author, William Golding, have come to light after John Carey, the emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was given access to a personal journal kept by Golding. Among them, that he tried to rape a 13 year old girl while a teenager himself; that as a teacher at a public school he tried to set boys against one another in the manner of Lord of the Flies; and that he depended on drink to help him fight his demons. Kathryn Hughes on The Guardian blog is concerned that Golding will be remembered as a sensational headline, and she observes :

Golding knew perfectly well that he was leaving behind an incendiary story that Carey was bound to pass on to the rest of the world. This raises the interesting possibility that Golding was secretly keen to be shown to posterity as a bit of an animal. Much of his work, including of course Lord of the Flies, concerns the beast which lies just below man's civilised surface. What better way to advertise the authenticity of your work than to reveal just what a savage soul lurked beneath the meek and mild outer facade of the Nobel laureate and Booker prize winner?

Sam Leith in The London Evening Standard is refreshingly cynical :

The usual balls gets spouted about the “dark side of genius”, the “sliver of ice” or “demons”. But really the duty of the biographer to his publishers is to produce a news story for which a Sunday newspaper will pay: and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that a literary biography without a sex-Nazi, child-slavery, and/or hamster-rape angle is now dead in the water as a publishing proposition.

And nothing, no nothing, anyone can dig up about his private life can knock Golding off his pedestal for me. And I guess that goes for any other author I revere. In fact, for any author ... Postscript : Christopher Howe in The Telegraph lists some other authors who had a rather shady past. Among the revelations :

Geoffrey Chaucer faced a lawsuit alleging his rape of a girl called Cicely Champaigne, a baker's daughter.

Postscript 2 Just came across this nice quote from Paul Theroux* which seems to make sense in this context:

If you look into history, you won't find many jolly, well-balanced people who were writers. I mean, look at them. ... In a way, you can't be a writer unless you have sort of a personality problem. Balanced people don't become writers, obviously. Balanced people become gardeners, they raise happy families, they go to work every day, they smile. They have noodle salad.

(Originally from CNN website, now longer online.)

A Lively Memory

In old age you can close your eyes and summon your youth at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

Author of both adult and children's novels, Penelope Lively is interviewed by Sarah Crowne in today's Guardian. Her novel Family Album comes out next month and is described as :

... a sophisticated investigation into the effects of time's passage and the reliability of memory presented in the guise of a minor-key domestic drama.

Fascinated I am, by the way memory is depicted in fiction, so this means the novel is a must-read.

Lively says on the subject :

The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself - can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.

And her main character muses :

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don't work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours ... The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life. I, me. Claudia H.

Psychologically Analysed

As an analyst my effort was always to find the place within myself that could communicate with the other person ... I would try and find the part of me that was furious, or male, or unmarried, or whatever. That has also been the basis for all my characters. They are all based on me - not on my outer life but on elements of my inner life. So that experience of learning to find things within myself has been invaluable.

Sally Vickers in The Guardian on what's she's been able to bring from her first career as a psychotherapist to her second - novelist. Her latest novel is Dancing Backwards.

A Whale of a Winner

This year's Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction has gone to a book about whales, Philip Hoare's Leviathan which has been described as :

... part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale.

Hoare apparently fell in love with whales after reading Moby Dick and first encountered the mammal when he saw a killer whale at Windsor safari park.

The chairman of judges, Jacob Weisberg, said of the book :

The quality of his writing was just so impressive, it is literary, just beautiful. It is a model of a certain kind of writing and I imagine it is a book that will be read for a long time to come.

You can listen to Hoare talking about his book to Claire Amistead here and find an extract here.