Stef Penney's Rattling Good Yarn

Got an e-mail from someone in the publicity department of Simon & Schuster a week or two back asking me if I'd "take another look" at Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves on my blog since the book has just been launched in the US. It quite amazed me that my blog, tapped in on a keyboard in Malaysia, might help to shift some copies on the other side of the world.

Well, the book was sitting on my TBR shelf already, looking forlorn, so what was I to do?

As it turned out, this book was just the read I needed: a rattling good yarn I could slip into my bag and read in odd moments between visiting my student-teachers in schools.

You'll probably remember that the novel won this year's Costa First Novel Award, and although it's set in Canada, the author suffered so badly from agoraphobia that she was unable to travel there and instead did her research in the British Library.

Not that that matters. I remember Kunal Basu at the Ubud Readers' and Writers' festival last year talking about writing his historical novels. It was impossible for him to visit the places where he set his novels because they no longer exist. He saw this in a positive light:

What excites is inaccessibility in real terms, but accessibility in the imagination.

Stef Penney sets her novel in mid C19th Canada and chucks in a whole load of ingredients ... murder, mysterious disappearances, codes to be cracked (one which may hold the secret of an ancient written Native American language and the other a fortune in furs), love stories (gay and straight).

If the story has a weakness it is that I think the author tried to cram in too much, and in parts, especially where the backgrounds of various characters were fleshed out, it seemed terribly rushed. There were an awful lot of threads to bring together by the end of the book, and whilst Penney largely managed this, some parts were left hanging.

I was sad that we did not have a chance to see the protagonist Mrs. Ross (what is her first name??) reunited with her adopted 17 year old son Francis after she finally (and how could she really miss all the clues?) realises that he is gay and that the murdered man was his lover.

And why was she in an asylum in Scotland ... and what does that have to do with the main drift of the story?

And why was there so little about the wolves?

The cast of characters is also very large - and some came alive rather more than others. Francis intrigued me. I liked the warm-hearted but bumbling accountant, Donald Moody, still trying to find his feet with the Hudson Bay Company.

But I loved the huge and ugly half-Mohawk, half-English trapper William Parker, and was so glad that Mrs Ross ended up warming her frostbitten fingers in his armpits ... even if I'd have liked something a lot steamier to melt the frozen Tundra.

Some characters didn't rise very far of the page though, including Knox and his wife and daughters. Others were well drawn but didn't have enough of a role in the book in my opinion, e.g. Jacob and Sturrock.

I also felt that the narration worked best in Mrs. Ross' first person, and got annoyed with the godlike omniscience with which the other chapters were narrated.

But as I say, a very good read which I'd recommend as I think many of you will enjoy it.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see it makes New York Times bestseller list.

First Books That Bombed

Some writers, like Stef Penney, make it big with their first novels. A surprising number of "big name" writers had first novels which totally bombed. John Walsh and Guy Adams list a few in the Independent, including Helen Fielding, Dan Brown, Salman Rushdie ... and surprise surprise ... Anthony Burgess. I had always thought Burgess' first novel was Time for a Tiger but it turns out to have been A Vision of Battlements. (What??)

Just as well their publishers gave them a second chance!

Agoraphobia and the Author

Should an author stick to only what they know, choosing to write about only places they have travelled to? Mark Lawson takes up the debate in the Guardian in the wake of Stef Penney's Costa Book of the Year win for The Tenderness of Wolves.

Armando Ianucci, chairman of the judges descibes the book as:

... not just an extraordinary first novel but also an extraordinary novel ... It was a very ambitious undertaking ...

The novel is set in Canada, but the author has never been there - she suffered from agoraphobia and found it incredibly difficult even to take a London Bus to the British Library, let alone jump on an aeroplane. Here she talks about how she managed to overcome the crippling condition and why she shuns publicity.

And you can read an extract from her novel here.

The Award Formerly Known as Whitbread

The Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Prize) have been announced.

William Boyd has won the Costa Novel Award for Restless, the tale of a wartime spy. It's actually his second Whitbread/Costa win, as his debut novel A Good Man in Africa, won a quarter of a century ago. The Independent reports that:

The judges described the novel as unputdownable. "Restless remains in the mind long after you finish it. Double-cross, double-bluff, all written with effortless clarity."

Boyd being a sensible chap said it was necessary to keep a "properly balanced" view of prizes:

I think they're a good thing because they encourage readers and that's what all writers want. But you have to look on it as the equivalent of a win on the horses or the lottery.

The First Novel Award went to Stef Penney a London-based screenwriter for The Tenderness of Wolves, a murder mystery set in 19th century Canada. Penney was unable to research her novel in Canada as she was suffering from agoraphobia, and unable to fly. So much for the old adage about writing what you know!

The Biography Award went to Keeping Mum: A Wartime Childhood by Brian Thompson. Thopson is a playwright and biographer, and he realised that his own family provided him with an ideal subject, though he says he found the book very difficult to write:

... it took me a very long time to realise that some of the most interesting and frightening and abusive people I'd ever met were my parents. I'd been looking in the wrong place for my stories.

John Haynes, considered an outsider when the shortlist (which included nobel winner Seamus Heaney) was announced, won the Poetry Award for Letter to Patience.

And goodness, the subject of this book length poem strikes a chord with me: it's an imaginery letter written by a man who has returned to Britain from Nigeria, reflecting on how the experience has changed him. The judges described it as:

... a unique long poem of outstanding quality, condensing a lifetime of reflection and experience into a work of transporting momentum, imaginative lucidity, and consummate formal accomplishment.

Veteran writer Linda Newberry took the Children's Book Award for Set in Stone:

... an emotionally charged narrative will thrill all lovers of intelligent fiction ...

the judges said.

The overall prize winner will be announced on 7 February.

Thrilling Shortlist

The Whitbread Prize is now renamed the Costa Prize after the coffee chain that took it over from the brewery, and has announced its first shortlist under that name. Here are the finalists in the fiction category:

William Boyd -Restless
Neil Griffiths - Saving Caravaggio
Mark Haddon - A Spot of Bother
David Mitchell -Black Swan Green

and in the First Novel category:

Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night
Marilyn Heward Mills - Cloth Girl
Stef Penney -The Tenderness of Wolves
James Scudamore -The Amnesia Clinic

(You can read a synopsis of all the shortlisted titles on Costa's website.)

John Ezard notes that the shift in sponsorship seems to have lead to a shift in taste in favour of the thriller:

Two of the four books picked for the novels shortlist released last night for the inaugural £50,000 Costa award are marketed by their publishers as "gripping", "tremendously exciting", "gritty" and "thrilling". ... One of the four books in the first novel category, The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, is "a story of betrayal and treachery" ending in a "thrilling revelation".

I know that will be just my friend Krishna's cup of coffee.