OCTOBER 2009

NEWSLETTER 33

WORK IN PROGRESS

I realize that this newsletter is over a month late and I apologize for that delay I’ve pushed back the deadline so as to include several visits I made during October of which more below. Meanwhile on the work front, my adult novel is progressing and I have not given up hope of finishing it during 2009. If not, then it won’t be far into 2010. I am determined to make a great effort during the rest of this month and all through November.

On the German tv movie front, SOMMERLICHT is in post production and those of you who read German will be able to glean some details from this website. The movie is certainly going to be very different indeed from my book and I’m fascinated to see how it turns out. This is a link to the Ziegler website which talks about the movie.

EVENTS

I’ve always loved being invited to speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival. This year, we made a weekend of it, and spent a couple of nights in the city before the event I did with Jonathan Stroud. We had dinner with one of my favourite bookbloggers, Cornflower, and her family in their beautiful home. My husband and I took tea in the Authors’ Yurt with Nicola Morgan and when he departed on Sunday morning, I had lunch with Linda Strachan, Vanessa Robertson of the Fidra Bookshop and now also of the Edinburgh Bookshop and Rebecca, her assistant and a good gossipy time was had by all.The event with Jonathan Stroud was terrific fun. Here are some pictures of us signing in the tent afterwards. (Thanks to Helen Giles.)

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I then rushed off to hear Anne Fine and Melvin Burgess speaking about books for vulnerable children. Random House took us to dinner on Sunday night and many thanks to Philippa Dickinson for that, and to Georgia Lawes, Lauren Bennett and Clare Hall-Craggs for arranging my trip. I had a marvellous time and being in Edinburgh for a few days allowed me to visit something I’d been longing to see for ages: the Phoebe Traquair murals in the Mansfield Traquair Centre. They are very beautiful and well worth a visit if you can arrange to be in Edinburgh on a day when the Mansfield Centre is open. They keep strange hours. Here is a photo I took while I was walking round but it doesn’t give you the detail.

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Everyone who reads this newsletter will know that I’m involved with the Lancashire Book of the Year award. I’m now also involved with an exciting new course being offered by UCLAN. (University of Central Lancashire at Preston) It’s an M.A. in Writing for Children, to go alongside a course they offer in Publishing. It’s the brainchild of Debbie Williams, who used to be in charge of children’s books at Waterstone’s and Helen Day. I went to the opening ceremony to welcome students to the course. Helen had spent hours the day before baking a special cake in the shape of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, which was a real compliment to me (HAPPY EVER AFTER is a reworking of three fairy tales including Sleeping Beauty) and I thought it was quite beautiful. Here’s a photograph.

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I visited North London Collegiate School recently and had a very good time talking to Year 7 girls and then to other pupils in the library over the lunch hour. It’s a school I always enjoy going to and this time the librarian, Hazel Bagworth-Mann and her colleagues had made a beautiful collage of all my titles and displayed it in the library.

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The first Didsbury Arts Festival took place between September 26th and October 3rd in my local area. Maria Stripling and Carol Williams and Debs Grace worked tirelessly to advertise and promote it and there were over 80 events of all kinds (musical, theatrical, artistic and craft as well as to do with writing) all featuring local talent. I attended a very pleasant reading by Cath Staincliffe, Elizabeth Baines and Carl Tighe. See below in Books for a review of Elizabeth’s new novel. I haven’t managed to read the other two novels yet, but I will soon.

I did a creative writing workshop for children at the local children’s bookshop, Razma Reads. Here’s a picture of Billie and me taken that day. (Thanks to Helen Giles once again. I don’t know what I’d do for pictures if it weren’t for her!)

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I also did an event at our local Pizza Express about publication tips and hazards awaiting the new writer etc. Not in the body of the restaurant itself but in a pleasant upstairs room. We didn’t order any pizzas but the coffee was lovely.

On Saturday October 3rd I returned to Razma Reads to give out the prizes for the Festival Short Story competition. Lots of people came to see the children collect their book tokens and the festival ended on a high note.

I went to Winchester House School in Brackley on October 5th and enjoyed my time there very much. Many thanks to Louise Stothard for arranging this and for driving me round. And thanks to Louise Farrow for a warm welcome. I stayed the night with Linda Newbery and her husband and cats and next day Linda drove me through the pouring rain to Bicester. The excellent Chiltern Line took me to London and I was in North Dulwich by 10.00 am. Nicola Jones, the librarian at JAPS (James Allen Preparatory School) was waiting to meet me and I had a very good day there. Lots of my books had been ordered in and I had actual queues waiting to get them signed after each session.

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS

I’m talking to students at UCLAN in early November (see above) in their reading group. They’ve been reading HAPPY EVER AFTER and it’ll be fun to see what they say.

On November 22nd, I’m with the North London branch of the Federation of Children’s Books Groups.

And on December 1st, I’m talking to the Friends of Chester Literature Festival

BOOKS

WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate) won the Man Booker prize and I was very pleased by that decision. It’s a cracking book: substantial, exciting, brilliantly written, full of passion and crowded with people and events and yet also very personal, and intimate and detailed. You can bury yourself in a perfectly depicted past which seems in many ways quite like the present. I cannot understand the newspaper fuss and flurry about historical novels. I’ve always loved them and if you look at it in a certain way, every novel is historical, even the ones set in the quite recent past. This one is a triumph in every way and I can’t wait for the sequel. Thomas Cromwell’s story is not over yet. I’m a fan of the novels of C J Sansom, too, and it’s fascinating to see his quite different take on Cromwell. Wolf Hall is a huge book and a very good excuse for splashing out on a new handbag to carry it in. Others will think this is just the pretext they need to buy an e-reader, but to me the heft of the novel is part of the pleasure.

By contrast, here’s a novella. There’s a lot to be said for novellas and I wish more publishers thought it was worthwhile publishing them. Salt, a small independent publisher, is brave in many ways and doesn’t mind bringing out small gems like TOO MANY MAGPIES by Elizabeth Baines. Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine. She’s written a very good collection of short stories, also from Salt, called BALANCING ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD. This novella is terrific. You start out thinking it’s going to be a creepy story. Then things develop and you wonder: were you mistaken? There’s a definite air of menace, of things being not quite right and was that something supernatural just there, or only ordinary life as seen through the eyes of an unusually sensitive woman? Then the narrative becomes more ‘normal’ and I put that word in inverted commas for a reason. At the end, everything becomes clear in the most satisfying way, so that you find yourself saying: I should have seen that. I ought to have noticed. I had the clues and didn’t pick them up. It’s very clever indeed and finally, very moving too. Salt have been in some financial difficulties lately and their readers have rallied round to help them, and I do recommend this as something to buy. There are various offers on the Salt website, so do go over there and have a look. It’s also light and small and would be a super Christmas present to post off to friends.

When I first came to live in Manchester in the late Sixties, I read every novel by Elizabeth Taylor that I could lay my hands on. I’m rereading them again now and they are just as good as I remembered. So I fell on THE OTHER ELIZABETH TAYLOR by Nicola Beauman ( Persephone Books) with glee. As with all Persephone Books, this volume is a thing of great physical beauty. The text doesn’t disappoint either. Beauman writes clearly and well and any lover of the novels will be fascinated to read the details of this writer’s life and loves. What fascinated me in particular was learning about Taylor’s long and warm relationship with another favourite writer of mine, William Maxwell, who was her editor at the New Yorker. There are photographs and also lots of good gossip. It’s shocking to read the unkind remarks of several other women writers of the time who didn’t think much of Taylor’s work. I loved this book.

MR. TOPPIT by Charles Elton (Penguin) was a Richard and Judy book and I liked it because it’s about a children’s writer and the havoc his work causes in his immediate family. It’s also a very funny exposure of media foibles and is constantly fast-moving and entertaining. I’m not altogether sure what it is that people have against children’s writers. A S Byatt’s THE CHILDREN’S BOOK also has children royally messed up by their parents, but as a children’s writer myself, I reckon it’s parents as people and not as writers who might be to blame!

Zoe Heller can be relied on to provide the blackest of black comedy. I loved THE BELIEVERS and also NOTES ON A SCANDAL and EVERYTHING YOU KNOW (Penguin) is her first book. It’s about a screenwriter whose wife dies and the fallout from this death. He has children, colleagues, and lovers and you laugh at what you perceive as a kind of mad farce but as you go on, you realize that what you’re laughing at is actually profoundly sad and you end the book admiring a writer who’s positively Swiftian in her satire, and who’s so good at describing family relationships of a particular kind. I believe it wasn’t very well received when it first came out but don’t let this put you off. It’s constantly interesting and fast-moving and I reckon very good indeed.

If you’re an Anne Tyler fan, NOAH’S COMPASS, her latest book, (Chatto and Windus) is going to be a real treat. I love the way she takes you right into the lives and minds of her characters. In this case, an elderly man who suffers an attack in his home and what his reactions to this are and how they affect his relationships with his family and in particular, a younger woman with whom he becomes involved. Describing the plot of a Tyler novel is pointless. It sounds as though nothing much happens to anybody and that what does happen isn’t very exciting but nothing could be further from the truth. She’s amazing and every new novel is a pleasure.

THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE by Elizabeth Jenkins (Virago) was first published in 1954. Jenkins is still alive, I believe, and has passed her hundredth birthday. It’s the story of a marriage and completely gripping and most beautifully written. We discussed this on Cornflower’s Book Group, online and if you follow this link you can see what everyone had to say about it, but I can recommend it most heartily.

First prize for the most inappropriate cover image ever goes to OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout (Pocket Book). It depicts a beautiful young woman in a strapless green evening gown, seen from the back and of course, as per usual these days, cut off at the head. How do I know she’s beautiful? I assume it from the hints. The creamy skin of her back; the gorgeous fabric of her gown. Olive Kitteridge, the eponymous heroine of this Pulitzer Prize winning collection of linked short stories is an elderly, large, plain ex-teacher of Maths. Go figure! The book is astonishingly good. Unputdownable and most original, too. You learn about a family, a community, and of course all about Olive herself through stories which at first seem separate and only link up completely at the end. Fantastic. Cover your copy with a pretty wallpaper or something, as primary school children do with their new exercise books.

I am half way through CROSSING TO SAFETY by Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics) and it is such a treat to find a writer I’d not heard of before and who is so good. I’ll write more about it next time and Cornflower, (see above) is going to be reading it with the Book Group. My husband is a fan, and his take on it is here. He also has some interesting things to say in this post about why we like certain books and don’t like others.

Next up, ANDROMEDA KLEIN by Frank Portman who wrote the wonderful KING DORK (Puffin) and CASTLE OF SHADOWS, a first novel by Ellen Renner.

I’ll write again in January....it’s a bit early to wish you all Happy New Year but hey, why not?

Happy New Year!

Adèle Geras

And do write to me at: adele @ adelegeras.com