Spring Catalogue 2019 by Unbound

Spring 2019

RECENT BESTSELLERS The Good Immigrant Edited by Nikesh Shukla 9781783523955 £8.99 Repeal the 8th Edited by Una Mullally 9781783525164 £9.99 Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile Alice Jolly 9781783525492 £18.99 Cleverlands Lucy Crehan 9781783524914 £8.99 The Madonna of Bolton Matt Cain 9781783526185 £14.99 Distortion Gautam Malkani 9781783525270 £16.99 So Here It Is Dave Hill 9781783525799 £8.99

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Unbound Unit 18 Waterside 44â&#x20AC;&#x201C;48 Wharf Road London N1 7UX Tel. 020 7253 4230 For a full list of contacts visit www.unbound.com Trade Sales & Marketing Manager Julian Mash julian@unbound.com Online Accounts Manager Brian Martin brian@unbound.com Head of Rights Ilona Chavasse ilona@unbound.com Head of Publicity Amy Winchester amy@unbound.com Boundless, Head of Content Arifa Akbar arifa@unbound.com To order any of the books in this catalogue, please contact your PGUK rep. If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re unsure who that is, contact Julian Mash at julian@unbound.com.

Dear Reader, Welcome to our January to June 2019 catalogue where you will find a full list of our upcoming titles along with extracts and interviews. The winter months are the perfect time to curl up with a good book. There is plenty of fiction to choose from in January and February: awardwinning novelist James Flint returns with Midland, a tale of two families torn apart by the hidden debts of love; Dr Tanvir Bush delivers Cull, a sharp and outrageous satire for our times about the deadly dark side of discrimination; Craig Melvin’s hugely entertaining The Belle Hotel is the bittersweet story of two Michelin star-crossed lovers set at a Brighton hotel; Marie Phillips, author of the international bestseller Gods Behaving Badly, unveils her reworking of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors in Oh, I Do Like To Be . . . and with over 100k ebooks sold, Natalie Fergie’s The Sewing Machine is available for the first time as a trade paperback in February. Spring sees Suzie Wilde return with the next instalment in The Book of Bera series, in the form of Obsidian. And not forgetting the latest title in our graphic novels list, Reel Love, a beautifully observed story about the magic of cinema and the pains of growing up, from the critically acclaimed author of Beast Wagon, Owen Michael Johnson. Our groundbreaking non-fiction list continues to grow with Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham (published in March) exploring how Birmingham has been transformed for the better by its migrant population (you can read an extract on page 11). Journalist and ‘No More Page 3’ campaigner Lucy-Anne Holmes’ revealing memoir about the search for better sex, Don’t Hold My Head Down, hits bookshops in March, and she discusses why she wrote the book with editor Imogen Denny on page 14. April sees Beth McColl’s How to Come Alive Again, a funny, practical book on how to breathe life back into your bones after experiencing mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. April sees the publication of Common People, an anthology celebrating working-class voices, bringing together established and emerging writers including Malorie Blackman, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Louise Doughty and Lisa McInerney, edited by Kit de Waal. These are just some of the highlights from our diverse list of upcoming books which are available to order through PGUK. Julian Mash Trade Sales & Marketing Manager

CONTENTS From the Shop Floor

Book-ish

Common People

Extracts from an anthology of working-class writers

6 8

Doing the Work that Nobody Else Wants to Do

An excerpt from Jon Bloomfield’s new book, Our City 11

Don’t Hold My Head Down

An interview with Lucy-Anne Holmes

Decades of Lead

Drawings from Pete Fowler’s sketchbooks

The Family Business

Craig Melvin on his two passions

Ten Pools with a View

Where to go for the best views from outdoor swimming pools

14 17 24 26

Rediscovering the Magic of Christmas

Festive tips from Merry Midwinter on alternative ways to celebrate at Christmastime

Turbans and Tales

A snapshot of the characters captured by photography duo Amit and Naroop

A Guide to Killing Your Monsters

Tips on self-care from Beth McColl’s new book

Reel Love

A sneak preview of this coming-of-age graphic novel

Six Ways to Change Your Media Diet

Tips from Jodie Jackson

34 40 43 51

Alice Jolly

Dip into one of her gorgeously packaged novels

D. H. Lawrence Was My Granddad: A Confession

Tom Cox reveals the truth…

Glorious Suburbia

Andy Miller looks beyond suburbia’s soulless reputation

West of West

Photographs from the end of Route 66

53 54 60 72

Donald Trump and the Global Environment

Ed Davey considers the environmental impact of the current US president

Sex Drive

Stephanie Theobald is on the road to a pleasure revolution

Ruth and Martin’s Album Club

Ian Rankin listens to Madonna by Madonna for the first time

New Titles

January–June 2019

New Titles: Digital

January–June 2019

Shelfie

A peek at Sally Bayley’s bookshelf

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FROM THE SHOP FLOOR: BOOK-ISH Address: 18 High Street, Crickhowell, Powys, NP8 1BD Opening Hours: Monday to Friday: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday: 9.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. Sunday: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tel: 01873 811256 Email: info@book-ish.co.uk Book-ish opened its doors in 2010 in the historic market town of Crickhowell. Founded by Emma Corfield, the shop has become a cornerstone of the local community and eighteen months ago moved to a bigger location in the middle of the High Street. Set over three floors it boasts a curated selection of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books as well as a café and events space. Opening a bookshop during a recession and at the height of anxiety over the impact of ebooks would be seen by most as a risky thing to do, but Emma has proven that a good bookshop can flourish: ‘Luckily we set our bookshop up in a wonderfully supportive community of book-lovers. The e-reader sheen soon faded and publishers have made concerted efforts to nurture indie booksellers. I feel there has never been more optimism within the trade than there is now.’ Emma is a firm believer that there is just no substitute for good customer service and hand-selling. ‘There’s nothing better than getting somebody excited about taking a book home.’ Coupled with their focus on events, Book-ish has grown to become one of the most respected independents in the country. Emma loves nothing more than ‘… getting out from behind the counter, becoming involved in the local community and running great events for all ages. Book-ish offers a space for people of all walks of life and interests to gather, talk and share… People feel comfortable walking through our doors and often become friends or build friendships through meeting at our events.’ 6

Dawn Taber, Bookseller How long have you worked at Book-ish? I joined Book-ish eighteen months ago when the business moved from a small shop to the beautiful period building (covering four floors) it now occupies. Oh, and it now has the additional bonus of a lovely café! What book are you currently reading? I usually have at least two books on the go! However, I’m currently reading a proof copy of Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak. This is his second novel, the first being the hugely successful The Book Thief published twelve years ago. Book-ish is hosting Markus to launch Bridge of Clay in November. I’m interviewing him for the event, so I'm paying very close attention to this read. What is the strangest thing a customer has ever asked you? ‘Do you sell fishing tackle?’ has to be the strangest – certainly beats the fly fishing and J. R. Hartley question for originality. I was almost too stunned to reply. I’m quite often asked for ‘the book with the blue/red/ green cover’. Detective work is all part of the fun of being a bookseller. What is your favourite spot in the shop? Easily our loft. Bright, relaxing modern space with the added bonus of a bar. The loft is a space where we hold author events, book clubs, writing groups, choir practice, workshops, baby showers, art exhibitions, birthday parties and even weddings. The loft is a great resource for Book-ish and the wider community. How and why are bookshops important? ‘Books, conversation and more…’ really does sum up the importance of bookshops to a community. Where else can you discover new ideas, make friends of all ages, meet your favourite authors, find that one book for your reluctant reader, hold your event, run your workshop and genuinely take time out? You may have to go elsewhere for your fishing tackle!

COMMON PEOPLE Compiled and edited by Kit de Waal, Common People is a celebration of working-class writers who have come together to write about their shared experiences and emotions. Rallied by a concern that working-class voices are increasingly absent from the pages of books and newspapers, their essays, poems and personal memoir shine in this evocative anthology. The following is an extract from Louise Doughty’s tender contribution, ‘Any Relation?’ In 2004, one cold spring afternoon, my father told me a secret. We were in his car at the time, driving back to the small East Midlands town where I had grown up and where he still lived with my mother. We had spent the day in Peterborough, the city where he had been raised, visiting elderly relatives. It had been a long day of tea and stories, and we both fell silent on the drive home. It was early spring and the light began to slant across the fields. As dusk gathered, my father, still looking straight ahead as he drove, spoke a single sentence. ‘If I tell you something, will you promise never to tell anyone else?’ My little writer’s heart, dark as pickled walnut, began to constrict in my chest. What was my father about to say? ‘You are not my daughter…’ or ‘I have another family’ or ‘I once killed a man’. I was too excited to make the promise but he continued anyway. ‘I left school when I was thirteen.’ My disappointment was profound. I sort of knew that already. He had often talked of how he had won a place at grammar school but that when his mother saw the price of the blazer she had said, ‘We can’t afford that. You’re not going.’ He had gone to the rough school instead where, in the playground one day, a teacher had given him a backhander so hard it threw him against a wall. He had left early and worked as an apprentice – his own father was a painter and decorator. For some reason, though, he had a bee in his bonnet about education. ‘He was always the posh one, our Ken!’ my Great Aunt Lenda had remarked to me once, raucously, pushing at his shoulder while my father laughed. He did his lower and higher certificates at night school and, eventually, studied for an external degree in engineering at Nottingham University, while doing a full-time job to support his wife and three children. ‘Your father was no help when you were all small,’ my mother once said, in an uncharacteristic moment of disloyalty. ‘He studied every evening and every weekend.’ When I was twelve and 8

he was well into his fifties, he finally got a PhD, the highest academic qualification anyone could get. Ever since, he had called himself ‘Doctor Doughty’. He took great pride in explaining his PhD thesis in engineering to anyone who mistook him for a medical doctor. My mother had left school at fifteen and gone to work as a secretary in the firm where she met my father. No night school or studying for her when we were small. She had the ironing to do. ‘Don’t you think, Dad,’ I said quietly, as we drove, ‘that actually, that’s something to be proud of?’ I was thinking how hard my father had worked: a full-time job, studying at night, he and our mother both giving everything to provide us with advantages they had never had. All three of us had gone on to higher education and it meant the world to him. The photos that took pride of place on the walls of the bungalow we were heading back to that day comprised a row of me and my brother and sister in our graduation gowns. ‘You had none of those opportunities and yet we all went to university because of what you did for us.’ My father was not prone to talking things through quietly – he was a man who liked an argument – but on this occasion he said, thoughtfully, ‘I suppose so, yes okay, maybe you’re right.’ I think of this conversation whenever I brag about my parents’ humble origins. Like many a middle-class child of working-class parents, it’s something I’m prone to doing when I feel embarrassed about how privileged my life is now (i.e. quite often). I thought about it in 2013, when I received a letter inviting me to prepare my entry for Who’s Who. My father’s own ancestors had been Romany Travellers on his mother’s side; his grandfather on his father’s side had grown up in a workhouse where he went by the name of Pauper 57. Back then, our family was not so much working class as underclass. When I received that letter, my father had been dead for eighteen months. Knowing how much social status had meant to him, I got a little moist and sentimental. ‘Look, Dad,’ I whispered to myself, ‘from Pauper 57 to Who’s Who in three generations.’ The lynchpin of this Dickensian-sounding elevation was my father and his determination that his children would, above all else, be educated. Education was the key to everything…

The following is Kit de Waal’s tantalising essay, ‘The Things We Ate’.

Broken biscuits from her factory bag with shards of dusty icing and a scratchy fight for the custard creams. Half a fig roll no one wanted. Toffee apples from her factory bag with sticky wooden sticks and brown paper stuck to the brown sugar, to the brown apple inside. Squashed potato crisps from her factory bag with little blue shakes of salt, split open and useless that we opened anyway like we’d bought them from new. White bread, old bread, West Indian bread with jewels of pork fat, soda bread from Nana’s Irish oven, brown bread at a posh girl’s house, mouldy bread with the mould cut out, butties, sarnies, toast, bread pudding black with treacle and sultanas, butter on the dry burnt crust. Sliceable, fry-able, pink and trembly Spam, steak and kidney pies cooked in a tin that opened with an exciting key. Tinned pork in seethrough jelly. Red, molten corned beef hash, sardines – skin, flesh and vertebrae and six pigs’ trotters in lemony water, the lungs of a chicken, the neck of a lamb. Ribs. Johnnie Cakes sweet as biscuits sopping up the saltfish juice. Leaden lumps of dumplings, rice and rice again and cold rice that turned to maggots in washing-up water, yam and sweet potato and Irish potato and old potato and baked potatoes, big as your face, their hot, leathery jackets full of beans and margarine. And chips! And chips! And chips! And red sauce when we had the money and vinegar when we didn’t. Our oven door left open for warmth and steam on the kitchen window and plates that never matched and spoons for everything and, once in a blue moon, blancmange and once a summer ice cream with Guinness but cake every Christmas. The meticulous division of a golden egg in April. Pains in your belly on a Sunday when the gravy ran off the plate. Pains from Monday to Friday when it didn’t. And Saturday’s cauldron of St. Kitts soup, dangerous bubbles, whole carrots, mysterious meat. And cocoa with sugar and unexpected, unaccountable heart-lifting chocolate shortbread biscuits after a winter’s night shift from a silent father who thought of his children on his long walk home. 10

Find Common People on page 109

DOING THE WORK THAT NOBODY ELSE WANTS TO DO Jon Bloomfield is a historian, urban policy specialist and advisor to the EUâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest climate change initiative, Climate KIC. For over a decade, he has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Below is an extract from his forthcoming book, Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham. Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham gives a human face to migration. I have interviewed fifty migrants to Birmingham from all walks of life: a mix of first and second generation; men and women; from Ireland to India, Pakistan to Poland, the Caribbean to Somalia. They have talked frankly and with humour about their experiences both at work and in society more generally. Their insights and anecdotes shape and flavour the book. Many will appreciate a progressive, readable book on migration as a counter to the negative stereotypes of the nationalist Right and the Daily Mail. The book is rooted in Birmingham but places migrantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; experiences in the wider context of similar developments taking place in other British and European towns and cities. It shows how we can go beyond multiculturalism; develop mixed, open neighbourhoods that blend new influences with old; and create the intercultural cities and towns that represent our common future. As the UK faces up to Brexit, this is an optimistic book for challenging times.

Doing the Work that Nobody Else Wants to Do Ashraf lives in one of a long line of red-brick, narrow-fronted terraced houses. Tall and slim, we sip tea in his living room, where the front door opens straight out onto the pavement. There is a row of streets here that stretch in parallel lines down to the main road that slices its way through inner-city Sparkbrook. This used to be the heart of manufacturing Birmingham. The former Birmingham Small Arms factory was based at the bottom of the road, which in turn became the main centre of motorcycle production in the UK. Those days are long gone, along with most of the indigenous white working class that used to live 11

in these Victorian terraces. Today, the owner-occupied houses are full of people originating from the Indian subcontinent and their children, along with more recent arrivals from Yemen and Somalia. A few Irish remain. Ashraf’s mother lives across the road from him, while two other brothers live further down the street. Ashraf’s parents came from the Mirpur area of Pakistan. His dad arrived in the 1960s and was employed as a steel worker in Sheffield and went back and forth to Pakistan. At the time lots of people were coming to the UK from Pakistan; many relocated because of the Mangla Dam, so his dad saw the chance to earn money and do better for his family. That was the reason for emigrating. He saved money on housing by living like many other migrants in shared accommodation. As soon as the night shift finished, they would swap beds with the day shift. Housesharing meant a lot of mattresses on the floor. In 1977 his mother got her visa and the family settled in Sparkbrook. His father got a job at the Fort Dunlop tyre plant, where his manufacturing career continued until he was made redundant in the mid-1980s. Ashraf was born in 1977 in Sparkbrook. He went to the local nursery, junior and secondary schools. His father died while he was still at school, and he and his eight siblings were brought up by his mother. Education wasn’t the priority at the time amongst kids his age unless the parents pushed you. His mother came from a rural, peasant background so there was no strong pressure on him to get on. He went to the local technical college but lasted only four months. The first generation of post-war migrants to Britain had played their part in Britain’s post-war manufacturing revival. Ashraf’s dad was one amongst many: he had worked in steel plants, foundries, brickworks and then a big tyre plant. The Thatcher era saw the wholesale demise of vast swathes of these manufacturing giants. From 1979 to 1984 Birmingham lost over 200,000 manufacturing jobs. The era of stable, steady, semiskilled manufacturing jobs in large plants and factories drew to a rapid close. Their sons and daughters either looked to the white-collar service sector for jobs, which usually required some examination qualifications, or else they applied for the 3D jobs: the dirty, the dull or the difficult, the type of jobs that nobody else was that keen on doing. There have always been low-paid and casual jobs in the economy. It is just that a more casualised, non-unionised, deregulated economy generates more of them. They are a growing feature of twenty-firstcentury Britain. Carers, cleaners, cooks; van drivers, delivery drivers, taxi drivers; fruit pickers and food processors; packers and shelf stackers; waiters and washer-uppers; security men, porters, warehouse 12

staff: many often working long hours, usually at the minimum wage, sometimes with irregular shift patterns and increasingly on zero-hours contracts. These jobs are rife within and around the Birmingham area. They require few qualifications, are relatively easy to access and often require only a short CV. In the city, 17 per cent of the working-age population have no formal qualifications, the highest figure of all English major cities and way above the national average. These are the types of jobs where many migrants are to be found, jostling with poorly qualified locals. The assured, steady manufacturing jobs of his father’s era are gone. Instead, Ashraf has had to find a series of 3D jobs in order to earn a living over the last twenty years. He started working as a labourer, followed by a stint as a lacquer sprayer. He did some packing where there was decent money, followed by security work at the Pallasades Shopping Centre in town. He then had seven years as a minicab driver, which he liked but ‘was very, very flexible’ on hours. A spell of unemployment followed. He now works as a delivery driver for Asda. It’s good. I enjoy it, being out, no one watching you. The wage isn’t brilliant, it’s about £7 an hour, but it’s about how comfortable you are in your job. If you don’t enjoy the work, it’s not worth it. As long as I can pay my mortgage and provide for my children, money doesn’t have a massive significance. I am not ever going to be a millionaire but I can support my family. I have regular hours and a set contract, which are two of the advantages of working for a larger, established company. His wife is careful with money; she’ll start looking for work soon, once their youngest is at school. In the future Ashraf would like to be self-employed again. He likes being independent, so he is looking to start a small business but he’ll start slowly and build it up.

Find Our City on page 100

DON’T HOLD MY HEAD DOWN Lucy-Anne Holmes talks to Imogen Denny about the inspiration behind her new book, and where her sex journey is leading to next . . . ID: You have successfully published several novels; what prompted this move to non-fiction? And can you tell me a bit about why you have written Don’t Hold My Head Down? LAH: I used to write romantic-comedy novels. I had written four of them over four years and then I had a bit of a break, where I ended up going on a bit of a sexual adventure and starting a campaign against Page 3. My agent at the time was keen to get me back in a book deal, so I was brainstorming fiction ideas one day, whilst on the train, off to talk about the No More Page 3 campaign somewhere. There I was trying to work out rom-com plots but this voice in my head kept whispering, ‘You know what you should write, the story of how you got to be here’: how I had basically found feminism by going on a sex journey. It had been such a life-changing period for me, at times hilarious and/or cringemaking, and at others frustrating or moving, but all of it had been so revelatory and beneficial that I wondered if other people might enjoy reading about it and also possibly take something useful from it. ID: Don’t Hold My Head Down is a tremendously evocative title, particularly for women. Did you know what you wanted to call it from the start? LAH: Yes, it has always been called Don’t Hold My Head Down. When I first started thinking about porn properly, rather than just watching it semi-regularly for masturbatory purposes, I found lots of pennies dropped for me and I would end up having little comedic rants with friends about it all. ‘And there is always a hand on a head!’ I would say: ‘If I am giving what is essentially a gift, I at least would like to come up for air should I so wish. Don’t hold my head down.’ ‘Don’t hold my head down’ became a bit of a mantra, and it felt fitting for the title. ID: One of the brilliant things about this book is your openness, your ability to be explicit and honest without it ever feeling crude. I know that was an important part of you writing this, but how did you find that process? 14

LAH: Oh, thank you! Well, to be honest it has been a funny old book to write. It has taken over five years in total and I took quite a pause in the writing when a lot of personal stuff happened, including the birth and early life of my son. When time freed up for me to begin writing again, I wasn’t sure I would go back to Don’t Hold My Head Down to be honest. I didn’t know whether I’d be more drawn to writing fiction again or even if I was done with writing and it was time for a new adventure. When I can, I do a morning writing practice where I sort of write down whatever is in my head (I got this from Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way) and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just see what comes out.’ Anyway, I started writing these morning pages and lo and behold it was all about sex again. I thought, ‘Oh blimey, this is the book that won’t go away, I’ll have to finish it.’ ID: I’ve never read anything else like this, I love the combination of memoir, manual and exploration. I’m curious to know if there are other books that inspired you, or did you have to forge your own way? LAH: No, I wasn’t inspired by one particular book, actually. I had never written a full-length non-fiction book before and I did struggle for what seemed like ages working out how to put it all together. Funnily enough, the book now reads as quite a linear story but that actually came later, after I’d written a first draft which was divided into different subjects. ID: If you could give women one piece of advice about their sex lives, what would it be? LAH: I definitely don’t have all the answers. But I know I found gold in being curious about my sex life and in asking myself questions about it. In doing this I not only opened up my sex life in some really great ways but I also learned about myself, and this self-knowledge has given me strength and an acceptance and love for myself that has made my life better in incalculable ways. ID: You mention some fascinating women in the book, from sexpert Annie Sprinkle to intimacy coach Betty Martin. Could you imagine your career moving in that direction? 15

LAH: Annie Sprinkle and Betty Martin are experts and legends in their fields; they taught me a lot and I was so glad to share their knowledge in Don’t Hold My Head Down. However, I am no sexpert or healer or teacher, I am someone who learned from her sex disasters and shared the stories in a book! However, it is funny that you ask this right now because I have done a few informal, I’m not sure what you could call them, workshops or circles perhaps, with women where we have just come together to have a little chat and look at the sexual area in our lives. I am struck by just how much women have been through in this area. We all have sex stories, so maybe I could create a space and opportunity for women to explore theirs. ID: You founded the successful No More Page 3 campaign in 2012. Do you think the British media’s attitude towards women has changed? Are there other issues you’d like to campaign about currently? LAH: I think society is changing its views on women at quite a rate. I’m not entirely sure the British media is keeping up to be honest. The Sun dropped Page 3 but still runs a Bust in Britain competition each year, the Daily Mail has a website which appears practically devoted to what women are wearing or not wearing. Two per cent of sport covered in British newspapers is women’s sport. All too often reporting blames female victims of violence, etc. So, it is still a bit crap. But yes, things are improving, and what was once considered normal is now being challenged. In terms of what I would campaign on, I am really interested in women’s role in a movement for peace, and how women can create a more peaceful world and how they can challenge male violence, which is so seemingly normalised. ID: What’s next on the horizon? LAH: Life is throwing up some lovely challenges. Being a mum, which I love, and also helping to home-school my step-daughter which is intense but wonderful. But in terms of writing it is all about fiction for me at the moment. I am gobbling it up, both reading and writing it. I am in a weird situation right now, in that I am in the early stages of two books that I am really enjoying. One is a thriller (very unlike me and what I have done before) which I am writing with my dad, and the other is a story about a couple. The only problem is that I like them both so much I am never sure which one to work on.

Find Don't Hold My Head Down on page 91

DECADES OF LEAD Venture deep into the mind of artist, designer and illustrator Pete Fowler as his thoughts, sketches, doodles and drafts are displayed for the very first time. Featuring some of Pete’s favourite drawings from the notebooks he’s amassed over three decades, Decades of Lead is a tribute to a lifetime’s work.

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THE FAMILY BUSINESS Craig Melvin is a restaurant consultant in London and Brighton. His novel The Belle Hotel is published by Unbound in February 2019. I was conceived in the linen cupboard of a grand Harrogate hotel and grew up above pubs and restaurants. It felt natural following my parents’ footsteps into the business. Mum was a head receptionist and Dad a hotel manager who started out as a bellboy. I made my first roux at catering college. Met one, too, and it changed my fortunes for ever: Albert Roux, fifty-something chef-patron founder, with his brother Michel, of Le Gavroche – a London legend even back then, holder of three Michelin stars and over a quarter of a century later still my favourite restaurant on the planet. I did my time as a kitchen slave, as a stagiaire chef in Switzerland, worked for Hilton International for a couple of years, then landed back in the nineties London of Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. I got gigs putting on high-end events with the big-name celeb chefs doing the food. Towards the end of that time I put on an event at Wellington Arch – ‘An Evening with Albert Roux’ – with Albert telling his story between courses, and Michel Roux Jr slaving over a hot stove sending out said courses.

My first day as an apprentice chef in Switzerland (1990)

Ten years ago, bored with that (okay, we had a recession) I turned my hand to writing, another craft to learn (a bit like cooking) and did an MA in creative writing. The book I began to write was the story of a dynasty of chefs, not unlike the Roux dynasty, set at a Brighton hotel over four decades. The book became a ‘foodie One Day’ according to The Big Book Group. My tutor on the MA said, ‘Write about what you know’ – that old chestnut – so I did! Funny thing was, writing The Belle Hotel – some of it is autobiographical, the Swiss stagiaire section for example – I fell in love with chefs and restaurants all over again. Researching and cooking the recipes for the book and reading all those celeb chef biographies made me realise how much I loved the business and missed it.

I set myself up as a pub and restaurant consultant and went out touting for business. Had the London restaurant scene changed since the Wild West of the nineties? Did the likes of Marco nick Gordon’s reservations book and set off the mother of all feuds? You bet they did. New chefs on the scene, same old nonsense. I got myself work as Gregg Wallace’s business consultant, we did a great gig at the Savoy, and I got a name for being the go-to guy for On a fag break with other stagiaires MasterChef winners. The good, the bad and later that summer the ugly. I worked with start-ups that went bust before they’d even fired up the gas and chains that started in greengrocers owned by blokes called Bill. I’ve helped roll out Thai, Indian, Spanish, Mexican, dirty burgers, craft beer and woodfired restaurant concepts in recent years. Some now high-street names you’ll have eaten at. Others, ahem, best forgotten. I love it – every hot-headed second of it. My editor suggested that maybe my fictional chef, Charlie Sheridan, wouldn’t go off on one quite so easily. This, after I’d just come off the phone from a venom-spitting MasterChef Professionals runner-up whose heavily-invested-in London restaurant wasn’t quite making target. Tone it down? Forget it! These fuckers are crazy, every single last one of them. And they have knives and fire, too. My advice: don’t go near them when they are angry. So, basically, don’t go near them. My son did work experience with me last week. We started at the Savoy, a planning meeting for an event with Gregg Wallace at Gordon Ramsay’s Savoy Grill. Guests will get to cook an Omelette Arnold Bennett and Gregg will judge the winner. I took him to my West End favourites – Rules, Big Easy, The Wolseley, then lunch at Maria’s Market Cafe in Borough Market, best greasy spoon in London. We spent the evening at a client of mine’s Hackney pub guzzling Gamma Ray ale with voodoo chicken wings. I wonder if my son’ll follow me into the business… Books or cooking, I don’t mind which.

Find The Belle Hotel on page 95

TEN POOLS WITH A VIEW Emma Pusill and Janet Wilkinson have created the practical, beautiful and inspiring Lido Guide, which lists information about all of the 120 publicly accessible open-air pools across the UK. They have only one thing in common – the open sky above them. Aside from that their individuality is remarkable. Some lie snug within a walled carapace, sheltered from everything that lurks in the real world. Some offer only tantalising glimpses, perhaps through mature trees, of the real world that so many swim to escape. And some make the most of the landscape that they are cut from, offering views that encourage swimmers to keep their heads firmly above water. These ten pools offer some of the best views to be had from the water. 1. LIDO PONTY Wales’ only lido stands in solitary splendour under the converging hills of the Rhondda, Cynon and Taf valleys. This pool lay derelict for years, forlornly collapsing on itself in the heart of Pontypridd, but its restoration is a triumph. The history of this fine old lido has been skilfully preserved, respected at every step. But modernity has been artfully brought to bear with indoor changing rooms, heated pools, and fountains. We guarantee you won’t have had enough of the view when you’ve finished your swim, so it’s a pleasure to be able to shower outdoors. Stand and stare, and soap.

2. CIRENCESTER Cirencester is a town so rich in warm stone, soft green planting, tastefully painted woodwork and history that to call it beautiful seems dismissive. How ever you approach this pool, which is tucked away off the road, you will be expecting great things. You cross a footbridge to enter, and the moment you round the corner through the gate you will be struck by the castellated stone building that dominates one side of the pool. It makes that footbridge feel like a drawbridge over a defended moat. The building is, in fact, former barracks standing sentinel over this friendly oasis in the middle of town.

3. ABBEY MEADOWS The bucolic Oxfordshire countryside is a balm for the soul. It rolls and tumbles away from the rivers that carve graceful, lazy arcs through its 26

heart. Abbey Meadows sits right on the riverbank. As you swim lengths in this spectacularly renovated, luxurious-feeling, all-purpose L-shaped pool, you’ll be tempted to admire nothing other than the quality of the finish. The deck level tank, laned for swimming, gives an intimate view of the river boats moored just beyond the boundary, and the swathes of green beyond.

4. ILKLEY The Yorkshire Dales is a landscape of impressive scale. It feels entirely fitting, therefore, that Ilkley lido is of an appropriate size. It is one of the largest sites we’ve come across, and whether you are immersed in the huge, unheated tank or spread out on the expansive areas of surrounding grass with a book and a cuppa, you can’t help but be bowled over by the Dales around you. On overcast days the clouds gather like bullies, kept at bay by the hills; on brilliant, clear, bright days the sky is a picnic blanket of blue.

5. CLEVEDON MARINE LAKE This Victorian tidal pool butts against the second-highest tidal range in the world. When the tide is out at Clevedon, the water recedes far enough to be pretty near invisible. The marine lake holds some back, and at 250-metres long there’s plenty to go around. At its seaward edge the water sits flush to the top of the sea wall, creating a giant infinity pool with views to the Victorian pier on the other side of the bay, and across the Bristol Channel to Wales. This is a view that changes dramatically with the seasons. Winter swimmers will be treated to the snow-capped peaks of South Wales, while summer swimmers will have every shade of blue and green conceivable.

6. HATHERSAGE The stone here has none of the coquettish warmth of its Cotswold cousin, but you know who you’d want on your side in a fight. Even its name, grit stone, speaks to its strength and edge. Outdoor pools are not what one expects to find in a landscape better known for birthing millstones, but in Hathersage you’ll find as fine an example as you could 27

hope for. The view, as you swim in this curiously elevated pool that seems suspended above the town, is ruled over by a coalition of rugged hills and a graceful Victorian bandstand just a few feet from the water. Good use is made of it for evening concerts so you can feast your ears, as well as your eyes, while you swim.

7. ARUNDEL If Cirencester’s former barracks lend the feel of a castle overlooking the pool, Arundel gives you the real deal. Fans of both castles and lidos, and let’s face it, who doesn’t love both of those things, need to have Arundel sitting firmly at the top of their ‘must swim’ list. The pool lies close to the centre of town, which makes the notion of swimming virtually in the shadow of a castle all the more fantastical. And this is a castle that would be right at home in a fairy tale. As you swim down the pool, the sight of the towers, turrets and battlements soaring over the trees won’t fail to lift the spirits.

8. TINSIDE Tinside is one of the grand old ladies of lidos. A vast, architectural delight sheltered beneath the Hoe and jutting out into Plymouth Sound, the view of the pool from above, as you approach, is spectacular. The semi-circle of brilliant blue stripes painted on the floor of the tank, reminiscent of a vintage deckchair, is cradled inside crisp, white rendered walls that keep the darker, brooding blue of the sea at bay. But this list is about views from the water, and in that respect Tinside is something of a surprise. The pool is hunkered down behind the sea walls that protect it, so you can’t actually see the sea while you swim. Rather perversely, for a pool that sits in its own promontory surrounded by ocean, the view to be savoured here is gained when you look back up at the Hoe. Let your eye drift upwards and you’ll see the red-and-white-striped Smeaton’s Tower, designed to serve as the third Eddystone lighthouse. It was dismantled and rebuilt on the Hoe when it was decommissioned, and it is visible, in its entirety, from the pool. 28

9. CLYST HYDON This pool is approached via a footpath through the trees, which opens out into a sheltered spot amongst the soft hills of the Devon countryside. The landscape holds this pool perfectly, like a well-formed puddle after summer rain. Every conceivable shade of green is visible from this pool and, unusually, it is the greenery that holds the eye rather than the blue of the water. The hills roll away from the pool, and cattle wander past. This view is as much a part of the serenity that characterises Clyst Hydon as is the off-the-beaten-track location. One leaves with a sense of having been transported back in time, to a simpler way of life that neither the pool nor the landscape it sits in are in any hurry to move on from. Long may that last.

10. CAMDEN OASIS You may think that an outdoor pool in the very heart of London is an odd choice for a list of pools boasting fine views. But urban views can be just as captivating as the coast or countryside. What makes Camden Oasis’s view stand out is two-fold. First, you simply don’t expect this pool to be here. It seems almost inconceivable that it could have survived in an area where real estate values are obscene, and the fact that it hasn’t been swallowed up by a developer is to be celebrated. The entrance from the street is unremarkable, and your first glimpse of the pool offers a wow-factor moment but it doesn’t prepare you for what being in this pool is like. The second remarkable thing about the view here is really only discernible once you get into the water. The pool is overlooked by functional, but not beautiful, flats; this is a blessing as they offer no distraction. You are not tempted to look at them so instead they draw your eye up to the sky. The effect, particularly if you float on your back awhile, is that a slice of town has been cut out and thrown away to make way for a pool. You feel as though you’re swimming at the bottom of a well, looking up at the distant blue of the sky framed by the hard edges of the buildings. You feel small, and humble, and grateful.

Find The Lido Guide on page 117

REDISCOVERING THE MAGIC OF CHRISTMAS MERRY MIDWINTER The celebration of midwinter is not about what you buy or how much Iyou – nor is it lamp found any one spiritual havespend the electric standard lit –inalso a candle (’cos I like or religious belief or practice. Instead, the winter solstice provides an them), but I’m thatwhat the batteries chargingshare; becauseto theset aside opportunity to thinking celebrate we asneed humans doesn’t seem verycome good. together Anyway, Ricky theofgenerator ourlight differences and withcan a start sense community and cheer. Merry Midwinter of ideas for how to when he comes, though as is he ais cornucopia working over-time he make your own decorations, alternative gifts, entertainment and saidsimple, he couldn’t be here before 8 p.m.from years gone by. games, as well as seasonal recipes Below, author Gillian Monks shares some of her favourite recipes and crafting how-tos for the Christmas season.

Solstice Sun Biscuits These sun-shaped biscuits are lovely to make and enjoy as part of your Winter Solstice celebrations. Gillian IngredIents:

12 oz (340 g) plain flour 7 oz (198 g) butter 7 oz (198 g) castor sugar Method:

• Rub butter into flour. • Add half the sugar and knead in with your hands. • Add other half of sugar and work in well with your hands. • Roll out to desired thickness – ¼" is good – and cut out with sun-shaped cutter, or a plain circular cutter if you don’t possess one. – 216 – 30

THE CELEBRATION OF MIDWINTER

• Paint with beaten white of egg and decorate with ‘eyes’ and smiling ‘mouths’ cut from lemon and orange jelly slices. Dust with castor sugar. • Bake on greased tray in a moderately hot oven for 10–12 minutes until golden. • Lift off and cool on wire cooling rack.

MERRY MIDWINTER

to Make a Kissing Ball AHow MODERN SOLSTICE CELEBRATION You wIll need:

We go out into the woods to be present with the sleeping Earth at this 2 metal coat hangers or 2 lengths of wire twisted together to darkest time. We take seasonal refreshments of yule log cake and flasks form 2 hoops of hot mulled wine – alcohol or fruit juices which have usually been made 2 lengths of tough string, thinner wire or coloured ribbon in the warmth of the young summer from fresh new oak leaves or mayLengths of ivy and thin whippy holly branches or longer sprigs blossom, sun-kissed blackcurrants or strawberries. Around a campfire of holly we gather to sit and to share our Midwinter memories and dreams for Strong dark cotton the coming year. There is laughter and story and joke telling and the Red ribbon singing of carols, and silence and stillness as we watch, wait and listen Coloured balls, real or synthetic fruits with all earthly life for the pivotal moment when the Sun is furthest from Mistletoe us, before it swings back in our direction again. Last Winter Solstice my family and I waited until mid-afternoon to Make:

before donning our warmest coats, hats, scarves and gloves and climb• Open the coat hangers out to form 2 metal hoops, or construct ing up the valley side above our home. On reaching a more sheltered from 2 lengths of wire, twisting ends together firmly. Placing spot we stopped and looked up at Mount Snowdon curled dreaming at one hoop inside the other, to form a sphere, firmly tie at top the head of the valley with all the misty grey mountain ridges rippling and bottom where two hoops briefly meet, using strong string, – 217 –The hoops should now form a lighter wire or coloured ribbon. rigid ball. • Begin winding round or tying young pliant branches of holly and ivy to the hoops until the metal is completely obscured. • Any decorations can be used to complete the ball, but the

MM_setting.indd 217

more natural the better. Fruits, real or synthetic, pomanders, seed heads of flowers sprayed with gold or silver or as they

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lighter wire or coloured ribbon. The hoops should now form a rigid ball. • Begin winding round or tying young pliant branches of holly and ivy to the hoops until the metal is completely obscured. • Any decorations can be used to complete the ball, but the more natural the better. Fruits, real or synthetic, pomanders, seed heads of flowers sprayed with gold or silver or as they come from the garden, ribbons – but always try to include some mistletoe!

EVERGREENERY

– 142 –

NOTE: You can make a kissing ball with more than 2 hoops – try using 3 or 4

hoops tied together and decorated in the same way for a really thick green ball. MERRY MIDWINTER MM_setting.indd 142

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IN MY CHILDHOOD the kissing ball hung from the centre of the living

Rum* Butter

room ceiling. This held a magic of its own. Greenery was wound or tied Filling small decorative jars and adding covers makes rum around two hoops to form a ball andpretty hunglabels withand specially tear-shaped very easy gift and to make forapples. friends and neighbours, buthung one which glitterbutter balls,a gilded nuts little From the centre the most is always welcomed and appreciated. important item, a bunch of mistletoe, its plump luminescent berries each a promise of a hearty kiss, a Gillian shy peck of surreptitiously daring presumption, or at the very least a warm cuddle! IngredIents: Mistletoe was the only thing that couldn’t be found on our own land, 1 lb (450 g) sugar much as we tried every way to propagate it, including putting it out for

lb (225 g)and fresh butter the ½ birds to eat drop the seeds in the trees or squashing the berries 1 small glass rum ourselves into the crooks of branches on likely hosts. A frenzied search Nutmeg and cinnamon to taste (a wee sprinkling of the local markets and greengrocery shops would of benutmeg, made until our ½ teaspoon cinnamon) coveted prize had been tracked down. Our part of the north-west of England was never blessed with an abundance of mistletoe, unlike some Method: other luckier parts of the country. • Beat the butter byour hand, beat in thenone sugar, thenbe the rum, and then Sometimes, despite endeavours, could found,

nutmeg andresort cinnamon. Puta into basin and smooth my mother would to using tiny one spriglarge of the vastly inferior plastic the top. variety. Apart from not looking or feeling right, one couldn’t remove a • with In Cumberland, a bowl of rum was always berry each kiss, denigrating anbutter important ritual prepared to mere licence. before the coming of a baby. It was offered to visitors a this Mummy told me that in years gone by, if a young lady was and refused

small piece was salutation, put in the baby’s first taste of with a affectionate seasonal then smouth he hadast its o be presented food. pair of earthly gloves instead!

• Beat the butter by hand, beat in the sugar, then the rum, the top. nutmeg and cinnamon. Put into one large basin and smooth • In Cumberland, a bowl of rum butter was always prepared the top.the coming of a baby. It was offered to visitors and a before • small In Cumberland, a bowl of rum butter wasasalways piece was put in the baby’s mouth its firstprepared taste of before the coming of a baby. It was offered to visitors and a earthly food. small piece was put in the baby’s mouth as its first taste of

NEW YEAR — THE TIME OF JANUS

earthly food. year, and sometimes carried on until after dusk. They would travel from house to house singing traditional rhymes to ‘let in’ the coming year and *

You can also make brandy butter in exactly the same way – simply substitute the

tospirit wishyou theuse. occupants health, wealth and happiness.

* You can also make brandy butter in – exactly 98 – the same way – simply substitute the spirit you use.

How to Make a Calenig – 98 – You wIll need: MM_setting.indd 98

An apple

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A red candle MM_setting.indd 98

3 cocktail sticks or wooden skewers

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Ears of wheat or corn, nuts (or substitute with grass seed heads or synthetic ears) Gold or silver (spray) paint – optional to Make:

• Make a hole in the top of the apple, slightly smaller than the candle, and gently push the candle down into it until the candle stands firmly. • Push the 3 cocktail sticks or skewers into the apple to form a tripod of legs (my mother and I always used cocktail sticks for ease, but they can be a bit insubstantial and inadequate if the apple or candle is large!). • Push ears of wheat or corn (or substitutes) into the flesh at the top of the apple. • Glue selection of plain or gilded nuts between the ears of corn and around the base of the candle. – 3132018 – Merry Midwinter is published in October

TURBANS AND TALES The turban is one of the most powerful symbols of Sikh identity and Turbans and Tales is a celebration of that identity. Historically, Sikhs were persecuted because of their turbans and unshorn hair, but today these are symbols of revolution, nonconformity and style. This book chronicles the journey of the Sikh Project, a photography programme created by acclaimed and awardwinning photography duo Amit and Naroop. Over a period of three years, the pair photographed a host of Sikhs all adapting and interpreting traditions in their own way. These portraits, which have been exhibited in London and New York, showcase the modern Sikh identity in all its beauty and diversity, with turbans that are unique to their wearer.

Waris Singh Ahluwalia, Actor and Designer Waris can be called a modern-day Renaissance man. Multi-talented, influential and charismatic, Waris is one of the most recognised Sikh faces of our times. As an actor, he has worked with some of Hollywood’s most notable film-makers and actors, including Wes Anderson, Spike Lee, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton and Denzel Washington. As a model, he has featured in campaigns for Gap, Gucci, The Kooples and Kenzo, among others. His company, HOUSE of WARIS, is an award-winning design studio dedicated to working with artisans around the world. To say he has his hands full is an understatement. Despite his fame, he was racially profiled for his turban and beard and was prohibited from boarding a flight in Mexico City in 2016. Instead of simply taking the boarding pass that he was offered for the next available flight, he remained in Mexico City until the airline publicly apologised and committed 34

to training its staff on all religious headgear. Waris knew that by accepting the boarding pass, he would be taking the easy road, letting the injustice slide, and someone else would eventually encounter the same discrimination he had faced. Waris chose to make a stand. The result was instant worldwide press and social media coverage on topics of fear and compassion. This act of defiance holds true with Warisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s belief that his turban represents his commitment to equality, justice and humanity.

Waris Singh

Ishprit Kaur, Nursing School Graduate ‘Is she a princess?’ was a question we were often asked as people observed the portrait of Ishprit Kaur at our New York City exhibition. Ishprit’s style immediately captivated us when she was presented as a potential subject for the project. She represents a new generation of Sikh women who are incorporating their turban in a contemporary way, while staying true to the symbolic values of what it represents. ‘I immediately felt empowered and regal,’ she recalls about first experiencing what a turban felt like on her head. And since 2009, it has stayed that way. A nursing school graduate, she was inspired by her mother to follow the same career path, a respected profession that her father said allowed her to earn both spiritually and financially.

Ishprit Kaur

Kanwar Singh, Project Coordinator at Khalsa Aid Charity / Kickboxer Kanwar Singh’s appearance immediately grabs you. You can’t help but want to know more about this man. The tattoos, the muscles, that penetrating look. But behind this confident, defiant exterior is a man whose identity has literally saved lives. A project coordinator for humanitarian aid charity Khalsa Aid, Kanwar travels around the world to help those living and suffering in life-threatening conditions. Over a cup of tea, Kanwar told us an unbelievable story of how his turban, which he describes as a limb, an extension of his body, acted as a beacon of safety, hope and opportunity: ‘I was with Khalsa Aid working in Greece. I was standing on the shoreline when I saw a raft in the distance. A Middle Eastern-looking man was waving frantically in my direction. The raft turned and headed right towards me. When the raft reached the shore, the Iraqi man, accompanied by a few other refugees, ran to me and shouted, “Sardar” (a title of nobility that was originally used to denote princes, noblemen and other aristocrats). He spoke in Punjabi as he’d lived in Pakistan for a while. He was being chased by smugglers at sea. But having seen my turban and knowing the values Sikhs stand for, he believed I could save him.’

Kanwar Singh Find Turbans and Tales on page 90

A GUIDE TO KILLING YOUR MONSTERS Writer and columnist Beth McColl writes about depression and mental health issues as someone who has experienced them first-hand, and she is here to tell you you’re not an oddity. You’re not a disappointment. You’re not a fuck-up, or a failure. How to Come Alive Again is her practical guide to accepting yourself, changing what doesn’t work, killing the worst of it and learning to live again. You’re the aubergine If an aubergine farmer was growing an aubergine and it wasn’t thriving – what do you think the aubergine farmer would do? Would he shout at the aubergine? Would he try to genetically engineer the aubergine to grow better? No. He’d look at the soil, he’d look at the environment, and he’d change what he needed to change so that the aubergine could thrive and flourish and be mad delicious. And you know © Charlotte McColl what… get this… YOU are the aubergine in this scenario. An incredible plot twist that nobody saw coming. You are the aubergine. Things in your environment are out of whack and perhaps you’re not getting the treatment and help that you need to be a truly good and happy aubergine, but this can change. Identifying the problems and then implementing changes and taking slow and deliberate action will make you into the better and happier aubergine that you’re desperate to be. This metaphor is falling to pieces, but you are not. You are okay.

* Templates for better days If you wake up early Try jumping straight out of bed. Trick yourself into thinking you’re the kind of person that jumps out of bed. Have a cup of something 40

hydrating. Water or a healthy juice or a hot herbal tea. Then have something to eat. Your body functions best when it is hydrated and fuelled. Turn off your phone (or place it far away on a high shelf) while you eat your breakfast and drink your hydrating drink. Focus on the tastes and sensations. Go for a walk. It’s a good way to start the day and getting your heart pumping will release endorphins. Endorphins are very tiny blood horses that gallop around your human body and make you feel all nice. Or something. Fuck it. Who knows? If you wake up very late Take a moment to breathe, and to repeat to yourself that no day is wasted and done until the very final minute. You have plenty of time to make today good. Your body wanted sleep and so it took it. There’s nothing to panic about now. If you feel groggy and fuzzy, then jump in the shower and be thorough about getting everything cleaned. Take deep breaths and let the steam and the water wake you up. Unless you’re meant to be officiating at a wedding or piloting a spaceship, then you’re good to take a few extra seconds in there. Don’t rush to catch up. If you’re able to, slow down and carefully do the things that you’ve missed. Have something small to eat, and a cup of tea or coffee, and think about your plan for the day. What can you do with the time left? What steps can you take to improve your mood and feel more in control of the day? If you wake up in a good mood Practise gratitude for this feeling. You’re a good person who deserves these good feelings and there are so many more good feelings ahead for you in life. With this in mind, get some breakfast and a cup of something warm and energising. The idea here is to keep the good feeling around for as long as possible, and so you need to nurture it with something tasty and full of vitamins (a very tiny and helpful kind of ghost found in certain foods and plants). If you wake up in a bad mood Practise patience and wilful endurance. You’re in a bad mood right now, you’re feeling bad, and badness is mostly all of what you can feel right now. In the face of that, you’re allowed to curl up and hide. You’re allowed to honour the shitty, terrible, miserable feeling in your heart. 41

You don’t fail when you honour your emotions. So admit that feeling to yourself. You feel bad. But also admit that you’re still able to do things on bad days. Bad days are difficult, but they aren’t impossible. They just require more patience and a bit of grit and determination. If you can leave the house Try to do something useful for future-you, like get a food shop in, or run a couple of errands – return parcels, take money to the bank, buy cards and stamps for upcoming birthdays. Take a walk. It doesn’t need to be a walk to anywhere in particular or for any particular purpose. Just try to enjoy the air and the sky and the feeling of the ground under your feet and the deliberate forward motion. Choose a new route, or an old favourite route, and just go. Walking for walking’s sake is always worthwhile. If you can’t leave the house Commit now to at least trying to do some very basic things today. These things might include brushing your hair, cleaning your teeth, making your bed, opening a window, catching up on a little bit of work or replying to at least four emails. No saving the world or leaping through burning hoops, today. No, sir. Those things can wait. What today is asking of you is that you try and that you do one or two things to exist above the gulf of deep, endless misery. Today is asking for no more than that. Try to be somewhere outside of your bed and your bedroom – even just for an hour or two. Set up shop in the kitchen or the living room. Staying in one room is likely to make you feel even worse than you’re already feeling.

Find How to Come Alive Again on page 102

REEL LOVE In a quiet corner of England, a young boy visits the cinema for the first time. Overwhelmed by the experience, he returns to see a movie that will ignite his imagination, fill his head with fantasy and change the course of his life. Below is an extract from Owen Michael Johnsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Reel Love, a beautifully observed story about the magic of cinema and the pains of growing up.

Find Reel Love on page 89

SIX WAYS TO CHANGE YOUR MEDIA DIET Author of You Are What You Read Jodie Jackson shares her advice for how we can change the way we consume the news – and in the process improve both our well-being and the state of the world. We are all familiar with the saying ‘you are what you eat’, a simple but effective phrase that has made us increasingly aware of the impact that food has on our physical health. Well, food is to the body what information is to the mind. The information that we ingest will turn into emotions, thoughts, actions and behaviour. The consequences are less visible but just as powerful. The news is one of the most influential and negative streams of information we inescapably consume. Watching it affects our mood, our beliefs, our understanding of the world, our relationship to other people and our politics – but its impact remains largely unquestioned by us, the consumers. It is time we turn the investigative lens on the news industry to expose the well-researched effects of the negativity bias in the news on our mental health and on the health of our democracy and our society. Below are my top six recommendations for the most effective ways to change your media diet today. 1. Become a Conscious Consumer: Industries that have gone through their own consumer-driven evolution all have one thing in common: they rely on a conscious consumer. And a critical requirement for us to become conscious about our consumption is education. Once we are educated about the helpful and harmful effects of the news, it becomes clear why we should change our media diet; it then becomes much easier to follow how to change. 2. Read/Watch Good-Quality Journalism: Quality journalism relies on expertise, fact-checking, investigation, time and resources. However, in our fast-paced media environment, stories are decided based on their traffic potential, revenue potential and turnaround time – with editorial quality ranking at the bottom of the list. This is largely explained by news organisations’ aggressive competition to race to the top of search engines by producing a huge amount of content. With this in mind, I would recommend we slow down: read slower 51

journalism from magazine-style news organisations such as Delayed Gratification, The Economist, Time, The Week and The Spectator. 3. Burst Your Filter Bubble: In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that a staggering 67 per cent of people in the US receive their news through social media. But social media feeds us a tailored information stream of content we like; we are presented with a version of reality that has been selected and edited to suit our own personal outlook. This creates an information bubble that helps reinforce our existing beliefs, rather than challenging us to think differently and learn new perspectives. We need to burst this bubble and actively seek out news rather than passively accepting only what is put in front of us. It is important that we pick our sources of news carefully and deliberately to create knowledge, balance, context, awareness and hope. 4. Be Prepared to Pay for Content: There is no such thing as a free lunch. If we are not paying for the content we read, someone else is. And news organisations will ultimately answer to whoever is paying the bills. More often than not this is advertisers and corporations who will have huge influence over content. But before we lay the blame at the door of news organisations, we must accept that we cannot have a free and independent press if we are not willing to pay for the content and enable them to truly become independent. 5. Become a Constructive Contributor: In our modern-day media environment, we are all publishers of information that will filter though someone elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s information stream. By sharing content, we can help our followers find the constructive news we are reading. Let us be responsible and thoughtful in the way we engage online, and remain accountable for our content. 6. Read Beyond the News: The final piece of advice I have for all those wishing to change their media diet, and in so doing change the media itself, is this: read more than just the news. Thomas Jefferson said, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; In our information age, news organisations are not the only ones we can turn to for education on world issues. It is possible to educate yourself through books, documentaries, and other organisations or institutions that you learn to trust, not just because they speak to your values and ideals but because they challenge them also. 52

Find You Are What You Read on page 103

DIP INTO ONE OF ALICE JOLLY’S GLORIOUS NOVELS . . .

‘I would place it among the classics of this century and the last’ Sally Bayley, author of Girl With Dove

Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her memoir Dead Babies and Seaside Towns (Unbound, 2015) won the PEN Ackerley Prize 2016. Her two earlier novels, What the Eye Doesn’t See and If Only You Knew, have been reissued by Unbound. Between the Regions of Kindness is published 18 April 2019. Her articles have been published in the Guardian, Mail on Sunday and the Independent, and she has broadcast for Radio 4. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Find Between the Regions of Kindness on page 107

D. H. LAWRENCE WAS MY GRANDDAD: A CONFESSION Tom Cox considers his first foray into fiction after seventeen years writing non-fiction. His collection of ghost stories, Help the Witch, will be published 18 October 2018. At a spoken word event I did in Tiverton, Devon, in a lovely shop called Liznojan Books, an independently run mother-and-daughter outlet with delicious cake, I was asked two questions which I’ve given a fair bit of thought in the intervening hours: one question that I’d been asked a few times before, and one I definitely hadn’t. The first question was: ‘Have you ever thought of doing stand-up?’ and the second was: ‘Is it true that your granddad was D. H. Lawrence?’ The answer to both was ‘No’, but I can’t promise that it always will be. We are all in a constant state of change. I don’t have any impulse to do stand-up comedy right now, but maybe I will, one day. At the moment, D. H. Lawrence is not my granddad. But perhaps he might be, at some point. Sometimes trying out a story on a crowd and listening to their reaction enabled me to pinpoint moments that people found especially poignant or funny Around three years ago, at a point when I was changing quite a lot about my writing life, I decided to take a different approach to the talks I do in support of my books – make them less centred around readings and instead memorise stories about my life, either those already in print or those that had happened more recently, and retell them without a book in my hand. I’d noticed that even when I was listening to a live reading by an author I loved, I had a tendency to drift off a bit. I’m sure people used to do the same at mine. The Q&A sessions at my events had often been the liveliest bits and I realised that I had an ability to turn an answer to a question into an entire story in itself: a talent that I no doubt get from my dad, whose stories always segue into other stories, and only actually end when somebody finally interrupts him or he falls asleep. I liked challenging myself to turn up for talks with very little idea of what I was going to talk about, and seeing where it went. Sometimes trying out a story on a crowd and listening to their reaction enabled me to pinpoint moments that people found especially poignant or funny, and I altered a sentence accordingly. Once or 54

twice, this happened after the horse had bolted, such as with this passage from my last book, 21st-Century Yokel, where my dad is talking – in an archetypally loud way – about the fox hunt near his house in Nottinghamshire: ‘THEY’RE COMING OVER THE BACK FIELDS BY HERE IN A MINUTE. JO! GET THE CAT IN! HE’S ORANGE. THEY MIGHT MISTAKE HIM FOR A FOX.’ When I recite this at my events, audiences have already started laughing after the word ‘ORANGE’. I now leave out the subsequent sentence. My dad did say that final sentence, but I could quite easily have left it out of the book, as it constitutes an over-explanation, when the joke has already hit home. I would have known this, had I told the story live before I wrote the book. My granddad isn’t D. H. Lawrence. The numbers just don’t add up I find that I’m never nervous at my talks nowadays, unless there are close friends or family in attendance. I enjoy making people laugh and I’m relaxed and intermittently – particularly during the bits featuring my dad – quite loud and sweary. But I think my advantage is that I’m an author talking about my book and when people come to see authors talk about their books they’re generally prepared for something a bit more sedate and serious. Were I to start presenting myself as ‘comedy’, I’d put the pressure on, set the bar too high. I also try to keep everything in perspective. I’ve surprised myself by how much I like public speaking, but ultimately I’m a writer, not a talker. For the last six months I’ve been hard at work on my debut fiction collection, Help the Witch: a quieter kind of writing that possibly lends itself less to spoken word than my previous work. I have written nine books before this one, all non-fiction, which seems like a long time to be in deferral, when you have always been so in love with fiction. I’ve 55

really been dragging my feet. But maybe that’s more to do with the pressure of my granddad being D. H. Lawrence. People don’t realise how hard it is to have a literary legacy like that in your family and I have felt the weight of it like an anvil tied to my ankle for many, many years.

My granddad isn’t D. H. Lawrence. The numbers just don’t add up, for a start. D. H. Lawrence died in 1930. Which means he would have had to have sired my dad or my mum before that, which means they would be at least around ninety now, and my dad would have been about eighty when he ran the London Marathon in a superhero costume of his own invention. It’s all possible, just about, but unlikely. One of my granddads, Tom, died before I was born, but only two years before I was born, not forty-five. The other wasn’t D. H. Lawrence; he was Ted, who worked in a women’s underwear factory and enthused infectiously about compost. I think I understand how the lady who thought my granddad was D. H. Lawrence might have got the wrong end of the stick. In the last chapter of 21st-Century Yokel I wrote about my granddad Ted’s life on the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border, and the way the ghost of D. H. Lawrence seemed to haunt our family in various eerily coincidental ways for a ten-year spell beginning around 1988. At all times during this chapter I made it clear that D. H. Lawrence wasn’t my granddad. The lady who thought my granddad was D. H. Lawrence might have been told about the chapter, skimread it, and got her information garbled. Whatever the case, she admitted that she’d since spread the word to several other people that my granddad was D. H. Lawrence. I don’t think that this could become a widespread belief, barring the vastly unlikely prospect of an information apocalypse in a century or so where very little information about me and D. H. Lawrence survives, and the even more unlikely prospect that anyone gives half a fuck about who my granddad was by that point. Help the Witch is my darkest book, my least comic book, but it’s also my most playful 56

But I also think it’s an illustration of how sceptical we should be about the stuff living people tell each other about other living people, and dead people. I think it’s also an illustration of why I have always trusted fiction so much, viewed it as no less ‘true’ than non-fiction, believed in its function as telling lies in the service of a greater truth. While I wrote my nine non-fiction books, around 90 per cent of my reading comprised novels or short stories. Once, during a radio interview about my first book, the DJ admitted he’d in fact thought it was a work of fiction, which – in a meta sort of way – just happened to have a narrator with the same name as mine. I perhaps should have been flattered, but I was horrified. If I’d have been permitted to write the book as fiction, I’d have made it loads better than this! I thought. Fiction was by far the greater art form and always would be, and because of this, when I finally did it, hopefully in about three years, my fiction would be superior to my non-fiction. In view of this, having now finally sent Help the Witch off to my publisher, fifteen years after the DJ’s misunderstanding, I might be expected to feel more euphoric about finally completing my first work outside of the parameters of non-fiction. I also understand why I don’t. 21st-Century Yokel was a book of fairly epic size which had a teething period of truly epic proportions: all sorts of people in the publishing industry told me for years that nobody would be interested in such an odd and ‘brandless’ and ‘journeyless’ book; I lost 23,000 words of it in a data disaster and had to start the whole thing all over again, then finished it in less than a year, and knew that – whatever it was, in the grand scheme of things – it was better than anything I’d written before. For a bigger feeling than that, I think I would have probably needed to write a lengthy novel, which, despite a certain amount of yearning to do so, I chose not to do, just now. Help the Witch is a shorter book, half the length of 21st-Century Yokel. It’s a collection of unsettling stories, some of which might have ghosts in them: a winter book, being published in time for Samhain. I was a huge fan of the Fighting Fantasy books as a kid, where you rolled the dice to find out what happened next, and I like to think there’s a not entirely dissimilar ‘choose your own adventure’ aspect to these stories as well: there’s quite a lot of space in them, not a lot of answers. Room for the reader to write their own narrative, in addition to the one I have written for them. This was a hugely exciting book for me to be able to write. When you’ve been writing in your own real-life voice – even if only often as a way 57

to talk about more universal experiences – for seventeen years, it’s a vast relief to be able to embody other characters, think in the way you think they might think, explore their lives. I found it very freeing. The title story is the one most in debt to my own life, and takes a lot of inspiration from my time living in the Peak District last winter, on top of a spooky mountain: a foolish decision in terms of my own mental health, sleep patterns and bank account, but a positive one if viewed solely in terms of my own writing. The narrator goes through several of the same experiences I went through and, like me, is somewhat addicted to crisps. But he’s very unlike me in several other ways: he’s an academic, who isn’t really very into firewood, hails from Sussex, and has just had his heart very severely broken. This was perhaps a risk, because after reading it some people are probably going to wonder if I am actually an academic from Sussex who has recently had my heart broken, possibly by some girl who only went out with me because my granddad is D. H. Lawrence. But instinct told me that a first-person diary would lead to the strongest story. Elsewhere I’ve experimented with form much more. There are tiny stories, long stories, a story almost told in the form of property listings, a story told in oral histories, a few journeys far into the future, and a couple of nips into the distant past. Help the Witch was originally just a working title conjured out of thin rainy air when I had two hours to think of one before the book went up for funding, but it turned out to be more relevant than I ever could have imagined: I think it hints aptly at something running through the stories, quite deep down, like the seam that ran under the house where I lived in the Peak District from the old mine at the top of the hill. Help the Witch is my darkest book, my least comic book, but it’s also my most playful. I think it’s very apt that most of it was conceived in a terrifying, almost certainly haunted house in a snowy wilderness at the height of winter, but its final few pages were written in baking sunlight on a beach in Devon, after a mile of salty swimming in water whose temperature hadn’t quite caught up with the weather. I am in debt to that disturbing house, despite all the trouble it caused me, and I am in debt to all the long walks I’ve been on in remote, ominous places over the last decade, and I’m in debt to the inexplicable incidents that have happened to me in my life, and keep me wavering back and forth over the line marked ‘Supernatural Sceptic’. The book would have been markedly different without all these factors. 58

Two other things had a significant impact on Help the Witch’s character. One of the excellent aspects of writing a book of ghost stories is that when you tell people this, they invariably have one of their own to share, whether they’re a believer or not. One of these – told to me by my friend Jecca and her mum Cathy, on the cusp of winter, in the ghost-packed city of Norwich – brought me out in an icy rash of goose pimples and was the genesis of one of the longest stories in Help the Witch, so thank you, Cathy and Jecca. I owe you each a pint of Adnams. I also think this book was – much like 21st-Century Yokel – massively impacted by that decision I made three years ago to change my writing life, giving up journalism, writing on this website, for myself, and using a non-traditional publisher. I approached these stories more loosely because of that. That decision – to step away from the media, from the extra reach and recognition it can bring to a writer – has been hard at times but I think it’s resulted in a second book in a row that’s exactly what I intended it to be, albeit one that’s smaller and weirder than its predecessor. I spent so many years beating myself up for not completing a work of fiction that now I’ve actually done it, I’m finding the feeling of not beating myself up any more extremely disorientating. It’s not quite how I expected it to be. I always thought when I finally wrote fiction, that would be it: I’d stick to it forever, because it’s the purer art form. Now I don’t feel so unequivocal. I’ve loved writing fiction and it’s given me a taste for something bigger in that area, but I’m reading more non-fiction than ever and I’ve shown myself recently that non-fiction can be more fun than I ever used to imagine it to be. I’m hugely looking forward to both of them being a big part of my future. Help the Witch is published in October 2018

GLORIOUS SUBURBIA Andy Miller looks beyond suburbia’s soulless reputation to argue that is is where most of us come from; it’s the place we return to every night after work or where our parents still live; and it has spawned great literature. ‘This is the tale of an Avenue in a suburb and of some of the people who lived in that Avenue … About the time the story starts the word “suburban” was beginning to acquire the meaning it has today. It is never said without a sneer or a hint of patronage. This is curious, for three-quarters of our population continue to reside in suburbs of one sort or another; they are not unlike other folk, and quite capable of extending their dreams beyond the realms of the 8:25 out and the 5:48 in. They dream, in fact, as consistently, and as extravagantly as anyone else’ R. F. Delderfield, The Dreaming Suburb (1958) ‘You look at Croydon and no one ever breaks out from the crowd’ Stormzy (2015) I seem to have spent much of my life explaining Croydon, a thankless task for which I have rarely received thanks; a Sisyphean one too. No matter how many times I stand up for the much-loathed borough someone will tell me to sit down. Usually I can shoulder the boulder as far as Upper Norwood but then it rolls all the way back to Purley and I have to start again. The name Croydon is thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon croeas deanas, meaning ‘the valley of the crocuses’, like you give a shit. When my book The Year of Reading Dangerously was, for reasons no one involved can now recall, published in America, my editor at Harper Perennial asked me to make a handful of transatlantic substitutions and clarifications – ‘dumpster’ for ‘skip’; ‘stroller’ for ‘pushchair’; Hancock, the 1961 BBC television sitcom starring Tony Hancock not to be confused with Hancock, the 2008 superhero action comedy-drama film starring Will Smith; and so on. In the book I described my childhood passion for reading and how, growing up in the area, Croydon’s bookshops and libraries were very important to me and set me on the path in life I have followed to this day; the publisher duly requested a new footnote interpreting Croydon for the benefit of American readers. Here’s what I wrote: 60

‘For US readers, Croydon is a suburb of south London, synonymous with much that is perceived to be drab and depressing about British suburbia. In 1999, the rock star David Bowie said in an interview, “It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from. I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about something or someone: ‘God, it’s so fucking Croydon!’.” As will become apparent in this section, this is not a view I share with Mr “Stardust” [sic], who grew up not on the planet Mars, as he would have you believe, but in the neighbouring suburb of Bromley.’ I’m sure this footnote claiming Bowie was suffering from Croydon envy left many American readers none the wiser – which, in one respect at least, was editorially consistent with the rest of the book. Suburbia is where most of us come from; it’s the place we return to every night after work or where our parents still live. In America, a succession of writers has chronicled the suburban existence: Richard Yates, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Celeste Ng and more. Yet when suburbia features in British fiction, if it features at all, it is usually as somewhere that isn’t the countryside and isn’t the city, a location which only exists to be escaped from. There are still surprisingly few novels content to dwell in the places many of us are content to dwell. In Britain, the suburbs are always small-minded, bourgeois, suffocating. This is a literary convention which stretches back to the nineteenth century, dealt with humorously in the Grossmiths’s Diary of a Nobody and more sternly elsewhere. As gleefully detailed by John Carey in his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses, several generations of writers and artists, from E. M. Forster and H. G. Wells to modernists such as Virginia Woolf or T. S. Eliot, even George Orwell, were horrified by the swarming middle classes, jumped-up clerks and opinionated shop workers with ideas above their station, building nasty red-brick villas on the meadows and pastures of their youth. They pursued this topic at length in their essays, novels and poetry, notes Carey, in a manner sufficiently obscure to prevent such ghastly plebs being able to understand it. As I wrote in The Year of Reading Dangerously, ‘How they loathed us, with our little patch of garden, our packed commuter trains, our despicable, belching crematoria – even when we die, they must suck our greasy ashes into their plutocratic lungs.’ These people are, for the most part, unsung, even though they represent the greater part of Britain’s population 61

But that was then. I have before me the new novel by a gentleman it would be fair and accurate to describe as a pillar of the British literary establishment. The protagonist of this novel is a journalist (and frustrated novelist) who lives in Haringey and works for the books pages of a broadsheet newspaper. After the death of his pal Rob, a well-regarded poet, he is required to visit Rob’s widow Jill at their house in ‘a place in Kent called Hadingfield’, an hour-long train ride from Charing Cross: ‘Semi-Land, [Rob] called it, “because everyone’s half dead”.’ Good one, Rob. ‘Only when pressed,’ reveals the narrator, ‘did he admit that he and Jill would have more space, a garden, some peace and quiet.’ Our hero makes the hour-long journey from Charing Cross to provincial Kent and, whilst walking from Hadingfield station to his late friend’s house, notes his impressions: ‘I shouldn’t have found the neighbourhood surprising, but its blandness shocked me all the same: the net curtains, toytown roof tiles, neat front gardens, glossy front doors. VOTE CONSERVATIVE posters decorated a couple of bow windows, whether as gloating reminders of the last general election result or as early campaigning for next month’s local council elections. Towards the end of the street a woman emerged from her house, an automatic smile on her face as she went through her exit sequence: the five beeps on the alarm keypad in her hallway; the slam of the front door; the click of her heels down the garden path; the clack of the gate latch; the uck-thuck of the car doors unlocking as she thumbed her ignition key… These were the sounds Rob had lived among – not silent fields punctuated by tractor-grind or bass-thuds from an inner-city flat, but a suburban in-between.’ Of course one should not confuse the words and sentiments of a character in a novel with those of the novel’s author. If I were to say this writer can get to fuck with his uck-thuck, you would know I was referring to the former and not the latter. But this contemporary take on suburbia, articulated by a major literary establishment figure via a (fictionalised) minor one, is almost generic in its dismissiveness – uck-thuck and bass-thuds aside, it could have been written at any time in the last one hundred years. Compare that paragraph with the author’s note with which R. F. Delderfield introduces his 1958 novel The Dreaming Suburb, the setting of which is more or less identical to that sketched above. 62

‘Manor Park Avenue is not any particular Avenue, and neither are the Carvers, Friths, Frasers or Cleggs any particular families, residing in or around this area. They might be people of any south London suburb; indeed, their lives throughout the period 1919–40 might be the lives of any suburban dwellers, on the outskirts on any large city in Britain. These people are, for the most part, unsung, even though they represent the greater part of Britain’s population. The story of the countrydwellers, and the city sophisticates, has been told often enough; it is time somebody spoke of the suburbs, for therein, I have sometimes felt, lies the history of our race.’ The concept of suburbia looms large in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whose hero is the embodiment of the displaced suburban Englishman, condemned to roam the universe in search of a decent cup of tea Delderfield wrote these words sixty years ago, but how much has really changed since then? Between the tractor-grind of nature writing and the bass-thud of cutting-edge fiction, who has documented – without prejudice – the places most people live? Julian Barnes’s latest novel, The Only Story, shares a suburban setting with his first, Metroland, published in 1980. Writing in the Guardian, Barnes explained why he was drawn back, somewhat ambivalently, to ‘leafy, neutral, unaggressive outer suburbia’: ‘To adapt Larkin: something, like nothing, happens anywhere … the twenty-ish protagonist [of The Only Story] itches to escape from what he judges a place of spiritual torpor. But it is also a place, as he discovers, where something as well as nothing may happen … I like this idea of a pale background wash, against which the rich colours of emotional action can show up more dramatically. Somewhat ruefully, I have to admit that – for me as a writer – suburbia is my kind of place.’ Barnes has been quick to inform the reader – to reassure her, perhaps – that ‘Metroland’ itself is ‘a kind of fake place. The name, an act of branding, was thought up by property developers and railway companies as the underground network expanded … So it was a non-place full of non-traditions, where – appropriately enough – the predominant architectural style was mock Tudor.’ I know they’re dreadful, he seems to be saying, but don’t worry, my interest in such 63

places is strictly artistic. In this he is squarely in the literary tradition identified by Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses; where he differs from E. M., T. S., H. G. et al. is his willingness to allow that ‘fake places’ need not breed fake people, and that inhabitants of Norbiton and Northwood can have access to the same rich inner lives as those of Hackney and Highgate. Mind you, it has been AN ENTIRE CENTURY. In her remarkable 2005 novel Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel shares Barnes’s ambivalence to the sprawl of suburbia, in this case the M25 corridor and its choked slip roads, out-of-town carpet warehouses and ‘green fields of the Home Counties shredded by JCBs’; in fact, she goes further, identifying it as a zone of malevolence and unease. But where Barnes sees suburbia as ‘a pale background wash’, Mantel’s narrative exults in its eye-catching fixtures, fittings and food: ‘The Fig & Pheasant, under a more dignified name, had once been a coaching inn, and its frontage was still spattered with the exudates of a narrow, busy A-road … It offered the novelty of baked potatoes wrapped in foil with butter or sour cream, and a choice of cod or haddock in breadcrumbs, accompanied by salad or greyish and lukewarm peas … There was a Junior Menu of pasta shapes and fish bites, and tiny sausages like the finger that the witch tested for plumpness. There were dusty ruched curtains and vaguely William Morris wallpaper, washable but not proof against kids wiping their hands down it, just as they did at home. In the sports bar, where smoking was banned, the ceiling was falsely yellowed, to simulate years of tobacco poisoning; it had been done thirty years ago, and no one saw reason to interfere with it.’ This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the carvery aesthetic. But neither is it untrue. What I like about Beyond Black is Mantel’s willingness to accept and engage with this landscape, to inhabit it rather than stand back from it, which is partly why the novel is so unusual. In fact what I like about Beyond Black is that Mantel is writing about these places at all; few others have done. In this period, perhaps only Nicola Barker, in her novels set in the Isle of Sheppey, Canvey Island and Ashford in Kent – Wide Open (1998), Behindlings (2001) and Darkmans (2007), respectively – was doing something similar. As the narrator of Patrick Keiller’s contemporaneous film Robinson in Space (1997) says, quoting the geographer Doreen Massey, ‘… amid the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace … most people still live in places like Harlesden or West Brom.’ 64

One of the UK’s most prolific visionaries when it came to hyperspace, world cities, skyscraper fortresses, etc., was of course the writer J. G. Ballard. Famously, Ballard lived in a semi-detached house in suburban Shepperton from 1960 until his death in 2009. ‘Actually, the suburbs are far more sinister places than most city dwellers imagine,’ he once said. ‘Their very blandness forces the imagination into new areas.’ Ballardians like to think their Brahmin sat cross-legged at the centre of what he once called the ‘gigantic boredom’ in much the same spirit of subversion that inspired his work; the ‘Seer of Shepperton’, as he became known. In reality, as he told the Sunday Express in 1987, ‘It was really only because of the children that I settled here. And that wasn’t boring; that was the biggest experience of my life … They were wonderfully happy years and I would gladly do it all over again.’ Like Rob the dead poet, even a Seer requires ‘more space, a garden, some peace and quiet’; and like Barnes, Ballard acknowledges that something, like nothing, happens anywhere. Which didn’t prevent him referring to the residents of suburbia as ‘dormant people … docile cattle’ in his novel Kingdom Come (2006), though presumably he didn’t do this to their faces – e.g. when borrowing a neighbour’s lawnmower. I know that berating the literary community for its collective failure to appreciate the appeal of Harvester restaurants and mock-Tudor semis, along with all the people who live in mock-Tudor semis and enjoy Harvester restaurants, can make one sound like David Brent critiquing John Betjeman’s poem ‘Slough’ in an episode of The Office. But the thing about Brent is that he is in a British sitcom lineage that stretches from Hancock in Hancock’s Half Hour to Martin Bryce in Ever Decreasing Circles and even Alan Partridge: the suburban nonentity with ideas above his or her station. And the literary forefather of this comic archetype is, of course, Charles Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. So I would like to draw your attention to a handful of books that treat British suburbia, and the people who live there, fairly – or at least, not unfairly. John Grindrod’s Outskirts (2017) undertakes a survey of the green belt from his perspective as someone who ‘grew up on the last road in London’ – i.e. the housing estate of New Addington. ‘I’ve always had a sense of having lived a life at the outskirts of both town and country,’ he writes, ‘on the dotted line between both and belonging to neither.’ 65

Grindrod mixes personal reminiscence, social history and political comment to sketch both a place and a state of mind. Like Lynsey Hanley’s memoir Estates (2007), Outskirts is a postcard sent from a destination where few writers seem to wish you, or they, were – and is all the more valuable for that. It was in Outskirts I first came across R. C. Sherriff’s novel Greengates. Sherriff is best known as the author of Journey’s End, the play based on his experiences as an officer during the First World War. But he was also a successful novelist; in books such as The Fortnight in September (1931), Greengates (1936) and The Hopkins Manuscript (1939) his subject was, in part, the life of the lower-middle classes in the still-new suburbs of south London. John Grindrod describes the plot of Greengates as ‘so slight as to be almost invisible: the tale of an elderly couple leaving inner London for a new house in a modern estate much like Croxley Green’. (Similarly, the plot of the earlier Fortnight in September may be summarised as: family of four quits Dulwich for two weeks’ holiday in Bognor Regis; comes home.) What distinguishes Sherriff’s account of these people is, unlike many other writers of the period, he likes them. All his work is suffused with a rare generosity of spirit. As historian Juliet Gardner observes in her introduction to the Persephone Books reissue of Greengates, ‘Sherriff excelled as the acute miniaturist and profound observer of human foibles and frailties that readers will recall from The Fortnight in September … It established his reputation as a sharp and perceptive chronicler of lives that, despite their undramatic domestic banalities, often reveal greater truths than might initially appear.’ It should further be noted that Greengates was published by the left-leaning Victor Gollancz in 1936, the same year he issued George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, another good novel about society, class and money but one with no generosity of spirit whatsoever. (As an aside, Sherriff’s progress to literary pre-eminence must have had contemporaries like E. M. Forster throwing up their hands in horror. He was the son of an insurance clerk and was educated at a grammar school. After the war he joined the Sun Insurance Company in London, where he worked as an insurance adjuster for a decade, commuting in every day from Esher. After the success of Journey’s End in 1929, Sherriff did something remarkable: aged thirty-three, he resigned from his job, and 66

from 1931 to 1934 he studied English Literature at New College, Oxford, where he subsequently (1937) founded a scholarship. In this period he also wrote screenplays, contributing to some of the most famous and successful films of the era: The Invisible Man (1933), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Mrs Miniver (1942) and more. ‘He never married, and remained devoted to his mother, with whom he lived, latterly at his Esher house “Rosebriars’’,’ notes one biographer, demurely.) R. F. Delderfield’s ‘Avenue’ saga (The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War, both 1958) will not be to all tastes and some readers may confuse the strong interweaving narrative with the soap operas they probably don’t watch because they don’t have TVs, or if they do have TVs, utilise them only to view Netflix and box sets. But these novels unite Delderfield’s strengths as a writer: good prose and vivid characterisation against a backdrop of historical events, plus empathy for ‘the Pirettas, the Cleggs, the Carvers, the Frasers and the Friths, respectively, of Numbers Two, Four, Twenty, Twenty-two, and Seventeen’. Both in this regard and as social documentary, they are practically unique; an R. C. Sherriff with the benefit of hindsight. As one critic noted on publication: ‘An acute, ironically endowed novelist has filled [the Avenue] with really fresh observation, genuine people; has worked with surprising range and made nobody, weak-headed spinster or girl adventuress, boy profiteer or jazz maniac, in the least a type.’ The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War deserve to be reappraised in the way books such as Norman Collins’s London Belongs to Me, Roland Camberton’s Scamp or Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife have been in recent years. There are two reasons why a rehabilitation of this sort probably won’t happen, however. The first is that, being texts of the suburbs rather than the city, they will never capture the critical imagination of Iain Sinclair. The second reason is that Delderfield is the epitome of the post-war ‘middlebrow’ novelist. His work is in the narrative-led, social realist and morbidly unfashionable tradition of writers such as J. B. Priestley, Dorothy Whipple or G. K. Chesterton (although it should be noted Whipple’s reputation has been restored in recent years by Persephone Books). Middlebrow, middleclass, middle England, the ‘suburban in-between’; the similarity of these labels isn’t a coincidence. The concept of suburbia looms large in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams, whose hero Arthur Dent is the 67

embodiment of the displaced suburban Englishman, condemned to roam the universe in search of a decent cup of tea. In Hitchhiker’s the Earth itself is a suburb, ‘situated far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy’ and ‘mostly harmless’, which is why no one cares very much when it is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, except of course all the people who liked living there. At the end of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), it is revealed that the reason Earth is/was so suburban is that many millennia in the past, the planet was accidentally populated by the passengers of a crashed spaceship, a ‘B Ark’, from the planet Golgafrincham. There are so many untold stories, so many undocumented lives in the avenues and new estates, so much experience waiting to be tapped and so many people who have never seen themselves in the mirror of fiction Those in charge on Golgafrincham wished to rid themselves of all the useless middlemen cluttering up the place – i.e. their suburban middle class – so they invented a story that the planet was doomed to extinction and that the entire population was to be evacuated in three giant Ark ships: politicians, scientists and high achievers in the ‘A Ark’, and useful people who actually made things and did things in the ‘C Ark’. Into the ‘B Ark’, meanwhile, went all the account executives, insurance salesmen, public relations executives, telephone sanitisers and so on; and it was this ship that was dispatched first and crashlanded on Earth. Adams gets a lot of good gags out of imagining the dystopia of a planet run by sub-committees of personnel officers, tired TV executives and hairdressers, but he also makes the point that there is, in fact, such a thing as society: having tricked their ‘useless’ bourgeoisie into leaving, Golgafrincham’s upper and working classes ‘stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone’. A trio of novels from the 1980s and 90s is worth noting. The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), by Bromley’s Hanif Kureishi, is probably the most celebrated depiction of suburban life in this period, in fiction at any rate; it won the Whitbread First Novel award and was subsequently adapted for a BBC TV series, with a soundtrack by David Bowie 68

(Bromley’s infamous old boy network in action). But the novel, great though it is, reprises the literary trope of defining suburbia as little more than ‘a leaving place’: it is London where things happen and people are truly alive. Shena Mackay’s Redhill Rococo (1986) is as distinctive and spiky as all her work; she never quite looks where you think she’s going to. On this occasion, her gaze falls on the Surrey dormitory town of Redhill in the early 1980s; the accelerating grottiness of the commuter belt under Thatcherism is captured here for posterity. But for me the best novel of this era is The Queen of the Tambourine (1991) by Jane Gardam, published a year after The Buddha of Suburbia and also winner of a Whitbread Award, though few seem to remember this now. It is a deeply melancholy and extremely funny book, one which is structured as a series of letters from a suburban housewife who may, or may not, be losing her mind, partly as a result of living in the place she does. It is also quite beautifully written: ‘Nothing has happened. Nothing but long grey days. I stand in the window a great deal. Nothing has happened since the razzle-dazzle of Oxford, the interesting anthropological behaviour of the Creative Writing Class, except rain. Rain and rain. Soft and soaking. Deeply seeping. Whispering night and day, all our lawns of Surrey green as Ireland and we in Rathbone Road as grey as ghosts. I stand watching the rain and contemplating the silence of God.’ As stylists, Gardam and Mackay are unlikely to be mistaken for one another. In other ways, however, there are definite similarities in their outlooks. In fact, both can be likened to writers such as Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym: not just as elegant, witty chroniclers of ‘small lives’ [sic] played out in ‘undramatic’ [sic] domestic settings, but also as female authors who were critically marginalised in their own lifetimes for writing about such things and such people. Historically, ‘middlebrow’ writing – that loaded term again – has often been derided as excessively ‘feminine’; and, as we have seen, ‘middlebrow’ fiction is often considered the suburbia of the literary world: too neat, too conservative, to encompass passion or intellect. In this respect publishers such as The Dorothy Project and the aforementioned Persephone Books represent not just feminist enterprises but classconscious ones too. This is why the latter company can happily publish R. C. Sherriff alongside Dorothy Whipple and a host of other neglected authors, the majority of whom are female. 69

(The story of the rediscovery of both Pym and her work in the 1970s is well known. As for Taylor, her biographer Nicola Beauman records the following incident that took place during judging for the 1971 Booker Prize, for which Taylor’s exquisite Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont had been shortlisted: ‘The chairman of the judges was John Gross and the largest part of the budget for the prize was spent on bringing Saul Bellow over from the States. From the start he behaved rather overbearingly (the other judges had to hear about his irritation that his room at the Ritz did not overlook the park) and he began the first meeting by saying about Mrs Palfrey, “I seem to hear the tinkle of teacups.”’) One might have expected a new millennium, and a different generation of British writers with a different experience of the suburbs, to have produced some significant new voices on the subject. But in 2009, the author and critic Stuart Evers wrote a blog post for the Guardian in which he expressed bafflement at suburbia’s continuing absence from British fiction: ‘When English literary novels do venture outside the greater London confines … where they rarely seem to alight is at the well-tended hedges of suburbia; a situation I find both strange and surprising. Why are British novelists so reluctant to take it on?’ In his post, Evers namechecks Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (2006) and Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency (2008), alongside Gwendoline Riley’s work and also Charles Chadwick’s It’s All Right Now (2005), to which I would add Beyond Black, Barker’s Thames Gateway trilogy and The Rotters’ Club (2001) by Jonathan Coe. However, if it’s the voice of the millennial suburban teenager you’re after, look no further than Niven Govinden’s terrific Graffiti My Soul (2006) and its narrator Veerapen Prendrapen, ‘the only kosher Tamil in Surrey’. Veerapen and his teenage mates get into fights, party, hang around the precinct on their bikes and, crucially, don’t escape to London: ‘I’m a good boy really, but I won’t lie about it; I like the street violence around here. It’s probably one of the reasons I’ll never move out of Surrey.’ But for me, the greatest novel of the suburbs, one which brings together many of the strands I have been talking about in this essay, is The Death of Reginald Perrin (1975) by David Nobbs (subsequently republished as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin): ‘The train was eleven minutes late, due to signal failure at Vauxhall. Reggie dragged his reluctant legs along Station Road, up the snicket, up Wordsworth Drive, turned right into Tennyson Avenue, then left into Coleridge Close. It was quiet on the Poets’ Estate. 70

The white gates barred all vulgar and irrelevant traffic. The air smelt of hot roads. Reggie marches his battle-weary body up the garden path, roses to left of him, roses to right of him, shining white house in front of him. House martins were feeding their first brood under the eaves…’ Pleasingly, The Death of Reginald Perrin was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, the same company responsible for Greengates and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. As a novelist, Nobbs shares Sherriff’s generosity of spirit but he also has Mantel’s eye for suburban detail, accepting it for what it is with the sharpest of wits. The novel is the story of one commuter’s nervous breakdown and its effect on his wife, his family and his colleagues at work. Like Gardam’s The Queen of the Tambourine it is both surprisingly bleak and extremely funny – when Nobbs adapted it for the TV series starring Leonard Rossiter, he largely ditched the former element whilst retaining the latter in full, viewing them, correctly, as two different entities with different aims. In the novel, Nobbs treats his suburban characters not as Ballard’s ‘dormant people’ or ‘docile cattle’ – though famously Reggie does see his mother-in-law as a hippopotamus – but as human beings whose lives are as rich and sad and hilarious as anyone else’s; the world Nobbs describes in the novel may have changed dramatically over the last forty years but human nature has not. The prose stands comparison with any of his literary contemporaries: he was a wonderful writer. And, predictably enough, when Nobbs died in 2015, his career as a novelist was largely overlooked by the book world, notable exceptions being Jonathan Coe, Joanne Harris and Irvine Welsh. He was just too funny, and he wrote about suburbia, the place most people live. Meanwhile the wait for new voices from the suburbs goes on. I would like to think that right now, a young writer from Carshalton or Bexleyheath or Hornchurch or Potters Bar or Harmondsworth or Feltham or Oxshott is working on the first novel ever to be set in any of these places. There are so many untold stories out there, so many undocumented lives in the avenues and new estates, so much experience waiting to be tapped and so many people who have never seen themselves in the mirror of fiction. Isn’t it about time they had their turn? This essay previously appeared on Unbound.com/Boundless. 71

WEST OF WEST West of West is a photographic exploration of the edge of America, from acclaimed photographer Sarah Lee and Guardian journalist Laura Barton. They travel to the end of Route 66 to find out what the American West means in an age of political turbulence.

Find West of West on page 119

DONALD TRUMP AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT Ed Davey is the author of Given Half a Chance, which looks at ten ways to address the issues faced by our environment. Here he takes a look at the impact of Trump’s presidency. When I started writing my book, Given Half a Chance, it was 2016: President Obama was in power, the Paris Climate Accord had recently been agreed, and the future looked (I thought) fairly rosy. Yes, the challenges were massive; but the world had woken up to them and was beginning to take the situation seriously. The spirit of the book was avowedly optimistic: the international community was engaged in an unprecedented effort to achieve a better world for people and the planet. A ‘restored earth’, as I imagined it to be, was possible. In January 2017, a fortnight or so before Trump’s inauguration, I had the good fortune to interview Sir David Attenborough for the book. He said the world needed to focus on three overarching challenges: renewable energy; population growth; and making cities more sustainable. On renewables, he spoke eloquently about Mission Innovation, a global effort to invest in renewable technology. Sir David had played a role in convincing President Obama to sign the US up to Mission Innovation in the run-up to the Paris talks in 2015. ‘Paris is a good agreement’, he said, ‘if Trump sticks to it: we will see.’ The Trump Administration has been in cahoots with the fossil fuel lobby and other polluting industries to roll back as many of the gains made at the federal level in the Obama era as they possibly can A few weeks passed, Trump was inaugurated, and then all my worst imaginings came to pass: Trump appointed the arch climate sceptic Scott Pruitt as head of the US’s influential Environmental Protection Agency, and then announced on 1 June 2017 that he wished to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. In the months that followed, Pruitt led a concerted pushback on as many as seventy-six environmental rules. Whether on air pollution and emissions, drilling and infrastructure, extraction and planning, animal welfare, toxic substances and safety, or water pollution, the Trump Administration has been in cahoots with the fossil fuel lobby and other polluting industries to roll 76

back as many of the gains made at the federal level in the Obama era as they possibly can. Oil and gas companies now no longer need to report methane emissions; nearly all of the US’s coastal waters are now open to offshore oil and gas drilling; and a ban on the hunting of wildlife predators in Alaskan wildlife refuges has been overturned. And while the US has not yet officially left the Paris Agreement, it cannot until the end of 2020, the Trump announcement certainly casts a shadow over the global climate effort at a time when we do not have a moment to lose. But we must not lose hope. Across the US, Sir David Attenborough and Ed Davey hundreds of cities, companies, universities, faith groups and civil society actors have come together to demonstrate their ongoing commitment, in defiance of Trump, to positive climate and environmental action. According to the coalitions ‘America’s Pledge’ and ‘We Are Still In’, 2,700 leaders representing 159 million people and $6.2 trillion in GDP have stepped up. US carbon emissions continue to fall, while clean energy now employs 790,000 workers in the US, of which 350,000 are in the wind and solar energy sectors. A number of US states – from Tennessee to Virginia, California to Ohio – continue to close coal power stations at a rapid rate, contrary to Trump’s statements on coal, while others are defending their climate policies in court, pushing back against federal attempts to remove emissions standards on cars and trucks. Some eighty-four cities and counties in the US have committed to going 100 per cent renewable. What is true of the US is true for the rest of the world. Despite political unrest, social upheaval, conflict and division – and notwithstanding the recent months of seemingly unprecedented and tragic forest fires, burgeoning temperatures and Arctic melting – a quiet and unspoken renaissance is underway. Millions of people are working to bring about a better future based on climate action. We need to pay attention to Sir David Attenborough’s wise words and focus on doing everything we can to ensure the protection and restoration of our precious natural environment, sustainable cities and reduced waste. Trump will not derail us; nor can he. The future is still bright, if we can but seize it. Find Given Half a Chance on page 105

SEX DRIVE: ON THE ROAD TO A PLEASURE REVOLUTION Novelist, journalist and broadcaster Stephanie Theobald on her journey to healing through self-pleasure and why the #metoo movement just got some more fuel in its tank. Coming back to London in 2015, having spent time in America researching a memoir on female masturbation, was never going to be easy. At parties, I’d have to make snap decisions when people asked what my new book was about. If they looked cool, I’d say, ‘Masturbation.’ Otherwise I’d just go, ‘It’s about female pleasure and desire,’ although even that seemed to make a lot of hands freeze over canapé trays. I’d started the year in New York at a ‘masturbation masterclass’ thrown by eighty-five-year-old 1970s rock-and-roll feminist Betty Dodson. I’d arrived in the city with a broken body and a breaking relationship, but by the end of an incredible weekend I’d learned that self-pleasure is not a second-rate activity but the foundation of female sexuality. Inspired, I set out on a road trip through the heart of countercultural America, hoping to meet more of these fantastic sex sages. And I did. There was 1970s porn-star-turned-ecosexual Annie Sprinkle, and twentyseven-year-old hotshot Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe. There was the high priestess of an alien pleasure cult, an Andy Warhol Superstar and the African-American former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. Elders was fired by President Clinton in 1994 in the midst of the AIDS crisis for daring to say that masturbation should be talked about in schools. During every night of my 3,497-mile journey, I would indulge in solosex ‘homework’. Yet as auto-eroticism started to bring me back to life, it spilled over into a desire for sex for two. And more. By the time I reached San Francisco, my motto had become: ‘Say Yes to Everything.’ At its core, Sex Drive is about coming to terms with the end of a relationship, the death of a former lover, my health. By the end of my journey it struck me that spirituality and sexuality are not necessarily different things. That if you spend enough time getting intimate with your own body, self-pleasure becomes a form of meditation, a way of going back to the basics of who you really are. I learned that you can re-charge your life force, and that what 78

Jean-Jacques Rousseau termed ‘the dangerous supplement’ can work as the ultimate self-care medicine. Three years ago, it was hard trying to convey this message to women back in England who’d been dealing with more pressing issues such as how to avoid having your boss leering at your cleavage, and numerous other micro- and macro-irritations. When that stuff becomes the norm, it can sap your energy without you even realising any more. Stephanie Theobald with

Betty Dodson And then the walls came tumbling down. Who knew, in October 2017, that an overweight movie mogul would trigger something that is starting to feel like a turbo-charged feminist revolution take two. The #metoo movement has had positive ramifications for women in a whole range of industries, changing sensibilities and ways of treating women that have been considered acceptable until now. Frances McDormand made international headlines in her 2018 Oscar speech when she demanded gender parity in one of the biggest and most male-dominated industries: movies.

But you can only get so far in changing the world by employing lawyers and appealing to open-minded studio bosses. The question is: what now for #metoo? Where do we go from here? Well, my answer is: the female body. Because if you can’t access the power of your own body then you’re never going to experience true freedom, liberation or equality. The actress Jessica Biel, for instance, has formed her own website to raise what she calls women’s ‘sexual health IQ’. She said, ‘I realised I just don’t know so many things about my own body. How do we not know these things? It’s crazy!’ She’s right. Until a couple of years ago, we knew more about the Dead Sea Scrolls than we did about the full dimensions of the clitoris. But change is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. Women have been conditioned to have closed sexuality and open feelings, and men to have open sexuality and closed feelings – and that’s all up for grabs now. You’re welcome to come along for the Sex Drive ride, but I feel confident enough to say that you don’t have to. It’s a bit like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future when he starts playing heavy metal at the 1950s prom: ‘I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet,’ he says. ‘But your kids are going to love it.’ Sex Drive is published in October 2018 79

RUTH AND MARTIN’S ALBUM CLUB The concept behind Ruth and Martin’s Album Club is simple: make people listen to a classic album they’ve never heard. Make them listen to it two more times. Get them to explain why they never bothered with it before. Then ask them to review it. Below is Ian Rankin’s first experience of Madonna’s eponymous debut album. Madonna by Madonna

First-time listener – Ian Rankin Ian Rankin writes the Inspector Rebus novels. He says they are international bestsellers, which may explain how he manages to spend so much money in bars and record shops. Ian’s top three albums ever? VERY DIFFICULT THIS. But right now, on this very day: Solid Air – John Martyn Let It Bleed – The Rolling Stones Unknown Pleasures – Joy Division So, over to you, Ian. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU????? Madonna was one month shy of her twenty-fifth birthday when her first album came out – which makes her seem a late-starter compared to today’s fresh-faced batch of pop star wannabes. Me? I was twenty-three in 1983, and things weren’t exactly working out. I know this because I used to keep a fairly accurate diary. The day Madonna was released into the world (27 July) saw me in a job at a tax office in Edinburgh, earning the princely sum of fifty-three quid a week net. It was over a year since I’d graduated (Upper Second Class Honours, thanks for asking) and I was living in a bedsit in Arden Street, Marchmont. I had applied for funding to do a PhD but had recently taken receipt of the rejection letter. I was getting pretty used to those, as they were arriving thick and fast for the short stories I was sending out into the cold, heartless bastard of a UK media world. Friends kept moving away – one was about to head to London and a job with a £6,500 p.a. salary, not that I was obsessed with money, you understand. I was applying for jobs anywhere that would pay better than the tax office, cycling home of an evening to open the official-looking letters 80

telling me to jog the fuck on. And the bike itself (bought for twenty-five quid second-hand) was playing up. There’s no indication in my diary that I was listening to much music at that time. The only LP I bought in July was The Beatles 67–70. I’d stopped watching Top of the Pops and didn’t buy singles. At high school, I’d moved between prog and the likes of Status Quo and Alex Harvey. Then punk came along and by university (1978–82) I was into the more industrial and gothy stuff – Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle (I was a fan club member), The Cure and Bauhaus. Throughout, there had been David Bowie and Eno, The Rolling Stones and John Martyn. But disco? Disco? Just as Charlie didn’t surf, Ian didn’t dance, not since those sweaty schooldays with the constant fear of rejection as you approached the girl seated the other side of the assembly hall. And if she did deign to accompany me for three minutes of Sweet or Mud or The Rubettes or The Osmonds… Oh, the horror. The horror. For the fact of the matter is, I danced like an ungainly banshee, really throwing myself into it. Eventually I would notice my partner backing away from the flailing limbs and flapping bell-bottoms. Probably not getting a snog later then, I would think to myself, not for the first time. Punk, when it came along, was OK. In fact, it was great. I could pogo, robot and dying-fly with the best of them. But discos and nightclubs would almost never see me darken their dimly lit doorways, unless they were hosting a pal’s birthday or wedding. I did have a few disco twelve-inch singles in my collection – Chic and Donna Summer maybe, stuff with good production values and interesting arrangements. But that was about it. And as a twenty-three-year-old, I had left bubblegum pop music behind long ago. No reason then why I would have known about Madonna, certainly not until ‘Like a Virgin’ or the film Desperately Seeking Susan (which I did see with my 81

girlfriend in 1985). But in July 1983 I wasn’t in the mood for getting into any groove or enjoying good times on anything fans of Madonna might classify as a holiday – though I did manage a wet week in Ireland. But put away that tiny violin, dear reader, for my situation was about to improve markedly. On 16 August a call from the Scotsman newspaper informed me that I’d won second prize in their short-story contest. My prize was a Sinclair Spectrum computer and paid publication in their weekend supplement. And a further month later, the Scottish Education Department had a change of heart. I’d be going back to uni after all – with three years’ funding to do a PhD. So I could chuck in the tax office and wipe my arse on the job applications. But was I cheered up enough to warrant a saunter on to the dance floor? Nah, I’d still have been murder. You’ve now listened to it at least three times; what do you think? She would go on to better things – we all know that. She would reinvent herself, devour different influences, and become something altogether bigger than the music she made. But would you know it from this first outing? Very doubtful, I’d say. If I’d heard this in 1983, I would have dismissed it as a lightweight outing by someone with a tinny voice and not enough ideas, someone who might manage a couple of hits before disappearing off the radar. ‘Insipid’ is one word I’ve used in my scrawled notes. Maybe the sterile early-eighties production has a lot to do with it. All those synths and simplistic electronic beats. The wakka-wakka guitars and twanged basses. Yes, I suppose I can imagine people dancing to it after a few too many drinks. Yes, I can see how the numbingly unimaginative lyrics and rhymes might speak to those just out of puberty. ‘Starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight … You may be my lucky star, but I’m the luckiest by far.’ If you say so, missus, but it’s hardly the most revolutionary opening to one of the great careers in pop culture. She sounds like a pert enough pixie throughout, though she was probably a full decade older than many of her immediate or soon-to-be fans. Cruelly, the version of the album available to me on Spotify is a reissue of some description, which may explain how ‘Borderline’ comes to be elongated to seven minutes, with one of those tedious fills in the middle, the kind that bedevilled ‘extended mixes’ and ‘DJ versions’ of the era. Remember that four-minute song you liked? Then try an added three minutes of half-arsed post-production, usually involving even more motorik drum machine and the odd thwock on a bass string. By the time you leave the dance floor, your hair will be plastered to your face and 82

your clothes will need wringing out – a look guaranteed to endear you to the opposite sex. And the thing is, ‘Borderline’ is one of the better tunes here. It has a proper hook, one you don’t mind being attached to. But it leads on to ‘Burning Up’ and various other vanilla showcases for a voice that has the subtle allure of a cheese-grater. And the words… words about needing to be adored, about needing your infatuation to be reciprocated, about the devastation of rejection. Appealing, perhaps, to that teenage audience. OK, maybe even to folk in their twenties. But I’m fifty-five now and just find it tedious. The songs start to resemble photostories from Jackie magazine and its ilk, with interchangeable characters and emotions. As soon as you hear her sing the word ‘attraction’, you know that ‘reaction’ and ‘satisfaction’ can’t be far behind. ‘These tears I cry for you are so hopeless.’ Well, cheer up then and let’s go for that cheap package break in the sun, because: ‘It’s time for the good times, Forget about the bad times…’ Leonard Cohen, she ain’t. She feels pre-programmed and prepackaged, which again may have something to do with the arid, inorganic studio methods and mechanisms of the age. It doesn’t sound to me like music to be played in your bedroom when a few chums have dropped round. It sounds… disposable. That Madonna herself was to prove anything but disposable is hugely to her credit. She would make very good records and high-calibre videos. She would act, set the fashion world on fire, be the name behind a book called Sex, give as good as she got in interviews and – eventually – become one of those artists you watched out for, because whatever she’d done now, it wouldn’t be boring, even if she ended up flat on her matador arse. I get that. I just don’t get it from this first album. ‘Let the DJ shake you. Let the music take you.’ Thanks for the offer, Madge, but I think I’ll sit this one out. Would you listen to it again? I’d rather not. I found much of the experience quite painful. A mark out of 10? 3 (but 7.5 for everything she did afterwards).

Find Ruth and Martin’s Album Club on page 111

NEW TITLES SPRING 2019

January

CULL

TANVIR BUSH A sharp and outrageous satire for our times about the deadly dark side of discrimination Alex has a problem. Categorized as one of the disabled, dolescrounging underclass, she is finding it hard to make ends meet. When in her part-time placement at the local newspaper she stumbles onto a troubling link between the disappearance of several homeless people, the government’s new Care and Protect Act, and the Grassybanks Residential Home for the disabled, elderly and vulnerable, she knows she has to investigate further… but at what cost to herself and her guide dog Chris? ‘With wit, flair and imagination, Bush unfolds the secret life of a nation on benefits’ Fay Weldon ‘This all too believable novel is an inheritor of the satirical genius of Britannia Hospital and A Clockwork Orange’ Maggie Gee

Title: Pub Date: Format: ISBN: Price: Rights:

Cull 24/01/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-592-8 £8.99 World English/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Dr Tanvir Bush is a novelist, photographer and film-maker. Her feature documentary Choka! – Get Lost! was nominated for the Pare Lorenz Award for social activism in film in 2001, and her first novel, Witch Girl, was published in 2015. She is an associate lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University. She is based in Wiltshire with her guide dog Grace. 86

January

MIDLAND JAMES FLINT

A tale of two families torn apart by the hidden debts of love, from the award-winning novelist James Flint One day, on his way back from a meeting, investment banker Alex Wold finds himself standing up to his waist in the Thames trying to guide a lost bottlenose whale back out to sea. Later, as he’s watching the continued rescue attempt on the news, his mother calls to tell him that Tony Nolan – her exhusband and wealthy neighbour – has died of a sudden heart attack. As the Wolds and the Nolans all head back to Warwickshire for Tony’s funeral both families are forced to take a difficult journey into the past. Midland is a devastating exploration of what binds families together, and what tears them apart.

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Midland 24/01/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-595-9 £8.99 UK & C/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1968, James Flint is the internationally acclaimed author of three novels: Habitus, 52 Ways to Magic America and The Book of Ash. In 2002, his short story ‘The Nuclear Train’ was adapted for Channel 4, while his journalism has appeared in The Times, the Guardian and Dazed & Confused among others. @jamesflint 87

January

OH, I DO LIKE TO BE . . . MARIE PHILLIPS

A reworking of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, from the author of the international bestseller Gods Behaving Badly To B&B or not to B&B? That is the question. Shakespeare clone and would-be playwright Billy has just arrived in an English seaside town with his sister Sally, who was cloned from a hair found on the back of a bus seat. All Billy wants is a cheap B&B, an ice cream and a huge hit in the West End. Little does he know that their fellow clones Bill and Sal are also residents of this town. Things are about to get confusing – cue professional rivalry, marital discord and a family reunion like no other. ‘Funny, super-smart, clever and ridiculous’ Richard Osman ‘A screwball comedy of highconcept errors’ Laline Paull, author of The Bees

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Oh, I Do Like To Be . . . 24/01/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-675-8 £8.99 UK & C ex Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Marie Phillips is the author of the international bestseller Gods Behaving Badly and The Table of Less Valued Knights, which was longlisted for the Baileys Prize. With Robert Hudson, she wrote the BBC Radio 4 series Warhorses of Letters and Some Hay in a Manger. Under the name Vanessa Parody, she co-wrote Fifty Shelves of Grey. @mpphillips 88

January

REEL LOVE

The Complete Collection

OWEN MICHAEL JOHNSON A beautifully observed story about the magic of cinema and the pains of growing up, from the critically acclaimed author of Beast Wagon In a quiet corner of England, a young boy visits the cinema for the first time, igniting his imagination, filling his head with fantasy and changing the course of his life. In adolescence, working part-time as an usher at his local cinema, he befriends the motley crew of cinephile staff, falls in love, finds his tribe and fantasises about his film-filled future. The final act sees that same boy as a grown man, back in his hometown after life panned out in a slightly unexpected way. When an opportunity to break into the film world presents itself, he sets out again to make his magnum opus…

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Reel Love 24/01/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-733-5 £14.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Owen Michael Johnson is a two-time British Comic Award-nominated writer and artist from the Lake District. A graduate of Royal Holloway University of London’s creative writing program, he has marketed comics for Titan Comics and 2000 AD and currently resides in Oxford. @owen_johnson 89

January

TURBANS AND TALES

Portraits of Contemporary Sikh Identity AMIT AMIN AND NAROOP JHOOTI

A stylish book of portraits celebrating the diversity of modern Sikh identity, based on an internationally acclaimed photography exhibition The turban is undoubtedly the most powerful and recognisable symbol of Sikh identity: worn for centuries by kings and holy men in South Asia, it took on a revolutionary meaning with the birth of Sikhism, and today it continues to signify nonconformity and style. Turbans and Tales chronicles the Sikh Project, a photography programme created by the awardwinning duo Amit and Naroop. Over a period of four years, they sought out individuals – men, women and children – with inspiring stories to tell, as well as a unique approach to wearing their traditional articles of faith. The portraits, which have been exhibited in London and New York, showcase the modern Sikh identity in all its beauty and diversity.

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Turbans and Tales 24/01/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-612-3 £25.00 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHY Born and raised in west London, photography duo Amit Amin and Naroop Jhooti developed their distinctive visual style in the music industry. Since then, their portfolio has expanded to include portraits of Tinie Tempah, Ricky Gervais, 50 Cent and Riz Ahmed, along with campaigns for Barclays, Samsung and MTV. @amitandnaroop 90

February

DON’T HOLD MY HEAD DOWN In search of some brilliant fucking LUCY-ANNE HOLMES

A frank and revealing memoir about the search for better sex, from ‘No More Page 3’ campaigner Lucy-Anne Holmes Don’t Hold My Head Down starts with the author having a disappointing, drunken wank to internet porn, and ends with her having day-long orgasms and taking on the most powerful newspaper in the country. In her mid-thirties, Lucy-Anne Holmes realised that something was missing. When it came to sex she still felt like a novice: she lacked confidence and felt incapable of asking for what she wanted. So, she made a ‘fuckit list’ of the things she’d like to try – slow sex, ejaculation, BDSM – and set out on a journey of discovery. This is the book that Lucy wanted to read; a frank, eye-opening and inspiring account of the search for better sex that shares her tips, revelations, failures and triumphs.

Title: Don’t Hold My Head Down Pub Date: 07/02/2019 Format: Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78352-621-5 Price: £14.99 Rights: World English ex Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Lucy-Anne Holmes is a writer and the founder of the successful ‘No More Page 3’ campaign. Her last novel, Just a Girl Standing In Front of a Boy, won the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s ‘Rom Com of the Year’ in 2015. She lives in Hertfordshire with her partner and young son. @lucyanneholmes 91

February

THE MONSTER CAFÉ

SEAN LEAHY ILLUSTRATED BY MIHALY ORODAN A beautifully illustrated book for children aged 3–5, from Twitter comedy sensation Sean Leahy In every town, there is one shop that always changes its face. In Stapleton, it is the very last shop in town. Bib is an adventurous sort of a boy, so a new café wouldn’t faze him, even if it was run by monsters! Excited by the idea of having a birthday dinner made by hairy beasts and served by a snake-like waitress, he encourages his whole family to take him to the most talked-about place in town. But what, or who, will be on the menu?

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The Monster Café 07/02/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-624-6 £9.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

The Monster Café is a humorous tale that deals with pre-conceptions, pre-school excitement and pre-tty big monsters.

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Sean Leahy is the flesh-and-bone edition of wonky tweetsmith @thepunningman. He has been named one of the ‘50 Funniest People on Twitter’ and has appeared on BuzzFeed, Comedy Central, the Huffington Post, Funny or Die and Time Out among others. Sean lives in London with his wife and two children. 92

February

MATERIAL REMAINS RICHARD W. H. BRAY

The world of St Andrews University is shattered in the wake of an untimely death On a hungover Friday morning, archeology student Mike McEwan’s life of tea, pints, late mornings and the occasional essay comes to an abrupt halt. Consumed with guilt, grief and confusion, Mike haunts the ruins of St Andrews, rebuilding them in his mind and obsessing over the loss of someone he barely knew, unsure of his place in her life, or her death. The discovery of an ancient plague burial site drags Mike back into contact with those around him. But life has changed, both for himself and others, and the burial ground holds more than the bones of those long dead. As university life continues around him, Mike peels back the layers of earth and its dark history, trying desperately to connect the victims of the past to the tumult of his present.

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Material Remains 07/02/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-615-4 £10.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Richard W. H. Bray is a writer and winemaker. His first book, Salt & Old Vines, won Best French Wine Book at the 2015 Gourmand Awards. He lives in London.

February

THE SEWING MACHINE NATALIE FERGIE

In this bestselling novel, an old sewing machine holds the key to one family’s secrets over four generations It is 1911, and Jean is about to join the mass strike at the Singer factory. For her, nothing will be the same again. Decades later, in Edinburgh, Connie sews coded moments of her life into a notebook, as her mother did before her. More than one hundred years after his grandmother’s sewing machine was made, Fred discovers a treasure trove of documents. His family history is laid out before him in a patchwork of unfamiliar handwriting and colourful seams. He starts to unpick the secrets of four generations, one stitch at a time.

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The Sewing Machine 07/02/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-748-9 £8.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Natalie Fergie is a textile enthusiast, and spent ten years running a one-woman dyeing business, sending parcels of unique yarn and thread all over the world. Before this she had a career in nursing. She lives near Edinburgh. @nataliesfergie 94

February

THE BELLE HOTEL CRAIG MELVIN

The bittersweet and salty story of two Michelin star-crossed lovers set at a Brighton hotel 13 October 2008. Welcome to the worst day of Chef Charlie Sheridan’s life, the day he’s about to lose his two great loves: his childhood sweetheart, Lulu, and the legendary Brighton hotel his grandfather, Franco Sheridan, opened in 1973. This is the story of the Belle Hotel, one that spans the course of four decades – from the training of a young chef in the 1970s and 80s, through the hedonistic 90s, up to the credit crunch of the noughties, when Charlie and Lulu must navigate their seaside hangout, the lure of the great restaurants of London, and the devastating effects of three generations of family secrets. ‘A great read’ Matt Haig

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The Belle Hotel 21/02/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-665-9 £9.99 World/Audio

‘Charm, elegance and wit… a foodie One Day’ The Big Book Group

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Craig Melvin holds an MA in creative writing from Sussex University and is a restaurant consultant in London and Brighton. He was mentored by Albert Roux at catering college and has worked in the restaurant and hotel business ever since. He also runs www.lunarlemonproductions.com with his wife Mel. @ccmelvin 95

February

DECADES OF LEAD

30 Years of Monsters, Sneakers & Sketches PETE FOWLER

Over 350 never-before-seen illustrations from the sketchbooks of legendary designer and artist Pete Fowler, best known for his work with Super Furry Animals From hairy synth players to mythical galleons, from battered sneakers to bizarre monsters: welcome to the world of Pete Fowler, the acclaimed artist and designer of album covers for Super Furry Animals, among others. For over thirty years, he has collected his thoughts, sketches, doodles, drafts and ideas in hundreds of sketchbooks, which have never been seen outside of a small circle of friends. Decades of Lead features over 350 of these never-before-seen illustrations, collected together in one beautiful volume. These sketches take the reader on a whimsical and eclectic journey into the mind of one of Britain’s most exciting graphic artists.

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Decades of Lead 21/02/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-410-5 £30.00 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Pete Fowler is an artist, designer, DJ and musician. He is one-half of the band Seahawks and has created album covers for Super Furry Animals and artwork for The Horrors and Tim Burgess, among others. His illustrations adorn book covers, T-shirts, skateboards, comics and prints. He spent several years creating monsters. @petefowlerart 96

March

FALLING FROM THE FLOATING WORLD NICK HURST

A taut thriller set in Tokyo’s criminal underworld When Ray is sacked from his advertising job in London, he goes to Japan for a fresh start. He lands work as an English teacher and strikes up a relationship with the beautiful, intriguing Tomoe, but his world is turned upside down when Tomoe’s father is found dead. Convinced it was murder, Tomoe sets out after the killers, but when she goes missing Ray is forced to act. His search, taking him into the world of corrupt politicians and the yakuza, is guaranteed to bring further loss of life – and Ray is pulled into a desperate chase to ensure it won’t be his. Title: Pub Date: Format: ISBN: Price: Rights:

Falling from the Floating World 07/03/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-631-4 £8.99 World/Audio/Film & TV

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Nick Hurst spent three years training with a kung fu master in Malaysia to write his first book, Sugong, which was published in 2012. He has written for the Guardian and Time Out. He lives in Japan. @nickhurst18

March

THE PLEASANT PROFESSION OF ROBERT A. HEINLEIN FARAH MENDLESOHN

A major new critical study of the science-fiction giant by a Hugo Award-winning critic and historian Robert A. Heinlein began publishing in the 1940s at the dawn of the Golden Age of science fiction, and today he is considered one of the genre’s ‘big three’ alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Heinlein’s short stories were instrumental in developing science fiction’s structure and rhetoric, while his novels demonstrated that such writing could be a vehicle for political argument. In this major study, Mendlesohn carries out a close reading of Heinlein’s work, including unpublished stories, essays and speeches. It sets out to think through the arguments he made about the nature of science fiction, American politics, and himself. ‘The most insightful consideration of R. A. H. ever’ Greg Benford

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The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein 07/03/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-678-9 £25.00 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Farah Mendlesohn is a historian and critic. She has chaired the Science Fiction Foundation and served as the President of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts, and she won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2005 with The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (edited with Edward James). @effjayem 98

March

THE POINT OF POETRY

How Poetry Can Teach Us About the Things in Life Which Really Matter JOE NUTT

Twenty-two essays on poems for those who prefer to avoid reading poetry, showing how they can enrich our lives What’s the point of poetry? It’s a question asked in classrooms all over the world, but it rarely receives a satisfactory answer. Which is why so many people, who read all kinds of books, never read poetry after leaving school. Exploring twenty-two works from poets as varied as William Blake, Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove and Hollie McNish, this book makes the case for what poetry can tell us about the things that matter in life. Each poem is discussed with refreshing clarity, using a mixture of anecdote and literary criticism. Poetry can enrich our lives, if we’ll let it, and this is the perfect companion for anyone looking to discover how.

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The Point of Poetry 21/03/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-701-4 £16.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Joe Nutt is a former teacher with twenty years of English teaching experience. He has written books on Shakespeare, John Donne and most recently a guidebook to Paradise Lost. He is now one of the leading educationalists in the UK and writes a fortnightly column for the Times Educational Supplement. @joenutt_author 99

March

OUR CITY

Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham JON BLOOMFIELD

The story of how Britain’s second city has been transformed for the better by its migrant population Based on original interviews, Our City tells the story of fifty migrants to Birmingham from all walks of life: first and second generation; men and women; from thirteen different countries ranging from Ireland to India, Pakistan to Poland, the Caribbean to Somalia. These tales of perseverance highlight the variety of the migrant experience and offer a firm defense of increased diversity. Through these migrants’ stories, historian Jon Bloomfield shows why mixed, open societies are the way forward for twenty-first-century cities, and how migrants help modern Britain not only survive but prosper. ‘Analytical and compelling and at the same time persuasive and moving. Its lessons need to be taken to heart’ Charles Clarke, former Home Secretary

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Our City 07/03/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-716-8 £18.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Jon Bloomfield is a historian and urban policy specialist. He is currently an advisor to the EU’s largest climate change initiative, Climate KIC, and for over a decade has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, having previously worked for Coventry and Birmingham City Councils. @jonbloomfield2 100

March

21st-CENTURY YOKEL TOM COX

A deeply personal and laugh-out-loud mixture of nature book and family memoir from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Good, The Bad and The Furry Thick with owls and badgers, oak trees and wood piles, scarecrows and ghosts, and Tom Cox’s loud and excitable dad, this book is full of the folklore of several counties – the ancient kind and the everyday variety – as well as wild places, mystical spots and curious objects. Tom’s writing treads a new path, one that has a lot in common with a rambling country walk; it’s bewitched by fresh air and big skies, intrepid in minor ways, haunted by weather and old stories and the spooky edges of the outdoors, restless and prone to a few detours, but it always reaches its destination in the end. ‘A rich, strange, oddly glorious brew . . . Cox’s writing is looselimbed, engaging and extremely funny, and time spent in his company is time very pleasantly spent’ Guardian

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21st-Century Yokel 21/03/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-739-7 £9.99 World ex Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Tom Cox lives in Devon with his cats. A one-time music journalist he is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Good, The Bad and The Furry and the William Hill Sports Book longlisted Bring Me The Head of Sergio Garcia. @cox_tom 101

April

HOW TO COME ALIVE AGAIN BETH McCOLL

Part self-help book, part practical guide to living with depression, anxiety and mental illness This book won’t save your life. But you already know this. So begins How to Come Alive Again, a funny, honest, broken book written by an author who could be described as the same. It’s a book about what to do when you’re an anxious, depressed, spaghetti-brained mess in a society that still very much prefers us to all act normal. At a time when mental health problems are increasingly prevalent among 18–35-year-olds, Beth McColl offers up practical advice about what’s worked for her… and what hasn’t. This is a book for anyone who has a mental illness, or knows and loves someone who does.

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How to Come Alive Again 04/04/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-719-9 £14.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Beth McColl is a twenty-something writer. She is an advice columnist for Dazed & Confused magazine and has written about love, sex and mental health for Metro, Brooklyn Magazine, Gradient and Ask-Men. She lives in London. @imteddybless 102

April

YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ JODIE JACKSON

A compelling exploration of why changing your media diet can change the world, and how to do it When Jodie Jackson began to research the impact of the media on our well-being, she quickly learned that the news, quite literally, makes us miserable. But she also found that stories about progress and possibility can serve to motivate us, playing into our natural desire to care. As a force for inspiration, the news can be hugely powerful, if we could only change the way we consume it. She shows us how our current twenty-four-hour news cycle is produced, combining research from psychology and sociology with real-life examples to build a compelling case for changing our media diet, to make the world a better place.

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You Are What You Read 04/04/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-722-9 £8.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Jodie Jackson is an author, researcher, campaigner and speaker, and a partner at The Constructive Journalism Project. She holds a master’s degree in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of East London, where she investigated the psychological impact of the news. She lives in London. @jacksonjodie21 103

April

HOUSE OF FICTION

From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life PHYLLIS RICHARDSON

A cultural exploration of some of the most iconic houses in English literature, from Shandy Hall to Manderley From Gothic castles to Georgian stately homes, Bloomsbury townhouses and high-rise penthouses, step on to a tour of real and imagined houses that great English writers have used to reflect the themes of their novels. Virginia Woolf’s love of Talland House in Cornwall is palpable in To the Lighthouse, just as E. M. Forster’s childhood home at Rooksnest mirrors the idyllic charm of Howards End. House of Fiction presents some of the most influential houses in Britain through the stories they inspired, while offering candid glimpses of the writers who brought them to life. ‘Fascinating... it reveals key imaginative shifts in British authors’ attitudes to homes over the years’ Sunday Times

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House of Fiction 04/04/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-693-2 £9.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Phyllis Richardson has written several books on architecture and design, including the highly successful XS series, Nano House, and Superlight: Lightness in Contemporary Houses. She has written on architecture, urban development and travel for the Financial Times, the Observer and DWELL magazine. @_houseoffiction 104

April

GIVEN HALF A CHANCE Ten Ways to Save the World EDWARD DAVEY

An optimistic call to arms showing how we can address the biggest environmental challenges facing the planet Given Half a Chance is both a snapshot of our world and a call to arms. From fields of solar panels in Nevada to the flourishing agricultural landscapes of Ethiopia; from the traditional water harvesters of northern Rajasthan to Britain’s inspiring waste campaigners, amazing things are happening right now across the world. People are acting with hope and courage, against all the odds, to make things better. The challenge before us is to replicate these successful approaches elsewhere, fast. This book draws on first-hand experience and interviews with many of the world’s leading experts to show how we can make a difference.

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Given Half a Chance 18/04/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-659-8 £9.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Edward Davey is the Project Director at World Resources Institute and has worked for The Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit on global environmental issues, as well as for the Colombian presidency on Colombia’s natural environment and the conservation of the Amazon. Given Half a Chance is his first book. @edwardleodavey 105

April

#ZERO

NEIL McCORMICK A pitch-black satire about a pop star on the verge of a nervous breakdown, from the author of Killing Bono Zero is the latest craze. Young, sexy and brilliant, he is a multihyphenated (singer-songwriterrapper-producer) superstar for the digital generation. According to his publicist at least. He’s also a narcissistic, insecure, hyperactive, coke-snorting, pill-popping, loud-mouthed maelstrom of contradictions skating over the thin ice of terminal self-loathing. He has touched down in New York with his sycophantic entourage for the launch of a new single/album/ movie/tour. It is countdown to Year Zero. But the boy at the centre of the media feeding frenzy is cracking up.

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#Zero 18/04/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-662-8 £8.99 UK & C ex Audio

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Neil McCormick is the Daily Telegraph’s chief pop and rock music critic. He is an author, radio pundit and television presenter, with his own music weekly interview show, Neil McCormick’s Needle Time. His memoir, Killing Bono (originally published as I Was Bono’s Doppelganger) was turned into a feature film in 2011. He lives in London. @neil_mccormick 106

April

BETWEEN THE REGIONS OF KINDNESS Alice Jolly

An exquisite and original take on the family saga, from the PEN Ackerley Prize-winning Alice Jolly Coventry, 1941. The morning after one of the worst nights of the Blitz. Twenty-two-year-old Rose enters the remains of a bombed house to find her best friend dead. Shocked and confused, she makes a split-second decision that will reverberate for generations to come. More than fifty years later, in modern-day Brighton, Rose’s granddaughter Lara waits for the return of her eighteen-year-old son Jay. Reckless and idealistic, he has gone to Iraq to stand on a conflict line as an unarmed witness to peace. Lara holds her parents, Mollie and Rufus, partly responsible for Jay’s departure. But in her attempts to explain their thwarted passions, she finds all her assumptions about her own life are called into question.

Title: Between the Regions of Kindness Pub Date: 18/04/2019 Format: Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78352-499-0 Price: £8.99 Rights: World English

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her memoir Dead Babies and Seaside Towns won the PEN Ackerley Prize 2016. She also won the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature in 2014 for one of her short stories, ‘Ray the Rottweiler’. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire. @jollyalice 107

April

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF LORD BYRON ANTONY PEATTIE

Featuring cover artwork and endpapers from the late Howard Hodgkin, this intimate biography of Lord Byron is the first book to explore the poet’s eating disorder and obsession with fatherhood Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and made it the cornerstone of the heroic ideal which was central to his work, his life and his death. This fresh biography aims to better understand the man; to explore these neglected or misunderstood aspects of his private life in order to illuminate his writing, his idea of heroism, his relationships with women, and with Coleridge and Shelley. This in turn points us towards a new understanding of his masterpiece, Don Juan.

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The Private Life of Lord Byron 18/04/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-426-6 £30.00 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Antony Peattie helped launch Opera Now magazine before going freelance, devising ‘Opera Bites’ for Glyndebourne, supertitles for Scottish Opera and surtitles for the Royal Opera. With Lord Harewood he edited the latest edition of Kobbe’s Complete Book of Opera, and he has lectured on Byron at the National Gallery and Tate Britain. He lives in London. 108

May

COMMON PEOPLE

An anthology of working-class writers KIT DE WAAL (EDITOR)

Louise Doughty, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Alex Wheatle and more join Kit de Waal in this anthology of essays, poems and personal memoir from working-class writers Where are the working-class writers? The answer is right here. Inspired by a shared concern that working-class voices are increasingly absent from the pages of books and newspapers, Kit de Waal has come together with thirty-three contributors from working-class backgrounds to share their experiences, lives and emotions in this stunning and powerful anthology. Damian Barr, Malorie Blackman, Lisa Blower, Jill Dawson, Louise Doughty, Stuart Maconie, Chris McCrudden, Lisa McInerney, Paul McVeigh, Daljit Nagra, Dave O’Brien, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Anita Sethi, Tony Walsh, Alex Wheatle and more are joined by neverbefore-published writers from all over the UK.

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Common People 02/05/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-745-8 £9.99 World English ex Audio

EDITOR’S BIOGRAPHY Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother and a Caribbean father. Her first novel, My Name Is Leon, is a Times and international bestseller and the winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2017. Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was published in 2018. @kitdewaal 109

May

THE LIFE OF DEATH LUCY BOOTH

What happens when Death makes a pact with the Devil? This is a stunning debut novel: part gothic horror story, part murder mystery, part modern romance In medieval Scotland, Elizabeth Murray is condemned to burn at the stake as a witch. Locked in her cell she is visited by a strange, handsome man who offers her a deal: her soul in return for eternal life. But what he offers is not a normal life: to survive she must become Death itself. For 500 years she whirls from one death to the next, until finally, desperate to escape the terms of her deal, she summons the man who saved her. He agrees to release her on one condition: that she gives him five lives. She must take these lives herself, each one more difficult and painful than the last…

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The Life of Death 02/05/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-710-6 £8.99 World English/Audio

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Lucy Booth was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011. She died in August 2016. During those five years she wrote this novel and it was her last wish to have it published posthumously.

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May

RUTH AND MARTIN’S ALBUM CLUB MARTIN FITZGERALD

A compilation of greatest hits (and some new material) from the beloved blog where famous people review classic albums they’ve listened to for the very first time The concept behind Ruth and Martin’s Album Club blog is simple: make people listen to a classic album they’ve never heard and ask them to review it. The Album Club has since featured some remarkable guests, including: Ian Rankin on Madonna’s Madonna. J. K. Rowling on the Violent Femmes’ Violent Femmes. Bonnie Greer on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Richard Osman on Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure. Ruth and Martin’s Album Club is a compilation of the blog’s greatest hits as well as some new and exclusive material. ‘I love Ruth and Martin’s Album Club. Classic albums (and oddities) given a fresh hearing, and Martin’s capsule reviews remain the best in the business. The man knows his stuff – heck, he even found an album I’d never heard’ Ian Rankin

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Ruth and Martin’s Album Club 02/05/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-738-0 £9.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Martin Fitzgerald has spent about 38 per cent of his life daydreaming about music whilst trying to hold down a job. Ruth Lockwood is his friend. She loves Bruce Springsteen, has never been in a bad mood in her life, and comes up with great ideas on dog walks. They both currently live in Nottingham. @ramalbumclub 111

May

MIND IS THE RIDE JET McDONALD

An adventure through cycling and philosophy Jet cycled four thousand miles from Bristol to India but didn’t want to write another travel book. Instead Mind is the Ride takes the reader on a physical and intellectual adventure by bicycle, a journey from Western to Eastern philosophy. Interweaving philosophy with the cyclist’s experiences, Jet uses the components of a bike as a metaphor. Each chapter is based around a single bicycle component. As each part is added, the story of the trip from west to east is furthered and a philosophy of mind is developed.

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Mind is the Ride 16/05/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-690-1 £14.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

By the end of the book the bike is ‘built’, the ride to India completed, and an understanding of the relationship between mind, body and bicycle made explicit.

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Jet McDonald is a writer, musician and psychiatrist. He spent a year cycling from the UK to India. He is a lead writer for Boneshaker magazine and his non-fiction work has been published in The Idler. He is a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrist’s Special Interest Group in Philosophy. @jetmcdonald 112

May

TAKE ME TO THE EDGE Poems

KATYA BOIRAND An ethereal collection of poems, each inspired by five words selected by their subject Five words is all it takes to provoke a chain of creation. This is what Katya Boirand discovered the first time she asked a friend for five words and then wrote a poem using them. This spark of inspiration started a movement, and soon Katya was asking everyone she met for their five words of choice. Take Me to the Edge is a selection of these poems, sitting alongside a portrait of each subject, in this stunning and joyous celebration of language, connection and art.

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Take Me to the Edge 16/05/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-713-7 ÂŁ20.00 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHORâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BIOGRAPHY Katya Boirand is an actress, dancer, writer and poet. She has travelled the world but now has roots in London. Take Me to the Edge is her first poetry collection.

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May

LIFE DRAWING A Life Under Lights JESSICA MARTIN

A graphic novel memoir about life as an actress, singer and artist in the big city Jessica Martin’s life was marked early on by the heat and intensity of the stage. She began singing jazz professionally at the age of sixteen before going on to perform as an impressionist on Spitting Image and as a star of West End musicals. In the spotlight she sought refuge from her parents’ marriage – filled with silences and secrets that would shake the foundations of her world. Featuring a cast of diverse characters and guest appearances from some very recognisable personalities, Life Drawing is the story of a woman trying to live a fully creative life while making herself a place to call home.

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Life Drawing 30/05/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-758-8 £14.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY After graduating from university, Jessica Martin performed on the fringe comedy circuit and gained a regular slot on Spitting Image. Her early comics, It Girl and Variety, were critically acclaimed bestsellers, and Elsie Harris Picture Palace was shortlisted for the Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition in 2014. @jessica7martin 114

May

DAD DROID

CHRIS BRAN AND JUSTIN CHUBB A funny, fast-paced adventure for children of all ages, including people aged 12.5 and 93-year-olds. It may contain nuts (and bolts) When Freddy Bird’s geniusinventor dad goes missing, Freddy and his best friend Minnie find themselves plunged into mortal danger, pursued by dangerous thugs, deadly mechanical birds and a sinister businessman with an incredible shark-like car. But when the children discover a secret tunnel where Freddy’s father has hidden parts of an amazing robot, they decide to outwit their enemies by putting the droid together – a droid that looks just like Freddy’s dad . . .

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Dad Droid 30/05/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-730-4 £8.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHY Chris Bran (@chrisbran) and Justin Chubb are writers and comedians, originally from the Channel Islands. They began working together on comedy sketches for Radio 4 and are best known for creating and starring in the series This is Jinsy, which ran for two series and was nominated both for a Rose D’Or and a British Comedy Award. 115

June

BIRD THERAPY JOE HARKNESS

A personal, passionate and practical guide to the mental-health benefits of birdwatching When Joe Harkness broke down in 2013, it nearly broke him. Medication helped; counselling was enlightening; mindfulness grounded him. But nothing came close to the healing power of nature, particularly birds. How had he never noticed such beauty before? Bird Therapy became his passion: a shared sounding board, a natural escape clause, confiding in others both his darkest moments and his most joyous observations.

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Bird Therapy 13/06/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-772-4 £14.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

Through quotes, anecdotes, practical tips, ideas, existing research and stories others have shared with him, Joe describes how birdwatching helped him – and how it could help you.

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Joe Harkness is an SEN teacher and a writer. He has written about Bird Therapy since 2015 and has published articles in Birdwatch magazine and The Curlew. He has recorded ‘tweets of the day’ for BBC Radio 4 and was asked to write guest blogs for the Wildlife Trusts and Mark Avery. @birdtherapy 116

June

THE LIDO GUIDE

EMMA PUSILL AND JANET WILKINSON The definitive photographic guide to every publicly accessible open-air pool in the UK Open-air pools engender a sense of community: nothing beats the sheer joy and sense of abandon of swimming outdoors. From grand art deco lidos to humble, fiercely loved community pools, The Lido Guide will feature a photographic guide to all 120 lidos in the UK. Collected together for the first time, each entry will detail what makes the pool unique, what swimming there is like, and information about your visit. This is a book not just about pools, but also cafés, tuck shops, changing rooms and above all, swimmers. The Lido Guide is a must-have for every swimmer, both a practical guide and a source of inspiration for future adventures.

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The Lido Guide 13/06/2019 Flexiback 978-1-78352-742-7 £14.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHY Emma Pusill (@saltwateritch/@lidoguide) and Janet Wilkinson (@deliciousswim) are lido enthusiasts and founders of the national Lido Conference.

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June

OBSIDIAN SUZIE WILDE

The second in the Book of Bera Viking fantasy adventure series: Bera faces old and new gods in the savage beauty of Ice Island Bera, the Viking seer, has been having visions. During the hard birthing of her daughter, she feels the earth convulse, an upheaval that somehow links the black bead of her necklace to the precious black stone: Obsidian. As her visions grow stronger, she has no choice but to set out for the Far North, to steal Obsidian and use it. But Bera is not the only one who wants the stone – to what lengths will she go to win it? Steeped in the life and beliefs of the Norse peoples, Suzie Wilde’s new novel is a gripping, standalone adventure. Praise for The Book of Bera: ‘Instantly captivating and compelling’ Lee Child

Obsidian 13/06/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-641-3 £8.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Suzie Wilde has an MA with Distinction in creative writing from the University of Sussex. In 2014, she was selected as one of the first six playwrights to take part in a series of workshops at the Criterion Theatre. She lives in Chichester. @susiewilde 118

June

WEST OF WEST

Travels Along the Edge of America SARAH LEE AND LAURA BARTON

From the edge of America, at the end of Route 66, West of West investigates what the American West means in an age of political turbulence Santa Monica marks the end of Route 66. The great American journey west culminates here, with a ferris wheel and a branch of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. It is on this short stretch of coast that Lee began shooting her photographic series in 2015. Back then, America and the California coast seemed to mean something quite different. But as the months unfolded, America’s identity was reshaped – by an election, by gathering questions of immigration, environment, gender, race, sexual assault and gun ownership.

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West of West 13/06/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-769-4 £25.00 World/Audio/TV & Film

West of West explores the idea of the West in shaping American identity and what the American West means now, when the East is the rising global force, and the frontier is shifting once more.

AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHY Sarah Lee (@sarahmlee) is a photographer for the Guardian. She has been an official BAFTA photographer since 2015. Laura Barton (@missbarton) is a writer and a broadcaster who regularly contributes to BBC Radio 4. 119

June

THE A TO Z OF SKATEBOARDING TONY HAWKS

The Sunday Times bestselling author and comedian writes back to unwitting American skateboarders who have mistaken him for Tony Hawk For more than twenty years, Tony Hawks has been mistaken for Tony Hawk, the American skateboarder. Even though it is abundantly clear on his website that he is an English comedian and author, people still write to him asking questions like ‘How do you do an ollie?’ One mischievous day he started writing back, and he now has hundreds of emails to which he has replied in a pompous tone, goading his correspondents for their spelling mistakes and poor grammar, while offering bogus or downright silly advice on how to improve their skateboarding. These ‘skatemails’ appear here alongside an A to Z guide to the world of skateboarding, as seen through the eyes of someone who knows absolutely nothing about it.

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The A to Z of Skateboarding 13/06/2019 Hardback 978-1-78352-672-7 £12.99 World/Audio/TV & Film

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Tony Hawks is a radio and TV comedian who makes regular appearances on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, Just a Minute and Have I Got News for You. He wrote the Sunday Times bestselling Round Ireland with a Fridge, which has since sold more than 800,000 copies and been made into a feature film. 120

June

DIFFERENT CLASS

Fashion, Football & Funk – The Story of Laurie Cunningham DERMOT KAVANAGH

Shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards, this is the biography of Laurie Cunningham, the first black footballer to play professionally for England When Laurie Cunningham played for England in an under21s match against Scotland in 1977, he became the first black footballer to represent England professionally. At a time when racist chants and bananas would fly from the stands, Cunningham’s success challenged how black players were perceived. But Cunningham was more than an exceptional footballer, he was a dandy with a love of funk music and bespoke suits, as easily graceful on the dance floor as he was on the pitch. Different Class tells the story of a son of Jamaican immigrants who, from modest beginnings, grew up to become an important but unsung figure in the rich cultural landscape of late twentiethcentury England.

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Different Class 27/06/2019 Paperback 978-1-78352-737-3 £9.99 World/Audio

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY Dermot Kavanagh is the Sports Picture Editor of the Sunday Times. His writing has been published in the Sunday Times, the football magazines When Saturday Comes and Howler. He is also a contributor to the literary website London Fictions. He lives in London with his wife and three sons. Different Class is his first book. 121

NEW TITLES: DIGITAL The following titles are from our digital list, available to order as short-run paperbacks from GBS at orders@gbs.tbs-ltd.co.uk A son’s journey to uncover the story of his parents’ war as a part of the Special Forces – and the truth behind the betrayal of his father’s Clarion mission to the Nazis.

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Monopoli Blues Tim Clark and Nick Cook 978-1-912618-51-4 £10.99

Haunted. Hunted. Cursed. You’ve never met anybody like Rumer Cross. A fresh and fiercely unique thriller.

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Vicious Rumer Joshua Winning 978-1-912618-00-2 £10.99

A group of thirteen-year-old boys go hiking on the moors of South West England – and gradually begin to disappear, one by one.

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122

The Moor Sam Haysom 978-1-912618-06-4 £10.99

The existential odyssey of a heartsick politician to save a war-torn, post-austerity Europe from algorithmic autocracy.

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Disco Sour Giuseppe Porcaro 978-1-912618-12-5 £9.99

A spy and forensic thriller, telling the tale of Cold War spy intrigue, merged with modernday cyber intelligence. Tense, fast-paced and insightful.

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The Failsafe Query Michael Jenkins 978-1-912618-28-6 £10.99

The Afterlife’s biggest rock festival is interrupted when headliner John Lennon vanishes; now promoter Felix Romsey has to get him back.

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Felix Romsey’s Afterparty Tim Thornton 978-1-912618-52-1 £10.99

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Three women, many lives, one story. A novel on the nature of the self.

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A Thing of the Moment Bruno Noble 978-1-912618-36-1 £11.99

Nineteen years old with freshly-dyed blue hair, punk rocker Gail places an advert in a music paper for ‘likeminded friends and weirdos’...

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Soap The Stamps, Jump The Tube Gail Thibert 978-1-912618-18-7 £10.99

A YA comic fantasy novel, about a teenage boy who is granted an infinite number of wishes. What could possibly go wrong?

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The Infinite Powers of Adam Gowers Brandon Robshaw 978-1-912618-34-7 £10.99

Detective Frederick Street loves his son Elvis; Elvis detests his dad. Each wants to shake the other down over a bent cocaine deal involving porn impresario, Wade Long, and Shoreditch spiv, James Maroon. ‘A rip-roaring debut ... Audacious writing puts a thrilling gloss on a conventional crime tale’ Observer Title: Author: ISBN: Price:

Night Time Cool Jamie Paradise 978-1-912618-16-3 £10.99

An engaging new biography of the most extraordinary woman in the Roman world.

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Agrippina Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore Emma Southon 978-1-911586-60-9 £11.99

A novel about love in the social media age. Is it possible to keep any secrets when your entire life is online?

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Ideal Angels Robert Welbourn 978-1-911586-78-4 £9.99

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In a not-too-distant future, people are split into either Citizens with rights or VOIDs with nothing. Forced to live in the former port, the VOIDs have adapted to the floods; the brutal nature of life outside of society however, is not so easy.

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Sour Fruit Eli Allison 978-1-912618-02-6 £10.99

In Truth, Madness is the fictional story of a correspondent driven to despair by the Middle East and South Asia. A reporter strives to find the truth. The more truth they find, the more maddening the world becomes.

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In Truth, Madness Imran Khan 978-1-911586-90-6 £10.99

A young boy travels to a magical realm and is set three impossible tasks to win the essence of time itself in order to save his dying mother.

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126

The Boy Who Stole Time Mark Bowsher 978-1-912618-64-4 £10.99

A debut poetry collection that asks the ageold question: if you throw a pineapple in a pool – will it sink or float?

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Pineapples In The Pool Melissa J. Davies 978-1-912618-62-0 £8.99

A fast, funny, emotive memoir showing how most fans really follow football. Through twelve games across five decades, recounting the combined folly and delight of supporting Lincoln City, Scotland and Rangers.

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The Quiet Fan Ian Plenderleith 978-1-912618-42-2 £10.99

Daedalus Mole has made some mistakes, but taking a wanted fugitive on an interstellar pub crawl is definitely the second-worst.

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The Second Death of Daedalus Mole Niall Slater 978-1-912618-32-3 £10.99

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Earth’s greatest warriors fight to survive in a land where evolution is rapid, enhancing them with bizarre adaptations. John Greene, a First World War machine gunner, struggles with his physical changes as he battles to return to his son.

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Darwin’s Soliders Ste Sharp 978-1-912618-10-1 £11.99

A tale of love, betrayal and swimming based on the true stories of champion Victorian women.

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Daisy Belle Swimming Champion of the World Caitlin Davies 978-1-911586-48-7 £10.99

A revolutionary on the run from a brainbugging surveillance society. How would we come to live if there could be no secrets: utopia or dystopia?

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2089 Miles M. Hudson 978-1-912618-80-4 £10.99

Go behind the scenes of the National Theatre’s production of War Horse in William Rycroft’s new memoir.

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All Quiet on the West End Front William Rycroft 978-1-912618-54-5 £10.99

Alternating between ancient and modern timelines, the story of two women, separated by millennia yet bound by the web of life.

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Bone Lines Stephanie Bretherton 978-1-912618-48-4 £10.99

A dark Renaissance thriller exposing one of history’s most depraved secrets.

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The Pumilio Child Judy McInerney 978-1-911586-03-6 £11.99

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SALLY BAYLEY’S SHELFIE Sally Bayley’s latest book Girl With Dove was published earlier this year to critical acclaim. She is the author of The Private Life of the Diary, published by Unbound in 2016. Can you remember the first book you bought? Gobbolino, the Witch’s Cat by Ursula Moray Williams when they were selling off the library books for 30 pence. I was seven and it was the book my teacher had read to us at story time. I was obsessed with this book and this cat, who I thought was my cat, Washington. We had nowhere to store books in our house so I hid it in the kitchen cupboard where we kept baking things and the salt and pepper, where only my grandmother went, so that my brothers didn’t steal it. How big is your library now? I have had thousands of books but I have just culled a large amount because I have just moved offices and I’m in transition between one teaching job and another. How do you arrange your books? I live on a boat and so I don’t have enough space there for proper bookshelves. My office space did not have proper shelves (it was mainly a social science research centre. They seem to hold/keep files, not books!) and I have never had built-in book shelves but that is my dream. I have looked into a reading pod, which is a sort of fold away/pop up library that you keep in the garden. I’m saving up for one. My books were always threatening to ‘avalanche’ in my office. My boat is like a mobile library: five books in, four books out, on a regular cycle. Favourite reading spot in your house? I live on a 45-foot-long, 6.5-foot-wide narrowboat moored on the River Isis in Oxford. I read in/on my bed, on my sofa and then in the cratch of my boat (at the front), with the canvas open in the warm months. As I say in Girl With Dove, I prefer reading outside. That’s the nice thing about living on a narrowboat – you’re always a little bit outside. 130

Favourite bookshop new or secondhand? My favourite bookshop was The Albion Beatnik Bookshop on Walton Street in Jericho, Oxford. It closed down in the last few months and I am still mourning it. I wrote much of Girl With Dove there. What’s on your ‘to read’ pile? Sally Vickers, The Librarian. And if I like that, more Sally Vickers. And I do a regular amount of rereading: every summer I read or reread a new big classic. I think War and Peace might be up next. Or Anna Karenina. What is your favourite edition that you own and why? I own a first edition of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel from 1965, but it was given to me as a present. I do like the Folio library editions. I have a Folio edition of William Hazlitt’s essays on my boat which is a bit bendy, but I love it for the typeface. To break the spine or keep it as immaculate as possible? All the books on my boat become ‘boaty’ books. They become ‘boated’, which means that they take on a certain slight damp bend and mustiness. Do you lend books? All the time. I have just given away some books to a student about to start her English course at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford. I mentored her (i.e. I went on about the books she should read. Much of it was poetry). I give away books to my students and to friends and to charity shops often. I also donate books to the town library. Do you like to get books signed by the author? I prefer to find books where there are letters or notes inside and particular messages and inscriptions. I find those sort of affectionate temporal notes very moving. Several of my books are filled with postcards and letters I sent to my foster grandmother who gave me books and whose books I inherited when she died (age ninety-six!). 131

GIVING NEW LIFE TO OLD BOOKS

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