Words Unlimited

Book of The Month: Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road

Red Dust Road has been sitting on my ‘to read’ pile since its publication in 2010. How can I have left it there for so long? If you’ve not read it, I don’t think it will disappoint. If you’re engaged in life-writing, I’d say this is a ‘must.’ I found it unputdownable.

Jackie Kay arrived on the poetry scene over twenty years ago a highly-acclaimed first collection, Adoption Papers.  In that book she wrote about the experience of being adopted; we ‘met’ her adoptive parents and grandparents, characters who lived and breathed on the page.  Since then she has published novels, short stories, more poems; some of this writing has touched on the matter of her birth parents.  Red Dust Road – what she calls ‘an autobiographical journey’ – now charts her twenty-year search for those parents, most recently her father, Jonathan who lives in Nigeria. The red dust road of the title is a track that she follows geographically and emotionally.

The book opens with Kay’s first meeting with Jonathan, a born-again Christian.  In her hotel room in Abuja he insists on inviting her to join him in prayer. She declines but watches politely as he chants and dances for two hours. ‘The man can talk. We have that in common …’ Kay observes.

This contrasts sharply with a meeting with her birth mother in Milton Keynes. Now a Mormon, and suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s, she is altogether a quieter, though no less complex a character. What is impressive about Kay is her restraint in writing about these challenging meetings.  She never confronts them, never blames or demands. Her compassion for them is remarkable. But then she seems to have been brought up by the most adorable adoptive parents, Helen and John Kay. The Kays – both active communists – clearly nurtured in Jackie both a sense of humour and an understanding of the ethical in encounters with fellow beings. Often, in these stories, the humour is there to relieve the sting.  When Helen Kay hears of the meeting with Jonathan she remarks, ‘By God, did we rescue you.’

Kay has been daring with the structure of a book that brings to life scenes from over twenty years. We are always on the move - Scotland, London, Nigeria, Milton Keynes.  As a working writer with an international reputation, Kay manages to find space to meet the people who gave her up in 1961- whether it’s between readings at Milton Keynes library or running a British Council workshop in Nigeria.

Though the narrative folds back and forth in time, thematically rather than chronologically, the reader never feels lost. We always know where we are on the emotional journey as Kay reflects in journal entries that reach back to student days, or propels us forward through dramatic scenes in her search for half-siblings.

It’s one of those books that feels necessary, by which I mean, the author HAD to write it. It has urgency and an emotional honesty. Most remarkable is that Kay never assumes a sense of entitlement to meet her extended family both in the UK and in Nigeria. In the more reflective passages she weighs up the issues – “How do you keep a grown woman secret? Why does a grown woman collude with being kept secret?” There is no final judgement and so there is space for the reader also to reflect – don’t most families have secrets of one kind or another?

One of three epigraphs at the front of the book is from Helene Cixous: ‘… all narratives tell one story in place of another.’ Kay writes her own story with such life, humour and verve, while, at the same time, acknowledging that her birth parents have different versions of their overlapping narrative.

Red Dust Road is a reminder that, where stories are concerned, we are insatiable. We can never have too many stories. This one is highly readable and thoughtful. A book, I’m sure, I’ll read again.  

 

Book of The Month: Tim Winton's, Eyrie

This is not a perfect book, but it’s a brilliant book. Perhaps I’ve come to expect too much of Tim Winton but, for me, the first fifty pages were a tad over-indulgent – too much time trapped inside Tom Keely’s monumental hang-over. We get it. It’s bad, really bad. And then there’s that stain in the carpet that never quite gets explained, well, apart from its metaphorical significance. If I hadn’t been a devoted Winton fan I might not have read on. That would have been a pity because this is one of the best novels I've read in a while.

When Keely enters the world of neighbour, Gemma, and her grandson, Kai, the pace quickens. By the midpoint of the book we’re into a page-turning thriller. Keely’s mother, Doris, a bracelet-jangling old Hippy, is vividly drawn and provides a still point of sanity as Keely’s world spins out of control.

Gemma and Keely have a childhood in common, having grown up in the same suburb. Since then he’s had a glittering career as an environmental campaigner with high media profile; she has had a daughter, now in jail [drugs] and a grandson who she’s determined to keep out of the clutches of social services, and worse.  Because Keely has fallen from grace they are neighbours again, but in a rather grim tower block in Freemantle, bustling port of Western Australia. 

Gemma is used to leaving Kai alone at night as she fills supermarket shelves, but when Keely and Kai form a friendship things begin to change.

Keely, jaded from a scandal we never quite have fully explained, is disillusioned, broke and at rock bottom. Among contemporary politicians, the mining corporations, how does the environment stand a chance and how can any one individual make a difference? He numbs such thoughts with drink and a growing addiction to painkillers. But as he begins to care about Kai, he starts to inch his way back to some kind of self- respect, albeit reluctantly.

Winton seems to be saying that whatever else we lose we can always choose to care for those nearest to us. In that respect we can make a difference, find some dignity.

Kai, the six-year-old who draws Keely out of his pill-popping stupor, reminded me of Ort in that earlier Winton novel, That Eye, The Sky. Like Ort, Kai is a visionary or, rather, a child who has seen too much for his years and imagines the worst. He has dreams of falling and worries about whether or not he will grow old.

Kai is given to leaning over the rail of the walkway, ten storeys high. Keely experiences hallucinations of the child falling but witnesses him so often poised over the rail, as if to fly, that he begins not to be able to tell the difference. Notions of falling, literally from the tower block or falling out of your life, permeate the book. 

The sense of place is palpable. I feel as if I could find may way around Freemantle – the dingy high-rise, the sprawling port, shiny marina, neat suburbs. Through Keely’s eyes, we see contemporary Freemantle both from the ground up and from his tenth floor eyrie.  Keely moves through the crowds witnessing junkies, rough sleepers, joggers, latte-sipping professionals and barristas – all jostling along together yet in their own worlds.

Winton is brilliant at handling backstory. Keely has a failed marriage and a tarnished career. None of this is fleshed out or visited in lengthy flashbacks. It is generally spliced into dialogue. The characters know what has gone on and talk obliquely, warily, to each other of the past.  We glimpse those past events between the lines of dialogue as Keely talks to his ex-wife, his mother, his sister, snatches that we must piece together.

I have the impression that Winton knows exactly what Keely has been through but now, in this story, we are dealing with the consequences, he’s not going to waste good story time filling you in. Keep up, reader! The effect of this is powerful as it pulls the reader closer to the characters, keeps up the tension and our curiosity.

So, not a perfect book but an absorbing, thoughtful read, an unflinching look at the contradictory layers of contemporary city life, a story that follows you round days after you’ve finished the book plus, a master-class in the art of minimal exposition.  

 

Book of The Month: Tim Winton, Minimum of Two

I came late to Tim Winton, but I’m catching up. Minimum of Two, his second collection of short stories, was first published in 1987 but hasn’t dated. This 2009 edition has been in my bag over the last month. I’ve hardly noticed my journeys round London on Underground and bus. One of these stories can be read in the time it takes to get from Highgate to Leicester Square. Perfect.

Winton is a master of the minimal - whole lives revealed in a glance, a glimpse, a moment forensically examined. His prose is down-to-earth and sublime poetry.

Anyone aspiring to write short, powerful stories, read this, it’s a master-class. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Book of the Month - January - Paul Klee: Making Visible

The exhibition at Tate Modern and accompanying catalogue proved to be wonderful reminders, at the start of the new year, that it’s crucial to get away from the computer, away from the current work-in-progress, to stand back and reflect. As I’ve said before, I always find it interesting to reflect on writing by observing a practitioner in another art form. 

The Klee exhibition’s arrangement in chronological order allows you to follow his creative curiosity – his production and his reflection on it. Sixteen rooms represent different phases. The works invite concentration and attention to detail as you follow the precision of Klee’s draughtsmanship and, increasingly, his developing sense of colour in subtle and delicious combinations. Then there are his experiments with technique that allow him to bring both his drawing and play with colour into new relationships.

All of this was stimulating and refreshing but the exhibition sineage and the catalogue also provided insight into how Klee worked. This body of ever-changing work was the result of Klee’s ability to negotiate the order and the chaos – both necessary to the creative process.

When I worked in the visual arts, often interviewing artists in their studio, I was struck by how many of the most successful creatives had orderly studios; they knew where everything was. This flies in the face of common assumptions that the obsessively ordered are too buttoned-up to be seriously creative. But, as Matthew Gale points out in his catalogue essay, ‘Carefully Ordered Confusion,’ for Klee his “reliance on systems allowed for improvisation.”

In what he called his Oeuvre Catalogue, Klee recorded completed works in chronological order. However, he apparently only listed the works that he believed said something about his growing knowledge of process and his development as an artist. This record allowed him to reflect back on his developing process, and to make rigorous selections for exhibitions. And, presumably, knowing he could track back he felt free to experiment and work with his intuition. This quote from one of the exhibition panels:

He also worked on several pieces at once. In order to do so, he had the studio set up in such a way that he could move between works, following the creative energy, not quite sure where any of these pieces would lead. Another quote from the exhibiton:

As he set off, Columbus-like, to follow a line, explore colour relationships, he might have started with an observation in nature but, as he said, the artist is not some kind of super camera: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

This echoes with the work of a poet, or any imaginative writer, exploring a given image - what are its larger dimensions? What is standing behind/beneath that image, that thing in the world that has caught the attention?

A first move might be a description but then comes that leap into the dark, the exploration of what lies beyond the surface image. Klee’s quote put me in mind of my favourite quote from poet Mark Doty on his writing process, which ends with these words:"The world does not need another description from me."

Getting back to Klee’s cataloguing - I'm thinking it could be useful to catalogue poems as I write them – which worked? Which do I go back to revise? Which do I finally give up on and why? If nothing else having this ledger will remind of the drafts I've yet to go back to! And it could work well for 2014 as I've taken up the 52 challenge.

Yes, definitely feel better for that trip to Tate Modern.

Book of The Month - September 2013 - The Editor's Eye

As I prepare to meet new students in October, The Editor’s Eye keeps rising to the top of my recently read pile as a useful resource. There are so many ‘How To Write’ books but few that turn such a forensic eye on the editing process.

This book stands out because of the way in which the author shows that editing is a series of stages, integral to the writing process, “… taking place before a book is written, while writing, after the first draft, and before and after a book is sent to book design.”  Editing is far more than checking spelling and punctuation.

In my experience there are two common ways in which beginning writers misunderstand editing, especially with their first book-length project. There are those who have cripplingly high expectations, believing that the first draft should come out near perfect, bar a few typos. On the other hand, there are those who say, “Oh, an editor will sort out my work once it’s finished.”  These writers tend to rush to send a first messy draft to an agent who, they feel sure, will spot its potential and sell it to an editor who will clean it all up. This is so unlikely to happen, especially in the current climate. The more polished a manuscript the more likely it is to rise to the top of the pile, but that polishing does not happen on the first draft.  If you’ve caught yourself thinking in either of these ways and you’re serious about putting your work out there, then this book could be for you.

Part of developing as a writer part is to become more skilled at being your own editor. That is, to know when to let yourself play and become lost in the creative exploration of your material and when to standing back to assess what you have.

The author breaks down the processes that get lumped together in the word Editing, suggesting there are four stages:

1. Developmental, which can occur before you start to write: brainstorming; testing out the concept for non-fiction; character studies or backstories for fiction; identifying holes in your outline; identifying research you might need.
2. Substantive, this is most likely to occur when you have a good chunk of manuscript written in a first draft. It involves working at a structural level: order of chapters; pacing; voice/tone; identifying missing content. This is standing back to see if the whole is hanging together.
3. Copyediting, attends to house style, spelling, punctuation, etc.
4. Proofreading, your last chance to get it fixed.

Many beginning writers think that editing is just 3 and 4. What’s really useful about this book are the chapters on 1 and 2. That said, to talk of stages and numbering things 1-4 suggests that all it takes to write a book is to be systematic. We all know it’s messier than that and Stacy Ennis is careful to acknowledge that.  Writing is all about going back and forth between order and chaos. This book will really help you when you need to be in ‘order’ mode and to decide what kind of order you might require.

The book is likely to be most useful to those writing non-fiction, but there is useful stuff for fiction writers too, such as making an outline to clarify your story either before you write or maybe when you have a few chapters but aren’t sure how they work together. 

Any writer keen to understand and to strengthen their own writing process could benefit from reading The Editor’s Eye. It offers a space in which each writer can take time to reflect on what might work for them, to take a fresh look at how to work productively with spontaneity and planning.

Book of The Month - July 2013 - Apple Tree Yard

Apple Tree Yard is Louise Doughty’s 7th novel and, for me, her most successful to date. She gets better with each book. A bold writer, Doughty knows how to tell a good story and never shies away from difficult material. Her last book, Whatever You Love, explored the raw psychology of a mother whose child had been killed in a hit-and-run.

In Apple Tree Yard we watch an extremely successful women’s life spiral out of control.  As a result of one impulsive act her status as a well-respected scientist, her long marriage and her relationships with grown-up son and daughter are all under threat.

Highly regarded in the field of genetics, Yvonne Carmichael is used to appearing before Government committees. After one such routine appearance a chance encounter sees her accepting an invitation to take a guided tour around parts of the House of Commons that are out of public view.  About the status of her guide Yvonne knows nothing but he’s clearly able to move freely around the Palace of Westminster, and she follows.  

Before she has time to consider what is happening to her the stranger leads her into a cupboard off the chapel of St Mary Undercroft. So begins the excitement of risky sex in surprising places. More impulsive meetings follow and Yvonne is soon on an unstoppable trail to her downfall.

But how far will she fall?

You will know from page one that all of this leads Yvonne into court as the book opens with her, the accused, on the witness stand being cross-examined; you won’t know until the last page what really went on.

For the first few chapters you might think that Doughty is has strayed into the land of 50 Shades but that’s what’s so clever about this book - erotica and courtroom drama is all there and expertly done but woven through strong characterisation is intelligent reflection on women’s sexuality and the status of the professional woman in the 21^st century. It was no accident that the inciting incident occurs in the same place as that brave act of suffragist Emily Davison, who hid overnight in that same cupboard so that she would be recorded in the 1911 census as being resident in the House of Commons.

As things get worse and Yvonne reflects on her career, marriage and how she is viewed.  She recalls a time when the children were young and she regularly cooked Sunday lunch for mother- and sisters-in-law. Every time her husband left the table to change a nappy, “the three of them would practically break into the Hallelujah Chorus. Nobody praised me for all the combining I did, all the juggling.  I never asked for praise. I took my own competence for granted as much as anyone else.”

Another serious theme is the way in which we self-mythologise.  Through Yvonne’s trial we see how the facts and the veracity of any story depends on how it is told and who is telling it.

Most compelling is the way Doughty shows how an ordinary family functions while containing dark secrets. She shows how easy it is to fall into leading a double life. Indeed, the book is dedicated to, “everyone who walks around knowing the truth to be different.”

Apple Tree Yard is the perfect summer read, but do pack a few more books because you will zip through this one.

Read the Words Unlimited interview with Louise Doughty, here.

 

Book of The Month - June 2013 - Born in The NHS

Born in the NHS is one of those books that’s hard to categorise. It offers a fascinating slice of social history – families in sickness and health, the changing roles of health professionals – over the last seventy years, but it’s no dry academic study. The book – a collaboration between two poets, Wendy French and Jane Kirwan – is brimming with life, real people and their dramas. It is also thoughtful, reflective and packed with things you didn’t know but might now be glad you’ve found out.

 

The idea for the book began with conversations between Kirwan and French about growing up in medical families. French’s father was a GP in Wales, Kirwan’s parents were both doctors, originally from Ireland but working most of their lives in Northampton. Both poets have also worked in the NHS and have extended family members still active in it and have a wealth of material to draw upon.

Alarmed at recent cuts and changes to the NHS, they felt the need to document, from their own lived experience, what they knew and valued about the Service. But it isn’t quite a documentary and neither is it a polemic, as they are keen to point out in the foreword, rather it is a ‘personal and impressionistic account.’  

It’s perhaps best described as a miscellany as it includes, prose, poems, anecdotes, memoir, facts. Presented as an A-Z, once you’ve read the introductions, which outline fascinating family histories, you are free to dip in and out.

Try, for example, under T for TUBERCULOSIS, Kirwan’s piece ‘Lipstick.’ Pre-NHS, pre-widely available antibiotics this disease was an ever present threat and highly contagious. The piece shows Kirwan’s medical student mother at a dance in 1931 cutting off the top of her lipstick that has been hastily snatched and used by ‘Maura from the bank.’

In P for PARAMEDICS French gives us a brief history of the ambulance service, something that developed out of the First World War. It is as recent as the 1970s and 1980s that ambulance drivers make the shift from offering transport to offering first treatment. This is followed by a highly moving poem ‘Running Late,’ about a cycling accident, that becomes all the more poignant when we discover the cyclist is French’s niece.  

This juxtaposition of fact, history, statistic against deeply felt personal story is effective throughout and makes the book compelling.

Born in the NHS offers unique, valuable insight into a national institution that has been around for such a short time. Required reading, I reckon for the under 40s who may have come to take it all for granted.

It’s also an excellent example of creative collaboration – what happens when poets talk to each other, how writing grows new writing – plus it marks the start of a new publishing venture – The Hippocrates Press.

This is a book that every home should have.

Book of The Month - May 2013 - Barbara Kingsolver

What I admire about Barbara Kingsolver’s novels is the way in which she takes on big issues but never preaches. She’s done it again with Flight Behaviour.

Dellarobia, at twenty-eight and after ten years of a lacklustre marriage, is about to take a drastic step. As the book opens she is hiking up the mountain slope that rises up from the Tennessee sheep farm she shares with her channel-surfacing husband, Cub, and her disapproving in-laws. She’s walking out on all of that to meet her young lover. But, up on the wooded slopes, she comes across an extraordinary sight: millions of butterflies hanging from the trees. These Monarchs have settled for the winter in the wrong place, they ought to be in Mexico, why have they come to rest in Tennessee?

The disruption to the migration of these butterflies, disrupts Dellarobia’s ill-thought-through attempt to migrate from her marriage. This is how Kingsolver does it - she pitches you into the personal and the political, the micro and the macro, from the first page. She has you hooked from the start with the plight of Dellarobia and the butterflies. As the story unfolds and Dellarobia’s dilemma is explored, so is that of the butterflies and the larger issue of climate change.

When news of these strange visitors leaks out there begins a debate between all the factions who have an interest: the displaced Mexican family, Dellarobia's in-laws, the local preacher, the media and not least Ovid Byron - he bears an uncanny resemblance to Barrack Obama - who has spent twenty years studying the migration patterns of Monarchs.  As Dellarobia becomes involved in assisting Ovid with scientific data collection, so she collects and reviews significant data about her marriage, her lost child and the chance to attend college which she never took. 

Kingsolver gives voice to all sides. Through these characters we see the effects of blind faith versus the objective recording and collecting of evidence. She paints a sympathetic portrait of redneck farmers and what they are up against - what can be afforded when living in near poverty? She’s critical of a certain kind of pious eco-campaigner and she dramatises the clash between the media and the scientists - what is the truth? What is known and how does that get communicated?

Questions and characters are tangible as is the landscape. I felt as if I’d been to Tennessee after reading this. I could find my way up that track to where the butterflies hung out as sure as Dellarobia or Ovid; I could smell the sheep in the yard.

My one niggle is that, at times, Kingsolver seemed to tread water, often repeating things we’d already been told. I felt as if I’d seen Cub channelling surfacing far too many times, having got the point after the first two or three mentions. Some scenes seemed over-detailed. But these are nit picks. A novel is never a perfect form, and Kingsolver has achieved so much with this book – a compelling story of family life woven through with the most pressing issue of the day. It is absorbing, thoughtful and entertaining. It’s a couple of weeks since I finished reading it and I find myself still thinking of the characters and the issues.

Book of The Month - April 2013 - Kay Ryan

 

 

 The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan is my stand-out book this month.  I first came across Ryan when she read at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival a couple of years ago. United States Poet Laureate from 2008 – 2010, her work is quirky, aphoristic. These short poems with their short lines are deceptively simple.

In a Q&A session at Aldeburgh she talked about what poetry meant to her: 'A poem is a brief moment of clarity.' The effect of reading her work is to clear a space in the head, to sharpen a thought.

Asked about her subject matter Ryan said, ‘The mind itself.’ Ryan is a philosopher of the everyday, catching the epiphany in the ordinary. There are large thoughts in these small poems. She seems to watch the mind at work and catch the thought process in the fewest words; the very opposite of Jorie Graham’s academic digressions, which I also love, but for different reasons.

Ryan also plays with cliché, rehabilitating tired words in poems such as, ‘Bitter Pill,’ ‘No Rest for The Idle’ and ‘Nothing Ventured.’ But I particularly enjoyed the poems that draw on the imagery of the natural world. Ryan calls herself a 'nature exploiter.' She’s not a nature poet in the way of fellow American, Mary Oliver. For Oliver experience in the natural world, its imagery, brings a spiritual quality to a poem.   In a Ryan poem reference to natural phenomena is a way to reflect on down-to-earth human behaviours, as in, ‘Expectations,’  ‘Hailstorm’ and ‘The Edges of Time:’

Expectations

We expect rain

to animate this

creek: these rocks

to harbor gurgles,

these pebbles to

creep downstream

a little, those leaves

to circle in the

eddy, the stains

and gloss of wet.

The bed is ready

but no rain yet.

 

Hailstorm

Like a storm

of hornets, the

little white planets

layer and relayer

as they whip around

in their high orbits,

getting more and

more dense before

they crash against

our crust. A maelstrom

of ferocious little

fists and punches,

so hard to believe

once it's past.

 

The Edges of Time

It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.

Though clearly influenced by Emily Dickinson, this work is distinctively Ryan. I am pleased to have discovered another kind of philosophical American woman; she makes interesting reading alongside Jorie Graham and Mary Oliver.

Again at Aldeburgh, Ryan said that her aim was to: 'Never make you feel heavier. A poem animates you, your cells the space between your cells. It adds oxygen.'

Reading this collection is to breathe fresh literary air, to oxygenate thoughts.

 

Book of The Month - March 2013 - Orkney

Amy Sackville’s Orkney is challenging and enchanting.

The first-person narrator is a sixty-something professor of literature who arrives on a remote Orkney island with his twenty-one-year-old bride, a former student. This is to be their honeymoon. But, for all their eating, drinking and storytelling together, they spend most of the daytime apart.  She is out on the beach watching the sea; he – a Keats scholar – stays inside, working on an endless tome, and watching her watching the sea.

Not much ‘plot,’ then, but tension builds around the mystery of the young wife. Sackville performs her own enchantment on the reader with long, flowing sentences that mesmerise. She catches and sustains the high tone of her male, academic narrator, who is, clearly, not quite reliable. 

Seen only through the Prof’s eyes can we be sure that what he is seeing is real? We never learn his wife’s name but are regularly reminded of her white hair, webbed hands and feet and her recurring nightmares in which the sea tries to claim her. Though she is drawn to the shore each day she can’t swim and fears the water. We learn that she was born among these islands but that her father mysteriously disappeared. She will not speak of her family. 

The pleasure in reading Orkney is in the fine writing and the ambiguity of a story that refuses to satisfy our want for explanation and for realism. That said there is enough realism to have us believe we are in Orkney – landscape and weather are beautifully evoked, the sea is made palpable: “Out at the sea’s edge, the water churns over, a static rolling like horses pawing the ground…” Other people seem solid enough – the dour Mrs Odie who brings eggs to the cottage and comes to clean. When the Prof and his white-haired wife visit the pub they encounter an all too ordinary family on a bird-watching holiday.

As the Prof tries to probe his wife’s secrets, her past, she says, ‘Let it go,’ and sets off to the shore again. Feeling sorry for himself the Prof muses: “The knight-at-arms is left to loiter palely on the cold hillside by his Belle Dame. But in what sense is she without Mercy? [she] Wraps him in fantasy and then abandons him to waste and rot? What is the nature of this enchantment? Or is it only madness, or a dream, and if so, whose?”

In the Prof’s questions are this reader’s questions.

It seems that Sackville has spun a whole novel from the Keats’s poem, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ furnishing the sparse narrative of that poem with this white haired woman.  There’s also a good helping of folktale and myth threaded throughout the book. So, for me, the wife seemed to be a figment of the Prof’s literary imagination; a mermaid dreamed up to ward off the end of his productive, potent life. Looked at this way, the story becomes a dramatisation of his desire and frustration.

In this ambitious second novel Sackville has created a sophisticated ‘folktale’ for now, that explores desire [its insatiability], the impossibility of knowing another person, no matter how enchanting you may find them, and the stories we invent around our separateness.

It is refreshing to find such literary boldness and a narrative that plays on long after the last page.

Amy Sackville talks about her writing process, here.