A new months calls for a new sunshine noir sending shivers down the spines of local thriller fans…

This month, the co-author of the popular Detective Kubu series, Michael Sears, had the opportunity to interview Paul Hardisty for The Big Thrill – the magazine for international thriller writers.

 
Here’s what Michael and Paul chatted about:

A Canadian by birth and now the CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science based in Queensland, Paul Hardisty has spent 25 years working all over the world as an engineer, hydrologist, and environmental scientist. He has rough-necked on oil rigs in Texas, explored for gold in the Arctic, and rehabilitated village water wells in the wilds of Africa. He survived a bomb blast in a café in Sana’a in 1993, and was one of the last Westerners out of Yemen before the outbreak of the 1994 civil war.

Yemen was the setting for Hardisty’s powerful debut thriller, The Abrupt Physics of Dying, which was short-listed for the Crime Writers Association Creasy New Blood Dagger award – the premiere British award for first novels in the mystery/thriller genre. It was followed by The Evolution of Fear last year.

Paul’s protagonist, Claymore Straker, is a South African who went through the mill of the Angola war and was badly chewed up in it. In Reconciliation for the Dead we find out what really happened to him then and why. It’s Clay’s backstory.

How much of that story have you always known, and how much have you developed in the writing of this book?

I have been thinking about and working on the plot and character elements of this series for the last 15 years. Clay’s experiences as a young man growing up in South Africa during apartheid were always going to be the essential backstory for the books, and I had a number of pretty specific events from his past fixed quite early. These appear as fragments of flashbacks and recollections in the first two books, which are set 13-plus years later, after Clay has been dishonorably discharged and exiled from SA.

In the third book, Reconciliation for the Dead, Clay goes back to South Africa to testify to Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), seeking amnesty for the terrible things he did during the war. His testimony provides the vehicle for us to go back to 1981, and explore Clay’s past in detail. It explains why Clay is the distant, emotionally closed, damaged man we meet first in The Abrupt Physics of Dying. The progression has been a natural one, I think, and has built suspense. So when you finally find out just what happened back then that was so bad, I hope it pretty much blows you away.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission meeting

 
Much of the book takes place when he is 21, fighting in the undeclared war in Angola on the side of the South African army. The theme of the book is largely his personal disillusionment with the defense of white South Africa as he learns about the abhorrent things that it’s doing. Yet he finds himself unable to join the other side, whatever his sympathies. Is this unresolved internal tension at the heart of the character we see in the books that are set later?

Absolutely. The man we meet in the first two books is simply unable to forgive himself for what he has done. It forces him, eventually, back to testify to the TRC, in an attempt to win amnesty, but mostly to find some kind of absolution. Throughout this, Rania, the other main character, is trying to help him understand that forgiveness is possible, and that most importantly, he must learn to forgive himself.

Most of the book takes place in South Africa and Angola. How did you develop the background knowledge to set a book in two countries you don’t know well?

Actually, I have worked extensively across Africa over the last 30 years. I was married in West Africa in the 1980s, was in Ethiopia in the early ’90s as the Mengistu regime fell, and have traveled extensively across Southern Africa. So I know some of the continent pretty well, and obviously, tried to set as many of the scenes as I could in places I know. I have supplemented that with extensive research on the period (1980-82), and mention a couple of key sources in the back of the book. I also consulted with friends who were there at the time.

Continue reading their conversation here.
 
Book details

• The Abrupt Physics of Dying: One Man. An Oil Company. A Decision That Could Cost His Life by Paul E. Hardisty
  EAN: 9781910633052
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• The Evolution of Fear by Paul E. Hardisty
  EAN: 9781910633243
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• Reconciliation for the Dead by Paul E. Hardisty
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The prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the renowned British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.

Ishiguro has received widespread acclaim for his novels Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant.

Read Michele Magwood’s interview with Ishiguro on the Buried Giant here and listen to her 2015 interview with Ishiguro here:

Published in the Sunday Times

The Word is Murder
Anthony Horowitz, Century
**
Just when one thought that Sherlock Holmes (the one Benedict Cumberbatch embraced as his character in the TV series) was the most arrogant detective ever to grace popular culture, Horowitz introduces us to himself and Daniel Hawthorne – both insufferable men. Horowitz writes himself as a character in his own book, where he is called on by Hawthorne to help in a murder case. The murder to be solved is that of Diana Cowper, a wealthy woman who goes to a funeral parlour to plan her burial just hours before she is strangled. Hawthorne is brought in as the police need someone with his intelligence to solve the case. Hawthorne brings Horowitz in to write the book. It’s watery and self-indulgent, with Horowitz name-dropping celebrities like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. The murder story, in the end, is irrelevant. – Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt

The New Girl: A Trans Girl Tells It Like It Is
Rhyannon Styles, Headline
****
This bold autobiography relates the tremendous challenges that the writer undergoes in order to embrace life as a woman. She spares no details and is candid in this honest exposé of life behind the scenes in the world of theatre and the performing arts, a place where freedom of expression and individuality is the norm. The New Girl grabs one’s attention and provides a fascinating glimpse into both the inner and outer world of a transgender person. – Penny Swisa

House of Spies
Daniel Silva, HarperCollins
***
Gabriel Allon, the Israeli spy, is back for his 17th book. Co-ordinated terrorist attacks in London’s West End have left hundreds dead. The attacks have all the markings of Saladin, the ISIS mastermind. Clues to the case take Allon and his team to the south of France where they must infiltrate the enemy. A complex thriller brimming with details. – Tiah Beautement @ms_tiahmarie

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• The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz
  EAN: 9781780896854
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• The New Girl: A Trans Girl Tells It Like It Is by Rhyannon Styles
  EAN: 9781472242563
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• House of Spies by Daniel Silva
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Published in the Sunday Times

Retribution Road
Antonin Varenne, MacLehose Press
****

Don’t be put off by the cowboy on the cover and the words “adventure story”. This is no cartoon Wild West tale, although guns are slung and whisky is drunk in quantity. Antonin Varenne is a French author who has won several prestigious awards in France for his noir novels. Here he travels back to the 19th century, where we meet the British mercenary Arthur Bowman, one of the East India Company’s private army of some 300 000 soldiers. He’s a vicious killer and a charismatic leader, but a mission in Burma ends up with his company captured and tortured.

Bowman barely survives and returns to the slums of London where he sinks into alcohol and opium addiction. When a corpse turns up bearing the same markings of torture that he suffered in Burma, he sets off to hunt the killer, convinced it is one of his men.

Bowman trails the man to America and follows his tracks across the vast young country. It is a pacy, vivid tale that moves at rapid speed for 500 pages and twists and turns like a thriller. Varenne breathes extraordinary life into history, from the junks on a Burmese river, to the Great Stink of London when the Thames dried up, to the gold mines of Colorado and virgin ranches of the Sierra Nevada. He captures the creak and suffocation of stagecoaches, the terror of working women protesters shot in New York, the tedium of sea crossings and the blinding vistas of the New World.

It is an intriguing blend of quest tale, detective story, Western and war drama, with an unusual love interest stirred in – but underneath it all are serious questions about the nature of courage and honour, and whether an evil man can ever be redeemed. – Michele Magwood @michelemagwood

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• Retribution Road by Antonin Varenne
  EAN: 9780857053749
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The 2017 Man Booker Prize has been announced!

As per the press release:

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders is named winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Lincoln in the Bardo is the first full-length novel from George Saunders, internationally renowned short story writer.

The 58-year-old New York resident, born in Texas, is the second American author to win the prize in its 49-year history. He was in contention for the prize with two British, one British-Pakistani and two American writers.

Lola, Baroness Young, 2017 Chair of judges, comments:

‘The form and style of this utterly original novel, reveals a witty, intelligent, and deeply moving narrative. This tale of the haunting and haunted souls in the afterlife of Abraham Lincoln’s young son paradoxically creates a vivid and lively evocation of the characters that populate this other world. Lincoln in the Bardo is both rooted in, and plays with history, and explores the meaning and experience of empathy.’

Lincoln in the Bardo focuses on a single night in the life of Abraham Lincoln: an actual moment in 1862 when the body of his 11-year-old son was laid to rest in a Washington cemetery. Strangely and brilliantly, Saunders activates this graveyard with the spirits of its dead. The Independent described the novel as ‘completely beguiling’, praising Saunders for concocting a ‘narrative like no other: a magical, mystery tour of the bardo – the “intermediate” or transitional state between one’s death and one’s next birth, according to Tibetan Buddhism.’ Meanwhile, the Guardian wrote that, ‘the short story master’s first novel is a tale of great formal daring…[it] stands head and shoulders above most contemporary fiction, showing a writer who is expanding his universe outwards, and who clearly has many more pleasures to offer his readers.’

Saunders told TIME magazine that he didn’t really want to write about Lincoln, ‘but was so captivated by this story I’d heard years ago about him entering his son’s crypt. I thought of the book as a way of trying to instil the same reaction I’d had all those years ago.’

Lincoln in the Bardo is published by Bloomsbury, making it the third consecutive year the prize has been won by an independent publisher, following Oneworld Publications’ success in 2015 with Marlon James and 2016 with Paul Beatty. Bloomsbury has won the prize three times before, with Howard Jacobson (2010), Margaret Atwood (2000) and Michael Ondaatje (1992).

Saunders’ win comes in the month that 1989 Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro was named as this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. Ishiguro follows in the footsteps of other Booker Prize-recognised authors who have gone on to win the award including: V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, William Golding, J. M. Coetzee and Doris Lessing.

Luke Ellis, CEO of Man Group, comments:

‘We are pleased to congratulate George Saunders, along with each of the shortlisted authors, for his fantastic achievement this year. At Man Group, we are extremely proud to be sponsoring the world’s foremost literary prize and celebrating exceptional literary talent for a fifteenth year. We understand the importance of intellectual capital and creative thought – and indeed, the ability to view the world from different lenses matters more than ever today, in this age of rapid and inexorable change. We also believe that businesses like ours have an important duty to advance progress in education at every level: from prizes like this, which recognise global talent, to the local grassroots initiatives championed by the Booker Prize Foundation and the Man Charitable Trust, which we are honoured to support.’

Lola, Baroness Young was joined on the 2017 judging panel by the literary critic, Lila Azam Zanganeh; the Man Booker Prize shortlisted novelist, Sarah Hall; the artist, Tom Phillips CBE RA; and the travel writer and novelist, Colin Thubron CBE. The judges considered 144 submissions for this year’s prize.

George Saunders’ win was announced by Lola Young at a dinner at London’s Guildhall. He was presented with a trophy from HRH The Duchess of Cornwall and a £50,000 cheque by Luke Ellis, Chief Executive of Man Group. Saunders also receives a designer bound edition of his book and a further £2,500 for being shortlisted.

At the event, which was broadcast live on the BBC News Channel, actors Maxine Peake, Rhashan Stone and Olivia Williams, read extracts from the shortlisted books. All the shortlisted authors attended alongside a number of former winners.

George Saunders will take part in his first official public event as winner at a New Statesman-partnered event at Foyles Charing Cross Road on Thursday 19 October 2017.

Royal Mail is again issuing a congratulatory postmark featuring the winner’s name, which will be applied to millions of items of stamped mail nationwide on Wednesday 18 October and Friday 20 October 2017. It will say ‘Congratulations to George Saunders, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize’.

Man Group, an active investment management firm, has sponsored the prize since 2002.

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• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  EAN: 9781408871751
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Published in the Sunday Times

Late Show
Michael Connelly, Orion, R275
***
Fierce, flawed and fallen from grace, Detective Renée Ballard now works “The Late Show” – the graveyard shift at the LA police department. Every night she opens cases and every morning turns them over to an investigating unit. Then she lands two cases she’s determined to keep – a multiple shooting and an assault on a transgender prostitute. Although Ballard senses the presence of “big evil”, she can’t know that her investigation will loop back to her department. Ballard is not as nuanced or compelling a character as Harry Bosch, and Connolly is perhaps too eager to show us he’s done his research, describing every detail of police paperwork and procedure, but this is nit picking. The book is fast-paced, clever, and delivers a gritty view of LA’s seedy underbelly. – Joanne Macgregor @JoanneMacg

Believe Me
Eddie Izzard, Michael Joseph, R340
****
This is not a shock-horror celebrity memoir; there is no profanity, gossip or exaggerations. It’s a story of damn hard work, passion and determination. Eddie Izzard knew from a young age that he wanted to be a performer. It took 12 years for him to officially break into the entertainment world. Out of each failed attempt, his determination grew, until he became the international celebrity he is today. At the same time, Izzard knew his sexuality was not easy to define. Being a self-proclaimed “action transvestite” has meant that he has taken on a unique view of the world and presents this in his performances and daring fashion choices. His well-deserved self-confidence is inspiring and catchy. – Samantha Gibb @samantha_gibb

The Rhino Whisperer
Evadeen Brickwood, Sula Books, R250
***
Brickwood turns an observant eye on Southern African problems, setting much of her story in the fictional Shangari Safari Park. When rhino poaching and murder come to Shangari, it’s like the serpent entering the Garden of Eden. We are given a cast – Tom and Sofia, who run the park; Barry the alcoholic vet; Sofia’s best friend Gugu, and Gugu’s dodgy billionaire boss Stan Makeroff (think Sol Kerzner meets Radovan Krejcir) – with the suspicion that one of them is Mr Big, the criminal mastermind behind it all. Delightfully exuberant, but needs editing. – Aubrey Paton

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• Late Show by Michael Connelly
  EAN: 9781409147534
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• Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard
  EAN: 9781405922029
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• The Rhino Whisperer by Evadeen Brickwood
  EAN: 9781370636105
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Published in the Sunday Times

A Column of Fire
Ken Follett, Macmillan, R350
****

‘This struggle for religious tolerance is the foundation of the range of freedoms that we enjoy in many countries today.’

On the downside, Follett does take his own sweet time to deliver. On the upside, he is not one for half measures. For the fans of the enormously popular Kingsbridge series of historical fiction novels it has been a decade-long wait for the third volume, A Column of Fire. All 750 pages of it hit the market with the momentum of a brick going through a glass window.

There is nothing modest about the scope of Follett’s work. The first Kingsbridge novel, Pillars of the Earth, covers the lives of the inhabitants in the eponymous town during the 12th century, as they erect its iconic cathedral.

The second, World Without End, carries the tale into the 14th century. The latest novel revisits the townsfolk’s descendants after a 200-year gap, in tumultuous 16th-century England, with plots to dethrone or assassinate Elizabeth I, the plague of the Black Death, the Gunpowder Plot, and the threatened invasion of the Spanish armada.

It’s a rollicking saga of love and death, violence, intrigue and treachery, tracing the roller-coaster fortunes of two families, the Willards and the Fitzgeralds. The backdrop is the religious turmoil that followed the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth I to the throne and set all of Catholic Europe against England.

It was the battle between these two religions that made the period an attractive subject, says Follett. “The conflict between tolerance and fanaticism has echoes, has a resonance, in the extremism and religious warfare of today.”

Follett is sceptical, however, of the potential for learning lasting lessons from history or literature. “[But] we do get a wider perspective from history and historical novels. Once one knows about the past, has spent time imagining it, one really can’t come up with such simple views and simple solutions that one otherwise might be tempted to do.”

In A Column of Fire, it is when personal and political worlds intersect that the complexities become especially acute. Families and communities are torn asunder, as power seesaws between the contesting Protestants and Catholics.

While both the Willards and Fitzgeralds are prominent Catholic families in Kingsbridge, the latter are more doctrinaire and have great social ambitions for their daughter Margery. It makes the Fitzgerald clan determined to thwart the love between her and Ned Willard. This divide becomes a yawning gulf when Ned enters the service, while Margery is forced to marry a scion of the aristocracy. Over the next 50 years, while Ned and Margery cling to their individual beliefs, their love apparently doomed, England and the Continent are in a state of upheaval.

One of the determined young Queen Elizabeth’s earliest moves is to set up the country’s first secret service, to neutralise the plots of her many enemies. Young Ned becomes one of her spymasters.

For Follett, who made his name as a writer of espionage novels before making the historical genre his own, it’s something of a full circle to combine the two. “I like writing about spies,” he enthuses. “There are always two stories: the official version that governments tell us and the actual one, the truth behind it all. Spies are interesting, because they know the true story.”

Follett is proud of the historical veracity of his writing. While there are authors who twist history for dramatic effect, and Follett says he has no issue with such creative licence, it is not for him. “I will not violate history. It means sticking to the truth, as best we know it.”

In a narrative that encompasses four centuries of history, in thousands of pages, this is no easy task. Just his draft, outlining the plot and characters of the book, is as long as a shortish novel.

“It is easy, with a minor character, to forget small details, like whether they have blue or green eyes. Readers, unfortunately, don’t seem to have the same problem, and are quick to point out the errors.” He uses an Excel spreadsheet to keep track, so the character’s age will automatically be updated by the program as the story progresses through the various chapters.

Accuracy is paramount. The manuscript is submitted to three or four professional historians, whom Follett pays “very well” to scrutinise for anachronisms and dubious interpretations of events.

He works a conventional nine-to-five workday week and says he is not unusual in his approach. Even the “bad boys” of writing, with reputations for carousing, tend to have a disciplined, measured approach to their work.

“It’s a fascinating, challenging, completely absorbing task. There’s an enormous satisfaction taking every bit of knowledge, wisdom and skill that one has, and turning that into novels that millions of people enjoy.”

He has already embarked on the drafting of his next book, although he is cagey about what it is, “mainly because it is early days and I don’t yet know whether it is going to work out”. However, he leaves the door open for a continuation of the Kingsbridge series.

After all, “this struggle for religious tolerance that we see just starting in the 16th century is really the foundation of the wide range of freedoms that we enjoy in many countries today”.

“That’s because once you have the right to make up your own mind about your God, you can’t help but wonder why you shouldn’t make up your own mind about the king and the laws.” @TheJaundicedEye

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• A Column of Fire by Ken Follett
  EAN: 9780525954972
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Published in the Sunday Times

A Gap in the Hedge
Johan Vlok Louw, Umuzi, R230
***
Amnesia is a strange thing. How do you remember how to drive a car or make a casserole but you can’t remember what your own name is? In this novel it sometimes feels as if Johan Vlok Louw is leading us up the garden path as Karl gets closer to knowing who he is. The only clues to guide him are an old grey Ford, and a taste for Coke, whisky and Paul Revere cigarettes. As he proceeds, step by step, through his sleazy, bewildering world, you are either drawn along through curiosity or, if you are less indulgent, you leave him to his own devices. – Yvonne Fontyn

The Floating Theatre
Martha Conway, Zaffre Publishing, R295
*****
When the steamer she is travelling on sinks, May Bedloe finds herself, for the first time, in charge of her own destiny. Joining a travelling theatre on the Ohio river, the divides between North and South and between freedom and slavery become apparent and divisive and May is drawn against her will into a dangerous war. She begins to realise that everyone makes a choice and those choices come with costs that can be hard to bear. The book starts off a little slowly, but May is captivating as she stumbles through her discovery of the complexities of life. A beautiful coming-of-age novel. – Jem Glendinning @jemathome

Did You See Melody?
Sophie Hannah, Hodder & Stoughton, R275
*****
Hannah easily transports you to sunny Arizona, to the Swallowtail – a sprawling resort spa with luxury three-bedroomed casitas surrounded by swaying cacti, sparkling pools and seemingly super-friendly staff. There’s an underlying atmosphere of menace and a group of dubious folks (residents, staff, police, and a talkshow host) – all with some sort of agenda. One of the twists is that there is no murder per se, rather a supposedly murdered girl named Melody who has been spotted by the unwitting heroine, Cara Burrows. Burrows herself has things to resolve as she has just run away from her husband and two kids in the UK. This novel works best as a binge read – Hannah is such an accomplished storyteller that solving the mystery of Melody becomes urgent. – Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt
 

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• A Gap in the Hedge by Johan Vlok Louw
  EAN: 9781415208915
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• The Floating Theatre: Be swept away by this captivating tale of courage and redemption by Martha Conway
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• Did You See Melody? by Sophie Hannah
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Published in the Sunday Times

There’s no changing the fact of World War 2, but Robert Harris gives us an intriguing reinterpretation, writes Tinyiko Maluleke.

Munich
Robert Harris, Hutchinson, R295
*****

“Fiction allowed me to deploy my tools of imagination … re-inserting the story of Munich into popular culture.”
 
 
For three decades, it seems that Robert Harris has been harbouring a fascination with the historical Munich Agreement of September 30 1938 – some would say an obsession. In our telephonic interview, Harris chuckled when I put this to him, but his response was measured. “I may not have felt it with the same intensity throughout that period, but I have been interested in this subject for a long time.”

The backstory is the beginnings of World War 2. After annexing Austria, Hitler demanded parts of Czechoslovakia. The Munich Agreement was signed to facilitate this. After Hitler received his piece of Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain (UK) and Édouard Daladier (France) hoped a catastrophic war had been averted. However, a year later, Hitler invaded Poland and plunged the world into war.

With Munich, Harris enters the fray from the unconventional angle of fiction. “Fiction allowed me to deploy my tools of imagination. It offered me the possibility of re-inserting the story of Munich into popular culture,” he says.

There are real and fictional characters, but it is the latter who provide the clearest lens through which we can see “what really happened”. Two fictional characters in their late 20s — Hugh Legat, one of Chamberlain’s private secretaries, and Paul Hartmann, a German diplomat – are the chief literary poles around which the narrative revolves. Through Legat and Hartmann, Harris guides the reader into the inner circle. Through their observations, as well as their unlimited access to the German Führer and the British prime minister, the reader sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels the looming war.

Given their pivotal role in the narrative, were Legat and Hartmann entirely fictional? “Strictly speaking, yes, they are. But there were enough real people like them in the late 1930s, aspects of whose biographies I used to construct these two and other characters.”

Harris’s refined ability to reconstruct setting, to recreate a sense of place and time, and his knack for the creation of believable characters, enable him to tease fiction out of history. In Munich, fiction dances with non-fiction, sucking the reader deeper into a breathtaking literary mirage.

The Hitler of Harris’s novel is neither pleased with himself nor sure of himself, before and after signing the Munich Agreement. He feels outplayed, outmanoeuvred and belittled by Chamberlain. Similarly, Harris’s Chamberlain is imbued with more grace, depth and integrity than many history books suggest. Only time will tell if Harris has done enough to rid him of the Pontius Pilate-like role assigned to him in the popular imagination.

I ask Harris what he wants his readers to feel or know after they have read the book. After speaking briefly about the precariousness of facile notions about the “politics of appeasement”, he said: “Above all else, I would like my readers to feel entertained.”

Few writers can blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction as masterfully and as delightfully as Harris does in Munich. The reader must be warned: this book will be hard to put down. – @ProfTinyiko

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• Munich by Robert Harris
  EAN: 9780091959197
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Via Danielle Hess, for Beautiful News

On Wednesday, 25 October 2017 Beautiful News released Elena Agnello’s short-film that relooks the chapter on diversity and shows a variety of families through her storybook. To watch the video click here.

In South Africa, only a third of our children are raised in homes with both parents. Agnello from Cape Town, seeks to address the misperceptions and representations by rewriting the script on family diversity.

The mother of one is a children’s book author. Her first book, I Am Alex, was published last year and deals with diversity in family structures. When Agnello had her daughter she was surprised by the uniformity of the homes represented in literature. Having grown up in a household headed by a single mother, she understands the need for kids to see themselves and their unique family structures in the stories they read. “I think it’s vital that we have this conversation with our children,” says Agnello. “I wish that children would be taught more about others and their traditions.”

Her book is set at a birthday party and introduces readers to different families through the characters depicted as guests. Like Agnello, one child at the party has a single parent, while another is being raised by adoptive parents. The point is for kids to feel included in society and to develop a culture of incorporating others into their world views. Families aren’t defined by numbers or the closeness of relatives, but by an environment of care formed between people who love one another.

Book details

• I am Alex by Elena Agnello, illustrated by Adrie le Roux
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  EAN: 9780994690708
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Published in the Sunday Times

You’re hosting a literary dinner with three writers. Who’s invited?

Deon Meyer, the late John Gordon-Davis and Margie Orford.

What novel would you give a child to introduce them to literature?

Biggles of 266 Squadron. Jingoistic and un-PC these days, but my mum gave it to me when I was young and it got me into reading.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, given to me by my mother-in-law – the best book written about how to write fiction. I re-read it every year before starting a new novel.

What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

Anything by travel writer Bill Bryson.

What are you most proud of writing?

A friend in Zimbabwe, who lost his farm during the land grabs, said to me: “Please write one of your novels about what’s going on here so the rest of the world knows what’s happening.” His request moved me to write African Dawn, which charts Zimbabwe’s turbulent history from 1959 to the present through the eyes of three families.

What keeps you awake at night?

I am living a life I could never have dreamt of, writing for a living and splitting my life between Australia and Africa. I still feel insecure every time I submit a new novel to my publishers – I don’t want to wake up from this dream.

Books on your bedside table?

Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling, The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson and The Pale Criminal by Philip Kerr (his series about PI Bernie Gunther in Nazi Germany is brilliant).

What is the strangest thing you’ve done when researching a book?

I learnt how to sabotage a fighter plane and hijack a ship carrying cars.

What book do you wish you’d written?

Hold My Hand I’m Dying by John Gordon-Davis, probably the best action/romance/thriller/tragedy/historical novel set in Africa.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Don’t listen to everyone who tells you you’re wasting your time. Be brave and quit your day job sooner.

What did you edit out of The Cull?

One sex scene.

How do you select the names of your characters?

I support charities promoting wildlife conservation, healthcare and aged care in various African countries so I offer the rights for people to have their name or that of a loved one assigned to a character. I get some brilliant names. I decide who they will be, although I did have one man, a policeman in real life, beg me to be an evil villain in my novel.

What words do you overuse?

Beginning sentences with “well” or “so”. It’s been pointed out to me that one too many of my heroines has “long tanned legs”.

Book details

• The Cull by Tony Park
  EAN: 9781770105836
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Published in the Sunday Times

The Shadow Land
Elizabeth Kostova, Text Publishing, R360
****

How do you put an entire country into a novel? American novelist Elizabeth Kostova had done just that and more in her third novel, The Shadow Land. But not before she pondered the question for over two decades.

The country is Bulgaria, which she first wrote about in her bestselling 2005 novel, The Historian, and first visited as a 24-year-old student of Balkan folk music in 1989, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She not only met her Bulgarian husband Georgi on that trip, but ventured to remote corners of the country collecting songs.

“I was fascinated by the place. I went back with him a lot to see his family, acquired friends there, and over the years made a lot of notes. I wanted to write a novel that somehow covered this chaotic post-communist world that I’ve gotten to know over 25 years but wasn’t sure how to do it, it just seemed overwhelming.”

It was 20 years later when she was completing her second novel, The Swan Thieves, that she awoke from a dream in which entire scenes as well as the narrative arc of an entirely different novel revealed themselves. “I woke from that dream just stunned. Not that I understood a lot of the detail, but it was coherent enough that I could work on it. And I worked on that same story for eight years,” says Kostova, who has deployed, just as she did so potently in The Historian, a rich blend of historical fact, travelogue and fictional detail to give shape and form to the labyrinthine mystery that is The Shadow Land.

A capacious, Victorian-esque novel with more than a whisper of romance, it deftly conveys the beauty and mystery of this ancient land, all the while ensnaring you in a web of intrigue that encompasses the darkest horrors of Bulgaria’s hidden history.

It begins when a young American, Alexandra Boyd, arrives in Sofia to teach English in the summer of 2008, and mistakenly picks up a funerary urn in a bag belonging to an elderly couple and their middle-aged son when she helps them into a taxi. Her subsequent attempts to return the urn to its rightful owners form the engine of the novel, which plies between the present and the past: between Alexandra’s story, and the story of the urn’s occupant, Stoyan Lazarov, a brilliant musician who suffered brutal repression in a secret labour camp during the communist era.

For Kostova, the man in the urn, who arrived in her dream, was an absolute gift.

“There is such a long tradition of literature that is about proper burial, which is why I chose an inscription from Antigone. And our ancient need to lay people to rest with honour, which Faulkner, too, wrote about in As I Lay Dying.

She has often described the myth of Dracula, which she wrote about in The Historian, as “a metaphor for the horrors of history that won’t go away”. But in writing The Shadow Land Kostova immersed herself in accounts of those who survived Bulgaria’s forced-labour camps, recorded in oral histories collected in the ’90s. “I felt like I plunged into real and worse history. In The Historian there is a lot of dark history but the essential story was metaphorical, but The Shadow Land, although fiction, deals with a lot of real things that happened – representative of some of the worst things that humans do to each other. It was really hard material to work with sometimes.”

There hasn’t yet been as much public discussion within Bulgaria about the labour camps as in other former communist nations, adds Kostova. “They were very secret, yet not so secret, in the way that totalitarianism used to be so that people knew just enough to be terrified of what might happen to them if they were arrested.”

Kostova is aware, too, that, despite not planning it that way, The Shadow Land serves as a timely tale about the perils of autocracy.

“I’ve had interesting discussions with American audiences…We’re courting this awful danger of repression and censorship and surveillance and a lot of other things that traditionally only totalitarian governments engage in. We just don’t understand what we have brought upon ourselves.” – Bron Sibree, @BronSibree

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• The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova
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Published in the Sunday Times

A Good Country
Laleh Khadivi, Bloomsbury, R290
****

Rez Courdee is the good, obedient 14-year-old son of Iranian immigrants in sunny California. His marks are top notch, and he’s winning prizes for chemistry. He keeps to himself and is home every night for supper with his stern, demanding father and meek mother, until a new friendship and his hormones draw him into a world of surfing and smoking weed.

Laleh Khadivi’s description of the lazy days of privileged adolescence and teenage angst and transformation are nuanced and vivid, with a powerful sense of how mutable and scarily vulnerable we are at this age. Nonetheless, Rez’s trials and tribulations are fairly standard fare – until a bomb goes off at the Boston Marathon, followed by a bloody attack at a mall close to home. His world changes.

Suddenly, he’s a threat, an outsider. For the first time, he experiences racism and stereotyping. As his white friends turn away form him, he bonds increasingly to charismatic Arash and beautiful Fatima. Like him, they are of immigrant descent.

Like him, they’d thought themselves regular American kids. Now they find themselves under suspicion. Their response is to look to their faith to make sense of their changing world. Rez starts to explore Islam, first through his friends and then, increasingly, online.

This is a powerful and thought-provoking coming-of-age story, with a twist. Rez asks himself ordinary teenage questions – who am I? What is the meaning and purpose of my life? – in extraordinary circumstances. His radicalisation and the choices he makes are quite devastating. – Kate Sidley, @KateSidley

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• A Good Country by Laleh Khadivi
  EAN: 9781408875995
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Via PEN SA

Yewande Omotoso and Mohale Mashigo have been longlisted for the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award 2018!

Omotoso and Mashigo have been included on the list for their novels The Woman Next Door and The Yearning respectively.

The shortlist will be announced in April 2018 and the winner will be announced on 13 June 2018.

Seven Irish novels are among 150 titles that have been nominated by libraries worldwide for the €100,000 International DUBLIN Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English. Nominations include 48 novels in translation with works by authors from 40 countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, North America & Canada, South America and Australia & New Zealand.

Click here for the full longlist of 150 titles.

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• The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
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• The Yearning by Mohale Mashigo
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Published in the Sunday Times

Minette Walters has combined her talent for psychological thrillers with the Middle Ages, writes Bron Sibree.

The Last Hours
****
Minette Walters
Allen & Unwin, R330

It’s no secret that British crime writer Minette Walters has re-directed her talents to historical fiction. Now, on the eve of the release of her debut historical novel, The Last Hours, Walters, whose crime novels have sold in excess of 25 million worldwide and have earned her the epithet “queen of the psychological thriller”, attributes her genre swap to a desire for change.

“I do love to challenge myself,” says Walters, 67. “I love the way the crime genre has developed but I worry sometimes that people aren’t innovative enough, that everybody is producing similar things so you get a trend, like my psychological thriller trend, which I’m told I was a pioneer of. I love change, constantly refreshing it all.”

Indeed, the extraordinarily gripping The Last Hours owes as much to her driving curiosity as it does to her quest for writerly challenges. It is a novel, Walters says, “that I’ve had on my mind ever since we moved down to this tiny hamlet in Dorset 18 years ago. The idea started the moment we were told there is a plague pit somewhere around the houses. Shortly afterward I saw a plaque on a wall in Weymouth harbour that said ‘This is where the Black Plague entered England,’ and from then on, even when I was writing the crime novels, I was thinking,’Gosh that would make a fabulous story.’

“But then I had to persuade publishers to publish it, and that’s not the easiest thing in the world if they want you to write crime novels. But it would have been awful to have this idea in my head and never to have written it.”

Set in Dorsetshire, The Last Hours opens in July 1348, soon after the Black Death has entered England. It revolves around events at the demesne (pronounced as domain) of Develish where something unheard of happens following the death of its brutal overlord, Sir Richard, from a mysterious illness. An illness that has, in a matter of days, killed dozens on the neighbouring demesne, their rotting corpses left lying by the thoroughfare. Lady Anne, Sir Richard’s long-suffering wife, takes control of Develish – including the lives of its 200 bonded serfs – and refuses entry or exit to a single soul. Even more scandalous, she chooses a bastard serf to act as her steward, instead of the Norman steward appointed by Sir Richard.

In creating The Last Hours, which is, in effect, a riveting psychological thriller that runs to 555 pages, Walters has deployed the same analytic techniques she applies to her crime novels, cannily calling into question the thinking of the day in relation to class and gender as well the disease itself. “It’s so hard to get your head around the level of devastation that it brought,” says Walters.

“War never brings that level of devastation. And of course, everyone believed it was a punishment sent by God. Within three days to a week people were dead.”

In keeping with her reputation for tackling controversial subjects on the page and off, Walters also touches upon paedophilia, one of her most enduring concerns, in the novel. For while she has abandoned what she calls “the whodunnit part” of the crime genre, she says “real crime still does, and will always, fascinate me. I’m deeply interested in motivations, in psychology, in why things happen. So in a sense I don’t feel the move from the crime genre to historical fiction is so great,” she adds, “because human nature does not change.”

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• The Last Hours by Minette Walters
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Published in the Sunday Times

The Idiot
****
Elif Batuman, Jonathan Cape, R290

It’s difficult to classify The Idiot. Elif Batuman’s novel begins on the narrator’s first day of college. Selin, a tall and clever Turkish-American girl, is going to Harvard. She is going to do all the things expected of a protagonist in a coming-of-age novel: she is going to make some friends, take some classes, and fall in love for the first time with an unsuitable mathematician called Ivan. She is going to Experience Life. Easy.

Not at all easy, though. The Idiot is about experience, but it’s also about the way we describe and understand experiences, and how we summarise the incoherencies and absurdities of everyday life and turn them into a story that makes sense.

Early on in the novel, Selin describes her approach to literature (and to life: Selin’s world is made of words). Selin believes that “every story has a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely.” How does she understand the meaning of the conversations she has with the unsuitable mathematician, where all they ever do is “mishear each other and say ‘What?’ all the time”, and yet she comes away from these interactions feeling so besotted and preoccupied she can hardly see straight? What is she supposed to do, and what is she meant to think, and how is she meant to behave all the time, and who is going to tell her? Who is going to decode the e-mails between her and the unsuitable mathematician, or explain what his sigh means when she produces a pack of alcohol swabs from her bag? Well?

This is all much funnier and much less tortured than it sounds. Batuman, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has a high sense of the absurd and a gift for observation that borders on the creepy. She see things that other people don’t see, and she makes her readers see them too. – Rosa Lyster, @rosalyster

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• The Idiot by Elif Batuman
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Published in the Sunday Times

Blackwing: The Raven’s Mark
***
ED McDonald, Gollancz, R310

Multi-volume fantasy series are generally soap operas, but every so often there is an excellent series with a rich, complex story that’s simply too long for a single volume. Blackwing may be one such, set in a world with three moons, where energy is spun from moonlight, magic has replaced science, and The Deep Kings (evil sorcerers) battle against The Nameless (non-evil magicians). Captain Ryhalt Galharrow works for Crowfoot, one of the Nameless; his workplace is the blasted wasteland of The Misery, frontier between The Republic and the Dhojara Empire of the Deep Kings. Galharrow and his cronies win this battle, but the war is still to come. Riveting. – Aubrey Paton

100: A Lovely Spirit Here
****
Cynthia Kros

Written to commemorate the centenary of Parkview junior and senior schools in Joburg, the book traces their evolution from one small school for whites to two multi-cultural, racially diverse schools open to all. Parkview Government School opened in 1917, a difficult time in both South African and world history. Kros has built a picture of what the school must have been like then, with the discovery of a fragile admissions register unearthed at Parkview Senior. Fast forward 100 years and you have a Model C school known for its academic excellence. This is not just a book about a school but one about the sorrows and triumphs of South Africa. – Bridget Hilton-Barber

Reading with Patrick
****
Michelle Kuo, Macmillan, R330

In her early 20s Michelle Kuo was determined to teach US history through black literature. Instead, the reality of rural poverty and institutionalised racism slapped her in the face. She persisted, making progress with her students before leaving for law school. A few years later, Patrick Browning, her most promising student, landed in jail for murder. Kuo returned to the Mississippi Delta to tutor him during his incarceration, feeding his love of words. The memoir goes beyond their story, providing insights into US racism. – Tiah Beautement @ms_tiahmarie

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• Blackwing: The Raven’s Mark by ED McDonald
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• Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo
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Famed US novelist and birder Jonathan Franzen was recently in South Africa, where he shared literary insights, and a defence of the LBJ, with Michele Magwood.

Jonathan Franzen is, as is his wont, talking about birds. Specifically, South African birds, and, even more specifically, the Cape grassbird. This is a bird that is usually dismissed at a glance as an LBJ – a little brown job, one of those ubiquitous dun-coloured birds that fade into the landscape and live in the shadow of rarer, more colourful birds. But not by Franzen. “I like the little brown ones,” he exclaims. “The Cape grassbird is the epitome for me of what a great bird is – it’s small and unobtrusive and yet when you look at it carefully with binoculars it just explodes with detail and subtle colours.”

Looking carefully and finding subtlety in seemingly ordinary things that then explode with detail is precisely what Franzen does as a writer. He comes heavily garlanded and routinely described as one of the US’ s greatest living novelists, but in Cape Town last week there wasn’t a trace of ego or the testiness he is famous for.

He was in the country for a National Geographic story on seabirds. South Africa, he says, is doing “very good things” for seabirds. He’d added on a 19-day birding tour of the country, and was now planning on getting out into deep water to see what he called the incredibly diverse seabird life off the coast.

Franzen is tall and rangy, woodsy in a way in scuffed boots and a checked shirt. He has beautiful, expressive hands and a mind like a sheathed blade. He has been interviewed countless times but there is none of the well-oiled shtick that many authors inevitably slip into. There are Pinter-long pauses as he considers a question, sighs and glances out of the window as he carefully composes his thoughts. Every now and again a teasing, self-deprecating humour ripples out.

He says he is less angry than he used to be, and less depressed – although he does refer to himself as a “depressive pessimist” – but concedes that there is still simmering anger at “the stupidity of the world and the meanness of people”. What human beings are doing to the natural world, the “atrocious political times in the US”.

He’s dismayed at the Trumpian effect on reading and writing. “A lot of people who used to read books are no longer remembering why they did, because they are so focused now on the outrage of the day. I blame devices. It seems to be an excuse to be distracted by your phone. People claim they have to remain up to date with what’s going on in Washington, but really they’re dependent on the stimulation from that phone.

“To me it makes the role of the writer all the more urgent. People need a haven from this ultra politicised, ultra angry nonsense that is coming at them every waking minute through their phones.”

Since Trump won the nomination, he says, book sales have collapsed in the US.

Franzen has written five novels. The first two, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, were well-received critically but not commercially. It was the third, The Corrections, that broke out, picking off literary prizes and selling more than three million copies. The infamous spat with Oprah helped, of course, but the two made up when she anointed his next novel, Freedom, for her book club and this time he appeared on the show. His latest novel, Purity, was published in 2015. In the lengthy gaps between books he writes astringent essays in such publications as the New Yorker and the Guardian.

Fiction, though, is clearly his first love, and he returns to it again and again during the course of the conversation, whether pointing out the historical correlation between liberalism and the rise of the novel, his belief that reading fiction is an opportunity to be somebody you aren’t – “very important if you’re living in any kind of diversity as a society” – or the value of escapism. “It’s good to be reminded that there’s a world in which meaning is possible – sophisticated, nuanced meaning, that doesn’t have to reduce to political simplicities. There are other more humane ways to make sense of the world.”

He calls writing “purposeful dreaming” and describes the intimacy of the relationship between writer and reader. “It’s the magical quality of the written word, that what you do as a writer, the process of investing imaginatively in a character or a story in order to put the words on the page, that that experience then gets replicated when you read that page, that the same investment springs up on the reader’s part. That is unique to the written word.”

One of the hallmarks of Franzen’s fiction is his intense characterisation. He leans in and drills down into his characters, excavating them with forensic skill. And when he’s done with excavating them he throws in a hand grenade. Life, he shows us, is messy. He is uncommonly perceptive about the human condition. What is the source, the spring of this perspicacity?

“I wish I could say something completely, brilliantly original,” he chuckles. “But I do go back again and again to my position in the family.” Franzen was a laatlammetjie, his two brothers much older than him. “So by the time I was 10 years old there were four adults in the house and me. They all had powerful, different personalities and although there was never any doubt they loved each other, they didn’t get along all that well. I grew up listening and trying to provide comic relief.”

When he discovered literature in college “it was like someone had handed me a key to understanding why people were saying the things they did. I suddenly had a magic decoder for my mother’s utterances. When I learnt to understand what Kafka was doing, I could understand the subtext of what was happening in the room. What was really going on when my mother would talk about the cranberry sauce. She’s not just talking about the cranberry sauce!” he laughs. “And that’s it right there – as a writer you want to present the cranberry sauce in its full specificity and vividness but you also want to understand what it signifies.”

Just as Franzen excavates his characters, so he excavates his own self, and one gets the sense of how hard the work really is, how psychologically gruelling it is for him.

“The process of trying to find a new character who is vivid to me, who I instinctively love, is in part finding some part of my existence that I have not explored. That relentless question of ‘What does the character want?’ is the medium of self-investigation, really. It only gets harder because I have colonised more and more of my interior to look for live material.”

He has what he calls “shadow documents” for each novel, drawers of abandoned pages and jottings. “The shadow documents are much longer than the books – they consist of almost daily note-taking, relentless psychoanalysis done in the symbolic language of fiction. It’s tedious and repetitive.”

He’s started a shadow document for a new novel he’s working on. “I’ve got, like, two and a half characters and a few pages.

“Each time it feels like I can never do this again.”

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• The Twenty-seventh City by Jonathan Franzen
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• Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen
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• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
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• Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
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• Purity by Jonathan Franzen
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Published in the Sunday Times

Tin Man
*****
Sarah Winman, Tinder Press, R275

This is one of those books that lures you in gently, and then grabs your heart and won’t let go. The book follows the intense friendship and love between two men, Ellis and Michael, from the age of 11 until one of their deaths. Set against the backdrop of Oxford and the gay scene in London in the ’90s, it is alternately idyllic and terrifying, as Aids takes so many young lives. It’s a heartbreaking, beautiful read, and one that will stay with me for a long time. – Bridget McNulty @bridgetmcnulty

The Fall of the ANC Continues: What next?
****
Prince Mashele & Mzukisi Qobo, Picador Africa, R175

Reading this book, one is left thinking that the struggle movement will be dead come the 2019 elections. The governing party has allowed and promoted greed, corruption and self-enrichment. According to the authors, as it falls the ANC will also take all of its wings down with it – the Women’s League, the Youth League and the tripartite alliance: Cosatu and the SACP. The authors say that if a survey were to be conducted on whether the ANC is corrupt, most honest citizens would probably answer yes. “This answer stems from what people see. Meetings of ANC structures increasingly look like luxury car shows. Those who live in the rural areas and who are bused to conferences must wonder which ANC they belong to that is so indifferent to their own conditions and yet so generous to the cadres who live in the cities.” – Khanyi Ndabeni

Secrets in Death
***
JD Robb, Little Brown, R275

When you get to book 45 in the series, you’d think it was time to pack up all those worn characters. Yet Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her mononymous hubby Roarke still have their loyal following. It’s not bad dipping into one again although some parts feel hackneyed. Ruthless gossip star Larinda Mars is murdered at a bar in New York. There’s a long list of suspects – all of whom were blackmailed by Mars. Eve finds it tough to narrow down the list but, thank goodness, Roarke once again has enough time to help her out. – Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt

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• Tin Man by Sarah Winman
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• The Fall of the ANC Continues: What next? by Prince Mashele, Mzukisi Qobo
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Published in the Sunday Times

La Belle Sauvage
***
Philip Pullman
Transworld, R290

His Dark Materials is not as famous as the Harry Potter series – maybe because there’s something much more insidious and dark in Philip Pullman’s multiverse than in JK Rowling’s magical world. (Also, only one book was made into a movie – The Golden Compass, which was not successful.)

La Belle Sauvage is the first volume in the new trilogy, The Book of Dust, which is a prequel to His Dark Materials. But over the phone from the UK, Pullman is quick to remind me of his book ’s motto: “It’s not a prequel or sequel, it’s an equal.”

It’s been 22 years since the first Dark Materials novel, Northern Lights, where we were introduced to his heroine Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon. (Daemons are a person’s soul, externalised as an animal.)

The trilogy begins 10 years before Northern Lights, and in La Belle Sauvage we’re taken back to the beginning, when Lyra is just six months old. She is taken to a priory to be hidden from the power-hungry religious force, The Magisterium, that will do anything to control the world.

In His Dark Materials, Lyra went on a quest to save children from having their daemons sliced from them by The Magisterium. She became a saviour. She gets to know that there is something called Dust (with a capital D, not the stuff that needs a feather duster) and that she would somehow expose the truth and let the world know what Dust is. But His Dark Materials ends before everything is neatly solved – before we find out what Dust is. Pullman promises we’ll know more about Dust in this trilogy.

“I was writing about Lyra for the past 10 years because there’s all these things to still happen,” Pullman says. “How did Lyra develop? How was she placed in Jordan College? There is still so much more to tell about Lyra and it’s all very exciting.”

But there’s not much of Lyra in this first book. Pullman focuses mainly on his two new characters who need to save Lyra from the Magisterium. They are 11-year-old Malcolm, curious, bright and oh-so-good, who works in his family’s pub called the Trout. His daemon is Asta – not yet settled in form as he is still a child. And then there’s Alice, 15, a dishwasher, difficult yet steadfast and an annoyance to Malcolm. This sets up the two protagonists – male and female – which is integral to Pullman’s writing; everyone’s daemon is also of the opposite sex.

“It creates a pubescent dynamic, a very basic human dynamic,” he says. “This is all about living and growing up. It’s a form of discovery and change. The characters have to learn and finally come into adulthood.”

But the Magisterium is tightening its grasp – afraid of what the scholars of the world are saying. The church uses whatever means necessary to control and destroy those with opposing opinions. It has formed the League of St Alexander, which is brainwashing children into feeling that it is their duty to spy on their parents, teachers and friends. This is what gets Pullman so excited.

“The League of St Alexander was a way of including the way communist societies asked children to spy on people. It’s based in truth.

“In the last year and a half we have seen lies, fraud and stupidity take over the world and governments. We have allowed a stupendous folly to happen, one that we can still scarcely believe – Brexit. This great European project was ravaged by lies and stupidity. A reckless decision. And then what happened in the US.”

But there’s not just the church that Malcolm and Alice have to save Lyra from. There’s a far darker, more disturbing look at the evil of men found in the character of Gerard Bonneville. He seems indestructible, a sinister presence that keeps on coming after them even though they thought he was dead. His daemon is a one-legged hyena. He has escaped prison and is after the six-month-old Lyra as well. Revenge against her mother, perhaps?

“He was a great surprise to me, a great gift,” says Pullman. “I could never have based this character on anyone … I do enjoy writing the bad characters.”

To make things even worse, Malcolm and Alice have to survive an epic flood that sweeps the country. They take refuge in Malcolm’s boat, La Belle Sauvage.

Pullman says he based this trilogy on the model of The Faerie Queene, the Edmund Spenser poem first published in 1590.

“It’s this classic poem that is told in multiple different ways. This is epic storytelling. The structure is what I really want to take with me on how to write the books.” The poem is allegorical, which fits in with the layers in La Belle Sauvage. We learn more about the universe that Lyra has to survive in and about the forces of evil that try to control her world.

As for the second book in the trilogy: “I have written it, and it is being edited now.” – @Jenniferdplatt

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• La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
  EAN: 9780857561084
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