Guest feature by Ann Jungman - 'political correctness': help or hindrance?

"I am going to shrink my tirade to three personal experiences, one as a teacher, one as a publisher and one as a writer ... "

Ann Jungman is a Londoner and still lives there. After misguidedly studying Law and Reading for the Bar, Ann drifted into primary teaching and that led into writing children’s books. With a hundred and thirty books under her belt, Ann is semi-retired and enjoying a leisurely life while battling arthritis. Ann’s most popular series was about Vlad, a diminutive, vegetarian vampire with a serious identity problem. After the books were surprisingly mentioned by Penelope Lively at the Booker Prize ceremony, Ann is hoping against hope that Collins will reprint them. Currently, she is working on a book about a Jewish girl surviving in Berlin, during the War, Singing in Dark Times - a new venture, a serious novel for teenagers.

What does 'political correctness' seek to achieve? It holds up standards that promote decency, kindness, toleration, acceptance of difference, anti-racism, anti-sexism, religious freedom, equality, fairness, and hopes of a better future. Who could object to any of that? And yet 'political correctness' is widely met with many doubts and some distrust and much irritation.

Mulling on all of this and starting to do some reading, I realised that 'political correctness' is a huge subject, at times blending into discussions about censorship, freedom of speech and politics. As such it is much too grand a topic for me to write anything coherent in a short piece, or, to be honest, in a long piece - it is just too big and too controversial. So, I am going to shrink my tirade to three personal experiences, one as a teacher, one as a publisher and one as a writer, that touch on all the subjects mentioned above.

Firstly, as a very young teacher in a rough school, I read my class the stories of Uncle Remus, a collection of tales told to slaves in the American South. The book was full of stories told by Uncle Remus, an aged slave. Based on a real model, the old man told stories to the enslaved people that were Americanised versions of West African folk tales. In Africa, the trickster was Brer Anancy, a spider; transposed to the US he becomes a rabbit. 

A child came in with the book and asked me to share it with the class. This was in the early sixties, when 'political correctness' wasn’t even a glint in someone’s eyes. The children loved the stories and I enjoyed putting on all the varied voices of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and all the others, I even managed a very respectable black Southern accent. I didn’t even have a flicker of doubt that these stories were not condescending or offensive – they were great stories, the language was rich, the small, weak but clever rabbit always outsmarted his larger opponents, and they were wonderfully funny.

The Classic Tales of Brer Rabbit, collected by Joel Chandler Harris, published by Running Press Kids, illustrated by Don Daily

In the decades since, Brer Rabbit has come in for huge amount of criticism and the stories have become extremely controversial, particularly since the era of Civil Rights and Black Power. Some black writers, like Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, found them a great source of information about attitudes in the pre-Bellum South and anthropologists discovered that the speech patterns, all spoken in argot, were amazingly accurate. The main problem was that Joel Chandler Harris, who retold the stories, was a white, Southern male. Harris had worked on a plantation, as a clerk, and spent much of his time in the slave quarters, fascinated by the culture the slaves had evolved, to keep a sense of themselves and to hang on to the culture of West Africa. The language the stories are told in was developed to make it hard for their oppressors to understand. However, over time that way of speaking became associated with Black and White Minstrel Shows and unflattering stereotyping that modern opinion thinks of as demeaning, implying negroes were less intelligent than others. 

At various times there have been many attempts to ban the books but they are still available, though probably less popular than they were. Beatrix Potter claimed to have based Peter Rabbit on Brer Rabbit and Enid Blyton wrote a whole series about him. For a hundred and sixty years, the stories were popular all over the world. Will they survive in the era of  'political correctness'? Who knows?

At the same time as I was reading the books with my class, the film Song of the South, in which Walt Disney animated the stories, was showing at the Odeon, Camden Town. One Saturday afternoon, I took some fifteen of my class to see it. While I had no doubts about the stories, I was appalled by the film.

It's set on the Old White Plantation, where the young master, the future owner, is very ill. Uncle Remus tells the boy stories, while the slaves stand under the boy's window singing and crying, at the thought that the lad might die. It was truly terrible, a children’s Gone with the Wind, that helped set back Civil Rights for a bit. The depiction of all those happy and musical slaves, more than content with their lives, was outrageous. When the film opened in 1946, black audiences protested outside the cinemas and stayed away. Though a huge box office success it is rarely shown now, as it is generally accepted that it is racist and patronising. The sequences that were animated, were of course, beautifully done but even there, the story of the Tar Baby was seen as unacceptable. I believe it is now banned.

In retrospect, I do not feel guilty about reading the stories, which made a bond between me and the class. The film is different, and had I known I would not have taken the class, I feel bad about it. This thought brought Marshall McLuan to mind, “the medium is the message”, in which he claims that there are hot and cool types of media. Books are “cool”, often read alone and quietly, giving rise to thoughts rather than actions, whereas film, TV, plays etc are “hot”, potentially rousing people to imitate or copy the “hot message”. If this is correct, I wonder why it is that books, particularly children’s books, are the subject of constant intervention and change on the grounds of political correctness, when the audience is the same for both. When one thinks of what is so readily available online and on TV that children have access to now, the over policing of “cool” books seems even more absurd.

The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak by Margaret Mahy, published by Barn Owl Books, illustrated by Wendy Smith

Now to my publishing gripe. When running Barn Owl Books, I was lucky enough to acquire a book by Margaret Mahy, The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak, a wonderfully anarchic story of the “Unexpected School” where the children could only go out in stone boots because of the regular hurricanes that occur and where only imaginative subjects are taught. The headmaster has no time for science but is in love with a lady inventor. Eventually, after numerous totally wacky events amid a cast of bizarre characters, the headmaster and the lady inventor marry and run a more balanced curriculum. Marvellous language, brilliant Dickensian characters and musings on themes of education and the environment - what was there not to like?

Alas, a book club wrote to complain bitterly, because the pantomime villain, one Sir Quincy Judd Sprokett, who described himself as “a very wicked industrialist”, and wants to flatten Hurricane Peak for its minerals, is in a wheelchair. Not any old wheelchair, but one that would have made James Bond envious. Sir Quincy is a real pantomime villain; all the devices on the chair enable this wicked man to act out his wicked deeds, except that the pupils at the “Unexpected School”, always mange to outwit him. The book club thought that having a disabled villain would undermine children with disabilities, so rejected the book. I asked several disabled children about Sir Quincy and they said they loved the notion of a wicked man in a fantastic wheelchair.

One wonders who made that decision, so mean-minded and literal and showing such a lack of imagination. Who in that Book Club felt that they knew better than Margaret Mahy, writer of brilliant books, picture books, young readers and wonderful novels for YA - winner of every possible prize, including the Andersen? That is why I get angry with 'political correctness'. It can be a constraint on imagination and fun, both for authors and publishers, and so often it's a small, somewhat precious group that inflicts their limited world view on more creative folk.

My third example is from a book I wrote: Vlad the Drac, my hugely popular series about a diminutive vampire with strong but rather old-fashioned views. In the book Vlad lives with a family in Kentish Town, where the mother is a doctor and the father a violinist. Vlad pretends to be progressive and thinks it's just splendid that women can now be doctors, unlike in his youth in Transylvania. However, when he gets ill, he yells “Don’t you bring a lady doctor anywhere near me!” I was told to leave it out, as it might be thought that the book was dismissing women in medicine. What it was intended to show was that Vlad is a hypocrite and has lots of prejudices that the family (and the reader) regard as absurd.

Here ends the lesson. I do still feel that anyone who sets themselves up as a “sensitivity expert” is very questionable. They have a vested interest to find a fault - if all is well, they are out of a job. It seems to me that you cannot write about peace if you don’t mention war, about racism without showing racist speech or prejudice, or sexism without some sexist content. Some people may get offended by a specific text but books are there to explain and provoke and show the world as it is and that means giving authors permission to have characters who don't fulfil the constraining requirements of a very narrow and literal interpretation of political correctness. At times it does seem to come dangerously close to a slippery slope. If authors and publishers feel that they cannot represent certain views, or use particular words, it will have a really deadly effect on literature, particularly as groups feel the need to protect children’s books more than others; children are seen as vulnerable and there needs to be a healthy balance between spontaneity and responsibility.

Children are often far more discerning than the guardians give them credit for.

While thinking about attempts to control what can be mentioned in books and even what words can be used, I was put in mind of the Oscar Wilde story, The Happy Prince. The much loved Prince is protected by his parents from knowing about anything ugly or troubling. When he dies, a statue is built in the centre of the town, covered in the finest gold. But the Prince, high up on his plinth, sees nothing but suffering and is so shocked that he encourages the birds to take the gold from his statue and give it to the poor and needy. The story ends with the statue being grey and ugly and being thrown away. 

The relevance of the story in the context of political correctness is all too obvious. We must do our bit to prepare our children for the world as it is, in all its wonderful beauty and all its darkness.

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, published by Thames and Hudson, illustrated by Maisie Paradise Shearring

Guest review by Jane Rogers: THE MATCHBOX GIRL by Alice Jolly

 

"As with all the best historical fiction, Jolly has written a novel which is only too relevant to our times ... "

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012. Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised as a BBC drama series), and Promised Lands (Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Jane also writes short stories, radio drama and adaptations, and has taught writing to a wide range of students.

Her latest collection of climate-themed short stories, Fire-Ready, is out now in paperback; five of the stories were read on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in March 2026. For a review by Lesley Glaister, and a Q&A with Jane, see below. For more information, see Jane's website.

This is an extraordinarily ambitious novel, set in Vienna before and during World War 2, and based on real events.

In Vienna in 1934 there’s a progressive residential centre for children with learning difficulties, children who today would be termed neurodivergent. The director is kindly, humane scientist Dr A (the real life Asperger). Our heroine and narrator, Adelheid, is a mute 12 year old inpatient. She has an unusual mind, the kind of mind Dr A is researching in order to better understand and teach children like her.

Instead of speaking, Adelheid writes things down; her passion for the truth, her intelligence, and her eagle-eyed attention to detail, make her a valuable assistant to Dr A, and over time she progresses from patient to member of staff. These qualities also make her a brilliantly unbiassed chronicler of the Nazis’ growing power and influence over Viennese life. Initially, like everyone else, she’s thrilled by the pomp and pageantry, the marching and singing.

But gradually she notices that certain staff members are disappearing – fleeing to America, or simply vanishing overnight. Jewish people. She observes that Dr A is being put under increasing pressure to turn his patients into ‘useful’ citizens. And that those who are unlikely to ever be ‘useful’ are being transferred to the sinister Am Spiegelgrund, a new children’s hospital where visitors are not permitted, and children are never heard of again.

This is a truly heart-breaking coming of age story, as naïve, truth-seeking Adelheid gradually comes to understand not only the extent of Nazi wickedness, but also to recognise the necessity – for people like Dr A – of playing along with it, in order to retain any agency at all. It is a bitterly accurate portrayal of the way in which fascist thinking can creep into people’s lives, and how, without in any way subscribing to antisemitism or child euthanasia, bystanders can become complicit. As with all the best historical fiction, Jolly has written a novel which is only too relevant to our times.

The subject matter is tragic, but mercifully this novel is not only uplifting, but often comic, thanks to Adelheid’s eccentric and original narrating voice. Here’s a taster:

‘I begin this Story on the day of 25 July 1934, a moment well known in the History of my Country of Austria. Personally, I do not remember that Day for the same reasons as do others. The World is so Extremely Busy, many things Happening all at once. (Adelheid – Do not go off down a Tram Track. Stick to the Facts.) The point is that on this day here is Adelheid Brunner (twelve years old) and she is arriving at the World-Famous Weiner Kinderklinik or Vienna Children’s Hospital. She has in her pocket Franz Joseph, who is named after a Habsburg Emperor, but is a Rat.’

The Matchbox Girl is published by Bloomsbury.

Jane Rogers' Fire-Ready reviewed by Lesley Glaister.

A Q&A with Jane about Fire-Ready.

Special feature: GREEN RISING and the Climate Fiction Writers League, by Wren James

 

"Writing is activism. Over a decade as a published author, I’ve come to learn this. It’s subtle, and slow working, but incredibly effective."

Wren James is the award-winning British author of many young adult novels. Their books include Last Seen Online, Green Rising and The Quiet at the End of the World (previously published as Lauren James). The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is in development as a feature film with RK Films.They have won the Sustainable Story Award and been shortlisted for the YA Book Prize, Carnegie Medal and STEAM Book Award. Their upcoming title is The Victors (May 2026), a graphic novel illustrated by Beth Fuller.

A story consultant on Netflix’s Heartstopper (Seasons 2 & 3) and a RLF Royal Fellow, Wren is also the founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League, creator of The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook, and editor of Future Hopes: Hopeful stories in a time of climate change. 

Wren is on the Society of Authors’ Sustainability Steering Committee and works as a consultant on climate storytelling for museums, production companies, major brands and publishers, with a focus on optimism and hope. They run a Queer Writers group in Coventry. Follow them on Instagram at @wrenjameswriter or find out more at their website. 

Writing is activism. Over a decade as a published author, I’ve come to learn this. It’s subtle, and slow working, but incredibly effective. My book about climate magicians, Green Rising, was recently used to kickstart a discussion of climate-friendly investments in a book club for fossil fuel bankers and their families.

In Green Rising, teenagers can grow plants from their skin. They use their powers to rewild the planet and stand up to the profit-hungry corporations driving carbon emissions.

The fun adventure story hit home for the investment bankers in a way that a newspaper article wouldn’t. When we read about fictional characters and experience their emotional highs and lows for ourselves, it unlocks a higher level of empathy and compassion. Even after the book is long finished, these characters stick in our minds. We are able to imagine their feelings in a way that we can’t relate to a faceless population on the news.

For climate activism, this is incredibly important. So many of the effects of climate change feel so distant, both in time and location. It’s hard to connect that to our daily lives. Fiction can help inspire people to act – whether that’s talking to their employer about their pensions scheme’s investments in fossil fuels, or changing to an eco-friendly energy tariff.

More importantly, fiction can help us to feel hope. 62% of people say they hear much more about the negative impacts of climate change than they do about progress towards reducing climate change, resulting in a perceived Solutions Gap. If you feel like the world is doomed, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, then there’s no reason to take any action.

I expected the process of writing Green Rising to be depressing and mentally exhausting. But, in fact, immersing myself in the climate debate helped me to stop feeling anxious and helpless about our future. I could see all the things that needed to be done to fix the future.

As writers, we can engineer a future world long before it exists in real life. In the forties, creators were envisioning men on the moon long before space travel existed. That cultural drive led to so much energy being invested in the Apollo missions and our successful journey into space. Without those early science fiction stories creating a cultural desire to walk on the moon, we wouldn’t have been driven to make it happen so soon.

In the 1900s, stories about a future where women had the vote encouraged support for the suffragist movement. In fact, a group was founded in the UK in 1908 called the Women Writers Suffrage League, whose mission was to encourage writers to mention the fight for the vote in their writing. As their prospectus stated, “a body of writers working for a common cause cannot fail to influence public opinion.”

Climate writers today do the same thing for our future. By creating stories about worlds filled with climate solutions, we are changing our collective picture of the future.

The Suffrage League inspired me to set up my own group, the Climate Fiction Writers League. Our guiding principle is to spread awareness of the importance of mentioning climate change in fiction of all types, from poetry to Eastenders. In my work in the writers' room for Netflix’s Heartstopper, I was able to showcase how this can be done naturally. The character Elle tours an art college when she’s applying for sixth form. An art exhibition at the college is based around climate change, meaning several scenes take place surrounded by artistic representations of the climate crisis.

The Climate Fiction Writers League now has over 300 traditionally published authors as members, who have all written climate fiction. Through the group, we partner with climate organisations and consult with museums and production companies.

It’s especially important for children to see hopeful visions of the future world they are going to grow up in. A few years ago, I pitched to my publisher a ‘positive’ climate anthology for children. The authors were given a list of solutions believed to combat climate change most effectively, and encouraged to create stories set in the future.

I told them to use their anger and frustration to drive their writing, but not to write an angry book. Their settings aren’t always positive utopias, but they don’t represent a hopeless dystopia. We want children to read stories that convey the seriousness of the situation without making it seem futile. They need to see that climate change is solvable.

I was also very careful about where we laid the blame for the climate crisis. I didn’t want to leave our readers feeling guilty about their carbon footprints. We want to inspire people, not panic them. No one will engage with climate activism if they’re just going to be made to feel guilty about not recycling!

I wanted to encourage the writers try to show the industry, economics and political factors which are to blame. To call out the companies who have been specifically working to slow climate activism, like fossil fuels companies who spread climate science misinformation in the nineties.

Adding in these elements meant I could add teaching questions and resources that would make the stories useful in a classroom setting, leading to discussions of wider issues around the climate crisis.

Ultimately, climate change is a political topic – it has to be. It’s unavoidable. The end of world is profitable. My characters are angry they’re being told to reduce their climate footprint, that they’re being made to feel guilty about their personal pollution when industry is responsible for the vast majority of emissions.

I wanted to create a book for young people who are anti-capitalist and pro-revolution, who are changing the world at an incredible pace against the enormous weight of the existing establishment.

The best climate fiction captures the feeling of being part of an ongoing green revolution. It acknowledges that we are living in a time of unprecedented existential fear. And then shows people how to turn that fear into hope and action.

This piece was commissioned by the innaugural Norwich Book Festival 2024.

Find out more about Green Rising, which is published by Walker.

For more about The Climate Conscious Writers Handbook, see Wren's website.

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

 

"... such a strong feminist novel. The 1950s are a world apart from the 2020s but that is not to say that feelings were any different then from ours now."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars, followed in 2019. Both titles are now available in paperback.

Set in post war Rome, and published in 1952, Forbidden Notebook has at its centre the daily life of Valeria Cosseti. She is a typical wife and mother. She washes the family clothes and cleans the house regularly. She shops for food and cooks it for her husband and two grown children. She also has a job in an office to help keep the family afloat.

The story begins when Valeria is going to the tobacconist one early Sunday morning to buy some cigarettes to put on the night table for her husband Michelle to find when he wakes. He always sleeps late on a Sunday. While at the shop she sees some notebooks with shiny black covers. On a sudden whim she asks for one but the tobacconist tells her that he is only allowed to sell tobacco on a Sunday and certainly not notebooks. Perhaps it is the act of being denied, but suddenly she is desperate to have a notebook and begs the tobacconist to sell one to her. He agrees, but tells her to hide it under her coat in case the police see it.

Valeria feels furtive. What on earth impelled her to do such a thing? And where can she put it? She wants to keep this impulse buy to herself but doesn’t have even a drawer for her own personal use. Nowhere is hers alone in the small house. Her daughter Mirella likes to go to her wardrobe and borrow clothes, the linen cupboard isn’t safe, the desk has been taken over by her son Riccardo … in the end, feeling more and more agitated by what she has done she throws it in the ragbag in the kitchen.

Ostensibly a novel about the daily chores and activities of the Cosseti family it is very much more. Writing in the notebook becomes a guilty secret for a woman who has never kept secrets from her family. She moves it from place to place, desperate for it not to be found because it quickly becomes an account of her internal thoughts, wishes and fears. She is at the heart of her family and it is apparent that they all love her, but the demands on her are many. She sometimes struggles to be the person they all think she is. No one seems to expect her to have an internal life of her own. If she differs from their expectations of her they smile indulgently and tell her to rest, which is almost impossible for one who has so much to do.

This book is such a strong feminist novel. The 1950s are a world apart from the 2020s but that is not to say that feelings were any different then from ours now. I found Valeria in turns heroic, pathetic, irritating and impressive. She is a woman of her time, in a country that has recently lost a bruising war. She has great self doubt as she starts to write, but finds herself putting down on paper not only her concerns about her daughter and the company she keeps, her son’s career and her husband but also her innermost thoughts about her own life, which she has hardly allowed herself to recognise up until now. Where the notebook leads her, what she does with her life and whether the notebook is discovered, all play out while she sits up late, after everyone has gone to bed, which is virtually the only time she has to put her thoughts down without being interrupted. Valeria lived with me for a long time after I finished the novel. 

Alba de Céspedes achieved something very special when she created Forbidden Notebook. The Financial Times called it ‘an exquisite, tormented howl,’ and it certainly is a tour de force. Is it about a life wasted, or a life found? I still find it hard to decide. Read it and ponder …

Forbidden Notebook is published by Pushkin Press, and was also chosen by Nick Manns in our Books of the Year feature.

Bookshop Feature: PANDA'S BOOKS AND RECORDS in Levenshulme, South Manchester, by Paul Magrs

 

"Let’s do it. Shall we do it? Shall we save the bookshop on our high street?"

Paul Magrs is a novelist. His partner Jeremy Hoad is a Community activist, DJ, and Organiser of Levenshulme Pride. They'll celebrate their thirtieth anniversary as a couple in summer 2026. Together they opened Panda's Books and Records in November 2025.

It was something we always thought we’d like to do, at some point in our lives.

When the chance came along – Halloween 2025 – to take possession of our own bookshop it was like: if not now, when are we actually going to do it? We’re both in our late fifties. Our crazy freelance lives give us the time to do something as mad as this. Let’s do it. Shall we do it?

Shall we save the bookshop on our high street?

Jeremy and I have lived in Levenshulme, South Manchester, for twenty-one years. It’s a right mix-up of cultures and always has been. It’s wonderful here: lots goes on and there’s always a drama. Sometimes it feels like the whole world in microcosm: Middlemarch, plonked on the A6 between Manchester and Stockport. And the bookshop is right in the middle of that thoroughfare.

Ian and Suzy started up the shop six years ago as Bopcap Books, building a loyal clientele and a sense of pride in all of us, that our run-down bit of town had its own bookshop. Used and new, with lovely art prints and classic novels, wonderful picture books and funny greetings cards. When they found that for a variety of reasons they had to give up the lease to concentrate on their newer shop – the Quiet Cat, in Macclesfield – we saw their bittersweet message on the local Facebook group. ‘Does anyone want to buy a bookshop?’ How they’d had a lovely time being our bookshop but now they had to go. Was anyone in a position to take it over?

We took maybe half a morning, right at the end of October, to decide that it was exactly what we wanted to do. Jeremy and I jumped in with both feet.

I turned 56 mid-November and the very next day I began a new career.

‘Panda’s Books and Records’ opened on November the thirteenth.

 
Now I sit at my front desk, feet chilly on the concrete floor, with the doors of the old police station in which we’re based open to the street. Our shop is part of a complex of antique outlets at the southern end of Stockport Road. We have disco and New Wave music playing all day long. People dance in our shop! They actually dance and bop about, singing, as they browse! They just do it without even realising it. Early on in the lead-up to last Christmas I realised how much I disliked the hushed calm of many bookshops – with their mimsy plinky-plonk music playing – and their library-like atmosphere, or that horrible feeling of being a bit like school. I prefer a bit of noise in a bookshop. Besides the music there’s a great deal of chatter and laughter here. Old friends coming in, local faces, brand new customers. Everyone gets introduced and there’s a lot of kerfuffle almost every day. People telling us how glad they are that the bookshop is still here. We saved the bookshop!

A toddler starts jumping up and down with excitement because she realises that there are Pandas in every spare corner of the two rooms of our shop. Not just the giant one sitting on a wooden chair when you first come in, or the ‘real’ original Panda sitting sentinel on the windowsill. There are plush Pandas perched everywhere, more and more as you look. The toddler can’t keep herself from dancing with glee.

We sell vinyl albums as well, and this is something else that makes it less stuffy than other bookshops, perhaps. There’s a lot of talk about bands and LPs. Young guys buying albums that came out before they were born. Lots of nostalgia: people collecting up treasures they once had, then lost and wish for again. The importance of physical media is something that’s come to the fore in these uncertain times, as if we can only ever be really sure of the records we play for ourselves; the books we hold in our hands.

 One regular customer who we inherited from Bopcap books – a lady who is 99 and bright as a button – sits by my desk and calls out topics she’d like to read about this month: Postage stamps! India! Famous quotations! Then she tells me about her Aunt Linda reading ‘The Little Sea Maid’ aloud ninety-odd years ago and how the sound of that voice has never left her. And just yesterday there was the eight year old boy who came in with his family but looked at the children’s books option-blinded, and couldn’t find anything he might want to read. Then I said, ‘Have you heard of the Hardy Boys? I read them all at your age. They’re exciting and what’s brilliant is, you can read them in any order you like.’ I set out a whole load of the 1970s Armada paperbacks – the ones with wonderfully painted covers. He chose the spookiest one, with an old dark castle on the cover.

I sit in our shop beside the Christmas tree we got from a local give-away group – its lights twinkle long past Christmas and its branches are now almost completely crowded with scarlet gift tags, on which we’ve asked people to write down their favourite book recommendations. Jeremy is on his feet all day while I serve customers and try to get back to my current read. He’s a dervish of bookcase reorganisation: everything has moved and changed its place in the past two months. Sometimes more than two or three times. He’s always looking for the perfect placement for each genre so that, as people walk around the shop, it tells its own story in exactly the right way. Each genre has been broken down into sub-groups and each shelf is labelled. People like our labels – Science Fiction and Fantasy became ‘Monsters and Planets’, History is now ‘Queens and Tyrants.’ I think we’ve taken the feel of the previous bookshop and evolved it gently to suit our own tastes in music and books and art: more nostalgia, more pulp, more kitsch and fantasy.

 

Every day we get people coming in with bags of books for sale or donation. Sometimes wonderful dragon hoards of gold. At times quite startling things that we might or might not take. Every day I bring in boxes of my own books from our over-stuffed house. It is as if I always knew this time would come. I have no one to actually pass my creaking, towering stacks onto and yet it seems as if I was always planning one day to put all this surplus stuff into a bookshop.

It’s a treasure trove, an exhibition, a museum, a superstore, a starship fuelled by writing and pictures and printed pages: capable of taking you anywhere in the galaxy. And I get to sit at the helm of this ship for four days of the week.

And I’ve remembered something I kind of forgot when I stayed at home, being a freelance writer every day. I really like being in the middle of the community, talking with people about life and books in the afternoon. It reminds me of my first job, at UEA, when I was first teaching Creative Writing there, in the late 90s. I used to sit in my office, drinking coffee and talking as if books and essays and stories were the most important things in the world. So it’s good to be somewhere that reminds you that they are.

There’s something very civilising in these tricky times, about being in a place devoted to passing on messages down the ages. That’s all books and pictures and stories really are: messages that say, ‘Hey, hello, how are you all doing in your own era? We’ve been having a right old time of it here. You won’t believe what’s going on here, back in time. It’s all kicking off! Listen to this…!’

It's being at the heart of an endless conversation. A convergence of so many dimensions. And that’s where I want to sit for slightly more than half of every week.

HAMNET by Maggie O'Farrell - the novel and the film appraised by Celia Rees

"Being such a big fan of the book, I was very much looking forward to the film and I was not disappointed ..."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - later Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay, The Fool’s Girl and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2012, she began researching and writing her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, paperback edition, Miss Graham’s War, published in 2021.

Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Like William Shakespeare, I am Warwickshire born and bred. I was born within the area of the Midlands which was once covered by the great Forest of Arden. My grandfather came from a village not many miles from Henley-in-Arden; his family had lived there for many generations: carpenters, blacksmiths, small farmers. Stratford-on-Avon would have been their nearest big town. As a child, I visited Stratford regularly, to shop, go for tea, walk by the river, feed the swans, visit the market, which is still held on Rother Street, just as it was when Shakespeare lived a couple of streets away. Stratford was very familiar to me and there was still an echo of the town that Shakespeare once knew. Less so now, the streets thronged with tourists, every other shop selling souvenirs, but down by the river on an autumn morning, walking in the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church with the Avon flowing below the wall, it’s still just about possible to sense a continuity of place with the man whose son is buried close by. Similarly, the Great Forest has dwindled to tufts and patches, some of the last precious remnants destroyed to make way for HS2, but Warwickshire remains an arboreal county and from certain perspectives, it is possible to look across the landscape and maintain the illusion that the Great Forest is still there.

Perhaps, sharing a county is the reason I’ve always felt an affinity to William Shakespeare. The Stratford boy, son of a tradesman, who went to London to make his way in the theatre, taking his town, his people, his county, the forest and trees, the fields, the river, the plants and animals with him. His origins were humble. Like most people of his sort, the only records are in official documents: birth, marriage, death, a Will, the purchase of property. The bare facts of a life. The rest is conjecture. For me, this makes it possible to glimpse the man behind the towering genius. This gave me permission to make him a character in The Fool’s Girl. I had the idea while watching an outdoor performance of Twelfth Night by the river, a stone’s throw from the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre. The production was in a natural amphitheatre, a group of drama students performing on a wooden platform, changing behind bushes, much more in keeping with the theatre Shakespeare would have known than the grand edifice I could see through the trees. Twelfth Night is one of my favourite plays, the line ‘What country, friends, is this?’ one of my favourite lines. I spent much of the play lost in speculation: ‘What happens to them after the play ends?’ Although a Comedy, the play’s end is ambiguous, to say the least. By the time the players took their final bow, I had an idea and two characters: Violetta (Viola and Orsino’s daughter) and Feste, the clown. A long way from Illyria, they are performing tricks on Bankside. Shakespeare is on his way from the theatre to his lodgings. He stops to watch. He is in need of a clown, but more than that, he senses they have a story to tell and, like all writers, he collects stories. He invites them to the Anchor Inn and the rest is The Fool’s Girl.

Shakespearian scholarship has changed in recent years and changed radically. In attempting to discover the possible truths about a life lived beneath the historical records, scholars have turned to the social history of the period, reasoning that, setting aside his genius, Shakespeare was a man of his time who can be discovered through extrapolating known facts about what life was like for people of his station in Stratford and the life of the London theatre. This is where I went to do my research. James Shapiro’s 1599, Jonathan Bate’s Soul of The Age, Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger and above all, Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife told me what his life could have been like and in Germaine’ Greer’s case the life of his wife. A life that could have been lived, very probably was lived. As a fiction writer that was good enough for me and I think, good enough for Maggie O’Farrell.

I must admit to being a great admirer of Maggie O’Farrell, her skill in weaving one story into another, past into present, just as memory is woven through everyday consciousness. She has a powerful sense of place. In Hamnet, her meticulous research never dominates or overpowers the narrative, but subtly confirms the world her characters inhabit, what they see and sense around them. Their world is there on the page, fully formed, as it would be for them. Her characters were real people, familiar to us because one of them is universally recognised. We can visit their different houses, see where they lived but not how. We cannot know them. Maggie O’Farrell makes them known. Particularly, the wife, Anne. She calls her Agnes, which distances her from the stock character of Anne Hathaway (of Cottage fame) and makes her into someone else entirely. Agnes pronounced with a soft ‘g’, sounds very much like Anne. Names were not fixed in sixteenth century Stratford: Agnes for Anne, Hamnet for Hamlet and there we have the key to the book.

Maggie O’Farrell does not just re-claim Anne/Agnes, she makes her a powerful, rather mysterious woman, a daughter of the ever present forest, herbalist, hawker, bee keeper with the gift of second sight. It is these qualities that mark her out as ‘other’, mysterious, mis-trusted, seen as dangerous and as such powerfully attractive to the Latin Tutor who comes to teach her younger brothers. The tutor is, of course, William Shakespeare. He is never named in the book because he doesn’t have to be. The author doesn’t only reclaim Shakespeare’s wife, she reclaims his children, too. Susannah, the oldest and especially the twins Judith and Hamnet. The book begins with Hamnet searching the house and then for any of the women folk of the family who can care for his sick twin. His search is desperate, the reader knows that Judith has plague as does Hamnet, he’s seen the buboes on her neck, ‘A pair of quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to hatch.’ His search is intercut with the past, his parents’ courtship and marriage. later, his mother’s equally frantic attempts to save her child are interwoven with the birth of children, her husband’s move to London and the plague bacillus’ ominous journey from Alexandria to Stratford-on-Avon.

The story turns on the interchangeability of the twins, as if they are two aspects of one person, as it does in two of Shakespeare’s plays The Comedy of Errors and particularly Twelfth Night. ‘One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,’ Orsino exclaims on seeing Viola’s twin. Hamnet changes places with Judith, takes her sickness onto himself. He dies, so that she will live. The profound sorrow felt by everyone at his death, contradicts the glib idea that a child’s life was cheaply held.

Shakespeare uses the alchemical power of his enormous talent to turn his beloved boy’s death into perhaps the greatest of his plays, Hamlet. Agnes goes to London to see the first performance. The whole book has been working towards this moment when Hamnet is brought back to life, if only for the span of the play.

Being such a big fan of the book, I was very much looking forward to the film and I was not disappointed. The stripping back of the complex narrative to a linear structure, allows more room for the story to develop from the initial courtship to the children falling ill. Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Emily Watson as her mother-in-law, Mary, bring alive the position of women at the centre of the everyday Elizabethan world, the harsh reality of their lives, the ordeal of childbirth, the constant threat to their children. The central tragedy was as harrowing on the screen as it was in the book, Jessie Buckley’s/ Agnes' frantic, inconsolable grief is visceral.

The most powerful part of the film lies in the performance of Hamlet in The Globe. Film is a child of theatre and it took a visual form to do justice to the scene. Part of the power lies in Agnes never having been in a theatre, never having seen a play, puzzling out what was going on, but the real power lay in the merging of the boy Hamnet into the young man Hamlet, played by two brothers Jacobi Jupe and Noah Jupe, and the effect this has on Agnes. Her reaching out to Hamlet and the reaching out of those around her, until the whole audience is reaching toward the stage says something about the power of theatre, the yearning to be part of it, for it to be true. Weeping audiences have become a cliché of the film, but when the young Hamnet turns for one last look at his mother before entering the black void at the centre of the painted backdrop, I must admit to shedding a tear.

Guest feature by Jamila Gavin: the research and influences behind MY SOUL, A SHINING TREE, Nero Prize category winner

"I knew that many Indians (1.5 million) had volunteered for the First World War, and I wanted their unknown stories to be represented."

Jamila Gavin was born in the foothills of the Himalayas in Mussorie, India, in 1941. After the war, her family relocated to England where she spent the remainder of her childhood.

Those first experiences of life at that time, between two countries and cultures, became the main inspiration for much of Jamila's writing. She wanted to reflect the changing face of multicultural Britain, knowing the importance of every child being able to find their mirror image in books. Her first book, The Magic Orange Tree, was published in 1979, followed by numerous other short stories, collections and several novels including The Surya Trilogy (Egmont,) Coram Boy, (Egmont: winner of the Whitbread Children’s Prize 2000) and Blackberry Blue, (Random House.) She lives in Stroud. Find out more on her website.

'I have inherited two rich cultures which have run side by side throughout my life.'

Some books seem to leap, almost fully formed into the mind, with the characters waiting for you to notice them, name them, and build them into the narrative. Coram Boy started life like that, for which I researched on the hoof – so to speak – as the narrative took hold.

Although Coram Boy was fiction, it was set in a real period, with one or two historic characters, so research was essential. In any case, research is my main way of confirming that my plots work – and that it could have happened. This is especially the case with the so-called “historical” novel; you always take a chance, when writing fiction in the context of real history. There’s always someone who is bound to wag the finger, and say, “Aaah! That didn’t happen” or, “you got that wrong!” Then your whole book can lose its credibility. In any case, for me, to fully engage with the plot and the period, I need to satisfy myself that my scenario and characters were as thorough and as credible as could be in fiction.

My Soul a Shining Tree started life as a contribution to an anthology, Stories of WW1, commissioned by Tony Bradman. I knew that many Indians, (1.5 million) had volunteered for the First World War, and I wanted their unknown stories to be represented in this anthology. In researching, I came across Khudadad Khan, a British Indian soldier in the Regiment of the Duke of Connaught’s 129th Own Baluchis. It was his uniform that clinched it – especially the red trousers - my title was definitely going to be The Man in the Red Trousers. Everything else had to make that title viable.

The original short story, set in in WW1, involved a young ten-year old Belgian character, Lotte. Lotte lives with her family on a farm in the village of Gheluveldt in Flanders, where she encounters a man in red trousers.

But to make it a novel, as Tony Bradman later recommended, I needed to extend the scenario, which had started with Lotte and Khudadad Khan, to Ernst, an under-age German Cavalry hussar. I knew what I wanted Ernst’s character to be. However, to make sure his story was viable: I found myself seeking out a book I had heard of, by Robert Musil: The Confusions of Young Törless. This book confirmed what I knew was most likely to be the case in a German military boarding school where Ernst was sent: the bullying, the need to find a way to survive, and the friendships that developed. I also felt certain that the issues I had read about many years earlier in Tom Brown’s School Days, by Thomas Hughes, would also apply to Ernst in his school.

Finally, almost insisting on a voice too, was a walnut tree, which dictated the title. It became their shelter, and was also able to observe the characters and events into which they all got swept up. I even researched the walnut tree to be sure it could actually have grown in Flanders. The deeper I delved, the more I wanted to be sure of my facts, so I went to Gheluveldt, to see for myself its geography, and where there was highish ground – so essential to my story. The outcome was My Soul, a Shining Tree. The title is taken from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, Tree and Sky – this poem and so many others by First World War poets were part of my emotional research.

My Soul, a Shining Tree is published by Farshore

Stories of WW1, where Khudadad Khan's story first appeared, is edited by Tony Bradman and published by Orchard. It includes stories by WR contributors Paul Dowswell, Adele Geras, Linda Newbery and Leslie Wilson.