Q&A: Celia Rees interviews Mary Hoffman about DAVID: THE UNAUTHORISED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 

"That’s what I like best, when writing historical fiction, lots of facts to draw on but a great big gap where you can create the story."

Mary Hoffman discusses her newly-reissued novel with Writers Review's Celia Rees.

Celia: David was originally published as YA, then re-published as an adult novel. Did you make any changes in the text to transition from YA to adult and where do you feel its real home lies?

 
Mary: It’s a tricky one. The original edition was published as YA, as you say, but reviewed in the UK press and on radio as an adult novel. My usual co-edition partners in Europe found it a bit too “adult” for their YA lists and I’m not convinced it was then seen by the adult editors and rights people in those publishing houses. We’ll never know. So I thought it should be re-issued with a better cover as as an adult novel. I made only minor changes to the text. I was told at the Bologna Book Fair this year that YA fiction is mainly read by 18-25-year-olds now anyway. So I think it may be that recent category “New Adult."

Celia: You have achieved remarkable success in a long writing career that has seen 90 books published for ages ranging from pre-school to Adult. What would your advice be to someone just starting out?

Mary: It’s 125 now! My first book was published 50 years ago, amazingly. But the publishing scene is so different now I don’t think my experiences would be relevant to someone just starting out. My advice based on what is going on now would be:

• Read widely. There was never a half-decent writer who wasn’t a voracious reader.

• Don’t give up the day job. The average annual earnings for a writer in the UK are £7K and that average is reached by including top sellers.

• Don’t write unless you must.

• Be professional, not a hobbyist, even when it is not your paid job.

• Be prepared to write many drafts.

• Try to get an agent; you will be more likely to be published if you have one.

Celia: You have an unusually wide range from picture books to adult novels. Do you have a favourite age to write for and what is your favourite genre?

Mary: What I like best is when the idea comes bringing its right length and format with it. I know now when an idea is going to be a picture book or a longer work of fiction but that took a while. My role model is the marvellous late New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy, who wrote from picture books to YA - all of the highest quality. I usually have more than one book on the go simultaneously, but whichever one I’m working on at the time is my favourite book and genre.

Celia: Your love of Italy shines through much of your YA and adult fiction. My favourites are your Stravaganza series, set in different Renaissance cities. Would you be tempted to write more of these novels, set in other cities?

Mary: I had outlines for a further six cities, characters and plots, but the publisher didn’t want more than the original six. Each book took nine months to a year to research and write and I needed a publisher’s advance to live on while I wrote them so self-publishing wasn’t an option.

Celia: Your love of Renaissance Florence and your ability to capture the life of the city are most evident in David. What made you want to write about the creation of one of the world’s most famous statues by one of the world’s most renowned artists? Did you ever feel in any way daunted by the task that you had set yourself?

Mary: Two things. I wanted to re-create the feeling of what it was like to see an iconic work of art for the first time. The Mona Lisa features in the book too, while it is being painted! And secondly, we have masses of information about the statue: the contract for it, the minutes of the committee meeting about where it should be placed, how it was moved from Michelangelo’s workshop to the Piazza della Signoria etc. But nothing at all abut the model, not even if there was one. That’s what I like best, when writing historical fiction, lots of facts to draw on but a great big gap where you can create the story.

Celia: Lastly, the inevitable question; would you care to share with us what you are working on now?

Mary: I don’t want to jinx it by revealing too much but I am about two chapters and an epilogue away from the end of the first draft of a historical novel for adults, set in the 14th century. Not Italy this time but England. I am obsessed with the Plantagenets and it is the first in a proposed trilogy. But it is uncommissioned, even though a senior Churchman believes in it so completely he has offered to host the (entirely notional) launch in his building in a certain Cathedral close! We shall see.

Most people of my age have retired but the “r” word is banned in our house. Remember what I advised about needing to write? It's who I am. I can’t imagine a day when I’m not writing, editing, proofreading, publicising or talking about books - oh yes, and reading them.

David: the Unauthorised Autobiography is published by Writers Review Publishing.

Celia's Miss Graham's War is published by Harper Collins - read the Q&A here.

The other two launch titles for Writers Review Publishing are Judith Allnatt's The Poet's Wife and Linda Newbery's The One True Thing.

Special feature: WRITERS REVIEW PUBLISHING!

 Introducing our first three books!

Exciting news - we are branching out into publishing! Our new venture launches on April 24th with titles by Judith Allnatt, Mary Hoffman and Linda Newbery, and more on the way. We will publish both new fiction and reissues of well-reviewed novels that deserve to reach new readers. 

At present we're publishing only fiction, but as we develop that may change to include non-fiction, memoirs or poetry, depending on what comes our way. 

Find out more on our website.

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The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt

It is 1841. Patty is married to John Clare: peasant poet, genius and madman.

Travelling home one day, Patty finds her husband sitting, footsore, at the side of the road, having absconded from a lunatic asylum over eighty miles away. She is devastated to discover that he has returned home not to find her, but to search for his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce, to whom he believes he is married.

Patty loves John deeply, but he seems lost to her. Plagued by jealousy, she seeks strength in memories: their whirlwind courtship, the poems John wrote for her, their shared affinity for the land. But as John descends further into delusion, hope seems to be fading. Will she ever be able to conquer her own anger and hurt, and reconcile with this man she now barely knows?

‘Affecting and beautifully written. Patty’s voice is at once homely and poetic, and her lyrical descriptions of the rhythms and customs of nineteenth century England – where it is unlucky to look at the moon through glass, and where a bundle of corn is left in the field at the end of every harvest, like an offering to the gods – are at the heart of the novel.’ The Times

‘This novel will leave you reaching for the nearest copy of John Clare’s powerful poems’ Daily Mail

'A subtle and sympathetic portrayal of losing a loved one to mental illness’ Times Literary Supplement  

‘A fascinating, compelling book, written with subtlety and a delicate touch, about the wife of John Clare, and the bewildering effects of her husband’s madness’ Clare Morrall  

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David - the Unauthorised Autobiography by Mary Hoffman

Michelangelo's statue, David, is famous around the world. Millions flock to Italy every year to admire the physical perfection of the young man captured within the marble. But the identity of the model has never been known . . . until now.

Acclaimed author Mary Hoffman imagines the story of Gabriele, a naive but incredibly handsome young man who is hired as Michelangelo's model, only to find himself drawn into a world of spies, political treachery, and murder. Set against the vibrant backdrop of Florence in its most turbulent times, this rich, colourful, thrilling tale gives life to one of the world's greatest masterpieces.

"An engrossing political murder-mystery." Amanda Craig, The Times

"This is a meaty, satisfying piece of work, astute and convincing, detailing Gabriele's burgeoning sexual and artistic nature." Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

"Mary Hoffman has written an elegant novel which is totally believable, witty, and hard to put down." Kathy Stevenson, Daily Mail

"David brings a sexy immediacy to the creation of a sculptural marvel . . .the book makes palpable the contemporary meaning of the statue of a giant-killer - a (literally) gigantic anti-aristocratic gesture." Suzi Feay, Financial Times

"It is a brilliant premise for a novel. . . . Full of carefully-researched detail, David is at once the tale of a fictional character, the story of a work of genius and an evocation of a particularly compelling moment in Italy's past." Linda Buckley-Archer, The Guardian

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The One True Thing by Linda Newbery

When the ground shifts, where is one true thing to be found?

Jane, in her twenties, is left parentless when her father dies suddenly; a second shock follows when his Will reveals the existence of a son no-one knew of. Now Wildings, the family home, must be sold. Spanning two generations, the novel tells the story of Bridget, Jane’s mother, trapped in an unhappy marriage on which her career depends, and of stone-carver Meg, who wants only independence but is enmeshed in conflicting loyalties and desires when Adam, a young artist, enters their lives, to devastating effect.

Now far from Wildings, Meg is bound by a promise to support Jane in her loss. Having thought of herself as an observer who saw everything, she’s forced to realise how much she failed to see – and the cost to those she loves.

‘A beautifully complex tapestry of lives and relationships … a novel to immerse yourself in.’ Jane Rogers, author of Mr Wroe’s Virgins

‘Newbery writes wonderfully.’ Financial Times

Cover artwork and design by Owen Gent.

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See our Bookseller feature - Linda Newbery talks to Tom Tivnan about how Writers Review Publishing came about.

Guest review by Mary Hoffman: A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW by Amor Towles

"No detail is wasted in this highly-wrought novel, with its meticulously constructed architecture. There is no set-up without its payoff, though you might have to wait ..."

Mary Hoffman’s first book, a YA novel, was published in 1975. Since then she has written 120 books, mainly for children and teenagers but lately also a couple of adult novels under pseudonyms. After graduating in English Literature from Cambridge and spending a couple of years studying Linguistics at UCL, Mary wrote courses for the Open University for five years but then went freelance. She recently started The Greystones Press, a small independent publishing house, with her husband. Mary’s books have been translated into 30 languages and have won prizes; she also runs the popular History Girls blog. Mary lives in a converted barn in West Oxfordshire with her husband and three demanding Burmese cats. 

In 2016, this second novel by a New York “investment professional” was released by Penguin Random House in hardback. It is one of those books that is a word of mouth success and has now sold around two million copies since publication. Although well-reviewed at the time and a Waterstones Book of the Month for two months, as well as being bought for a TV series with Kenneth Branagh, it remained a bit of a connoisseur’s choice.

I’d heard good things about it and even given it to an acquaintance without having read it myself and then it was one of my book group’s choices last year. When it arrived, it looked a bit disappointing, even though garlanded with enthusiastic review quotes. It has a dull black, white and grey cover, with an old gent looking out over a balcony, enlivened only by the gold-embossed title. The back-cover blurb doesn’t entice either.

But let none of this put you off; this book is a real treat.

Alexander Ilyich Rostov is an aristocrat who came back to Moscow after the Revolution and has lived in the Hotel Metropol for four years when he is invited to an interview with the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. No-one at the hotel expects him to return from this “interview,” which is in fact a trial; the likelihood is that he will be shot.

But he is saved by a “revolutionary” poem which has his name on it and is returned to the Metropol, where he is sentenced to live under house arrest for the rest of his days. But not in his former luxurious suite. His furniture and belongings – such as will fit – are taken up to servants’ quarters in the attic, where he has one poky room.

But Rostov is a man of infinite resource and sagacity and makes one little room an everywhere.

Time passes and he ages and over the years makes indestructible friendships with members of staff, an American diplomat, a doomed prince, a famous actress and even the Chief Administrator of the security special branch at the Kremlin (leading after hundreds of pages to one of the funniest lines in the book).

For life at the Metropol is full of visitors and guests from all over the world; it is the very essence of cosmopolitanism, even during the most restrictive years of the new régime. But the most influential presences in Rostov’s new life are two little girls: first Nina, the nine-year-old daughter of a Ukrainian bureaucrat, who opens up the secrets of the hotel to the Count and gives him a passkey that opens all doors. Then, much later, her daughter Sofia, whom she leaves in his care and to whom he becomes a surrogate father.

No detail is wasted in this highly-wrought novel, with its meticulously constructed architecture. There is no set-up without its payoff, though you might have to wait many pages and passing years for it.

Rostov becomes head waiter at the hotel’s premier restaurant and his relationship with the chef and the maitre d’ – the “triumvirate” – underpins his life, as a man in reduced circumstances who is always nevertheless a gentleman. And among his many personal resources, he has a stack of gold coins hidden in his desk, which comes in handy when he is plotting something.

As he does, magnificently, in the long finale, which builds to a pitch, as Rostov takes advantage of Sofia’s playing the piano in a concert in Paris, utilising all his contacts, to give her – and himself – a new life.

I have just read Amor Towles’ first novel, Rules of Civility, which couldn’t be more different. It is set in New York in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s and the protagonist is a young woman. The only thing that links them is that perhaps they both deal with how people should behave in difficult situations, even though in the first book they don’t always manage to live up to their own standards.

In A Gentleman in Moscow, Towles pulls off that difficult trick of creating a genuinely good person, who is never dull. Whether shooting a fellow aristocrat who has cheated on his sister or not shooting an inferior who has tried to make his life a misery for years, Rostov abides inimitably by his own “rules of civility.” He might throw himself off the hotel’s roof or sit up there eating honey from the handyman’s bees.

He might observe a trio of escaped geese on a floor of the hotel or play invented word games over dinner with Sofia or make love to a beautiful woman. He might identify a mystery ingredient in a dish created by the chef or steal a passport from a hotel guest. Whatever he does, it is the essence of cool; only Nina and Sofia ever dumbfound him.

Amor Towles’ sensibility is as subtle and fine as Count Rostov’s palate. Whatever he writes next, I will read it.

A Gentleman in Moscow is published by Windmill Books.

See also: Stasi 77 by David Young

Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutcher

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

CHRISTMAS ROUND-UP Part 1: What's on our to-read piles?

What's on our reading piles? Some of our contributors look ahead - to new publications, books they plan to re-read, authors they've neglected. We hope you'll find some great suggestions here. Thanks, as always, to all our guest reviewers for sharing their favourites - WRITERS REVIEW wouldn't exist without them! Come back next week for Part 2, and the first Monday in January for Part 3.

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Piers Torday:  I am saving Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize winning Girl, Woman, Other for the holidays, as following the election result, I need something urgently contemporary and modern that takes the novel forward to hopefully move me forward too. I am hugely looking forward to Salley Vickers’ latest, Grandmothers, as The Librarian was one of my favourite titles of the last year or so. For the New Year, I am anticipating a subterranean wander with Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, as the weather and political climate look set to make overground distinctly unappealing…

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Yvonne Coppard:  Like many others, I eagerly await Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, concluding the journey that started with the wonderful Wolf Hall. For non-fiction, I will re-read my old fave, Carlo Ravelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, and will eagerly move on to the new Unlocking the Universe, by Lucy and (the late) Stephen Hawking. Billed as ’the ultimate children’s guide to space, time and everything in between’, it sounds just about the right level for me in my quest to understand the basics of our extraordinary planet before I die.

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Ann Turnbull:  I'll be reading Girl by Edna O’Brien – because I feel so inspired that at the age of 88 she has not only written another novel but chosen such a bold theme. Also The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje – because I loved the film, always meant to read the book, and recently read the first few pages and didn’t want to stop.

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Marianne Kavanaugh:  I’m looking forward to Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule, which comes out in June. It has a deliciously Patricia Highsmith-type premise – two women meet on a train and agree to murder each other’s husbands. Otherwise, as usual, I will be disappearing into books I should have read but somehow missed, like Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (with the added bonus of an introduction by Ali Smith). Also waiting for me is Leila Slimani’s first novel Adèle (Dans le jardin de l’ogre). I loved her best-selling Lullaby (Chanson Douce) – a taut, claustrophobic story told in dark, plain language.

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Cindy Jefferies:  On my teetering to read pile is Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende. As more books get added , this novel is about half way down the pile now, but I have just teased it out and put it back to the top. Her work always cheers me if I need cheering. Reading her feels to me rather like meeting a friend after a long time and spending a few hours catching up.

Over Christmas, children and grandchildren will be in and out, giving little time for me to get immersed in anything other than board games, slices of cake and general frivolity. Making an Elephant by Graham Swift is one I keep for those snatched moments. It’s a collection of essays, interviews and memories along with some poetry. Swift tells us about reading aloud at Cheltenham and elsewhere, spending Christmas with Salman Rushdie in hiding, buying a guitar with Kazuo Ishiguro, the death of his father. I find every essay absorbing. Swift writes modestly, and isn’t afraid of laughing at himself. It’s always a pleasure to pick up the book and discover something else, and along the way some of his thoughts on writing slip in, to be mulled over. Perfect!

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Gwen Grant:  Poems that make Grown Men Cry - Great poems. Great choices. Irish Colin McCann chooses American Wendell Berry’s moving dream of a dead friend. Malawi-born Jack Mapanje cried all right but with laughter at Bertold Brecht’s ‘The Book Burnings, as a furious poet learns his work is not going to be burnt.

Crime writer John Sandford’s latest book, Neon Prey, is lined up, too, his spare, laconic, writing married to high octane stories of murder and mayhem that make the hero, Lucas Davenport, very likable. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh reveal the vulnerability, goodness and perseverance of a man slowly finding his way in life. Good writing draws you in; love has you walking alongside.

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Jon Appleton: Spanning 40s America to 70s Ireland, Anne Enright’s new novel, Actress (Cape, February) promises to cast her unflinching gaze on the scars of childhood but will no doubt be just as vibrant and stimulating as I’ve found her other novels to be. Second, full disclosure: I was lucky to work, in a small way, on Chris Whitaker’s We Begin at the End (Zaffre, March) but I’ll be reading my finished copy afresh and recommending it widely. It’s going to be one of THE big books of 2020 – a powerfully realised, panoramic crime novel that offers every kind of readerly pleasure.

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Judith Allnatt: I’m going to start 2020 with the delight of reading new novels by favourite authors, both of which are set in the years leading up to WW2. Sue Gee’s new novel Trio has settings that intrigue me straightaway “the isolated moors of Northumberland, a hill-town school and a graceful old country house”. Here, a grieving widower is awakened to both music and love.

A Single Thread by Tracey Chevalier on the other hand, concerns a ‘surplus woman’, unlikely to marry, seeking company in a group of embroiderers and becoming privy to their secrets. One can be sure that both writers will explore grief and desire with all their customary subtlety and insight.

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Mary Hoffman: For me the big event of 2020 will be the March publication of The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel’s third novel in the “Cromwell trilogy.” We pre-ordered it the minute it was announced. And there’s plenty of time to re-read Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies before then. (It will be the third time for me).

Mantel is the only fiction writer I buy in hardback, so I am waiting for paperbacks of Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (also March), Big Sky by Kate Atkinson (late January) and possibly Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (that’s not till July but I am in no hurry.

And a little bird told me that Celia Rees’s first adult novel, Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook, is coming from HarperCollins in May. I might have to break my no hardback fiction rule for that one!

READING AHEAD Part 2: what's in our sights?

More of our contributors - including some new faces to the blog - give us their reading choices. What was on their Christmas list? What have they been hoarding for a special treat? Old favourites, new publications, authors recently discovered ... 

As ever, a big thank you to our guests, thanks to whose generosity we post a new review every Monday. We hope you'll find something here to add to your own to-be-read pile.

Savita Kalhan: I am eagerly awaiting Crossfire by Malorie Blackman, the fifth book in the iconic Noughts and Crosses series, which is to be published next summer. The original series for children was inspired by political events and racial discrimination. Crossfire is no different. Brexit, Trump and the rise of the far right, have inspired Crossfire, and will no doubt spark discussions amongst teenagers and adults alike.

Can We All Be Feminists is a collection of essays by seventeen writers from diverse backgrounds. Listening to some of the essayists at a Waterstones’ event, and reading Eishar Kaur’s essay on the way home on the train highlights how slow change continues to be – she is writing as a third generation British Asian woman and I am second generation – and also how ‘feminism’ can mean radically different things according to your background, ethnicity and colour.

Hilary McKay: Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk was my car book. I have car books, I’ve had them for years. Comes from the days of waiting with hot water bottles in the dark outside music lessons, party venues, gyms, schools, all those places that I don’t wait outside of anymore because the children are grown up(ish). So I’ve brought it into the warm, thing of beauty that it is, with that cover. That hawk. Now I’m two chapters in, and it’s as I guessed and as I’ve heard, long distance poetry. I have no fear of finishing it because I know already I’ll just turn to the beginning and start again.

Jon Appleton: A few years ago Paul Burston made the seamless transition from writing hilarious comedies to dark, searching crime fiction. I enjoyed The Black Path hugely so am looking forward to Paul’s creative exploration of the dark side of social media in The Closer I Get (Orenda Books, May). Paul is massively savvy about the online world so I’m sure his take will be insightful and persuasive and his story compelling.

I love it when Jill Dawson takes characters from real life and immerses them in turbulent semi-fictional scenarios - her next book, The Language of Birds (Sceptre, April) plunges us into the 1970s and the infamous disappearance of Lord Lucan. Can’t wait! In the meantime why not read The Crime Writer, her most recent novel which is about Patricia Highsmith? Chilling.

Leslie Wilson: I'm looking forward to reading The Pursuit of Power, Europe 1815-1914, by Richard J Evans. Evans is an author who I greatly esteem, because he has written about Nazi Germany in a dispassionate, enlightening and scholarly way. This book, however, deals with the period between Waterloo and the outbreak of World War 1, the era that my English and Silesian-German grandparents were born into (the latter part, anyway). There was so much going on during that period; the revolutions of 1848, the growth of cultural and political nationalism, colonialism, technological change, but also feminism and trade unionism. Can't wait.

Nick Manns: I caught Paul Broks on Radio 4 last Spring. From this fleeting hearing I gathered that he was a respected neuropsychologist, talking about the importance of magical thinking. The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars defies categorisation (so is every bookseller’s nightmare). Depending on where you jump in – and Broks is happy for readers to work through in any order – it’s autobiography, speculative philosophy, neuroscience, grief memoir and ghost story. It's also unsettling: “There is no clear dividing line in the brain between inner imaginings and perceptions of the real, solid ‘world out there’. Reality and fantasy are built into the same neural circuits." I’m about to reread it, letting into the house the quotidian, the strange, the dead.

Gwen Grant: A Place in the Woods, by Helen Hoover, is one of my most treasured books. Chicagoans Helen and her husband, Adrian, move to the vast forests on the edge of Minnesota’s northern wilderness. Helen’s deep love and respect for the forest and its wild inhabitants shines through as she shares the beauty and
danger of this world..

Environmentalists, they face many challenges. A violent storm almost destroys their cabin. Hunters appear. Their money runs out. Only when Helen starts to sell her detailed and lovely stories about the woods, illustrated with Ade’s beautiful pen and ink drawings, does the threat to their new life begin to lessen.

Chris Priestley: Having had the privilege of illustrating Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down and hearing him speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August, I intend to work my way through his other books. I’m going to start with When I Was the Greatest. 

I am a big fan of the short story form as a writer and reader, but for some reason I’ve never got round to reading any Flannery O’Connor. I’m about to put that right with A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I also have Alice Munro’s Moons of Jupiter to look forward to.

Mary Hoffman: The book I am most looking forward to is Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, whenever it comes out. I adored the first two, which I have read twice - and seen the stage plays and TV adaptation twice too. Meanwhile I am on the London Library's waiting list for Diarmaid MacCullough’s Thomas Cromwell: a Life, and I do have the 642 pages of Giles Tremlett’s Isabella of Castile: Europe’s first Great Queen, waiting by my bedside, for when I’ve finished Charles Ross’s Edward lV. Almost all my non-fiction reading is history these days. On the fiction front, I shall wait till Kate Atkinson’s Transcription comes out in paperback in March, since I don’t buy fiction in hardback (I make an exception for Hilary Mantel). Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance isn’t available till July next year but Madeleine Miller’s Circe is on my Christmas list. 

Paul Dowswell: Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill is now on my ‘read again pile’, and I’m happy to recommend it to anyone looking for a riveting read. Spufford’s tale, of a young man recently arrived in colonial New York with an exceedingly large cheque, is a glorious cinematic, smell-o-vision adventure. I can’t remember the last time I read a book I could see so clearly in my mind’s eye. Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Wilkinson and Oona Chaplin strutted the stage and read the pages for me. Spufford teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths. If he teaches half as well as he writes they are very lucky to have him.

Patricia Elliott: Rosie, the wonderful writer Rose Tremain's memories of growing up in sooty post-war London, with school holidays spent at the country paradise of Linkenholt, her grandparents' home, is both delightful and disturbing. Her father deserts the family when Rose is ten. Her bleak childhood, dominated by her cold, unkind mother, is alleviated only by her loving nanny, and by teachers who encourage her creativity when she is banished to boarding school so her mother can marry a new man. Only after being 'finished' in France, does she finally rebel and escape to Oxford. Some of the most interesting parts refer to incidents that have inspired her novels.

Cynthia Jefferies: Having recently discovered the British Library Crime Classics, what better title to choose for Christmas reading than J.Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White, his Christmas Crime story? First published in 1937 it has an evocative cover complete with deep snow, stars twinkling and a steam train stuck in a snow drift. Four murders in a dozen hours! I reckon I’ve earned my bit of turkey. So says the police inspector, belatedly arriving at the scene. Eleanor Farjeon’s brother was prolific so I will be looking out for more. I love crime within this period a lot, almost enough to try it myself!

Sheena Wilkinson: Christmas is a time for old friends. This year Linda Newbery’s The Key to Flambards sent me back to K.M. Peyton’s originals. My own work in progress is set in 1921, so revisiting the post-war atmosphere of Flambards Divided is fascinating– though my book is set in Belfast which had its mind on things other than horses and racing cars. I’ve recently loved Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, and I hear there’s a new Jackson Brodie on the horizon next year. So that has settled my Christmas reading – a leisurely reread of the first four Jackson Brodie books to get me in the mood.

Linda Newbery:  I keep seeing clips and mentions of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (not least interviewing Michelle Obama at the Festival Hall!) and am impressed by everything she says.  Americanah, a story of two returned Nigerian exiles, former lovers, sounds enticing - and I've just seen that Barack Obama has chosen it as one of his books of the year, too. Having been gripped by Michelle Paver's chilling Dark Matter, I've now got Thin Air, a ghost story set in the Himalayas in the 1930s. And I have high expectations of The Binding, a first adult novel by Bridget Collins, known for her bold and accomplished teenage fiction. We'll hear more about this for sure, and just look at that sumptuous cover!

Finally here is Bridget herself, who'll be a January guest:

Bridget Collins: I’m really looking forward to re-reading Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver. It’s a

Photo: Symon Hamer

brilliant, immersive reworking of the Rumpelstiltskin story, with wonderfully rich world-building and great characters. The images that stay with me are so beautiful (think silver, ice, dissolving mirrors, silk) that I can’t wait to rediscover them. The first time I read it I just devoured it – but then, because it was so in demand, I had to give it straight back to the library! So I’m going to buy it and go more slowly this time, relishing every word.