What Lies Within

Bringing Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel It was love at first sight. Our romance started this summer in Wolf Hall, where Thomas Cromwell and I were first acquainted. At first I was unsure of him: he grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, had a penchant for loose women and was quick to swing a sword around. However, after a brief spell abroad Cromwell reinvented himself, and I swiftly fell head over heels for the most complex fictional character I have ever come across. He is man of contradictions, conflicting passions and sometimes less than altruistic motives. In Bringing Up the Bodies, we see a darker side of Cromwell but he is just as compelling to watch in action. He has achieved the ultimate position of power, but at what price, and how long will he sit at Henry VIII’s side? Mantel’s series is dazzling, noisy, crowded, rich, bloody and brilliant. The fact that my review has basically consisted of me banging on about her main character as if he were a real person is testament to her skill as a storyteller – and her ability to breathe new life into a historical period which has been much represented. I will be cheering on for her and Cromwell come Booker Night. Bring it! Sam Eades, Publicity Umbrella by Will Self Will Self’s first novel is a paragraph-free stream-of-consciousness affair, with a perplexing smattering of italics. Challenging – yes. And I like a challenge. The problem is – and perhaps this is some self-indulgent weakness on my part as a reader – I’m the sort that likes to be rewarded for it, too. I love Ulysses. Perhaps I didn’t discover this until I read it through for the second time, when I began to appreciate its rhythms, its many personalities, its celebration of the complex, surreal, heterogeneous nature of human experience. And I loved it because of its audaciousness: breaking new literary ground, becoming, of course, a byword for Modernist experimentation in form. And I think that was my beef with Umbrella. I hesitate to say that all fiction must have a point, but, in a sense, perhaps it should. It should, in some way, contribute to or challenge our understanding of ourselves and of the world in which we live. And I’m afraid I didn’t feel that Umbrella was making any such contribution. It felt, instead, like a kind of literary historical re-enactment. Joyce was smashing preconceptions of what a novel should be, putting up two fingers to the form that had, in one way of another, persisted for several centuries. Will Self, meanwhile, is aping Joyce – a writer who did the same thing, only far better, almost a century ago. Lucy Foley, Editorial Swimming Home by Deborah Levy Coming in at under 200 pages, this is the skinniest book on the shortlist, but one that packs a significant punch. It’s the story of some family friends whose villa holiday in the South of France is disturbed when they find a naked woman swimming in the pool. It turns out to be an unstable young woman called Kitty, who believes she has a special connection to a member of the party, Joe, a famous poet. Levy is brilliant on atmosphere and from the moment Kitty emerges from that pool, you sense that any equilibrium that existed between the characters assembled at this villa has been irreversibly disturbed, to be replaced by an uneasiness that pervades the entire novel. Levy’s writing is super sharp and taut; every sentence is charged and every scene is loaded. The end result is massively compelling and hugely unsettling; this is a novel that leaves a strange taste in your mouth, in the very best way. Leah Woodburn, Editorial The Lighthouse by Alison Moore ‘The Honeymoon was dreadful – they had delayed fights and lost luggage, twin beds and upset stomachs, bad weather and arguments.’ A bleak tale of a man’s continual attempts to explain the tragedy of his past – from his mother’s abandonment to his wife leaving him after yet another betrayal. The protagonist, Futh, leaves for Germany in an attempt to escape his demons. But by stumbling into the paths of an unhappily married couple running the hotel in Hallhaus, his fate is sealed as soon as he unwittingly adds to their misery. Alison Moore’s skill is to keep the tension high in what is an otherwise immensely depressing story. Richard Roper, Editorial The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng This novel was a pleasure to read. Tan Twan Eng’s writing style is so calming, despite at times describing the horrors of life in a slave labour camp for our protagonist, Teoh Yun Ling. She is a fascinating character, soul survivor of a prisoner-of-war camp who becomes a judge, prosecuting war criminals and terrorists both to seek justice for the tortures she endured and to find out more information about the camp. The novel is split between the present day, where she has recently retired and is reconnecting with old friends in Malaya and 1951, when she first starts out as prosecutor and is forced to face her demons and seek out Aritomo, ‘a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan’ to ask him to build a garden for her sister who did not survive the camp. Both characters are unapologetic of their feelings and beliefs regarding the hostilities but Aritomo agrees to teach Yun Ling the art of Japanese gardening so she can build the garden herself. It is full of cultural and historical complexities that do echo other books that I’ve read but there are some fascinating concepts unearthed, which I absolutely relished. Laura Skerritt, Creative and Marketing Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil I’d heard good things about this unusual, opium-soaked tome, and was pleased to find it as eccentric, vibrant and narcotically stimulating as I’d been led to expect. I’ve always been intrigued by portraits of drug addiction (Melvin Burgess’ Junk, anyone?!), and Thayil paints a disturbing but charged portrait of a group of people enslaved by opium, and their slow descent into hallucinatory madness. And through the opium smoke is an evocation of the chaotic city of Bombay and the quirky, diverse people who populate it. I’d recommend this for anyone who wants something different – or a reading experience which is the literary equivalent to meandering through an opium-induced dreamworld. Emily Kitchin, Editorial

2012 was eventful in all of the right ways. Over the years I’ve been to plenty of literary festivals on the coat tails of my husband Bobby (one half of the comic book duo The Etherington Brothers), always happy in my role as WAG. In 2012 however, I was hitting the road for the first time as an author in my own right. I knew I enjoyed the lanyards, the green room snacks, the linen jacket spotting, but the actual ‘appearing’ part? I seem sociable, I think I probably am, but I also love the solitary side of being a writer; disappearing into my own head, communing, for hours on end, with no one except the people I’m making up. Talking to a crowd of strangers isn’t necessarily the most natural fit with such a cloistered pursuit but it is part of the job of and, happily, I’ve discovered that I really like it. At the Edinburgh Festival I shared a stage with the brilliant Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard (the New York Times dubbed him a ‘bad boy of European letters’ and I got to feel rock and roll by association). Then there was Appledore, a pretty-as-pie spot on the North Devon coast, for a ‘New Voices’ panel with another Richard & Judy book club author Shelley Harris, and Carol Rifka Brunt. A lovely evening of Q&A at Rossiter Books of Ross-on-Wye, one of the nicest indies I’ve ever visited. The Portsmouth Bookfest for an all-Headline panel, where fellow newbie Morgan McCarthy and I got to line up with Adele Parks and Emily Barr. The inaugural Penarth Book Festival, with my mum in the audience (and under strict ‘pipe down’ instructions). And to end the year, Book Slam Bristol, the Big Daddy and Founding Father of what’s still being called the ‘new wave’ of live literature events. My first Book Slam experience was in 2009, for the launch of Patrick Neate’s Jerusalem. Patrick was my tutor on an Arvon course the year before, and he founded Book Slam to ‘support a diverse reading culture and stand against what is, for us all, an increasingly monolithic cultural life.’ That evening at The Tabernacle, Roger Robinson read his poetry, Soweto Kinch played sax, and Patrick read from his new novel. I’d never before been to an event that so winningly mixed live literature and music; it was very cool. Book Slam’s monthly nights have been running for nearly a decade now, and the list of alumni is crazy-stellar, as well as supporting new, deserve-to-be-heard voices. The second Book Slam short story anthology, Too Much Too Young, was published a little over a month ago and features brand new stories from the likes of David Nicholls, Marina Lewycka, Jackie Kay, Chris Cleave, and, somehow, me. The collection was celebrated with three launch parties at venues across London, and a first ever event in Bristol at the cool art space of Spike Island. I read from my story, Me and Bobby McGee, along with fellow anthology authors Salena Godden and Nikesh Shukla, while guitarist Robin Allender brought the music. For all the events of the summer, I’d never done anything quite like this. It didn’t help at all to think of the Book Slam I’d attended the week before, how completely charming and brilliant Jackie Kay was at the mic, or how swept away we’d all been by the whirlwind poetry of Luke Wright. Later, I was certainly glad that Salena Godden, whose Stage Presence is in capitals and underscored, and Nikesh, who’d also doubled as our winsome compere, came on after me. But I did my bit, read from my story, and had a ball. Standing up there, I realised there’s something magical about telling a story to a roomful of people, and a privilege to have them listen; there’s a sense of togetherness, we’re bound just as tightly as anybody wants, and a charged stillness descends. I’ve employed these next words of Raymond Carver before and while he’s talking about short stories it feels true of the live literature experience too. It’s certainly been mine, whether on the stage or in the audience. ‘…Our hearts or our intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, “created of warm blood and nerves”, as a Chekhov characters puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.”