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I admit my heart sank when asked to write a blog.

I’ve never written one—and don’t read them. I’m a closet blog-o-phobe. The faddish term sums it up for me: “blob” combined with the word for dead wood, rhyming with “hog”. It promises to bore, buttonhole, and take up copious space on my crowded mental sofa.

I can’t help it. The massed global community of avid, dedicated, garrulous bloggers makes me want to be silent.

If this reaction seems alien and ungenerous; so be it. It’s probably related to my being a painfully slow writer with a tendency to get hypnotised by words, and hair-splitting distinctions of tone, colour, weight and meaning. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m a chronic re-writer of sentences and manuscripts. Not surprisingly, I don’t get much done. When writing a book, I eat, sleep, drink, and manage basic bodily functions. Email allows me to stay in touch with people who might otherwise assume I’ve died. Blogging is a non-starter.

When working on a novel, I’ll glance at news headlines, read the odd poem, watch a DVD, or listen to music. But I don’t read books, avoiding parallel fictional worlds–much as I’d not attempt to eat a rich meal and cook one simultaneously. Reading and writing are, for me, forms of digestion and assimilation.

Writers are—or should be—hyper-porous, so it’s essential to watch one’s influences and use of energy. It’s a bit like putting a red sock in a hot white wash, or listening to someone with a heavy Southern accent: the influence can be subtle, but before long, I’m pink, and come from Alabama.

My novel “One Thousand Chestnut Trees” involved an intensive distillation of facts and experience; adolescent memories, feelings about race and culture, and interpretation of the complex wars that shaped Korea. This filtering demanded patience, time and space incompatible with zingy web pursuits and their instant charms.

I’m glad that people have a powerful desire to connect and disseminate their views, and it’s wonderful that they have a platform. (What did they do before?—ed.) But sometimes it feels as if the tsunami of casual internet content threatens to engulf considered writing. I sound like a party-pooper, but perhaps there’s a saturation point past which blogging becomes a riptide of babble.

Despite hypocritically writing this now, I’m not much interested in my own views—a prerequisite for the born blogger. It must be fun, and vital in some way I can’t relate to. It’s old-fashioned, but I feel it’s a privilege to “be read”. With so much competition from other media it seems a miracle that people find their way to reading books; I only hope readers sense in my work that their attention matters.

The latest edition of Mira Stout’s One Thousand Chestnut Trees is out today.

Read more about blogging:

• Fuel Injected Dreams
• Blogging like its 1665

The final christmas wishlist is from Janice Lee, author of The Piano Teacher. Ambitious, exotic, and a classic book club read, The Piano Teacher is a combination of Tenko meets The Remains of the Day. Sometimes the end of a love affair is only the beginning…

To purchase a copy of the book, or to read ‘The Creative Gift’ – an article about The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee, click here.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore,

Personal Days by Ed Park,

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

We hope you’ve enjoyed this feature, and if any of the recommendations inspired your christmas purchasing, we’d love to hear from you!

Click here to read other author’s wishlists.

We will be taking a short break over Christmas while we celebrate the holidays. Why not add our RSS feed to your iGoogle homepage and be reminded when new content is up. Alternatively, follow FifthEstate on Twitter.

We asked some of our brilliant authors for books they’d like to give- or get – for Christmas. This time it’s the turn of Michael Burleigh, brilliant author of Moral Combat: A History of World War II, due to be published by HarperPress in 2010. Pre-order your copy here.

Last Christmas friends gave us Caroline Clifton-Mogg’s Secret Gardens of London (Thames and Hudson). I’ve leafed through it several times this year, in the hope that it might help transform our very small back yard.

Maybe some kind soul will give us Alexandra D’Arnoux’s Secret Gardens of Paris this year, although I fear the back yard will remain a yard throughout 2010.

I love reference books so perhaps another generous friend will poney up for the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary? At £250 they will have to be quick since the price rises to £275 after 31st January.

Finally, I’ve been slowly and selectively repurchasing memorable books which I sold during a rough patch. Things like Gregory of Tours History of the Franks (Penguin).

I’ve always been interested in late antiquity/the early Middle Ages, so any sources from those times would be very welcome, since I plan to revisit them in my dotage.

I’d also like the several volumes of the Pentagon Papers which I need for a future project…..should anyone have a set hanging idly around.

Click here to read other author’s wishlists.

We asked some of our brilliant authors for books they’d like to give- or get – for Christmas. The next installment of our Christmas wishlist series is from Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan.

I’d give Jeremy Mynott’s beautifully compendious Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience (Princeton University Press) to my friend Dennis Minsky, naturalist extraordinaire on Cape Cod, because I’d like him to stop correcting my Anglo-centric spelling of bird names.

I’d give Hal Whitehead’s Sperm whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (University of Chicago Press) to everyone I know.  It’s an eye-opening, life-changing account of the world’s largest predators; animals possessed of the biggest brain ever known, yet whose nature remains vastly misunderstood.  Dr Whitehead’s book is the Moby-Dick for our times.  His final chapter, which posits the idea that sperm whales may have evolved their own religion, is truly astounding.

Dr Whitehead’s book would be aptly partnered in my present-giving with John Burton’s Ta-ra, Johnny Boy: Boy whaler to Rainbow Warrior, a self-published memoir which is a salutary lesson in the way our relationship with whales has (thankfully) moved from whale hunting to whale watching.  Burton’s account of the eyes of a harpooned and dying sperm whale looking up at its assailants will haunt me for the rest of my life.

On another note, I’m eagerly awaiting the lustrous new catalogue to this year’s Tate St Ives’ The Dark Monarch (Tate publishing) exhibition, because it sums up all that I find fascinating in artists as (ostensibly) disparate as Derek Jarman and Cecil Collins.  The British neo-romantic period of painting is one of my favourites – a lost England, as evoked in the films of Michael Powell and the writing of Denton Welch.

But the one book I really can’t wait to get my hands on is John Waters’ forthcoming ‘memoir-in-homage’, Role Models (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux).  Waters is one of the greatest ironists America has produced, and in this new volume, he promises to spill the beans on his muses.  We’re promised chapters on Rei Kawabo, high priestess of Japanese minimalism and creator of Comme des Garcons (for whom the filmmaker occasionally models), as well as less ‘tasteful’  essays on Charles Manson.  But then, what you expect from a man who, as a teenager, re-enacted the Kennedy assassination his parents’ front lawn in Baltimore?

Leviathan is the story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.

Leviathan is also the winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize. Get your copy here.

Click here to read other author’s wishlists.

Louise Tucker talks to Rebecca Connell

If you haven’t read the book yet – please note, this interview contains spoilers.

There are three strong characters in the novel. Who interested you most and why?

I saw all three characters as quite distinct from each other and Nicholas was the character who came to me first. In general I tend to prefer writing men, rather than women; I find it easier. I wanted to get the sense that this was someone who was quite morally ambiguous, so that the reader’s response to him would shift back and forth. I thought of him as the most complex.

As far as Lydia was concerned, I wanted her to be quite an unlikeable character, someone who, on the surface, was everything that someone would want, without much underneath. I almost felt I didn’t know her. And similarly, in a way, I saw Louise as someone that the reader wouldn’t know that well, someone who had an air of mystery about her but who had a lot going on under the surface, so the opposite of her mother.

And where did the idea for the book come from?

The scene where Louise is following Nicholas on the street came to me first. At that point I didn’t know why the woman was following the man at all, I just liked the idea of a woman following a much older man, and leaving it quite ambiguous – was it, for example, a sexual thing or not? It evolved from there.

I played around with ideas of how the plot would develop for quite a while. Originally I thought Louise would die at the end so I was working towards that, but as I continued writing that felt too melodramatic, since the pivotal point had been Lydia’s death, so I had to shift my expectations. But there were certain characters, like Adam and Naomi, who I hadn’t banked on at all. I had seen Nicholas as an eternal bachelor, who hadn’t quite got over his affair with Lydia, but then I started feeling that it would be a lot richer and more complex if he did have a family, if he had slipped into a different role.

The theme of this novel is very dark and your website mentions that your next novel is even darker: what attracts you to such darkness?

You don’t necessarily have to experience darkness to understand it and I think there is darkness, or sadness, within most people, even if it hasn’t been tested to the limit. I haven’t experienced a lot of tragedy but I know that capacity is there, and for me the book was about pushing that into the open. Certainly as far as infidelity goes it’s a subject that I personally don’t feel very ambiguous about. I’m pretty anti it, as most people probably are, but I was interested in trying to create a situation in which someone’s infidelity was sympathised with to an extent. I think writing should be about pushing your own moral boundaries as well as those of your readers and characters.

Louise’s life seems to be haunted by the lives of her parents: do you think that is common?

I think we are all shaped by our parents to varying degrees, most people probably more so than they’d like to admit. My own family life is nothing like Louise’s but I have a father who’s a strong character and he himself saw some parallels between Nicholas’s personality and his own, even though that wasn’t explicitly intended on my part. Powerful people in your life can influence your writing whether you mean them to or not.

The incest is not commented on in the book, either by Louise or Nicholas. If anything, it’s skated over. Why is that?

Louise and Nicholas are both people who have grown used to repressing their feelings, and to pushing painful memories underground. I initially considered the possibility of them having an explicit conversation about Louise’s relationship with Adam and its implications, but it felt wrong. When push came to shove, I don’t think either of these characters would want to face up to the unpleasantness of the situation, at least not immediately, and I wanted to reflect that in how much – or rather, how little – the reader was told about how they were feeling about it. Ultimately, it’s just another secret that both of them will have to keep.

You went to Oxford University and set the book in the same town; what made you choose it as your location, apart from familiarity?

Familiarity was important and although I thought about setting the book in London, which I know better, it didn’t feel quite right. London is such a huge, sprawling place, and although Oxford is a busy city too, there’s a more enclosed and insular feel to it, an introspective feel. To me that was important because the characters are so bound up in their own worlds that they don’t really let the outside world intrude too much into them. I liked the idea of a setting that reflected that.

Why is it the ‘art’ of losing?

Ah yes, the title, it took me quite a long time to get to the title; I probably didn’t have one until I was about halfway through at least. Obviously loss is a big theme from both Louise and Nicholas’s perspective, but particularly for Louise: she doesn’t have any obvious talent, ambition or direction in her life and almost the only thing that she’s good at is tapping into the past, connecting with that sense of loss. So whilst it’s not exactly an art, it is something which she holds precious, in the same way that other people would hold a talent or an ambition precious.

It’s also a quotation from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. The poem itself is not particularly relevant, but that’s how I came across the phrase. I felt I wanted something to do with loss so I Googled for quotations and that’s what came up and it seemed to fit. In the past I’ve always had a title first so it was bit unsettling not to have one. Ideally I wanted to have something to do with identity because I feel that that is such an important theme in the book, but I couldn’t quite find the right phrase.

Why is identity so important a theme for you?

From a conceptual point of view I’ve always had an interest, but I also think that the idea of self, how we define ourselves, is central to life, as is the way that others define us. The synthesis between those two things, or the disjunction between them, is fascinating. I often feel that the perceptions we have of other people are wildly inaccurate or at least only reflect one aspect of a personality but it’s something that you never quite know unless you’re very close and even then it may not accurately reflect what’s going on inside. I tried to play with that theme, via Louise changing her name and almost to an extent becoming her mother. But since she doesn’t know Lydia she has to create a different self who is perhaps like Lydia but perhaps isn’t. I had the sense that she was trying to search for something deeper about her mother which didn’t even exist.

What was it like to cross the divide from unpublished, unagented writer to agented and sold writer?

It was something that I’d been anticipating for a long long time and although I’m mercifully young to have a first novel published I do feel quite old to be doing it. I’d built up in my head this mystique of what it would be like to have an agent and a publisher; I used to lie in bed thinking about it, so when it actually happened it felt quite natural: this is what I always thought I would do, so what took me so long?!

At the same time there was a lot of excitement, particularly in the agenting process, because once you have an agent you hand it over to them to find a publisher and sort out all the details, whereas finding an agent is something you do by yourself with no one to back you up. I found that part of the process, the submissions process, difficult because I wasn’t used to putting my work out there and part of me didn’t want to. But I got to the point where I thought it’s silly not to try.

Apart from doing an English degree, did you do any courses in creative writing or have you read lots of books on plot?

I’ve never done a course or anything like that because I feel that creative writing MAs have a limited use. I don’t think they can teach you to write, though they can be good for motivation, but that’s something in the past that I’ve never really needed. I also think that there is a certain house style and the work that comes out of them can feel a bit samey, so I consciously didn’t go in that direction.

As far as books go, I read Carole Blake’s From Pitch to Publication quite carefully but I didn’t do extensive studies. I think because I have been writing since I was about five I went for it in my own way, and hoped that that’s what the market wanted too.

Who are your influences as a writer?

My first major influence was Agatha Christie. When I was younger I was really into her. And although I’m not writing murder mysteries as such, I do think the elements of crime and mystery are always going to be part of my writing. As a teenager I was into a lot of writers who are traditionally seen as quite misogynist, like Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Julian Barnes and David Lodge, people who women aren’t supposed to like. But I never saw their writing like that; I thought their view of women was quite interesting, maybe not always accurate, but there were certainly some points of recognition. And I think that’s partly why I like writing about men. I feel that I’ve learned from writers who create powerful male characters and that comes quite naturally to me now.

In more recent years, Maggie O’Farrell’s After You’d Gone was a big inspiration for my own novel, because it plays around with tenses and first and third person. I knew I wanted to do that but I wasn’t sure it could work; having read her book, I thought, yes, it can and I’ll give it a go.

How do you think your writing will develop?

I think over time I will move slightly more in the direction of the crime genre. It’s something that has always interested me. It might sound morbid but a book without a death is not a book for me!

August. If you’re posh, it’s time to start hunting for grouse, and if you’re not, it’s time to start hunting for a place to hide from Other People’s Holiday Photos. And, of these, as we all secretly know, the most interesting ones are a) the technically brilliant ones but really b) the ones with you/your beloved in the picture.

And why should publishing be much different? Personalization, making an activity or object relevant to oneself, is key to determining value.

So, a good week for some of us: the BETA website authonomy.com, has finally come of age and brought in its rankings system — which is key to the whole thing. (Bit of disclosure/background: I’m part of the development team setting up the site to help a lot of unpublished and self-published writers and readers.)

With a lot of luck, authonomy will allow people to step into their own picture of the book world — and post up their manuscripts (budding authors) or lists of discovery (budding critics) for the public to read.

It’s early days yet because we’re still about 2-3 weeks away from removing invite code and allowing open access on the site. To be honest, we’re as interested as anyone to see what precisely people will make of this service and how far it can go to help them achieve their goals.

Gratifyingly, one of the digital tribe who really knows his stuff, James Long, has some generous, encouraging things to say over at The Digitalist and even wonders …. is Authonomy relevant to his Big Question of what brings people to a publisher’s website.

Now Authonomy is not really the kind of publisher’s website I have in mind for this question – usually I’m thinking of the catalogue and marketing site – but it presents such a clear answer. You come to Authonomy because you want to get published. And now, the mechanism for achieving that (or having a good stab at it) is in place.

I think the user group / market segment that Authonomy is serving is a bit different … to the group relevant to my Big Question; this is, in my mind, the middle ground: folks who are more than just readers (ain’t nothing wrong with being just a reader!) but not quite writers yet (in the sense of being published, especially within the publishing establishment).

Cheers for that. Agreed we definitely didn’t develop authonomy to market HC books so we’re not at the same party as a publisher’s marketing site…but now you’re mentioned it: about those “folks who are more than just readers”….

Them.

The people who inexplicably want to do more with books than just read them.

It’s this group of people who have dogged my (and probably your) thoughts ever since someone dad-danced up to us and mumbled “web 2.0″ in our ears, isn’t it? We’ve clearly all been wondering if today’s book lover might want an active role or (great word this) conversation, from tagging through to list-building to writing erudite reviews and recommendations…to attending a book group and now even dating (link). 2.0-tastic!
Do we know the answer yet? Hello – does anyone want to talk to us? to each other via us? Not sure.

It’s been said that authonomy is the obvious development of this 2.0 lark. I’m not sure if we could have ‘schemed’ for it in such terms, but I’ll admit authonomy’s proposition is certainly more extreme and involved than asking book lovers to dedicate themselves to tinkling round the edges, listing, recommending and tagging heavily-protected and -copyrighted material for the sheer joy of it. Possibly more fun. Hopefully with a reward a lot more commensurate with the effort.

Well, authonomy’s fledgling BETA community are an amazing bunch of people. Committed, creative, enthusiastic, supportive, (and, my god, active), and I don’t know much about this ‘underground‘ but some of our members are certainly pretty leftfield.

I recently ran a little group interview/survey, ‘Writing and You’, to serve as something of a group photo before our community meets our public. (to anyone interested, I’ll post the full results on the authonomy blog soon.)

What exactly are these 1300+ people doing at authonomy for such a generous amount of time per day? Why the hell are barristers secretly staying up at 2am to recommend other people’s books to the community and policewomen sending encouragement to fellow crime afficiados?

Well it might come as no surprise to learn that the majority in our community are what marketeers would call heavy book readers and ‘consumers’, and care passionately about words and writing.

What might surprise you more is the authonomy community’s stated ambitions. Whilst half of us have eyes on the prize and, if we haven’t got one already, are going all out for a nicely rewarding publishing contract (and I really hope authonomy gets these people there) a healthy number of us (34%) are writing for other reasons — as a hobby, a creative enterprise, or simply to communicate. One member writes

The process of creating a piece of writing is utterly absorbing, and the best way to spend my time.

And according to the survey, some of our members, by nurturing their hobby, are creating stuff they’re pleased with, which in turn drives an ambition to take their creativity beyond a secret pasttime. This passion and drive is truly exciting.

And I’ll tell you what. People interested in books and publishing really like using words. If you’ve got access, take a look at the average comment on a book at authonomy and you’ll see what I mean. Rarely do we get a comment shorter than 100 words (some stretch for pages of involved and committed feedback).

If all that doesn’t get you feeling better about publishing-and-the-web’s long term prospects, you and I have different reasons for being here.

But, granted, whilst it’s not to be counted part of the recent tranche of publishers’ consumer websites, authonomy does not come into the world without its own ambitions. It’s not to sell books, print money or steal ‘book ideas’, or market HarperCollins existing ‘product’.

Ultimately, our own aim is to help authors get their work promoted or published, help all publishers recruit new talent, and help readers/critics discover at grassroots some exciting and eclectic new writing voices. Why?

It’s simply that we recognize that in a world where reading is in danger of becoming a minority sport, where government-funded reading campaigns are fast-adopting the same tone as a public health announcement, we have an interest in nurturing, fuelling and encouraging that passion for the written word. Even Apple’s Steve Jobs, the man with the power to put a copy of War and Peace into the pocket of most people in the developed world if he so wished, said books aren’t that big a deal. We so need to prove him wrong.

Obviously I‘d be lying to say, after the months of development work we’ve put in, it doesn’t feel absolutely fantastic to have a decent handful of people say they’re admiring what we doing. But my own (personal) opinion is that if authonomy site comes to anything, it’s not primarily to be seen as a point scored for HC, but as a point scored for reading and writing.

If you’re in the industry and you’d like to know how authonomy can help you, please do drop me an email some time — it’s my pet subject. I suspect if authonomy is functioning correctly and doing its community justice, it’ll be used as a tool by agents and publishers all over the shop to spot talent, to keep the passion alive — and to keep us all in the picture.

Here’s the final part of The Famous Author Handwriting Challenge: who’s our last mystery scribbler?

CLUE: Her characters would revel in this challenge.

Now you’ve seen all three (here, here and, um, here) drop us a line at editor@fifthestate.co.uk with your three guesses. We’ll pick a winner from all the right answers – to whom a box of books will be winging out. You’ve got until next Friday, the 23rd November.

And to help you out here’s the final ‘blind’ analysis from our graphologist, Diane Simpson:

My first instinct when viewing this busy, untidy script was to sit back in my chair with screwed up eyes. If this was the spoken word then this would surely be a garrulous individual – not boring but simply with an overpowering desire to communicate. Regardless of all else, this will not be a ‘one book’ wonder.

The variable size and clever connections tells us that here we have someone with a vast reservoir of energy and willpower at her disposal and yet, oddly, a rather scattered motivation. So much to see, so much to do! This is a positive, very enthusiastic individual with real thirst for productivity that could well put other considerations into the shade.

Unlikely to be happy in the role of a leader, she tends to respond in a reactive rather than proactive way. She is strikingly observant. She keeps her options open as long as is possible and is particularly alert to the shades, nuances and implications of change.

Although apparently open, she is able to contain her reactions and responses and will deliberate in a positively Machiavellian way in order to gain her desired ends. A plotter par excellence!

Very much a ‘now’ person, she is highly project orientated and takes immense pleasure from a completion – which is all very well was it not for the sheer number of projects she is likely to maintain at any one time. The ease of writing flow indicates she favours free expression and has a particularly adept way of improvising; if something won’t work one way then there will always be another and another.

Interestingly public and private at the same time, she is unafraid of the public arena and yet neither craves nor needs attention that usually accompanies public life, in fact, in an odd sort of way, it is almost irrelevant.

This is a people-person who at the same time is extremely driven, independent and self-critical. Immensely creative and generally optimistic, she is almost sure to aim for a positive ending every time. Those complex links and connections point to problem solving as a real forte for this individual and she uses a combination of logic and intuition to achieve her ends.

Today another writer gets their scribblings – and their personality – disected by our graphologist. So who does this belong to? CLUE: She has around 800 titles to her name.

Diane Simpson, a professional graphologist, gave us this analysis :

Here we have a somewhat intense individual. Highly driven and very intelligent, she is a controller and in turn will resist being controlled.

She is likely to be known for successfully getting her own way. She will achieve this by relinquishing very little of herself. In a business sense this would probably reveal itself by her having an inability to delegate – her work will become her ‘baby’ and not something to be handed over to another.

Here we have an adept communicator, but there are also signs of visual artistry in this writing. Note the Greek ‘d’s’, the dives and swoops of the pen as it connects entire words and the many other presentation related manifestations. This is someone with a real eye for line and design; someone able to visualise exactly what she wants to achieve.

A real stickler for detail and discipline, she reveals a respect for both in the way she dots her i’s. Most people complete a word and then go back to dot any i’s; the further back their hands have to travel, the less accurately placed the dot – not so with this writer! Despite the writing being speedily and unhesitatingly written, the longer the word and the further back her hand has to travel, the more accurate the placement of the i dot (an unusual and frankly quite amazing indication of this woman’s attention to detail).

The endings of words tend to be abrupt; she doesn’t linger. This is a sharp minded, somewhat impatient individual who really will not suffer fools at all, never mind gladly. Neither particularly introvert nor extrovert, in fact showing a disinterest in how she appears to others, I suspect that people may tend more to bore and irritate than to intrigue and attract her.

The wealth of angularity in her script suggests a certain spikiness of response in other ways; this is someone who will stand her ground in the face of opposition — her first thought being to question the motivation of the opposer rather than the content of their argument.

Creative and practical thinking are manifest in this woman’s writing in equal parts, leading me to believe that creativity and practicality will play equal parts in what she does.

Check back tomorrow for our final author – and to send us your guesses…

Here’s the first sample from The Famous Author Handwriting Challenge: three mystery authors, one graphologist and, well, you.

So who’s behind this tiny scrawl? Clue: trust your inkling…

Diane Simpson, a professional graphologist, had this to say about today’s author:

At first glance this small, neat script appears to trot unprepossessingly across the page. His exceedingly small personal pronoun does indeed suggest that this man is a modest individual; but being modest does not mean ineffectual.

There is evidence of strong personal discipline in this angular, firm script. Here we have a man who is far more likely to harbour a preference for detailed, factual understatement than ‘in your face’ floridity of wording.

It seems to me that he takes himself rather seriously. He requires no outside criticism as he provides more than enough for himself. He is self-critical and self-monitoring …he really cares about getting things right. I don;t think he’s shy – but he chooses to keep himself to himself.

I began to trace the writing and found that it is guarded and careful rather than relaxed and freely written. This is someone who is particularly sensitive and at times somewhat pedantic; not the sort of person to easily catch unawares.

His words tend to terminate abruptly, so he’s not one for small talk. However, I do note the extra effort he has put into some of the lead-in lines at the beginning of words — a reflection of his liking and need for preparation.

His critical faculties are sharp and he seems to set himself apart from others …definitely not a hearty ‘Hail Fellow, well met’ type. I don’t think he’s shy – but he chooses to keep himself to himself. I wonder whether he has a ‘garden shed’ of sorts (or some other sort of world?) in which to disappear when he chooses?.

I don’t think this man unduly trusts other people and their opinions, his preference being to do things in very much his own way and in his own time. He seems to relish the independence afforded by freedom of action and decision.

On reflection I suspect that this man would shy away from the prospect of having his handwriting analysed – which makes me feel rather guilty!

Check back tomorrow for another!

Recently I unwittingly sent my landlady an offensive email. My housemate had emailed her a note of complaint and copied me in. In a Monday-morning fug, I pressed ‘Reply to All’, and proceeded to call her “a total pain in the arse.” Woops.

We no longer live in her house. We were going to move out anyway — she really was a pain, honestly — but no one deserves to be faced with out-and-out abuse first thing on a Monday morning, especially from a jumped up squirt like me.

It’s at times like these that I curse the ease and convenience of email. This would never have happened in the days before computers — it’s pretty hard to think of a situation in which you could ‘accidentally’ slag off your landlady by letter, isn’t it?

Putting pen to paper takes consideration, slowing the conversion from what’s in your head to how you would like it communicated. With email, words and sentences seem to tumble out of your head and attain legitimacy as soon as they appear on screen. And with a habitual twitch of the forefinger they’re sent.

It would take unusual conviction to write, seal, stamp and send an ill-advised letter to your girlfriend while drunk. Not so with email. One little click and your incoherent ramblings are in the inbox of your bemused belle. You can’t really send a letter by mistake. Even if you scribble something down in the heat of the moment, you always have the walk to the letter box to ponder the likely consequences of your missive.

When I look at my sent emails, I can hardly believe it was me that wrote ‘total pain in the arse.’ No sooner had the word popped into my head, it was sent. Staring blankly at me from the screen it looks so ridiculous and over-the-top. There is absolutely no way I’d have written that by hand. Apart from the fact that a letter would have taken a day to get there, when you write something pen-in-hand, it’s considered, pondered, and just right. In fact, my handwriting is so bad I usually need write it out again — another layer of consideration.

Essentially though, it’s me that’s the problem, not the technology. The truth is that the incredible convenience of email communication fails to protect me against my own haste and my itchy mouse-finger. The best emails — both sent and received — follow the format of the letter that it has replaced and require the same care and attention. And of course, if I really want to, I can always make that special effort and put pen to paper.

So all next week, in praise of the humble letter, Fifth Estate will be dragging out missives from some of our most famous authors – and submitting their handwriting to analysis. We’ll then be challenging you to identify the author from their handwriting. After days of deliberation, numerous think-tanks and heated debates, we decided to call the feature The Famous Author Handwriting Challenge. Are you up to it? Be sure to tune in on Monday…

Frankfurt? Where’s Frankfurt? While publishing’s hardest bargainers jet over to Germany for the book trade’s annual deal-athon, Fifth Estate is heading to the Cheltenham Festival for a week of the finest literary loafing – and we’d like you to join us.

From Wednesday until Sunday Fifth Estate will be posting articles, photos and podcasts from one of the foremost literary events in Britain. We’ll also be handing out the 5th Estate Daily, a special print edition of the blog that will carry all the news from each day’s events – and a digest of the best still to come.

All the stories will be collected together on our Cheltenham page for the easiest reading, and we’ll also be uploading our photos to the Fifth Estate Flickr set, which you can find here. If you’re versed in the joys of RSS, now might be a good time to subscribe for regular updates; and if you’re not, what better time to learn?

Over ten days some 400 authors are descending upon Gloucestershire, from Max Hastings to Margaret Atwood; Ian McEwan to Iain Banks. Stick with us, and as always, please do join in the debate. It’s got to be better than a cold night in Hesse…

The viciously well-dressed novelist Donna Tartt once said,

There is the dandy, or there is Virginia Woolf who was famous for going about in rags, practically. Very nice clothes are not incompatible with the writer’s profession, in a way that they are for a painter or a dancer.

I had occasion to remember this recently as I contemplated my ancient trainers and fake Levis before I attended a book party at the Reform Club. I have no idea what the right garb is for networking, now that I spend much of my day alone, dribbling into my keyboard. I do occasionally dress up for my own amusement, but it’s often quite hard to explain why you’re wearing velvet hotpants at 11 am, as I did the other day, if one of your housemates happens to pop home. (I was delighted that the hotpants still fit – I last wore them in public twelve years ago but I can‘t really carry them off these days).

And many days of my writing life do indeed feel like a grand waste of a decent outfit: even when someone handsome comes to read the electricity meter, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this wasn’t the life Isabel Marant dreamed of for her diffusion line. In my hot youth, I quite often got spectacularly dolled up on a Saturday night just to watch Casualty at home. Now that my outfits cost serious money, however, it feels as though they deserve some kind of audience. Somehow, not even I am narcissistic enough to indulge in leopard print and lipgloss just for my own benefit. It might have made Carrie Bradshaw happy but typing in La Perla and Manolos didn’t do much for her prose, did it?

For writing, I may dress like a Dalston schoolgirl (hoop earrings, jeans and white trainers) but even I know that something more is required for impressing potential employers. I know what to wear for real parties: something low-cut and a glazed expression. I have loads of slut-wear, far more than any of my better-looking friends, which tells its own story but I know this won’t cut it at book launches. For the Reform Club, I contemplated asking a friend to bankroll an ankle-length Laura Ashley frock as this seemed to be what was required. I considered not going at all. Finally, I solicited the advice of a trusted friend who uttered soothingly “If you’re a writer though, they’ll expect you to turn up looking slightly eccentric. Anything just south of Isabella Blow will be just perfect.”

She’d said pretty much the same thing last year when I’d gone to Vogue House for a meeting, and she had been right. On that occasion, I’d done my prep. Helpfully, the latest edition of the magazine had featured a full page colour shot of the editor I was due to meet in her favourite outfit: monochrome Prada. In panicked response, I’d bought a fuschia pink cloche hat (it was the only Sonia Rykiel item I could afford in the Liberty sale) before discarding it and settling for a Jigsaw twinset and maddeningly expensive jeans. It worked just fine but I began yearning for something a little more de trop as I watched Sloanes in furs and artfully laddered tights strut around Hanover Square.

Anyway, waiting for the sartorial muse to strike, I sulked so long and hard before the Reform Club party that I had to get ready in a hurry and cut a gash into my leg whilst shaving it. I threw together the least offensive items from my wardrobe (Jigsaw skirt, Gap T Shirt and Birkenstocks) and prayed that my leg would stop bleeding. I contemplated buying some dove-grey fishnets in Boots on the way but settled for arriving late, rain-sodden and apprehensive. Carmen Calil was there, looking magnificent in Missoni but I just stuck out amidst all the braying Tories and girls in sweater dresses and I regretted the Birkenstocks. I looked wrong, and couldn’t wait to go home so I drank too much and swore copiously. I don’t think I can blame my ill-advised footwear but I flirted with all the wrong people and developed a speech impediment before fleeing into the night. Still, at least I didn’t fall over.

When they first met, Welsh Poet Laureate Gwyneth Lewis and psychologist Dorothy Rowe realised they had more than a publisher in common. In their recent books, Sunbathing in the Rain and Beyond Fear, respectively, they both interpret depression.

In my view, Gwyneth has penned one of the best first-person accounts of the state in Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression . The book is part memoir, part literary guide. She writes

Depression is internal snow. Black snow. The flakes whirl around like motes in the water around your personal shipwreck. The quicker you dive down to see your sorry state, the better for you in life. For above you, if only you can reach it without getting the bends, are sunshine, laughter on a yacht, the clink of plates as a lunch of steaming fish is handed round.

Dorothy, meanwhile, has worked in clinical psychology for many decades, and her now classic book Beyond Fear is one of the essential must-read titles for anyone researching or exploring this topic. (I spoke to her earlier in the year in a series of podcasts broadcast here).

They both visited the filing cupboard this week to record this conversation about living well, and how to interpret and survive darker times — one of our best podcasts yet, I think.

Dorothy Rowe in conversation with Gwyneth Lewis (18MB)

The wait for you and me is finally over. A vicar’s wife is the winner of the Waitrose Food Illustrated Writing Competition and a book deal worth £20,000.

Confounding every flowery pinnied stereotype, Elisa Beynon, (who is known to cook in her high heels,) has wowed our judges including Nigel Slater, Waitrose Food Illustrated Editor William Sitwell and Louise Haines of 4th Estate with her submission. They felt that her entry, bursting with mouthwatering ideas from the vicarage kitchen displayed ‘enthusiasm, warmth, gentle humour’ and ‘terrific home cooking.’ You can read her winning entry in the attached PDF.

Elisa says her spinsterhood signature dish was broccoli and tomato ketchup, until marriage to husband Nigel (a vicar) taught her that ‘church and food’ go together like ‘PMT and chocolate.’

But only trial, ‘unsavoury error’, and a delight in the impact her food had on friends, family and her husband’s parishioners, has seen Elisa develop her winning recipes including The Great Chocolate Rescue Remedy (for Hormonal Girls,) Hot Halloumi Salad (for Social girls) and Sunshine soup (for post-baby blues.)

She says,

For me, food is all about ingredients and interaction and planning the perfect dish for the person or people who are coming over. Left to my own devices, I’ll eat from the fridge, but to see others enjoy my food is delicious. Friends encouraged me to write down my recipes a few years ago now, but only seeing this competition on the front of WFI galvanised me in to action and made me realise that writing down my recipes brings together the things I adore— food, writing and people.

Judge Nigel Slater says “Eliza’s entry shone with enthusiasm, warmth and gentle humour. A truly original voice.” Louise Haines adds: “She is a witty writer and a terrific home cook.”

The folk at 4th Estate will now start working with Elisa Beynon to put her book together, and we’ll keep you posted.

Thanks so much to 2500 of you who entered, and – even if you didn’t walk away with the top prize this time – I hope you’ll keep cooking, and posting some signature recipes up on to 5th Estate for us hungry readers.

Click here to view a PDF of Elisa Beynon’s winning entry

Over the past month I’ve given a handful of readings, and at each one — after the dry-mouthed stage of beginning to speak in front of a roomful of intent faces, after reading a few pages that by now sound to me more like an incantation than like prose — someone asks the same question. Or a version of the same question. Which is: How much of your book is autobiographical?

Curiously, this question often comes couched in a hypothetical — How would you respond to the charge that your book is autobiographical? Charge? Am I being charged, right at this very moment? I feel like ducking behind the lectern, or slinking toward a seat, or pretending to notice some kind bookstore employee telling me my time is up.

You’d think, since this is the only question that dependably arises, that I would by now have come up with a reliable, formidable answer, which I could trot out at each event, speaking slowly but confidently, with pauses and bursts of fluency meant to simulate live thought. Nope. Each time, I stammer and stop and start over and hold my mouth open (a very real demonstration of live thought, unfortunately).

But now, at the comfort of my own desk, watched only by my new puppy (who would love to chew my keyboard, if only I’d look away for a minute), I hope I can do slightly better. So, how would I respond to the charge of having written an autobiographical novel?

Guilty! But also not guilty! See, the characters who populate the novel, as well as the things they say and do, are all happily invented. Henry exists nowhere but in the book’s pages, and same goes for Margaret, Sameer, David, Lucy, and all the rest of them — I had a lot of work for them to do, and fortunately or un-, that didn’t leave room for impersonations of family and friends.

The canvas on which they all were painted, however, is a good deal more familiar. I did, as described in an earlier post, once work as a keeper at the Central Park Zoo. I did grow up in Chevy Chase and then move to New York, just as my book’s protagonist, Henry, does. I too have an older brother and grew up in a yellow house at the bottom of a hill and went to an elementary school called Somerset. And many other particulars besides.

And yet I believe, in spite of the knowing smile now passing over the face of my pup, that all of those things are essentially incidental, like the fact of the book’s having been written in English. I wrote it in English because that happened to be the language I grew up speaking, but I think it could just as well have been written in Italian or Russian or Inuit. The substance of a novel is a jelly-ish thing that isn’t contained in its language, and similarly isn’t, I don’t think, contained in the biographical details of its characters.

I can imagine a Russian author writing a version of my book about a young man growing up in a small town outside of St. Petersburg and going to work cleaning up after the circus in Moscow. The particulars would all be different, the faces and names and settings would all be shuffled, but some essential thing — the way of looking at things, the manner of interacting with the world — would remain. The book would be Zoology’s long-lost identical twin. Zoology and it would sit across the table from each other, unable to speak but amazed at how they both take off their glasses when nervous and prefer peanut M&M’s to regular.

Its author would stand stumped at many a distant podium.

After my third year of college, I applied to be a zookeeper. The position wouldn’t pay; the hours would be long; the work, everyone kept assuring me, would not be the least bit glamorous. But it held a bizarrely strong appeal for me.

I’d spent a lot of time in zoos growing up (my mom worked designing exhibits for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and had always adored animals, so I had quite fond associations with the zoo. But also I wanted a job, strange as it sounds, that I knew wouldn’t lead to a job offer once college was over. I was already certain that I wanted to write fiction for a living, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything that might distract me from that.

The Central Park Zoo (which I’d visited and loved) seemed like just the thing.

And they really weren’t kidding about the work not being glamorous. I’d worked before — at a bookstore, as a research assistant in a biology lab, at a political magazine — but I’d never done steady work that was so physical. I know that the huge majority of the world’s jobs are like this, so it really shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, but I’d never experienced anything like it before.

Someone would hand me a rake and point to the long dirt-covered area where the goats lived — and that would be my afternoon’s work. Or else I’d spend a couple of hours scrubbing out the cages where the guinea fowl were going to lay their eggs. It gave me plenty of time to daydream and to stare at the animals and to think about the things I was writing.

I wrote on index cards that I kept in my pocket, so I could tuck them away if my boss happened to wander near. One afternoon I was leaning on the goat pen, writing an idea — probably a very lofty idea for a novel that had nothing to do with the zoo — when Newman the Goat, a central character in my book who really does exist, appeared over my shoulder and bit the cards out of my hand. He seemed to be making fun of me, reminding me that there was plenty of material right in front of me. And that I had forgotten to feed him his afternoon meal.

The next year in college, my last year, I started writing what would become Zoology, though I didn’t have any real idea of its shape at first. I had just found something about the animals so endlessly interesting — the way they carried on being themselves, day after day, in such limited circumstances — that I knew I wanted to do something with them.

After graduating, I took a job as a tutor for a company in Manhattan. I was able to set my own schedule, which gave me the time to keep working on my book, and it also meant I got to go into lots of families’ apartments and see how they live, which is something I love to do.

I’ve worked with everyone from eight-year-olds to eighteen-year-olds, so — aside from relearning the quadratic equation and the dates of the French Revolution — I’ve also gotten to re-experience, in a strange way, huge stretches of life that I’d forgotten. I remember now the amazing conscience-less-ness with which little kids eat (whole plates of mini-pizzas, pints of ice cream, bags of Cheetos), the daily painfulness of being twelve, the brilliance and industry with which high schoolers guard their social lives from their parents.

But I’ve been tutoring now for about two and a half years, and this spring, when the book comes out, I think I’m finally going to stop. I can already feel the formula for a parabola sinking back to the dark trenches of my mind, probably not to be dislodged until, years from now, some future son or daughter comes crankily home with a math test.

Originally I had great ambitions for this week’s blog entry/article/diary/postmodernist rant. It was going to set the world on fire through a digital pulpit, blazing a trail so bright that those who chose to walk down it (my readers) would be rendered blind through my succinct deconstruction of the industry and its principals.

What can I say? I was younger then.

The first draft didn’t work, bluntly speaking. But from the carcass of that well-meaning but ultimately stillborn blog I was able to fashion this and I hope the disjointed but opinionated pieces slot together to make a meaningful whole. It’s all very postmodernist, still, for fans of such endeavours.

A character sketch: Quentin wakes when the sun rises, stirred by a dawn chorus and the misleading promise of a day yet to be lived. Throughout this day he will undergo many of life’s necessities — drink, excrete, eat — with robotic precision, and human enthusiasm (read: subdued). His pleasures away from this are derived through an incessant search for sensory stimulation; fresh greens, the nose; bits of cardboard to devour, the tongue; the scruffy old slipper in the corner of the conservatory, the penis.

If the title hasn’t already tipped you off, Quentin is my pet rabbit, and he is a simple creature, with simple pleasures.

Take the slipper, for example. This he likes to hump, of an eve. A low intelligence and a pre-programmed biological survival code are surely to blame for this comical — and frequent — occurrence, for sure. But I’ve taken it upon myself to use this case study as a microcosm for people’s book-buying habits, and see what conclusions can be drawn from the conceptual blender.

Whoa, whoa, wait. Come back here a second. I told you it would get odd.

The rabbit humps the slipper, okay; he goes for what his brain tells him he wants, even though, I’m sure, Quentin knows that hunk of sweaty material isn’t a female Lionhead rabbit, and it won’t birth him a litter. It’s just an inanimate object in front of him, and one which he can’t resist, at certain moments.

Now. I and millions of other readers undergo the same process, I hereby argue, with authors such as Stephen King.

Let me rephrase that, to avoid confusion — we undergo the same process with the books of Stephen King and his bestselling ilk.

Again — we have an undesirable urge, when in the bookstore and the supermarket, to pick up these flashy paperbacks and proceed to the counter (not with the intention of humping them, I hope).

The amount of times I’ve been branching through a King book and have thought to myself: Aw, King, mate, what’re you being a dickhead for? Or, shaking my head in disappointment: King, come on. You can do better here and I think you know it. Only the other week, I retired a Grisham book to the bin after a disappointing first half.

Yet I buy more! We all do. These bestselling ‘kings’ are good at what they do, no doubt there, they Pass Straight To Go (a typical Kingism — yeah, I can do it too, Steve). But there is so much more that I, personally, want and should be reading when instead I tend to favour these authors. And crucially, I favour them when they have let me down, and quite spectacularly cough theconclusiontotheDarkTower cough. I’ve given them extra chances, despite frequent bad behaviour, despite crap film adaptations, despite the thousands of other authors begging for my attention.

Yet perhaps that is it. We go with what we know. It’s safe and easy and doesn’t spring any nasty surprises on us; just an occasional weary disappointment. We ignore the real deal – Quentin’s female rabbit friend – and go for the comfortable greyness, the discarded slipper in the corner. The slipper is our constant.

On 28th May Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising hits the shelves for just £3.49 discounted and I dare say that I will purchase it, despite detesting his last slab of tedium, 1999’s Hannibal. The reviews tell me this book is awful, the film adaptation was awful, my own reading of it as a hardback original told me it was awful, yet still I will dump it into a basket as I rove around the aisles of Tesco’s. I know already this act will occur in the future, it is predestined, inevitable. I must be nuts.

The study of Quentin has shown me that book buyers and horny rabbits have a lot in common, in a trade fiction-irrepressible impulse sense. Both are creatures of pattern and environment, and will follow the same cycles if there is no break in the routine. Place the bestselling authors at the front of the shelves, they buy; place the footwear in the conservatory, they hump. The metaphor, analogy, whatever you want to call it, may be simplified if not downright sloppy but scientists experiment on lower life forms to help understand human problems and conditions and here I use a cute but lower life form to understand our habits as readers. I wonder what other secrets study of The Quent will reveal – the possibilities are endless. The case, ongoing.

It was announced earlier in the year that Martin Amis was having a break from his sporadic writing patterns and sojourning to Manchester University to teach creative writing. A flurry of commentary appeared online and in print about the self-stylised literary bad boy’s submergence into academia and, for my sins, here’s more.

Although he promises to “be nice” towards his students — a sentiment he didn’t feel fit to lavish upon his publishers when he demanded a £500,000 advance for The Information in 1995 — I do believe that his inherent celebrity will work against him, causing students to take his negative comments personally and respond with informed viciousness and underhanded swipes.

How long, I began to wonder, as I tried to cast my mind off an ensuing dissertation, before a variation of the following would occur:

“But is it a story?” Amis enquires, bringing his eyes up to meet the class. “I see it more as a portrait. Post-modern, witty, and laced with cultural reference it may be. Dripping with delectable charm, sure. Yet when we get to the meat of this two thousand word submission, when we get past all the bells and whistles — we find that this isn’t so much as a story about Barney the Prussian Vampire as it is a portrait of a day in his life. It’s Joyce on pre-Weimar steroids.”

“Riddle me this, mate. Without your dad — without Kingsley — you wouldn’t have ever been a writer, right? You’d have been a tramp.”

Here Amis would have two options, the way I see it.

Option A —

Amis sighs audibly, and puts the flimsy manuscript down on the table in front. Shrugging like a subdued teenager, he mumbles something about “being disappointed” and points at the clock above the classroom door. “Let’s take a ten minute coffee break. People are getting strained and we could do with some time off. Class dismissed.”

Option B —

Amis meets the glare of the student. He puts the flimsy manuscript down on the table in front. He smiles. The accusation of the student rushes through his mind once again — “without your father . . . you’d have been a tramp” — before he attempts his reply.

“Why yes . . . Yes indeed. I believe I would have been.”

I think it’s going to be tough for Amis (although not so tough with that £500,000 securely in the bank, correct?). Citing flaunty reasons for teaching creative writing — the aforementioned book he hopes to rise from the ashes of the experience — is all well and dandy but to me is a cop-out answer. He’s rich; unlike most writers who teach creative writing, Amis doesn’t need to supplement his writing with a job on the side. Ol’ Father King sorted all that out for him years ago. Saying he is doing it for the experience doesn’t sit with me, either. You read some kids’ writing, you comment upon it. How’re you going to squeeze a book out of that, Martin? It’s hardly going on the road like Kerouac, is it?

Why, Amis, why?

I was pondering this one day whilst walking in the glorious Oxford weather, trying to keep my mind away from Dissertation Land, and a conclusion hit me all at once (the espresso I’d just sunk might have had something to do with my divine inspiration, it must be said).

All of the supposed reasons for Amis trekking to Manchester to teach led to one destination, to one realisation, and at once my cynicism and confusion was gone.

I realised – It didn’t matter.

And, oh look, that realisation led to an observation about the publishing industry.

It’s an industry to which motives and analysis rarely apply. Yeah, yeah — it’s a business, profit is the defining goal, yawn. That’s very true. But the key to the industry is innovation and, in effect, doing stuff that other people can’t see the point in, or benefit. Print On Demand is one such example; now Lightning Source are on their way to going global. Giving books free away with the tabloids is another. Sending authors on tours around the country, turning them into rock stars — it all worked, to some degree or another. Further back, Allen Lane steaming ahead with his paperback collection.

Therefore, just because we (I) can’t see Amis’s point in teaching creative writing vis-à-vis his current life situation isn’t necessarily something to hold against him. He could have an Ace concealed, waiting to reveal it at a future date. The experience may just inspire him to write a book that bests Money (no sniggering, at the back); he may just find the next Thomas Hardy studying at Manchester University; he may just outlive his stigma as an author who only got published in the first place because his father was famous.

Whatever the case, I salute Amis. He’s breaking the mould, albeit in a very square, academically approved way. In following this age-old publishing tradition, there is the opportunity for a wide reaching commercial and individual success. The trick is to avoid the mould-breaking innovations that turn mouldy, like scapegoat Judith Regan’s unfortunate O.J. book and the Anthea Turner biography. If he manages that, Amis will come up trumps, and in the end will even have a story to write about it; Bad Boy Amis Offspring Morphs into Luvvy-Darling Academia King.

Ever since Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in October last year, as the youngest female winner in the award’s 39 year history, I have been wanting to read it. I picked up my paperback copy from Heathrow while flying home for Christmas, but could not find the time to sit down and read it. I admit I felt slightly apprehensive, thinking that as a Booker Prize winner it must be a difficult, challenging read.

Then the book was chosen as the March title for the SYP Oxford Book Club and I suddenly had both a very good reason and a deadline for reading it.

The story is set in Kalimpong in India, far north-east in the Himalayan mountains, near Bhutan and Nepal. I admit I had to look Kalimpong up on a map, as Himalayan geography was never my strongest subject. Reading about the area made the story feel more real, and gave me more insight into the conflict described in the book between Nepalese insurgents and the upper class Indians living in Kalimpong.

The story gripped me within a few pages and transported me completely and utterly to a tiny mountain village on the other side of the world. I could vividly imagine the shabby house where Sai, the main character, lives with her grandfather and their cook, the landscape, plants, smells, even the extreme humidity during monsoon season. I have missed reading stories like this!

The book gets under your skin, and it made me feel angry, sad, annoyed and nostalgic as the story progressed. The haunting loneliness that permeates the family lineage of all the characters, the extreme poverty and widespread injustice, the Nepalese insurgency — uncomfortable to read about but necessary for understanding the culture and history where the story is set.

The thing that made it so uncomfortable for me to read was the domestic situation for all the main characters. The extreme poverty — even of the “upper classes” — in Kalimpong, the domestic violence, the role of women, and the lack of close family ties, friendship and solidarity was difficult to come to terms.

The SYP book club meeting was a great opportunity to discuss the book with fellow young publishers, and gave me insight into issues I did not consider myself while reading the book. This is why I always read a few reviews after finishing a book — I admit that sometimes I miss quite obvious things!

It’s been several weeks since I finished the book but the story won’t let go, it’s playing on my mind and has inspired me to read more about India, West Bengal, Darjeeling and the conflicts in this area. Warmly recommended!

Does anyone remember the summer of 1998? A date that now seems so far back in the sands of time as to be completely unreachable, a time when Bewitched’s C’est La Vie was rocketing up the pop charts; a time when Tony Blair still ‘had it’; and the internet took eleven minutes to dial up, was prone to randomly disconnect, and cost 50 pence a minute. A good year in spite of these things (some would argue it was a good year because of them), there was a moment nestled amongst that vibrant and sunny summer that stuck with me and changed the way I read fiction or, more specifically, the way in which I read characters.

I was fourteen then, reasonably healthy, reasonably happy, and enjoyed the odd bike ride. One evening I decided to bike with a friend out into the countryside. Now Lincolnshire, for those not in the know, is pretty; very pretty. Full of fields. Full of wildlife. And for a fourteen-year-old, full of boredom. But we had found something of interest, a potential pit of fun hidden away in the Lincolnshire wilderness.

It was a disused quarry, small, but full of ridges and rolling hills that we could bike up and down; a makeshift obstacle course that was ours for the taking. We got maybe a good forty minutes out of it, riding about, laughing, falling off our bikes in a spray of dust. We were having so much fun we didn’t notice the 4×4 Land Rover pull up.

“This ‘ere’s private prop’ty,” the farmer said, stepping out of the Land Rover. “Whart you lads up tuh?”

We mumbled some excuse and started wheeling our bikes towards the quarry exit, looking towards the horizon and escape. Not once did we stop to consider if it was indeed his private property to preside over.

“Stay orf land that’s nat yours!” he barked after us, adjusting his hat with tobacco-stained fingers. “Go on — ‘op it.”

Turning this event over in my mind later on that evening, I realised for the first time I was consciously aware that what I had viewed was a living, breathing, talking, excreting caricature; a farmer portraying the image of a stereotypical farmer that is ingrained in all our minds from birth. Like the Hawaiian shirt-clad, cigar-chomping American tourist stereotype, this chap was a complete pastiche of himself. Some publications, like Viz, produce caricatures from the national demographic and pursue them towards their logical conclusions, with often hilarious results. I think the point is that there is a kernel of truth in every stereotype; although it can never be taken as the ultimate truth.

There is much talk in publishing today of the author brand. I have a recent Stephen King paperback on my shelf where on the spine we find the author’s name is roughly a 12 point font size larger than the title of the book. There lies an example of the author-brand at work; but I propose there is also a concept of an author-caricature. Whereas the brand is created by the marketers, the author-caricature (hereby referred to as AC) is a complex structure created by the author itself, as it relates mostly to the contents of the books rather than the covers.

Hunter S. Thompson is a classic example. Read The Rum Diary. A novel he wrote in the late 1950s, dealing with a fictional character who gets up to lots of mischief in Puerto Rico. Now read any of the books he wrote after that, after emerging as a survivor of the 1960s. Thompson himself is the central character of these subsequent cult favourites, and in all of them he clowns around, and gets up to lots of craziness ala The Rum Diary’s Paul Kemp. Thompson essentially converted himself from author to AC, becoming one of his own characters and producing books that we can only presume are real-life experiences. But would the Thompson of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas have gone on such a reckless drug-fuelled epic if he had known he wasn’t going to write a book about it later on?

The reason Thompson moulded himself into an AC is because caricatures, when done correctly, are fun. If I had written a story about the farmer at the quarry, it could be an amusing diversion because it plays into our pre-established ideas of The Farmer as occupation, supplanted in our subconscious by countless children’s books and TV shows. In real life, he played into that notion to such a tee that to fictionalise him would be to acknowledge the ridiculousness of the caricature and at the same time emphasize its worth in society. ACs like Thompson and Burroughs created their very own caricatures that today one can comfortably slip into, should one be so inclined: the drugged-out writer. Others occupy spaces that have been created long prior to their arrival on the publishing scene; Irvine Welsh as angry Scotch writer; Stephen King as a Dickens-esque ‘writer of the people’; Jaime Oliver as Yet Another Young Male Chef.

Eventually, so I’m told, the summer of 1998 ended. In the September I started at a Grammar school and in the years following observed many more caricatures, both in the media and in real life. Some ugly, some lovely, most plain funny. The biggest caricature I ever met was in 2002, at a talk given by one Jeremy Paxman. This grumpy, take-no-prisoners TV tyrant was as sweet as a puppy dog in real life; the hard nosed reporter image he portrays is a lie. So is fiction, by its very nature, and that is where caricatures of people and occupations can be most successful as it is there we can recognise exaggerations of the strangers we meet from day to day. One day I very well might return to that disused quarry, in the hope of finding the farmer. I would ask him for some advice, for some tips; “Just how, Mister, do you manage to keep up the lie?”

Here’s the second the Foyles’ Day videos, featuring readings and discussion between Hilary Mantel, Bella Bathurst and Danuta Kean. To view on a larger screen, visit our Google Video link.

Great new website has launched at www.bestyoungnovelists.com. I’m liking the design a lot.

Prettiness aside, this is a great place to visit and get inspiration for Must-Read-Before-I-Die kind of lists. Last week Granta in New York unveiled its second-ever list of Best of Young American Novelists, comprised of 21 American-based authors aged 35 and under, and this is the result. (Granta made its first selection of American novelists in 1996.) More information about the significance of the list here.

A small, shameless boast: We think that Fourth Estate has the highest number of authors on the list out of the UK publishers.

Daniel Alarcón – Fourth Estate -Harper Collins

The success of Eve Green amazed me. It began life as scribbles in a journal; it ended up being a novel that not only sat in bookshops, but which also won prizes, and featured on a prime-time television book club. It felt dreamlike. Even now, the journey that little book went through seems hard to believe. I smile to think of it; I will always be thrilled, and grateful – but, invariably, with this success, there were pressures.

With my second book, I had ideas, and I had ambitions – but in the aftermath of Eve Green all I wanted to do was not disappoint.

There is always talk of the tricky second novel – and I used to think it was a cliche. But I’d sit at my desk, look out of the window and think, “don’t mess up…” I dreaded, instantly, being a one-hit wonder, and imagined reviews for my second book which called me exactly that – a flash-in-the-pan a one-trick-pony. Such fears were all in my head. I never – not even once! – felt any pressure at all from my publishing house, or agent. They were all so calm and patient with me, and gave me the space to write. But I still felt pressured, simply because I wanted to do well; I didn’t want to let anyone down.

Hindsight is, truly, a fine thing. I see now, perfectly, what I did wrong in the early months of writing Oystercatchers. I withdrew a little; I forced myself to stay at that computer, even if the words weren’t coming; I felt guilty over days-off and holidays and, worst of all, I set myself standards I really had no chance of meeting (eg, 2000 words a day! Some writers might achieve that; I am, by nature, a little slower than that….!) This all came from my own worries – from the “don’t mess up” voice inside me.

This approach didn’t work. It stopped the words, and those words that did come felt jilted, not my own. It took some straight-talking friends and a few days in the countryside to make me realise that if I were to produce anything half-good, I had to listen to my instincts, as I had done with Eve Green. I reverted back to my old writing ways – write in the morning; exercise; socialise; spend time in the places that inspire me; and, most important of all, don’t worry about the critics, the reviews, the ghost of Eve Green. Just write for ME. MY writing. So gradually, I did.

I learnt many lessons in my writing of Oystercatchers. I know myself, as writer, far better. Eve Green will always be special to me, for obvious reasons (it was my first book; it made me so happy to see it do well) – but in many ways Oystercatchers has been the most valuable. I know myself better from writing it. It was a greater challenge, by far – and I was so proud of myself when, after nearly three years, I typed in the last full stop.

I don’t regret anything. My second novel is not as accessible, perhaps, as its predecessor, and it has a darker tone to it – right from the start, I wanted that. But it is also an honest book, I think; through my experiences I hope to have instilled Moira with a truthful sense of introspection, self-concern. She is not me, that’s for sure; some of her choices and actions are as shocking to me as I hope they are to the reader! But there are moments in the novel when I sympathise with her, and recognise certain feelings, and for this reason, despite her flaws, I care for her.

I never expect to have even half the sucess that Eve Green did ever again. But I hope I have learnt from it – and that this learning will inform my other novels in the future.

Reading Groups extra: Got a question for Susan Fletcher? Be it on the writing process, the pressure of writing a second book to live up to her first, her inspiration for Oystercatchers, or on the Whitbread (now Costa) Book Award, you can send your question to readinggroups@harpercollins.co.uk or leave it here on 5th Estate. Susan will answer them all, and we’ll be posting responses on the reading groups site next month at www.readinggroups.co.uk

The 23rd International Jerusalem Book Fair took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel high up on the hills that surround the old city walls. The hotel is nondescript save for the balcony on the 20th floor, which offers a panoramic view of the old city, the Temple of the Mount and the nine-metre-high security wall and runs chaotically through the city, separating the Jewish and Arab communities. From here you can see the layers and tectonics of the city and how they have developed and collided over the millennia. What becomes immediately clear is that everything in this city from architecture to archaeology is political.

The conflict, like the old city of Jerusalem, would take more than the week provided to unravel fully. But at its heart, according to those on both sides of the wall the conflict is one over the historical narrative of the city and not simply territorial possession. It is against this backdrop that the role of the Jerusalem Book Fair is defined both for publishing in Israel and the wider world.

It cannot be ignored that proposals were slipped under our hotel room doors in the dead of the night, and phone messages left in secretive voices explaining that it was a matter of great urgency that we meet. But the book fair plays a very serious and fundamental role in engaging not only Arabs and Israelis in a dialogue about the city and the country’s future, but also the hundreds of publishers and agents who visit from around the world. This at a time when refusal to engage is endemic.

It is a huge credit to the organisers of the book fair that for the first time, after months of negotiation through a third party intermediary, they were able to invite a Palestinian publisher, Samech Dandis, to have a stand at the fair. Such was the media frenzy on the announcement that he almost did not come.

The book fair is also the centrepiece of Israeli publishing. In the organisers’ own words, Israeli publishing is ‘locked in a cage’ by its own language, since the market outside Israel for books in Hebrew is finite. So frustrated have writers become that they are turning to foreign languages as a means of getting their work published, even in Israel. It is not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time as the number of young people leaving the country is increasing.

In the last few years even Hebrew novels are suffering as translated fiction takes primacy with Jonathan Littel novel, ‘Les Bienveillantes’, going for $35,000, an unprecedented amount in a country where sales of 500 copies a week can get you onto the bestseller’s list.

But it was not only through the prism of publishing that our hosts wanted us to get to know their country. On our second night the group was split between hosting agents where we were invited into their houses to hear their stories.

Dorothy Harman and her husband hosted a dinner at which their children, recently arrived back from New York and East Dulwich, London, told us their stories. It was the only time that we would hear about the future of the country. A future that they saw to be profoundly sad since there is a common acceptance that there are no fresh ideas in circulation, and each aging prime minister is recycled until his policies are discredited. Maybe for this reason the story always returns to the past: each side engaged in a conflict of ownership of the narrative history of Jerusalem. Jewish areas are referred to as deeply rooted ‘neighbourhoods’ while the Palestinians live in transient ‘settlements’. Arab taxi drivers will talk for hours about their family history, claiming that their connection to Jerusalem goes back 500 years, which is of course impossible to disprove.

For the organisers of the Jerusalem book fair, the historical narrative of the conflict was engaged as a dialogue most obviously at an event called ‘Voices from the Hilltops’, where the agent Deborah Harris had arranged a day of discussions, reading and film screenings dealing with the conflict from a plethora of perspectives, and included the sublime octogenarian poet, Taha Muhammed Ali. Two years previously the joint event had taken place on the bridge to Jordan, in no man’s land. It is testament to the achievements of the book fair that this time the conference was on the outskirts of Jerusalem, within touching distance of the security wall and Bethlehem.

The event included a film called Beaufort, which had just won the Berlin Film Festival award for best director, based on Ron Leshem’s novel If There is a Heaven set during Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. It seems apparent that the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ for our generation can only come from this part of the world.

It was when the level of discussion had reached its most profound that the German literary agent, Michael Gaeb, stood up and spoke for us all when he confessed his confusion over how he should feel as an outsider who felt obligated to have an opinion. Before the discussion could go much further, could the panel provide any orientation to understanding the situation that had come to define their existence?

The question seemed to surprise the panel since the first answer was simply ‘leave’. It became clear though that for all panel that they wanted us to fall in love with the city layer by layer, and to choose our own narrative since for as long as there is dialogue there is hope. They wanted us to go and find the city for ourselves. This became even more personal when one Israeli literary agent asked me to take some photographs of Bethlehem as this was a place that she would never be able to visit.

Along the 1967 border the museum of the Seam has been founded as a means of engaging with the conflict through art. The curator speaks proudly of the group of Israeli soldiers barely out of their teens, leaving the exhibition in silence, shocked at the confrontation with the situation from a perspective other than their own.

The British graffiti artist, Banksy, had got across the check point in 2004 to adorn the Palestine side of the wall with his own narrative. Ironically the curator had not heard of Banksy’s antics let alone seen them, banned as an Israeli Jew from crossing into Palestine. The photograph below, taken to the sound of gunfire, was for him.

At the Ramallah checkpoint with Banksy, 2007.

It was not all about publishing. There was a healthy collection of bad dance moves on display. A visit was made to the Mount of Olives for sunrise over the Old City, after a nervous moment outside a club with a gang of gun carrying Israeli soldiers, who seemed to be as tired and emotional as we were. And an unbreakable bond is forged between semi-naked men tiptoeing out of the changing room for a swim in the Dead Sea talking slightly too loudly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

But it was the visualisation of the history and the geography from the 20th floor that left the deepest impression, intricately bound as it is to the necessity and desire to engage in dialogue that the book fair stands for.

Our first film created from Foyles Day. It’s about 15 minutes, featuring some readings and a discussion about how to write successful memoir – in particular what publishers are looking for.

If you’d rather watch it full screen click here.

Thanks to everyone who came, by the way. It was packed out. And especially thanks to those who’ve since got in touch with us to say you loved it.

We’ll be featuring more films each week, and the unabridged podcasts from next week.