The Blog

I’m doing something a little different for the end-of-year round-up this year. Instead of the best books of 2008, here are some of the titles that I’m sure would have been good… if only I’d got around to reading them. (more…)

Salon.com and New York Times critic Louis Bayard has spent the last few years carving out a niche for himself as a writer of historical crime stories featuring real-life individuals and characters from classic fiction. Mr. Timothy (2003) followed the continuing adventures of Timothy Cratchit from A Christmas Carol, while The Pale Blue Eye (2006) was set around West Point Military Academy and featured a young cadet by the name of Edgar Allan Poe. Both novels had a lot to recommend them; in particular, The Pale Blue Eye was a more entertaining book than 2006′s other Poe-inspired yarn, Matthew Pearl’s disappointing The Poe Shadow (which was published on the same day and as a result must have drawn at least some of the limelight from Bayard’s novel).

In his new novel, The Black Tower, Bayard turns his attention to the French Restoration and the exploits of real-life criminal-turned-detective Eugène François Vidocq. (more…)

Inside Book Publishing, 4th ed.
Giles Clark & Angus Phillips
Published in the UK by Routledge.
ISBN 978-0415441575

If you’re a writer, it may seem that mastering your craft is more than enough work, but it’s worth learning what you can about the industry as well. Whatever else it may mean to you, finding a publisher and getting your book into print is primarily a business activity, and as with any other business, the more you know before you get involved, the better your position will be.

Inside Book Publishing, by Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, is an excellent introduction to the subject, managing to be both comprehensive and concise. While its primary audience is academic (it’s used on several publishing courses, including at Oxford Brookes where Phillips teaches), it actually has a much broader appeal. Chapters explaining marketing, distribution and the allocation of rights are worth reading for budding authors and publishers alike, and a detailed breakdown of the costs of publishing a book will help new writers to understand why they’re not going to be able to retire from sales of their first novel. Each chapter concludes with a ‘further reading’ list, making this a perfect starting point for deeper research into whichever topics are most relevant to you.

There are shelves of books available on the subject of publishing (and in particular self-publishing), but I think it’s worth reading something that takes a serious-minded, academic approach to the core of the subject, and this book fills that role perfectly.

The latest edition was printed this summer, and is backed up by a respectable website, also called Inside Book Publishing. The site includes a blog, which has an interesting update on the potential effect of the recession on British publishers.

The Minutes of the Lazarus Club is a story of murder and espionage in industrial nineteenth-century London, the kind of thing that some people call a “gaslight romance”. The central character, George Phillips, is a doctor at St Thomas’s hospital, but the novel’s being sold on a supporting cast that includes Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Florence Nightingale, and even Charles Darwin. Tony Pollard is a well-regarded historian and archaeologist, but how well does he fare when he brings the historical elements into a work of fiction?

A real danger for historians and other academics when they try writing fiction is the tendency to overload the narrative with facts and trivia. The story forgotten, they launch into a technical description of an object or a brief treatise on some aspect of the period, making the reader feel as though they’ve fallen through a hole in the story and landed on somebody’s lecture notes. This is a pitfall that Pollard largely avoids, though: after some early wobbles (the early chapters set in the hospital have some very informative dialogue in them), he does a good job of keeping things relevant to the story, and the historical information serves to colour the goings-on, rather than distract from them. (more…)

Editing and revising a novel can be a long, depressing task. A lot of the initial thrill of creation goes after the first draft has been completed, leaving behind the job of going through your work again and again: does this character come across convincingly? Could this phrase be a little tighter? In the cold light of day, does the plot really, genuinely make any sense? And the more general thoughts: How could you have made so many mistakes? What does this sea of red ink (or pixels) say about you as a writer? (more…)

Aleksandar Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project opens in Chicago in 1908, with Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Bessarabia, attempting to deliver a letter to George Shippy, the local Chief of Police. However, Shippy takes one look at the dishevelled foreigner on his doorstep, assumes he’s an anarchist, panics, and shoots him dead. (more…)

It’s the early nineties, and the city of Sarajevo is under siege by the Bosnian Serb forces. Three characters make their way through the chaos and destruction of the city streets: Kenan, on a journey across town to collect drinkable water for his family; Dragan, held up on his way to work, afraid to cross an intersection covered by a Serb sniper; and Arrow, a Sarajevan sniper struggling to maintain her independence. In the background to all of their lives is the music of the unnamed cellist of the title, who goes out into the street each day for twenty-two days, to play one adagio for each of the victims of a recent shelling. (more…)

Lawrence Durrell, best known as the author of the Alexandria Quartet, wrote a total of sixteen novels. Most are still in print, but until this year, his first two novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, have been impossible to get hold of. (more…)

The Lebanese author Amin Maalouf has built his career both in fiction—Samarkand, Leo Africanus, Balthasar’s Odyssey, etc.—and history, including The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

In Origins, prompted by the discovery of a trunk containing the correspondence and notebooks of his late grandfather, Maalouf turns his research skills towards his own family background, and the result is an engrossing story of the changing shapes of families and nations during the early years of the last century. (more…)

Although it’s sometimes necessary to whisk a character in and out of a story without drawing too much attention to him, it’s generally worth remembering that a forgettable character can be a wasted opportunity. One book that really shows how much can be achieved with minor characters is The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. (more…)

I’ve been blogging about books, in one way or another, for a few years now—I think the first book I reviewed, on a long-forgotten website, was Yellow Dog by Martin Amis, which would make it 2003—and lately I’ve been thinking about what kinds of books are best suited to blogging.

I’m not talking about genre, because fantasy bloggers will always want to blog about fantasy novels, and literary folk will always want to blog about Philip Roth. Neither am I thinking about old-versus-new books, which again is down to the blogger’s taste. (more…)

Andrew Davidson’s debut novel, The Gargoyle, begins with a car accident that leaves its narrator, an unnamed, cocaine-addled pornographer, hospitalised with disfiguring burns. While he’s recovering in the hospital he’s visited by the mysterious Marianne Engel, who greets him with the enigmatic words, “You’ve been burned… again,” and proceeds to soothe him with tales of previous lives and lost loves.

The Gargoyle has drawn comparisons to authors including Vladimir Nabokov and Umberto Eco… but does it deserve them? (more…)

When Charles Boyle first wrote this novella, a charming story of infidelity and cricket, told with the kind of sparkling prose that reminds us just how much fun reading can be, he so despaired of getting it published that he formed his own publishing house, CB Editions, in order to get it into print. Not wanting to seem megalomaniacal (after all, the publishing house is already named after him), he chose a pseudonym for the novel… and has been explaining Jennie Walker to journalists ever since.

Soon after the original publication, Bloomsbury bought the rights, and have now released their own edition. (more…)

When I was a boy, dreaming my first dreams of writing and publication, it was generally known that one turned for further information to the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, that august publication that lists publishers, agents, etc., along with juicy advice on everything from taxes to how to prepare your manuscript. It’s been around for years—over a century, in fact—and back in the day, everybody seemed to know that this was the place you went to if you wanted to get yourself informed.

Sure, there were those dodgy “Authors: publish your book!” ads in the pages of literary and writing magazines, and we were warned about vanity publishing, but there wasn’t the level of misinformation then that there is now; because, for really powerful misinformation, we had to wait for the Internet to arrive. (more…)

In his debut collection of short stories, Vietnam-born author Nam Le attempts to prove that an ethnic writer needn’t be constrained to writing about their background and experiences. There’s a world out there to write about, he argues, and he goes on to explore it, one continent at a time.

Unfortunately, the stories in The Boat serve as a reminder of the importance of writing about what you know, and of the dangers of a formal writing education. (more…)

If The Creator’s Map demonstrated the expat writer’s pitfall—the risk of going away to another country, only to come back with a story overladen with guidebook trivia—in Fieldwork, Mischa Berlinksi makes a better job of it. There’s no leaden trivia here, but rather a lively and engrossing tale about friction between anthropologists and missionaries in Thailand.

It’s held together by the mystery surrounding Martiya van der Leun, whose journey to Thailand began with the intention of studying a remote tribe, but led to her being incarcerated in a Thai jail for murder. (more…)

Beginning your novel with a hungover protagonist, who’s staring blearily around and trying to handle the pain while he’s getting his bearings, is one of the great literary clichés, and as a rule it’s best avoided.

Then again, when the hangover is accompanied by amnesia so complete that he can’t remember a murder taking place, and when the obligatory stumble to the bathroom results in the discovery of his wife’s corpse, exceptions can be made. So begins Janek Mitter’s day, and The Mind’s Eye, an Inspector Van Veeteren novel by Håkan Nesser. (more…)

In the weeks since the Booker longlist was announced, book bloggers have been throwing their other challenges aside and getting to work reviewing the nominees. Here’s the longlist, with links to some of the reviews that have already appeared on the Blogosphere: (more…)

Well, the site still needs a nip here and a tuck there, but I think that the new design is starting to take shape. Essentially, what started out as a business site with a blog has become a blog / magazine site which also offers a service. So, why the changes? (more…)

While brief biographies have their place, sometimes there’s no substitute for the brick, the breeze-block examination of an author’s life and work. I’ve been through Ian MacNiven’s biography of Lawrence Durrell twice, and I’ve been meaning to repurchase and reread Ted Morgan’s Maugham: A Biography for a while now. This summer, Jonathan Cape have added to the goldmine of big biographies with Semi Invisible Man: the life of Norman Lewis, by the writer (and sometime editor of Lewis’ work), Julian Evans. (more…)