Backstory issue 3

FERDIA LENNON • ELLA RISBRIDGER • CLAIRE FULLER • ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN

FOR BOOK LOVERS

ISSUE 3 • £4.95

The love formula Writing a romcom, by the numbers

HOW TO GROW A READER

BEANO, POPEYE & OTHER PURRFECT BOOKSHOP CATS

THE UNCOSY LIFE OF RICHARD COLES

Welcome

TOM ROWLEY BACKSTORY Magazine

Issue 3 Editor TOM ROWLEY Art Director DARIO VERRENGIA darioverrengia.com Deputy Editor MEGAN STELLER Backstory team SAVANNAH SULLIVAN DENISE WALLIN DARBY WILLCOCKS SALLY WOOD Cover Art NATHALIE LEES Endpapers SAVANNAH SULLIVAN Contributor Portraits JORDY VAN DEN NIEUWENDIJK

ISSUE 3

It’s been a joy to share our favourite books, bookshops and writers with you: welcome to our final issue Never meet your heroes, they say. Presumably they fear that those our imaginations have made dazzling will be revealed on closer inspection to be pompous, rude or plain dull. It’s the flipside of Walter Bagehot’s famous advice to the monarchy: “We must not let in daylight upon magic.”

Well, I reckon “they”, whoever they are, have never worked in a bookshop. Meeting our heroes is one of the loveliest bits of the job. In the two years since opening my own indie bookshop – also called Backstory – I’ve had the honour of interviewing some of my favourite writers, from novelists Nickolas Butler, Jessica Andrews and David Nicholls to non-fiction titans like Patrick Radden Keefe, Ed Caesar and Barbara Demick. And, though I’ll admit breathing a relieved sigh each time, not one of them turned out to be an arsehole.

(Admittedly, they all had books to sell.)

Editing three issues of this magazine has given me the same joy. What a treat it has been to lap up the work of debut writers like Colin Walsh, Yael van der Wouden or Ferdia Lennon and then get to commission them to do something original and sparky just for us.

The same goes for those whose reporting I most admired in my previous career as a journalist. If I’m honest with you, it was a thrill to ask Simon Parkin – whose prose has previously made me care about subjects as seemingly dull as carp-fishing – to write for the mag. His excellent profile of Richard Coles starts on page 44.

Likewise Sophie Elmhirst, author of what I can only describe as the definitive reportage on condoms (find it on The Guardian’s website). Her lovely piece about whether non-fiction or fiction actually gets closer to the truth begins on page 24.

Better still has been championing new talent. A particular shoutout in this regard to my ex-colleague Amy Strong →

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– whose column on page 29 I think really captures the spirit of Backstory – and current colleague Savannah Sullivan, whose gorgeous illustrations adorn our endpapers and several spreads inside.

This third issue of Backstory will be our last. You’d think I’d have known this already from a decade working in newsrooms, but it turns out that editing and publishing your own magazine is a full-time job. And I have one of those already, running the bookshop that, two years in, I already cherish more than I can say. I’ve had a lot of fun making a mag from scratch (and then figuring out how to sell it around the world in order not to make money but ideally not to lose it), but it’s also, at times, driven me a bit mad.

So thank you for joining us on this adventure. I hope you get as much pleasure from this final issue as we, the Backstory team, did, sitting at the bar in our bookshop just before press day, trying to spot typos, each with a different coloured pencil. And who knows, maybe we’ll try some more publishing in the future.

That’s another thing “they” say, isn’t it? Never say never.

Thanks for reading, Tom

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The Backstory team as it was in summer 2024: Denise Wallin, Savannah Sullivan, Megan Steller, Tom Rowley, Darby Brown and Amy Strong, whose valedictory column is on page 29

71 Balham High Road London SW12 9AP — books@backstory.london — Instagram: @backstory.london Website: backstory.london — © Backstory Books Ltd, 2025. All rights reserved.

BACKSTORY

Backstory Magazine

Contents Features

Columns

Regulars ISSUE 3

Purrfect bookshop cats

p8

What makes a classic classic?

p10

Romcoms, by the numbers

p12

Crewe vs Crewe: literary brothers

p18

In praise of marginalia

p22

Fiction, fact, and the truth

p24

Ella Risbridger pairs books and food

p30

How to grow a reader

p36

Judge a book by its p42

p42

The uncosy life of Richard Coles

p44

A bookshop rises from the ashes

p54

Can popular books explain science?

p58

George Cochrane on little libraries

p7

Matilda Welin on marrying bookcases

p17

Amy Strong on bookshop archetypes

p29

Theo Merz’s sickbed obsession

p35

John Forde’s literary binge

p41

Claire Fuller doesn’t like this headline

p51

Shelfie

p52

Postcard

p62

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Contributors KERRY RYAN has written for The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph. She won the Hachette Grow Your Own Story prize in 2024. This year she is excited to read Who Wants To Live Forever

by Hanna Thomas Uose.

CLAIRE FULLER is the author of five novels, including prize-winning Unsettled Ground. Her latest is The Memory of Animals. She can’t wait for everyone to read Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford, which she calls “a little bit weird, a tiny bit spooky, and like nothing else I’ve read”.

NATHALIE LEES has worked for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist, Die Zeit and The Washington Post. She is excited to read Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell.

JORDY VAN DEN NIEUWENDIJK is a Dutch artist who lives in Melbourne. He has worked for Apple, The New York Times and Vogue.

SAVANNAH SULLIVAN is a senior bookseller and visual merchandiser at Backstory.

She loves cryptic crosswords and cheesecake. She can’t wait to read All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall.

GEORGE COCHRANE has written for The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Financial Times and TLS. He is keen to read Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark.

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FERDIA LENNON is the author of Glorious Exploits, which won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2024. He is looking forward to seeing what readers make of a book he loved in proof form, Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh.

FAYE KEEGAN has written for The Guardian, Vogue and National Geographic.

She is queuing up Human Rites by Juno Dawson.

KATE YOUNG is the author of the Little Library cookbooks and Experienced, a romantic comedy set in Bristol. She is “already on the edge of my seat” about Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin.

MATILDA WELIN splits her time between news journalism and feature writing. She is looking forward to the Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on the Reaping.

TOM WHIPPLE is the Science Editor of The Times and author of Battle of The Beams. He is eager to read Shattered by Hanif Kureishi: “the playwright has become his own subject”.

PADDY CREWE is the author of My Name is Yip and True Love.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST is a journalist for The Guardian, The Economist and The New Yorker. Her first book, Maurice and Maralyn, won the Nero Book Award for non-fiction. She is excited to see Joe Dunthorne’s strange, brilliant book, Children of Radium, in the wild.

AMY STRONG worked as a bookseller at Backstory from 2022-2024 and is now pursuing a career as a Classics teacher. She will be in the line for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest, Dream Count.

NORMAN MILLER is a poet, playwright and non-fiction book writer. He lives in Brighton, having grown tired of London (but not of life). He reckons Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser sounds bold and entertaining.

ELLA RISBRIDGER has written for The Financial Times, The Guardian and Vogue and is the author of Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For). She thinks Charlotte Runcie’s novel Bring The House Down will, “rightfully, be everywhere”.

SIMON PARKIN is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Island of Extraordinary Captives and The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad. He is poised to read 38 Londres Street by Philippe Sands.

THEO MERZ has worked as a journalist in London, Moscow and Hong Kong, writing for The Economist, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and VICE. He wants to read Love in Exile by Shon Faye.

ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN is the author of The Sleep Watcher, Starling Days and Harmless Like You. She has been lucky enough to read Hark by Alice Vincent in proof and is looking forward to chatting about it with others.

ADAM HIGTON is an artist and musician. He has worked for The Guardian, Popeye in Japan and The New York Times. He can’t wait to read Artist As Astronaut about Ionel Talpazan’s UFO painting.

JOHN FORDE has written for Letterboxd Journal, The Huffington Post, IndieWire and TotalFilm. He’s looking forward to The Two Roberts, Damian Barr’s reimagining of Scottish artists Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun.

EMILY WILCOX calls herself “an emporium of stories inside eyelinered skin”. She definitely judges books by their covers, which is how Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao has already won her over.

STEPHEN DARK has written for The Guardian, The Financial Times and titles in the American West.

After a decade living in Buenos Aires, he is keenly anticipating Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, about a professor with the author’s name investigating the murders of men found castrated in the city.

TOM CREWE is the author of The New Life, which won several literary prizes and was The Sunday Times’s Novel of the Year in 2023.

He is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. He’s looking forward to David Szalay’s Flesh.

ELLEN JONES is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish. Forthcoming translations include Balún-Canán by Rosario Castellanos and Imagine Breaking Everything by Lina Munar Guevara. She is excited to read Robin Myers’s translation of We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.

BACKSTORY

GEORGE COCHRANE

My secret benefactor has great taste Shortly after a recent house move, I discovered I was living near a Little Free Library. You’ll have seen these things around. Roughly the size and shape of a bird table, they’re places to give away books you don’t want and find ones you do. But there’s a catch. The only books they ever seem to stock are by Dilly Court and Jeffrey Archer.

So imagine my surprise when on my first visit I found a pristine old Penguin of Bernard Malamud’s great novel The Assistant, a fetching collection of Edgar Allan Poe and a brand-new copy of the recent John Buchan biography. This was surely a one-off; on the next visit it would be Nadine Dorries if I was lucky.

My many, many visits since then have taught me not to be so cynical. My finds include Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere and Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key, though there are 20 more I could name. The beauty of the take-one-leave-one system is, they haven’t swelled my groaning shelves one bit.

I’d love to know who’s giving such treasures away – indeed, how they can give them away. I imagine they’re from the same source, perhaps an older person wanting to slim their collection for the sake of those who’ll inherit it. (Even at that stage of life I couldn’t imagine

ISSUE 3

parting with a vintage copy of Ross Macdonald’s The Galton Case. That would be going with me to the grave.)

Finding books I’m willing to trade has proven tricky. I’ve got plenty to choose from, but books are more than just glue and paper. Consider my copy of W. B. Yeats’s Collected Plays. I bought it at school while I was studying his poetry.

I took it with me to university when I thought I might write a dissertation on Yeats. It’s followed me over three house moves. And while I don’t think it’s once been opened, it’s part of the furniture now. I could never get rid of it.

So what have I brought myself to give away? A biography of Charles Stewart Parnell, The Penguin Book of German Verse, some Robert Browning – nothing, to my shame, of equivalent quality to what I’ve exchanged them for. (My shabbiest trade was a tatty copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea for a better condition The Sea, The Sea).

Yet without fail my dreck gets taken. By whom? I like to think it’s the same person giving away the books I’m taking, a bibliophile so book-addicted that even as they try to slim their collection they add to it. If so, mysterious person, I suggest we cut out the middleman altogether and meet. I’ve got some books you might be interested in…

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BOOKSHOP CATS Words by Emily Wilcox

Illustrations by Savannah Sullivan

BEANO

Scarthin Books, Cromford, UK JOB TITLE: Furry Head of Security AGE: “Hey, I’m the one asking for ID here.”

MOST IMPAWTANT ROLE: Removing posters that are exactly one Beano tall from the window, thus obstructing the sunbeams streaking through in which he tops up his tan (he’s still really white in places!).

HIS OFFICE: A one-Beano-width drawer behind the counter on a blanket that was crocheted just for him, feasting on his pre-packaged lunch of cat biscuits and the long hair of staff that use tasty shampoo.

REASONS FOR SANCTIONED VIOLENCE: Will kill a man if they touch his belly.

FAVOURITE READ: Any issue of the Beano magazine (duh).

POPEYE

Book Mongers, Brixton, UK

JOB TITLE: Monger of Books and All-Round Gentlecat AGE: Nearing retirement – 72 cat years young (14 to us)!

CURRENTLY READING: Hypnotism by George A. Estabrooks (a required read on the curriculum at How to Train Your Human College, subject specialism: Feline Domination).

SPECIAL SKILLS: His siren-like ability to lure passers-by into the store from his throne station upon the wool-topped cushion in the shop window.

WORKPLACE INJURIES: As he’s often found obstructing the path of customers who make their way into the store, it isn’t a massive surprise that Popeye has caressed the sole of many a shoe. (As it happens, he is far too robust for it to make a dent, thus no claims have currently been made).

DAFNE

John’s Antiquarian, Fågeltofta, Sweden JOB TITLE: Teller of Tails and Resident Typist FAVOURITE BOOK: Pancakes for Findus by Sven Nordqvist (in Swedish).

DIRECT EMPLOYEE QUOTE: “An antiquarian bookshop of any stature needs a cat.”

This was her pitch to John, of John’s Antiquarian, when he found her in the bushes.

THE SCOPE OF HER MARKETING SKILLS: When there are customers, Dafne will hide. When they leave, Dafne will reappear. She’s yet to make a sale. Alas, sometimes she is bored and lies down on the desk in the shop to receive petting from passing browsers; this is the only currency she accepts.

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BACKSTORY

FRANNY & MALCOLM

Small World Books, Venice Beach, USA FRANNY JOB TITLE: Guard Dog KEY SKILLS BROUGHT TO THE ROLE: Can assimilate the enemy (whenever there’s a dog in the store she embraces her role as the guard dog – very territorial, very brave).

COMMENTS FROM HR: *Whilst dabbing a paper towel against their cheek* “Yep. She’s a licker”.

DETAILS OF HER OVERTIME SHIFTS: When the store is busy and understaffed, Franny will adopt her sassy alter ego – Francine – and greet customers. Perhaps pat them as though they are a tall glass to be shoved off an edge.

FAVOURITE BOOK SECTION: The sociology section (because she can’t dismantle human society without first understanding human society).

MALCOLM WORK UNIFORM: A tuxedo (he moonlights as a chauffurr when off-shift).

FAVOURITE GENRES: Sci-fi and fantasy, especially since that aisle has the highest footfall, allowing him to flex his special cat ability to get in the way of everybody, ever.

PERKS OF THE JOB: During weekdays, after many shipments of books have arrived, their cardboard box carcasses make for a fantastically comfy bed.

FAVOURITE PLACES TO NAP (UNPAID): An unwitting customer who has crouched down to browse the lower shelves, providing the perfect non-consensual lap space.

AGATHA & STEINBECK

The Book Man, Abbotsford and Chilliwack, Canada

AGATHA JOB TITLE: Tree Dweller (Undercover Supurrvisor) at the Abbotsford store PREVIOUS ROLE: Escape artist. Having often pushed off the cat door cover, wandering around the store until all alarms were blaring, she has since been promoted to a more stationary position.

A-MEWS-ING FACTS: A notable ham fiend. If a customer has been to the deli, she’ll harass/hound/plague/persistently enquire about their purchase – until they feed her some.

WHAT SHE GETS UP TO BEHIND THE SHELVES WHEN THE LIGHTS ARE OFF AND THE UNIVERSE IS IN THE PALM OF HER PAWS: She slinks on over to an alternate reality, one where cat trees grow in ham-filled fields, and belly rubs have long been outlawed. By morning, she’s scratching manically at the front door because, well, she was an escape artist.

STEINBECK JOB TITLE: Cat-aloguer at the Chilliwack store LEAST FAVOURITE BOOK DESIGNS: Anything with crows. He’s terrified of crows.

PREFURRED BOOK TRANSLATIONS: Anything in “baby talk.” He loves a little baby talk.

FAVOURITE READS: All things John Steinbeck (but his guilty pleasure is Garfield.

Gingers must stick together).

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS OF THE JOB: A driving licence. Specifically for carts and prams, in which he will regularly park himself.

BOOKSHOP CATS

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10

BACKSTORY

AN ABSOLUTELY CLASSIC QUIZ

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/ * WRITING A ROMCOM, BY THE NUMBERS * /

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BACKSTORY

It was a glance down at my e-reader percentage tracker that started it. Mid-way through Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material (58%, to be precise) I was anticipating an imminent blow-up, smugly confident that everything was going far too smoothly.

Sure enough, five pages later, Luc was dumping Oliver through the bathroom door, barely holding himself together.

My certainty was borne of experience. For some time I’d been in deep, mainlining romance novels back-to-back.

It was early 2021, I was isolating solo and

EXCELLING IN ROMANCE

losing my mind, and romance novels felt like a good place to disappear into. During those impossibly long months we spent locked inside, seeking out surety and predictability was a measurable trend; in 2021 romance books sales in the UK rose by an unprecedented 49%. A couple of friends and I set up a weekly romcom watching club too — on Sunday afternoons we’d pick an old favourite, or one we’d inexplicably missed the first time round. We’d text throughout, and afterwards we’d call and talk through what

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worked and what we loved, beat by beat.

All this reading and watching and thinking (and a longheld love of numbers) afforded me a strong sense of the maths of a romantic comedy. It’s not the tropes I’m speaking of but the story structure itself: the meet-cute, the introduction of the obstacles that seem immovable, the first tantalising maybe-they-will moment, the devastating no-they-can’t moment, the thrilling inevitability of the characters throwing caution to the wind, the test of the high-stakes crisis, the oft-rebuffed declaration of love, and the final grand romantic gesture.

I started to keep a record, tracking in the back of a notebook the points at which the big inevitable moments occurred: the break-up in Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue (65%), the guhgung guh-gung Hungry Eyes intimacy in Dirty Dancing (36%), the Brooklyn Museum meet-cute that reunites Eva and Shane in Tia Williams’ Seven Days in June (16%), Lizzy discovering in Pride and Prejudice that Darcy showed up at Lydia’s wedding and secured the match with Wickham (81%).

I like data and numbers and patterns, like laying things out and examining the flow of them. And so, once I’d filled pages with numbers, I logged my findings, the pattern of these narrative beats, in an Excel spreadsheet. I had no great designs for it, couldn’t have dreamed how useful

A meet-cute 6% - 12%

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it might become. I simply wanted to map it out, wanted to appreciate the consistency, to run the averages and see if a ‘perfect structure’ existed. Over the course of a year I logged a hundred romcoms, an even split of books and films, their beats tracked by numbers.

The game, for writers of romance novels, is a relatively simple one to articulate: you must create characters uniquely suited to each other, keep them apart for a considerable portion of the narrative, and then, finally, unite them and show a flash of the impossibly happy future ahead.

But where the game is simple to understand, it’s trickier to play. You need just the right blend of internal and external factors keeping your characters apart, while ensuring that your readers remain deeply invested. You need a way to get the couple close and pull them apart, teasing every possible moment of connection and attraction, delivering almosts and not quites, building the highs and lows across the course of the narrative until the characters are finally left with the only reasonable reality: they simply must be together. The narrative beats are the key.

They are also the reason that the word ‘predictable’ is often levelled as a criticism of romance as a genre. But the structure isn’t just a pattern, it’s a promise; the predictability and inevitability of a romance novel are a large part of its

A moment 33%

A high, or a low 50%

BACKSTORY

“The predictability is a feature of the genre, not a bug”

delight. As my romance-book-expert friend Ella Risbridger once perfectly articulated, it is a feature of the genre, not a bug.

Faced with my big screen of data, revealing patterns emerged. There’s a reason, for instance, that the shock moment towards the end of David Nicholls’s One Day hits as hard as it does: structurally, it wrong-foots us. Beat by beat, from their Edinburgh meet-cute, through their almost moment in Greece, their heart-breaking mid-point fight, and their

The stakes are raised, and raised again 65-70%

romantic reunion in Paris, Emma and Dexter are in a romantic comedy. After Paris, what’s meant to happen is a moment of vulnerability, an (oft-rebuffed) declaration of love (85%), and then the grand romantic gesture (94%). In One Day that final beat can never happen; instead, in the space of a single sentence, we’re left utterly bereft, a brutal little moment of narrative wizardry.

It is interesting too to scan down the columns and note the outliers: a meetcute at 23%, say, when the average is 6%, and almost all have happened by 12%. Jilly Cooper gifts Harriet and dishy Simon Villiers a dreamy little meet-cute in the opening chapter – a near car accident in the snow! – but canny readers will know that he’s all wrong. Here, it’s the second meet-cute that counts: when aloof, high-cheekboned Cory Erskine interviews her to be his children’s nanny. It doesn’t come until 23% of the way through – only once we know our heroine so well that we can see why she may be the one who can thaw Erskine’s chill. Cinematic classic Moonstruck has a similarly late meet-cute, another that offers up a chance for us to know the central character first. Early on, Cher’s Loretta accepts a proposal from a man she doesn’t love (poor old Johnny), and settles for a life of less out of fear.

We’re rooting for more for her, and when Nicholas Cage’s Ronny steps back from the bakery ovens to shout about love, →

A declaration of love 85%

EXCELLING IN ROMANCE

A romantic gesture 94%

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26% of the way through the film, we know instantly that he’s The One. Given that it’s foundational not just in romance structure but in all narrative structures, it’s unsurprising that the beat with the smallest statistical range is the mid-point: the emotional high or low that projects the characters onwards into the second half of the story. It is, for example, at precisely 50% that Elizabeth Darcy rejects Mr Darcy’s first proposal, that Max tells Olivia he’s falling in love with her in Jasmine Guillory’s Party for Two, that Bridget Jones catches Daniel Cleaver with an “American stick insect” in the film version of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and that Rachel Chu finds a fish and a viciously jealous message in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians.

The other most consistent point occurs around 94%: the grand romantic gesture, the run-to-the-airport, heart-inmouth, cards on the table, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” of it all. It could be anything – time-lost Jane landing in the here and now in August’s diner at the end of Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop, the mad drive to the Savoy and pink-shirted William Thacker’s question to Anna Scott in Notting Hill, Alim asking Feyi if he can follow her back to Brooklyn in Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, Theo’s album for Clemmie in Laura Wood’s Under Your Spell.

As Noah puts it in Curtis Sittenfeld’s

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deliciously self-referential Romantic Comedy: “…in romantic comedies, don’t they usually end with one of the people hurrying to be reunited with the other and publicly declaring their love? Like at a party or an airport? I didn’t know I just had to buy a urinal at Target.”

I appreciate that there may be a real lack of romance to this scientific breakdown. The best ones, of course, closely follow the structure, and make all of it feel effortless. After an earlier than usual meet-cute, Nora Ephron’s perfect script for When Harry Met Sally follows the structure to a tee. Jasmine Guillory’s novels are sexy, emotionally resonant, and adhere so closely to the averages that I have to assume she has a spreadsheet too.

The same can be said of Ashleigh Herring Blake, of Emily Henry, and of Laura Wood.

Reading them, I never feel as though the characters are being manoeuvred through a carefully laid-out obstacle course. It’s more that they’re lost somewhere oddly familiar, pushing forward together in the direction of home.

It was late in 2021 when the first threads of a romcom I wanted to write came together: a woman on a three-month break from her girlfriend, a Bristol brunch café and a gay bar in Edinburgh, the world’s best flatmate and a lot of crisps. And it was here that my spreadsheet finally found its purpose. I excluded significant outliers and double-checked the averages. I would need a meet-cute by 12%, the first act introduction of both complications and a thwarted romantic moment, a towering high or devastating low at the precise mid-point, a consistent raising of the stakes throughout the second act, and a rebuffed declaration and then final grand romantic gesture in the final few chapters. I turned my percentage points into post-it notes, covered my walls with the structure, drew a graph, and opened a new spreadsheet. And I started to shape the narrative beats into a novel.

BACKSTORY

MATILDA WELIN

Retaining a sense of shelf My mum tells a story of something that happened in 1978, when she moved in with my dad. He reorganised their bookshelves.

One evening, when mum came home from work, dad turned out to have spent the day categorising all the books in the apartment. He showed off his work. There they were, all of her books and all of his, sorted by theme and by the alphabet – and mixed with each other.

To mum, the new order felt oddly intimate. She and dad had already slept together, rented an apartment together, started a life together – but this? It was too much. Suddenly her novels, political non-fiction and university poetry were mixed with Asterix, John Le Carré, classics and political science. More than any other act of coming together, mixing books was like mixing identities. “I felt sad”, mum tells me. “My books had always hung out together, cover against cover. From now on, they wouldn’t get to do that.”

Today, I share an apartment with my partner. We’ve lived together for six years. Our books are, still, for the most part, separate. My chick lit does not touch his London history tomes, and my graphic novels – The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and the complete work of Swedish author Liv Strömquist – are in an entirely different room to his collec-

ROMCOM3 ISSUE

tion of Viz. He loves American classics; I love YA novels.

At the top shelf of one of our bookcases sits his Evelyn Waughs and Muriel Sparks, his JD’s – Salinger – and JG’s – Ballard. At the top shelf of another, my PC Jersilds and Rachel Carson, my Scarlett Thomases and Melissa Bankses. He re-reads A Confederacy of Dunces. I forget who even wrote it. I quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when making a cup of tea. He looks blank.

Moving in with someone and building a life with them was, for me, a scary thing. Who am I with him, the man I love? Am I the same person as I am with myself? And if not, can the two co-exist inside my head? In my books, I hide away a little nugget of me, of who I am as an individual rather than as a romantic partner. I think that is what my mum would have needed, too.

But hang on, what is he reading now? I peer over at him in bed. Suddenly, I am oddly invested in the slow drama of Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. “What is happening?” I ask. “Is the armadillo back?” Then I discover The Hitchhiker’s Guide in his bag (he doesn’t like it. At least from now on he’ll get my jokes). And are those our new paperbacks on the same shelf?

Tentatively, my inner mindscape and his are coming together. Soon, we’ll be touching, cover against cover.

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CREWE V TOM 35 BOOKS: 1 (The New Life) LITERARY INFLUENCE: Henry James FAVOURITE CHARACTER: Clara Middleton from George Meredith’s The Egoist WISHES HE’D WRITTEN: Anything by P. G. Wodehouse GUILTY PLEASURE READ: Twitter WRITING SOUNDTRACK: Currently Rosie Lowe, and some Tchaikovsky

TWO GARLANDED NEWBIE WRITERS – BOTH PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN – JUST HAPPEN TO BE BROTHERS, LESS THAN TWO YEARS APART. SO WHO’S PREMIER CREWE: PADDY OR TOM?

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BACKSTORY

CREWE S PADDY 33 BOOKS: 2 (My Name is Yip, True Love) LITERARY INFLUENCE: John Irving FAVOURITE CHARACTER: Frank Bascombe from Richard Ford’s novels WISHES HE’D WRITTEN: So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell GUILTY PLEASURE READ: Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce WRITING SOUNDTRACK: Silence

WE GAVE THEM SOME SUGGESTED TOPICS, SET OUR RECORDER RUNNING, AND LEFT THEM TO WORK IT OUT.

CREWE VS CREWE

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How close are you to each other?

TOM: Desperately. Desperately close.

PADDY: Yeah, just put that.

What are your respective roles within the family?

TOM: I would say we have a similar role. I think we both like to be entertaining and make people laugh. We’re probably rivalling each other for the ultimate putdown or the ultimate way to wind each other up – or we can join forces and turn on our sister or our parents. I think we spent much of our childhood trying to make each other laugh.

PADDY: And language being a part of that.

TOM: And language being the medium.

PADDY: Wordplay was always…

TOM: Nicknames and…

PADDY: Wordplay has always been very important in the family. And I think in our respective friendship groups, a joke often hinges on something to do with wordplay.

TOM: Paddy was very sporty and I was very into books and writing; we did seem at one point to be on quite divergent paths.

What do you think brought you round to writing in the end?

PADDY: I was never academic. [But an A* in a creative school project] helped me on my way and maybe I started to think that, since I had an older brother who this came very naturally to, and everybody knew him for being very gifted in that area – I don’t think I’ve said this before – then I must have been thinking if he had it, then maybe I had some of it too. That was probably my logic. It wasn’t predestined for me at all. But very much so for Tom. TOM: We had a dad who liked writing for his own pleasure. He was a schoolteacher and he wrote things for assembly, comic sketches and plays. He was a big reader and encouraged us to read, so I think he transmitted some sense of creativity. And

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we all liked showing off.

PADDY: Tom and I shared a room for a very long time as children, and we found great comfort in being able to narrativise our day.

TOM: We had a rule that before we went to sleep, each of us had to tell our school day from start to finish, trying to give amusing details to make it entertaining for each other.

What is it like reading each other’s novels?

PADDY: It’s a joy. To be able to read someone’s book that you’re very close to, that you admire and that you feel no pressure to dissect.

TOM: I’m very interested to know what Paddy is going to do next, the feeling that there’s something else to read coming along. That pleasure you have when you have a writer you really like, and you look forward to their next book – it’s that, but tied to a closer relationship. It’s joyful to think of us going through life producing books and always having them to share.

You do feel, I suppose, that you learn something from reading them.

PADDY: You definitely do.

TOM: And in Yip, I could feel Paddy’s humour in the dialogue and the nicknames and the liveliness of the language. And in True Love, I recognised lots of moments from our childhood in gestures, images, the textures of things.

PADDY: Obviously our memories will be different in some respects but we’re both relying on the same source. So if there were, for example, a sofa in one of our books, there’s every chance we would turn to the same sofa we had as children – or the same colour scheme, or the same motif, or something. They’re normally very small things, small details – the colour of a tea towel.

TOM: The recurring symbol of the

BACKSTORY

tea towel in the Crewes’ fiction! I think mum said reading my book that she could hear some of my similes, that they are like something I would have said at home, which took me by surprise. When you’re polishing your best similes it doesn’t occur to you that it’s like something you would have said out loud. I suppose that’s inevitable: you’re always going to end up transmitting more of yourself into your books than you realise.

Were your experiences of being published similar or different?

PADDY: Similar in that they were both critically well received…

TOM: Both washed in praise!

PADDY: Yours being more decorated, and generally having more coverage I would say.

TOM: I don’t know whether you felt this way – obviously I was delighted with the book’s success, and still am, but I did have this strange feeling. Up until the book went to press I was so deeply invested in it, it was so completely the thing I had devoted years of my life to, I was in every sentence, it was my all and everything.

What seemed remarkable to me was that once the book was published it immediately started to feel like something separate from me, that it no longer really belonged to me at all.

I used to always think if the Tom who was writing this book could have won this award or seen that review or that endorsement or whatever he would have appreciated it so much more. I think it’s just that publication is a slow process and by the time you get to the end of it, you’ve become accustomed…you’ve seen the book cover, you’ve had the publicity meetings.

PADDY: I do think it’s the inherent nature of a long-lasting pursuit. I’m not saying they are necessarily equivalent, but when you hear of Olympians training for

CREWE VS CREWE

four years and winning a medal, there is naturally a hollowness left there because so much has gone into the making of it that there’s very little energy remaining for whatever comes next. Or it’s a much more diminished sense of satisfaction – that the satisfaction has basically been almost exhausted by the process and then you get to this endpoint.

Then you go back to that idea of what you’re doing it for and I think perhaps most writers probably fall foul of that, of wanting to write because praise is going to be heaped upon them. I used to think the absolute epitome of achievement would be to get a good review in The Guardian and then you get the good review in The Guardian and you couldn’t really give a monkeys about it. You then reassess what you’re doing it for.

It suddenly became very clear that I couldn’t get what I was pursuing but that I could get something out of it on my own terms just from the process of writing.

Whatever comes after seemed to be beyond my control and I didn’t derive very much enjoyment from it at all. Something happened after Yip where I thought “I can do this on my own terms — I can just turn up and keep at it and make it feel as close to playing as possible”. That’s when I think I can do good things, when I think I’m having fun.

TOM: That sounds like a difference because I never feel like I’m playing – or indeed really having fun. You have a natural flair and you feel very free just to write and see what comes out, whereas I’m more worried about structure, I’ve got this anxiety about the shape of it.

Who is the better Crewe?

PADDY: We’ve decided not to answer that one.

TOM: Because we’re joint leaders in Anglophone fiction.

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a i l a n i g r a M WORDS BY

Kerry Ryan

During lockdown, I ordered a copy of John Donne’s collected poems from a second-hand bookshop. Forced isolation had turned my mind strange. I would suddenly recall in brilliant technicolour people I hadn’t thought about in years. Like my long-lost friend from first year English Lit who had loved Donne.

“He’s so sensual,” she said once, but shyly because people where we’re from never called anyone or anything sensual.

In that pandemic time, deprived of physical contact, it was the sensual, the corporeal that I craved the most. I couldn’t connect with my old friend — she didn’t use social media — but I had Donne on order, and was anticipating tender kisses and tongues, breast to breast, thigh to thigh.

When the book arrived, I wiped the cover with sanitiser but had no solution for the virulence of biro and highAnne Fadiman describes two lighter inside. In her essay on reading habits, Anne types of book lovers: the Fadiman describes two types of book lovers: the courtly lovers, who treat courtly lovers, who treat their books with reverence, their books with reverence, and the carnal lovers who tear, fold and write all and the carnal lovers who over the margins. This mystery annotator was a tear, fold and write all over full-on carnal — her pen had ravished almost every the margins. page. Instead of getting intimate with Donne, I was forced into the role of voyeur, relegated to the cuck chair while some stranger got hot and heavy in the margins with my metaphysical poet. Exactly! Amazing! Yes! Ever since I was a junior library member, I have loved marginalia. The audacity of the “common reader” to assume equal standing and engage with those Proust called “the best and the wisest of us’” gave me, a writer from the margins, hope. Here were people writing against a system of authority, carving their names into the dome of St Paul’s. Here was the private reading experience made public: the agreeing, the disagreeing, the ex-

22

BACKSTORY

claiming and empathising. Readers shaping and reshaping their selves in response to the writer’s call. A large chunk of my PhD research was spent studying marginalia’s cultural shift from acceptable medieval practice to transgressive act. Yet even for me, there are limits. Too much, and it’s like someone shouting at the screen when you’re trying to watch TV. This carnal lover of Donne’s had written her name on the flyleaf. Who exactly had ruined my communion with the poet and my past? I found her online. She looked like my Irish cousins. We were similar ages, had both trained as journalists and wrote and taught fiction. As I read her writing on mental health, on vulnerability and creativity, I nodded along. This was someone who, I was sure, had had Pre-Raphaelite postcards pinned to the wall of her student bedsit and still listened to Florence and the Machine on repeat. Just like me.

I sent an email: I have your Donne! Her reply came within minutes: I always hoped this would happen! She had sold her books in California and somehow, her Donne had travelled all the way from the west coast of America to a Brixton bookshop and to my address in Kent.

I saw how this would go. It would be the great literary friendship of the ages. We would be Vita and Virginia, Diana and Anne of Green Gables. We would meet up, holiday together and exchange long emails on the regular. Our correspondence would be published, become a bestseller and be serialised on Radio 4. This is kismet, I replied. We have so much in common.

I never heard from her again. There is the tiniest possibility that I came on too strong, too soon. Pandemic disconnection had made me pant for connection. After I breathlessly listed everything we had in common, Donne’s annotator had scraped back her chair and walked out of the restaurant. She was now working for a charity; her marginalia, her online essays and articles had been written by a younger woman. Perhaps she didn’t like being reminded of who she used to be. Perhaps she had shed those skins.

I pull out a yellowing book from my shelf and, by an underlined passage, an old version of myself has written: This is it!

But “it” turned out not to be it at all. We are, as Donne wrote, “creatures born transformable”. We change and we change our minds. The sensual poet turns out to be just another sex pest.

The university friend turns out to have wanted something more than friendship — if only we could have read between the lines.

Our writing remains, yet the self is transient.

Now, if I find a name in the flyleaf, I leave well alone. Yet I still write my name in my own books and wonder who might buy them one day. If, and when, the email comes, I will be ready.

Yes, I will reply, I too really, really love Florence and the Machine.

* OMG YES

MARGINALIA

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Truth Telling 24

BACKSTORY

The line between fiction and non-fiction energises writers and concerns readers.

But which genre is closer to telling the truth?

Words by Sophie Elmhirst

Portrait by Daniel Lamont

No one had warned me about the humiliating behaviours of a first-time author. I’d been briefed by other writers on the anti-climactic lull that occurs after publication, when the world oddly doesn’t change even though it now contains your book, but no one had admitted, for example, the bookshop skulk. Maybe they were too embarrassed. Or maybe they’d blanked it from their memory. I refuse to believe they didn’t do it.

The skulk is this: you enter a bookshop and lurk, hoping to catch sight of your book in a prominent position on a shelf or table, ideally being pressed into a customer’s hands by a bookseller with a tear coursing down their cheek: “This will change. Your. Life.” You only do this a few times, because in reality your book is often not in the shop at all or tucked well out of sight, surrounded by so many other books that its very existence feels humiliating. It turned out that the one thing the world did not need was another book.

Once, when I was skulking in my local bookshop, I found my book shelved under New Fiction. Maurice and Maralyn is the true story of a married couple in the 1970s who were shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for four months. I hadn’t made it up. And yet, there it was, with its title that sounded a bit like a novel, sitting among actual novels like the new, awkward kid in school, trying to fit in.

I didn’t move it. If anything, its mis-shelving was in keeping with the question I’d been asked often at events: how

much of this story was true, and how much had I imagined? I gave a pat answer: I hadn’t imagined anything! It was a true story based on research and interviews. I’d read Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s diaries and books, as well as volumes of press coverage of their shipwreck and rescue, and I’d interviewed many of their friends and relations. I’d combined this with context and colour, drawn from the impressions of Honolulu I’d read in 1970s guidebooks to Hawaii in the British Library, or descriptions of the behaviour of sea turtles and tides that I’d watched in documentaries or read in books about the ocean.

Writing involved moulding this material into a narrative. I wanted to write about Maurice and Maralyn’s lives in a way that would read like a novel rather than a conventional biography or historical account. That is, I’d wanted the book to revolve around character and interiority, to be driven by a sense of narrative progression, rather than the transmitting of information or argument. It was a story, after all. I didn’t see why non-fiction shouldn’t borrow the novel’s devices, or why a non-fiction book couldn’t afford the same unfolding, intimate pleasures of a novel. On the flipside, just because a book doesn’t have footnotes or an index doesn’t mean the story isn’t true.

And yet, I knew I wasn’t quite giving the whole picture. The book also contained speculation and interpretation, the many times where I allowed myself to wonder about these people and come →

TRUTH TELLING

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up with theories about their behaviour. It wasn’t fiction, but these parts required imagination, if that word covers the process of trying to understand why people are the way they are.

And what about the omissions? I’d left out whole decades of their lives. The story I’d told was partial, incomplete. I’d done what any writer does, in other words, and shaped the material according to my own design. I could see why the questioners found it hard to know where the factual story ended and my own meddling began.

The blurred line between fiction and non-fiction has long energised writers and concerned readers. In the sixties and seventies, the “New Journalism” crew — Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and others — found themselves under scrutiny for the liberties taken in their narrative non-fiction. A reader wants to know what they’re dealing with, what they can rely on, where the boundaries lie and how solid those boundaries are. The writer, I suspect, wants to know what they can get away with. The aim is not deception, but that’s often how it’s seen.

In Mark O’Connell’s recent work of non-fiction, A Thread of Violence, he deals with the fictions surrounding his subject, the murderer Malcolm Macarthur, as much as the facts. (This includes literal fictions: Macarthur had already been the subject of a novel by John Banville.) In an interview, O’Connell admitted that he’d had to leave things out that Macarthur had requested to be off the record. He’d therefore not been able to tell the whole truth. “What even is non-fiction?” said O’Connell. “It is predicated on telling stories and making narratives out of the mess and chaos of reality. I feel that non-fiction is a niche sub-genre of fiction.”

I’m not sure this sub-genre would work in a bookshop. As browsers and readers, we like clear dividing lines. Here are history and biography: stories about real people doing real things for which we

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have evidence. And here’s fiction: madeup characters doing made-up things, conjured by a writer’s mind. But perform an autopsy on a biography, examine its constituent parts and gaps, and you soon lose your grip on that clarity.

For years, the American writer Janet Malcolm was the chief pathologist of non-fiction. Whatever Malcolm was nominally writing about in the New Yorker or in her books — murderers, journalists, Gertrude Stein, Syliva Plath — she was also writing about writing; more precisely, the morally compromised process of writing about real people. The biographer, Malcolm wrote, “is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for the reverse image.” A subject, she explained, is filtered through a writer’s consciousness and becomes a victim (her word) of their ambition and bias.

In her essay on the Bloomsbury group, A House of One’s Own, Malcolm gave the example of Frances Spalding, who chose to maintain an affectionate portrait of Vanessa Bell in her biography even after the publication of a brutally unflattering memoir by Bell’s daughter, Angelica. Spalding had made a choice: she had decided on her version of Bell and stuck to it, which is another way of saying she had written a character.

You’d think we’d be more comfortable with the quicksand in fiction. But novelists of all kinds often face similar questions, if from a different perspective. (“How much did you make up?” is replaced by “How much is true?”). In her book, How Should A Person Be, Sheila Heti, a writer of diaries and autofiction, could not escape the conflation of her character, Sheila, with herself, however much she insisted she’d written a novel. You don’t call a character Sheila to avoid such a conflation: it was part of the project, a

BACKSTORY

“A reader wants to know what they’re dealing with.

A writer wants to know what they can get away with.”

purposeful blurring.

Hilary Mantel, meanwhile, often found herself facing suspicious questions about the accuracy of her account of Thomas Cromwell, as if her novelized version should precisely match the historical record. “Readers,” she said in one of her Reith Lectures in 2017, “are touchingly loyal to the first history they learn. If you challenge it, it’s as if you’re taking away their childhoods.” I’d add that readers are uncomfortable with uncertainty, in books as in life. We like to know where we stand, even while knowing that it is the shifting ground of uncertainty that produces the best art.

Mantel points exactly to where she sees the boundary between fiction and fact. “As soon as we die,” she declared, “we enter into fiction.” Her proof is anecdotal:

TRUTH TELLING

ask two family members to describe another who has recently died, and you won’t receive the same answer. Once someone cannot speak for themselves, they are remembered: an act of creation.

The past is not reproduced in exact copy, it is made and interpreted. There are facts and figures, yes, but as Mantel points out, the same facts and figures are used by different historians to furnish wildly different arguments. Anyway, our evidence is only ever partial. All information about the past is shot with holes. The work of the historian or biographer is to fill in the gaps, or at least create a version of the past or a person which papers over them and appears whole.

So where does this leave us? The other day I heard Andrew O’Hagan, a journalist and novelist, talking about his new

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SOPHIE RECOMMENDS OUT OF SHEER RAGE

by Geoff Dyer I would go anywhere with Geoff Dyer, especially into the comic depths of his attempt to write a book about DH Lawrence. Most of the time he’s battling his own procrastination but along the way, with the deftest touch, you get the kind of breathing, human portrait of Lawrence that you’d never find in a formal biography.

THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF

by Helen Garner Garner spent years in the courtrooms of Melbourne to report this book: an account of the trial of a man who drove his three young sons into a lake. It is agonising to read, but Garner is a master of clarity and sensitivity, able to distill moments too awful to understand into prose that sits so precisely and gently on the page.

HHHH

by Laurent Binet Officially this one’s a novel, but Binet’s story of the mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich is rooted in historical fact. The events are captivating in themselves, but Binet’s tussle with the porous boundary between truth and fiction make the book a fascinating, knotty piece of work.

GIVING UP THE GHOST

by Hilary Mantel In Mantel’s hands, the memoir becomes something else: not a plod through a life, but a tessellation of impressions and memory. She writes about her body and its struggles with visceral honesty using all the same powers you see in her fiction - taut, steely prose, and a fearless opening of her senses.

A LIFE DISCARDED

by Alexander Masters Masters writes a unique form of nonfiction, telling stories no one else would go near. This one is based on a load of abandoned diaries he found in a skip. In his quest to discover their author he explores so much - about himself, friendship, loneliness and all the things that make an ordinary life.

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book, Caledonian Road. He spoke about the reporting he’d done for the novel, immersing himself in various London communities which he’d then alchemised into fiction. Journalism, he said, can no longer “accept the responsibility” for truth: it had, in recent years, been too compromised by ideology, by partisan groups claiming ownership of the facts and brandishing them like weapons to serve their own ends. “It might in the end in our time ironically be fiction writers who insist on the truth.”

Another way of putting that, perhaps, is that the truth is richer and more complicated than a collection of facts. And while the bald categories of fiction and non-fiction are useful for shelf organisation, they don’t necessarily represent what is going on in the writing itself.

When you take raw material and turn it into words, fictionalising happens whether that material is the minutiae of your own life or the beheading of Anne Boleyn.

The past is filtered through a human mind and ends up in the approximate form of words on a page. And then what happens? They go to a reader, who performs her own creative act as she decides what she thinks those words mean.

Close to publication, my editor and I decided that we wouldn’t include a photograph of Maurice and Maralyn in my book, though there were many to choose from. She thought — and I agreed — that it might be nice for the reader to imagine what they looked like, rather than be told.

I felt, too, that a single photo would somehow be misrepresentative: showing them at a single moment in their lives, while the book tried to tell a longer story of their many phases. In the space where the photograph might have been, I hoped the reader would instead have a whole carousel of mental images to draw on, made from what they’d read. These images would be inaccurate in their specifics, no doubt, but they’d feel closer to the truth.

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AMY STRONG

Our shop’s a stage – and you’re the stars I’m very much not an extrovert (I’m an avid reader with two degrees in Classics, so this is unsurprising), but I do have a fascination with people. During my twoyear tenure as a bookseller, Backstory sometimes felt more like a reality TV show than a bookshop, with a diverse and wonderfully eccentric cast of characters.

There are always Background Characters: friends giving life updates over glasses of wine; women in their twenties looking for a book to weep over; women in their eighties looking for a raunchy read; men buying yet another book about the Second World War. The casting director is always placing cute babies by the till. Sometimes the script writers get lazy and include too many grandparents boasting about their grandchildren who are always very advanced readers for their age.

It wouldn’t be good telly without some drama, so at least once a week we get in the token quasi-socialist who seems befuddled by the concept of capitalism: “Do you have to pay for the books?”

A common, but sometimes tediously drawn-out, plotline is the Gnarly Recommendation Request. One end of the spectrum is highly specific: “Only books translated from Spanish. Must be 200-300 pages in length. No female

ISSUE 3

authors.” The other end is painfully vague, such as, “I think he likes fiction. Or maybe non-fiction. I’m 65% sure he likes reading.”

We love appearances from our favourite Recurring Characters that turn up once or twice a season, like the charming gentleman that comes in a few times a year to order the biggest, driest law textbooks I’ve ever seen, or the smiley cyclist who pedals down from North London every few weeks.

The One-Off Appearances raise the stakes of an episode but ultimately aren’t renewed for further seasons.

These include the very well dressed, blinged-out man carrying a box that was later revealed to contain a live rabbit, and the woman who purchased over 200 books in one go to kit out her “yoga farm”.

Finally, we have our Main Characters who come in every week and greet us booksellers by name and whose coffee orders we have memorised. Some have been with us since our doors first opened, others are fresher faced. A few have had to move on due to relocation or scheduling issues, but will pop back for a cameo every now and then.

I left Backstory last summer to become a Classics teacher, so now I get to be a customer too. Or, as Horace might say, nunc est bibendum (et legendum).

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A VERY LITERARY FEAST T O S TA RT

CRISPY CHICKEN W I T H CORONATION-ADJACENT DIP

Having eaten up Craig Brown’s previous royal biography, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses Of Princess Margaret, I bought the new one A Voyage Around The Queen in hardback: that good.

Brown has this real knack for writing about royalty in a way that interrogates not just the whole institution, but its place at the centre of British life: who are these people, and why do we care? What does their existence mean for us? What does it say, and why does it matter? Crucially, Brown is neither fawning nor didactic and has, instead, a sweet ear for juicy gossip. The book simply rattles along in crispy, salty, sweet little chunks: snack-sized, in fact, or starter-sized if we’re thinking in menu terms.

There is something very satisfy-

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ing about a book you read in immaculate bites: the perfectly diminutive chapters of Bryan Washington’s impeccable novel Memorial, for instance, are a bittersweet and very funny, very sad full-body gulp about a man and his (maybe ex?) boyfriend’s mother living alone together, speaking no common language except a love of Black American–inflected Japanese food.

After Craig Brown and a re-read of Memorial – and perhaps a recent deep dive into the sensation-heavy Preti Taneja’s intense and epic King Lear retelling We That Are Young– I knew I had to make this. It’s Coronation Chicken, Jim, but not as we know it. There is so much to like about Coronation chicken, is the thing: salt and

BACKSTORY

There are few things better than reading a book, perhaps with several friends also reading a book, while eating something delicious. Ella Risbridger gives us three delicious courses and the books that inspired them.

A Voyage Around The Queen, Craig Brown

Memorial, Bryan Washington

sweet, spiked with sultanas and softly scented with curry, creamy and tender and much more interesting than you might think when you think “1952”.

Much like the royals themselves, as a dish it manages to be both a little passé and yet a lot compelling.

So with Taneja’s feasts and Washington’s crisp Japanese-esque fried chicken in mind, let’s consider hot panko-breaded little fried chicken nuggets, plus some kind of Coronation-adjacent dip. Spices more redolent of actual Indian cuisine than 1950s Britain, rich and complex; a Kewpie mayo and thick coconut yoghurt base, for extra flavour; sultanas soaked in a splash of sake. Call it 2 tbsp each of Japanese mayo and coconut yoghurt, plus 2 tbsp of mango chutney. Add in

A VERY LITERARY FEAST

We That Are Young, Preti Taneja

a pinch of salt, a tsp of garam masala, a tsp of turmeric, ½ tsp of ground cumin, ½ tsp of ground coriander. A teaspoon of chaat masala, if you have it: the amchoor, or dried mango, brings the sour complex hit you want here. 2 tbsp of sultanas, soaked in 4 tbsp of some kind of interesting booze: sake if you have it, or bourbon for doubling down on that Washingtonian, American influence. Leave them as long as you can; drain; and fold through the spiced yoghurt sauce.

As for the chicken itself: I wish I could tell you otherwise, but we’re eating this with crispy pan-fried chicken nuggets. Let’s give ourselves as many happy endings as we can earn (and maybe save the Preti Taneja until you’re feeling sturdy.)

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MAINS

SQUASH RAGU W I T H CORNBREAD COBBLER

I think I started thinking about cornbread because of True Grit by Charles Portis. It came out in 1968, and yet I just read it last week. I read it because Donna Tartt did the foreword, and– I am assuming you know this– we are overdue a large and thrilling Donna Tartt novel, much as we are overdue several large and thrilling natural disasters. It takes her ten years to write a book, apparently, and yet The Goldfinch came out in 2012.

The Secret History is the perfect winter read– rich in deep red wine and heavy snow– and so I was hopping around, hoping for some new Tartt action, and suddenly there I was reading True Grit and so very compelled I couldn’t put the book down even to buy cornmeal for my cornbread. I knew, I think, from the first mention of Rooster Cogburn shooting

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little breads from the sky that I, too, was going to have to make some little breads. I knew, too, that I was going to love it from the very first sentence.

“People,” says the narrator Mattie, “do not give it credence that a 14-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” And listen: it absolutely lives up to that first line. I lived in the wilds for the whole book, and came home hungry.

Which is, of course, the thing The Secret History does so well, too: you yearn the whole time.

It’s the kind of thing you finish and want to talk about forever, the kind of book that you see what all the fuss is about the moment you pick it up. Books with real heft. It deserved, I thought, a dinner of real heft: a

BACKSTORY

True Grit, Charles Portis

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

cornbread cobbler, crisp and cheesy, with a deep wine-rich squash and white bean ragu bubbling beneath, a kind of Three Sisters casserole.

Once a year I turn to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass for comfort: a book I want to talk about forever and have read so many times the words on the spine are fading away.

The seasons are necessary, and the earth is always here, even under snow.

The deep snow of Braiding Sweetgrass’s “Maple Sugar Moon” is the same deep snow in The Secret History, and in both books it’s something ancient and important. To Robin Wall Kimmerer, though, it’s also magic. It’s magical, and practical, and belongs to her– as our own places belong to us. Three Sisters cornbread casserole, then: a couple of finely chopped sweet onions, a stalk of celery, a tin of tomatoes, and the can swilled out with stock, two big

A VERY LITERARY FEAST

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

handfuls of roasted chopped butternut squash and a jar of good white beans, all simmered together with olive oil and rosemary and thyme in a big oven-proof dish for at least an hour.

And on top, a light, savoury, cornbread crisp: 150g cornmeal, ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda, 100g self-raising flour, ½ tsp salt. A little tin of sweetcorn, drained, and 50g strong cheddar, grated, both stirred in to the dry ingredients; and 300ml yoghurt to bind it all together with your hands; and rolled into uneven balls and set across the surface of the casserole. More cheese grated over, and baked– at 180C– for twenty minutes, or until golden and crispy and the casserole comes bubbling up around the edges: savoury and rich and nourishing, the kind of dinner that makes you see what all the fuss was about.

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TO FINISH

BAKED CINNAMON CUSTARD DOUGHNUTS W I T H BLACKBERRY COMPOTE

Normal Rules Don’t Apply, Kate Atkinson

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

Nobody remembers that E. Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, also wrote frankly horrible short stories: the kind of stories where nobody is to be trusted, and nothing is what it seems, and where love will drag you down into the darkness with it. Which is also, sort of, the thing in the newest book of Kate Atkinson stories. It’s not that they are spooky, exactly, but they are– like most of her writing– unsettling in a way you can’t quite put your finger on.

And nothing goes better with the heebie-jeebies than a berry jelly doughnut: sweet doughnut, sharp blackberry compote, total horror. I was thinking about blackberries because I had just re-read Sarah Waters’s collapse-of-the-countryhouse-novel The Little Stranger, which always strikes me as a real

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Horror Stories, E. Nesbit

bramble bush of a book: thorny, bitter, sticky, and perfect. Also, they go berrying! Blackberry compote is very easy: a 250g punnet of berries, the juice of half a lemon, 2 tsp of sugar, swirled around and left to sit for 5 minutes, and then simmered over a low heat for 20 more.

Baked doughnuts are also easy: combine 150g caster sugar with 250g self-raising flour, ½ tsp of bicarbonate of soda, 2 tbsp custard powder, and 2 tsp ground cinnamon. Beat 2 eggs into 120ml milk, and stir through 100g melted butter. Beat the wet into the dry until smooth, and pour into silicone doughnut moulds (these are very cheap online). Bake for 20 minutes at 180C, dust with powdered sugar (or cinnamon caster sugar), and serve with berry compote for dipping.

BACKSTORY

THEO MERZ

For a flu that lingers, I prescribe Lisa Jewell I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a Lisa Jewell superfan.

For context, I had previously been only vaguely aware of her bestselling psychological thrillers. But I was struck down with the worst flu of my adult life and I somehow knew that there were only two things that would see me through it: Jewell. And more Jewell.

It was like when a person suffers a stroke and ends up speaking in the accent of a country they have never visited. I couldn’t explain why I needed to read her books. Neither my body nor my mind were entirely my own.

As soon as the sickness hit I downloaded what was then her latest, None of This is True, onto my Kindle. (I know.

In my defence, I was dying.)

For the rest of the day I read and slept. The story — featuring a North London house; a family facing a threat from the outside; child abuse; murder; obsession — seeped into my dreams and the reality of my North London flat.

The next day would have blended entirely into the first had it not brought a new book: The Family Upstairs. This time it was a large Chelsea house; a threat that was coming from the inside; child abuse; murder; obsession.

On the third day, I tried to get some

ISSUE 3

critical distance and downloaded The Truth About Lisa Jewell, in which academic Will Brooker spends a year with the writer. Unfortunately, an early reference to Roland Barthes brought me out in a cold sweat and I was back to square one.

On day four, a friend called with a covid test and a couple of bags of crack, which is to say two Lisa Jewells. On day five, the last of my illness, I grew confused and overdosed on The Night She Disappeared.

It’s hard to comprehend what happened that week. I suppose I must have seen None of This is True on a bookshop table and unconsciously logged the author for future attention. If I were forced to explain what made Jewell’s books the only thing I could consume in my hour of need, I might point to their extreme readability, their twisty plots, or the way their content mirrors the experience of illness itself: a familiar setting, whether a house or a healthy body, is invaded by evil, in the form of a psychopath or a virus.

I’ve yet to revisit Jewell: I fear the writer is too connected in my mind to being bed-bound. But I find myself eyeing germ-covered handrails on the tube and lingering next to coughing strangers. Because the truth is I long for that strange sickness to return.

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A T R O E G A H R D O O E WW R

Novelist Rowan Hisayo Buchanan began building her daughter’s library before she was conceived.

Would her child inherit her first love?

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BACKSTORY

Illustrations by: ADAM HIGTON

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If you are the sort of person who addresses anxiety with research and you are pregnant, you will be inundated with advice. You’ll be warned about toxins and screens and scores of other things that threaten your tiny growing being. These concerns will haunt you before your child even gulps her first mouthful of polluted city air. This essay is not going to tell you how to parent. It’s not going to tell you what to do or not to do. There’s enough of that around. It’s only the story of what I did to try to give my daughter one of the things that I love best in the world.

There are expectant parents who daydream about baking cakes with their offspring, kicking around a football, entering pageants, going on hikes or introducing them to the wonders of Pokémon. I had precisely two daydreams—reading together and planting seeds in pots. All parental dreams are vaguely delusional, not because they are impossible but because a far greater portion of the first one to two years of a life seems to be devoted to keeping the small person alive, often against the small person’s own best efforts.

Still, I wanted to give it a go. Especially because amidst all of the terrifying warnings, it turned out my dream of reading together might not be entirely misguided. A longitudinal study in the USA found that mother-child reading time significantly increased the child’s academic achievement scores. (If you’re wondering where the father is in this—the study began in 1979.)

An article published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children cited numerous studies to claim picture books can improve young children’s social and emotional literacy. Other studies suggest that children who are read to as infants have larger vocabularies on entering school. The science of child development is tricky. Every family is unique, and socio-economic factors play a role. Correlation and causation →

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can get muddied. But a nurse had to teach me how to hold my baby’s neck and someone else had to teach me to feed her, and so it was nice to hope that there was maybe one good thing I could do for her that wouldn’t feel impossibly hard.

I began building my daughter’s library before she was conceived. Picture books played a small role in why I fell in love with her father. When I met him, I did not know yet if I wanted to have a baby.

He knew this. He also knew that I loved stories and that I loved illustration. One of the first moments of rightness I felt was when he revealed that he bought picture books for himself.

I remember curling up on the sofa in his shared flat and marvelling at Beatrice Alemagna’s Lion in Paris. It’s a ridiculously gorgeous book that uses collage and hand drawing, published by the Tate. I remember explaining that I was a fierce fan of Isabelle Arsenault, an illustrator from Quebec, who works in many mediums. In particular, I admire the way when she works in pencil, she intercuts sharp decisive lines into the most delicate fogs of shading. Her work is lovely, sometimes cute, but never saccharine.

Only, I wasn’t quite as prepared as I thought. I had not appreciated that newborns do not come into the world with any sense of what a book is for. They can barely see. They don’t even get full colour vision until four months old. There was a moment in which I fretted to her father that she’d never love stories, picture

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books or otherwise. I worried that narrative, which is how I make sense of the world, would mean nothing to her. This says more about me than her. She was probably three months old at the time.

Her father reminded me that even if she only adored football, I’d love her and show up to all her games. I agreed but made up my mind that I’d do my best to inveigle her into the world of literature.

I realised that teaching a baby to love books is really to beguile them with other temptations—cuddles, lap time and, in an act of desperation, books that sing. The allure of music seemed somehow more inbuilt than a love of the page—something my tone-deaf spirit must churlishly admit.

I learned that long picture books with many words and small detailed pictures are not designed for those early months.

Even “Each Peach, Pear, Plum” was snubbed—the drawings perhaps too small and inexplicable. But other classics were a hit, Dear Zoo and The Very Hungry Caterpillar in particular. Slowly, she stopped trying to eat the books and started looking at them.

For anyone with a person that tiny, I recommend Marion Deuchars, whose thick ink strokes and white backgrounds snag small eyes. I’d also suggest Marcos Farina’s Animal Show and How Many Birds which worked for my child but also

BACKSTORY

for me. An Argentine artist who trained in graphic design, his work is blocky yet delicate, and vaguely reminiscent of the 70’s. Bold enough and clear enough to grab a baby’s attention and striking enough for a tired mother to enjoy the hundredth time around. They are, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful books for tiny children and I had a chance to look at plenty because my work kept taking me to bookshops.

In the spring of my daughter’s first year, I was promoting a novel and an anthology. Her father was on paternity leave.

He rocked her to sleep while I went to bookstores to talk about that novel and to interview others about their own work.

Usually, I’d pick up a book for her. Browsing the shelves, I was for a moment mother and author.

My novel, The Sleep Watcher, is not for small children. It is about as far from soft muslins as you can imagine. It is set in a run-down seaside town and is about out of body experiences, secrets, and the ways in which love and violence can form the tangled roots of a family tree. And yet, sitting on stage, I began to realize that

IN COLD HOW TO GROW BLOOD A READER

many of its literary influences dated back to my first bookshelf. Somewhere in there is Satoshi Kitamura’s Lily Takes A Walk, a picture book in which a post box grows jagged teeth and the street lamps are eyes.

The same bookshelf fed my brain Edgar Alan Poe stories illustrated by Gris Grimly, a collection of Japanese folk stories riddled with ghosts, a battered school copy of the Tempest with someone else’s notes in the margins, and a paperback of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden bought by one of my parents and stumbled upon in my teenage years. I never chose these influences but they’re part of what built my brain, the references I reached for writing a novel about growing up, trying to untangle rage and loyalty, trying to become a person worthy of loving. They’re probably why some readers have described the novel as gothic.

As I carried back each book to my daughter’s room, I wondered what →

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might stick. Lily Takes A Walk was read to me before I could read. Perhaps that’s the horror and wonder of parenting—your haphazard best will be someone’s introduction to the world.

She learned to flip the pages. To lift flaps. I acquired a front facing bookshelf because a friend told me that she’d had one from when her daughter could crawl.

Apparently being able to see the covers of the books made them more intriguing and accessible for small hands. Reading around, I stumbled on a study that claimed front-facing books increased circulation in libraries so I thought it couldn’t hurt to try.

Around this time, I learned that many Montessori practitioners advise realistic books for young children. This made sense to me. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is wonderful, but caterpillars do not, in the general run of things, eat salami or ice cream. Yet, why would my daughter know otherwise? When I stumbled upon a board book by Maggie Li about the water system, I was intrigued. Drip is a water droplet with a sweet little smile—so maybe not totally realistic. But my daughter loved to watch him go down the pipes, past the fish, and turn into a cloud again.

I discovered that The National Trust collaborated with Nosy Crow on two series of board books with excellent flaps and

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animals that don’t wear clothes or drive cars—My Very First Spotters Guide and Big Outdoors for Little Adventurers. Between them they have taught my daughter to tell the difference between a woodpecker and a kingfisher, though she’s still a Hungry Caterpillar fan. And after reading in Keith Gessen’s Raising Raffi that the lack of realism in Eric Carle’s art was in part a rebellion against Nazi ideology—I can’t really complain.

My daughter also fell in love with Rabbit’s Nap—a last minute train station purchase—by the author and illustrator of the famed Gruffalo. The rabbit wears a dotty dress, her mouse friends are in a band and she knows a bear that wears a flat cap. There’s no rebellion against Nazis here but how could I deny my child’s ‘more, more, more!’ when once, all she wanted to do with her books was pulp them between pink gums?

We’re just now embarking on paper pages. Her hands are calm enough to turn, not tear. A current favourite is 5 Minute Nature Stories: True Tales from the Woodland, which feels like it might have been titled to please an algorithm. But Mona K’s charming illustrations and Gabb Dawnay’s rhyming descriptions of forest life have made my daughter excited about the mating rituals of the tiger moth. (Or at the very least she likes pointing at them and saying—moffff.)

I called this essay How to Grow a Reader. But of course, she can’t read. Not even her own name. She is only one and a half. But first thing at morning and last thing in the evening, she’ll drag over a pile of books and pat the bed firmly and we’ll sit together and read. I don’t know if she’ll be a big reader. I’m still learning how to grow one of those. But at least for now she is a book lover, and it is a joy we can share. Last night going to sleep, she muttered to herself “Each Peach, Pear, Plum”.

Well, more precisely—“Eesh, peesh, pear, pum”. Which is close enough, I think.

BACKSTORY

JOHN FORDE

Too much of a good thing There are few things more pleasing than finishing a novel by your new favourite author, only to discover their other books, waiting to be consumed. I was 14 when I read Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and spent the next year happily binge-reading her hefty back catalogue.

These days, bingeing has become our primary mode of cultural consumption. Instead of waiting each week for the latest episode of a show, we can download entire series and devour them in a weekend.

Books are harder to binge, as they generally take longer to finish and require our undivided attention. That said, the digital age makes it possible to download and read an author’s complete oeuvre: everything, everywhere, all at once.

“Too much of a good thing is wonderful,” Mae West said — but is it? In an age of limitless choice, we seem to have less time and concentration than ever, our brains frazzled by over-stimulation.

By contrast, diving into the works of one author can be highly satisfying.

Following a single voice allows us to tune out the noise of modern life, pay attention and develop a deeper understanding of their work.

Novice binge-readers should look

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no further than Truman Capote. His three completed novels — the coming-ofage tale Other Voices, Other Rooms; Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a bittersweet portrait of a New York party girl; and In Cold Blood, an account of a real-life murder case — cover a wide range of genres, united by his crystalline prose and forensic eye.

If you’re up for a bigger challenge, immerse yourself in Margaret Atwood, whose astonishing bibliography ranges from dystopias (The Handmaid’s Tale), historical murder cases (Alias Grace), feminist comedies (The Edible Woman) and retellings of Greek myths (The Penelopiad).

Binge-reading can be unhealthy.

My youthful brush with Christie led to a lifelong distrust of vicars, unmarked medicine bottles and fireplaces concealing murder weapons. A week with Stephen King may render you unable to leave the house.

Other writers are better savoured as an aperitif than a three-course meal.

Anita Brookner’s gorgeously written novels about lonely middle-aged women, when taken together, will kill any belief in romance.

So put down that bestseller and consider going monogamous with a novelist of your choice. It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

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the

p42 test The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Milkman, Anna Burns

P1: HOW IT STARTED Celebrated dunk into the peevish mind of an alienated 1950s US teen, with a poke at other childhood novels offering “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”.

P1: HOW IT STARTED Whatever Holden Caulfield thought, there’s potent simplicity to the Copperfield kid’s first-person reflection on “whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life”.

P42: HOW IT’S GOING “I think I really like it best when you can kid the pants off a girl when the opportunity arises, but it’s a funny thing. The girls I like best are the ones I never feel much like kidding.”

P42: HOW IT’S GOING “We were welcomed by a very civil woman...By and by, when we had dined in a sumptuous manner off boiled dabs, melted butter, and potatoes, with a chop for me, a hairy man with a very good-natured face came home.”

P1: HOW IT STARTED In a society riven by sexual and social tensions, a nameless narrator who is threatened by gun-toting “Somebody McSomebody” unleashes a cascade of words.

OUR VERDICT DNF (Did Not Finish). Give us a break, Holden - and quite a few contemporary reviewers agreed. One American teenager quoted in The New York Times vented at the monotony of reading “about these jerks and...that crumby school”.

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OUR VERDICT Keep it coming. Descriptive mastery whose child perspective details delight.

P42: HOW IT’S GOING “Normal people, meaning married couples, were moving out...It was just they didn’t want to hurt older relatives’ feelings...their long-deceased fragile ancestors...set in ways easily to be affronted.”

OUR VERDICT Keep it coming. Blackly comic skewering of Irish mores outraged by unmarried “fornication” on a suburban street.

BACKSTORY

Flashy first pages seem de rigeur to hook browsers in today’s packed novels market. So might a random deeper peek better suggest if a book has legs? Nodding to Douglas Adams’s revelation of 42 as the answer to Ultimate Questions, how do recent bestsellers and some classics fare in a (totally subjective) p42 test?

By Norman Miller

Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

P1: HOW IT STARTED Dead-eyed intro to a protagonist whose “mind had abandoned him and left his body wandering down below” on a flat Glasgow day.

P1: HOW IT STARTED Much-lauded recent bestseller opens with rapid-fire sentences that sketch a sad portrait of two contrasting brothers in the aftermath of a funeral.

P1: HOW IT STARTED As the clock strikes 13, one of the best-known first pages presents a dystopian world of hard lives, Hate Weeks and chilling authoritarianism.

P42: HOW IT’S GOING “Shug looked in the mirror and watched the woman, who was watching him. The Glasgow housewives always sat square in the middle...she sat upright and rigid, like a Presbyterian queen.”

OUR VERDICT Keep it coming. Melancholy and minutiae woven into a resonant chat in the back of Shug’s stinking taxi.

THE PAGE 42 TEST

P42: HOW IT’S GOING “It’s different for women.

Impossible to imagine a girl of twenty-two behaving as Ivan has behaved tonight... he appears to feel frustrated with himself for not knowing how to accomplish this task [of seducing an older woman he has just met].”

P42: HOW IT’S GOING “His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out [AND ON AND ON AND ON]”

OUR VERDICT DNF. She can write, for sure — but why the narrow emotional focus and lazy gender stereotyping?

OUR VERDICT DNF. A deadening repetitiveness that makes you wish for a novel at least 100 pages shorter.

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A

TROUBLE S O M E PRIEST

The uncosy life of a king of cosy crime

by Simon Parkin 44

BACKSTORY

RICHARD COLES

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max of an argument with his bandmate Jimmy Somerville during the Aids crisis, Coles deployed an unanswerable clincher.

“I’m ill and I’ve just discovered I’m HIV positive - get off my back.” The lie, spoken amid Coles’s own grief at losing so many friends to the disease, would take years to unravel.

Coles was clever but not studious. He became “a public-school drop-out,” as he described it, then suicidal. After he failed to take his life, his family sent him to a psychiatric hospital. When he recovered, he moved to London, an embryonic Trotskyist with stage-school ambitions who found, in the city’s vibrant gay scene, belonging.

He befriended Somerville, a striking young Scot with an angelic falsetto.

Somerville left his band, Bronski Beat, and the pair founded The Communards, a union that turbocharged Coles’ prospects, both professional and romantic. In fame’s soft-focus glow, Coles rid himself of his sexual shyness via a string of lovers, some of whom bed him only so they could get closer to Somerville (one boyfriend displayed a photograph on his mantlepiece of him posing with the band; he had folded Coles out of shot).

Envy soon poisoned the partnership when Coles was routinely ignored while the music press and fans directed their attention at Somerville. The Communards survived for only two albums, and Coles, still in his twenties, emerged blinkingly, lost but wealthy, a combination that drew him, inexorably, into the numbing embrace of drugs. During this time, he may or may not have purchased a speedboat.

Self-loathing hastened the habit (in the first of three memoirs Coles describes himself, at this time, as variously “coarse”, “unkind”, “self-absorbed,” “self-pitying”, a “witless man in a mess”). Then, while sitting at the back of a church service into which he had stumbled in search of peace, somebody unlikely came along and figured everything out: Jesus of Nazareth.

BACKSTORY

Previous Page Photo: Neil Spence / Alamy Stock Photo

Once, at the height of The Communards’ popularity, Richard Coles ate mango on a tropical island for breakfast, steak frites in Paris for lunch, and a slice of pizza in New York at sundown. It was a time when selling music was both viable and lucrative, and in 1986 the band’s irresistible cover of the disco hit ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ brought the duo fame, houses, and all the glittering cliches of a successful pop career at that time—including a gruelling schedule of international travel.

To ease the psychic whiplash involved in his new life, Coles would always carry with him an Agatha Christie crime novel, a reliable way in which to ground himself in the familiarity of England, even when two miles up in the air. “One of the ways [crime fiction] works is by offering reassurance,” he told me recently. “You have a world which is familiar, in which everyone knows their place. Then, suddenly, that’s turned upside down by catastrophic intervention. Finally, somebody unlikely comes along and figures everything out, so everyone can feel good again.”

For Coles, now sixty-two, this role of redeemer appealed. After his grandfather gifted him The Complete Sherlock Holmes when he was ten years old, he asked his mother to buy him a deerstalker. He wore the hat while parading around his hometown, peering, moon-eyed, through a magnifying glass. A precocious, ambitious child, who was regrettably—as he saw it—stuck in the regional town of Kettering, the young Coles was “haunted by the idea of people living glamorously beyond my provincial horizons.” He “ached” for glory and would do, or say, almost anything for the esteem or sympathy of others.

Like Holmes he experimented with the truth, and soon discovered “an extraordinary propensity for lying.” He told his classmates that he was an adopted orphan whose upper-class parents had died in an air crash in Switzerland. Other fibs were more harmful. Later, at the cli-

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO STEP FURTHER THAN SIX FEET OUTSIDE A COUNTRY PARSONAGE TO FIND ENOUGH TO DETAIN YOU”

It was a Damascene conversion, authentic and total, and it provided a lost soul with the forgiveness which he had been unable to summon for himself. The drugs lingered, but Coles, who now wore a little silver cross around his neck, was on a new path. While studying Theology at King’s College, London, Coles would take his fellow, penniless students to the Groucho Club, or the opera. He combined his studies with a budding career in BBC radio presenting but the call of the priesthood proved strong—even if Coles was initially unsure of whether he wanted to be a high church Protestant or Catholic, both paths filled with a kind of sacred camp pantomime that appealed.

RICHARD COLES

In 2011 Coles was licensed and installed as Vicar of Finedon in North Northamptonshire. Tradition has it that the number of rings the new incumbent gives on the bell to signify their arrival will equal the number of years served. Coles pulled sixteen times. His friends had imagined Coles was leaving London for a “sleepy little backwater,” as he put it. There was a murder in his first week, a messy situation, as all murders are, with “complicated” aftereffects. “I share with Jane Austen a sense that you don’t have to step further than six feet outside a country parsonage to find enough to detain you.”

There was much to detain Coles in parish life, from issuing sermons (“often just a display of an opinion,” he says) to helping organise the building of houses for homeless people or establishing a nursery for children from low-income families. Coles became a fixture on the national stage, too, with appearances on panel shows like Have I Got New For You, and a hosting gig on Radio 4’s magazine programme Saturday Live.

In this way, Coles became a Vicar of Dibley character in the British public’s imagination; a person who embodied a beloved but threatened vision of England, one of musty decency, afternoon glasses of sherry, worm-chewed pews, and cardiganed bellringers.

He mostly relished being a vicar. “After you’ve been there for a while, you realize you’ve been part of the best days of your parishioners’ lives and the worst days of their lives,” he said. “And their story is your story, and it’s just wonderful.” But there was an aspect of the job that was indescribably painful. Whereas, in society, the acceptance of queerness feels long settled (even if, within living memory, gay sex was a crime), within some sections of the Church of England the idea that homosexuality is irregular lingers, despite being referenced only a handful of times in the Bible. →

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Photo: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

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BACKSTORY

Christians have discarded hundreds of commandments over the centuries, separating those which are cultural rules, written for a particular moment in time, from those, like “thou shall not murder”, which are considered for perpetuity.

Those few verses that forbid same-sex relationships could, quite easily, be understood as the output of writers working in a less-enlightened context, a rule no longer relevant for our age, like so many other Biblical directives.

As a student, Coles perceived a way to join the clergy after he met John Gaskill, a priest who had “worked out how to reconcile Christian faith with an inconvenient sexual orientation.” But in time, his resolve was shaken by anti-gay lobbyist groups within the church who are, he said, “well-organised and well-funded.”

For some Christians the Bible is not a complex compilation of texts written across centuries and cultures, blending poetry, symbolism and oral tradition but, as A.N. Wilson once wrote, a “weapon to use against people of whom they disapprove”. Coles experienced firsthand the violence of such dogma when, in 2019, his husband David Oldham died from alcoholism.

In the aftermath Coles received several hateful letters, condemning Coles and his late partner. It was one of the factors that led him to reassess his position as Britain’s most conspicuous vicar. “I found after a while, the cost of upholding an institutional position that you thought inimical not only to the well-being of the people you’re supposed to minister to, but also to your commitment to the gospel to be very burdensome indeed,” he told me. He retired from clerical duties in 2022—five years short of his earlier, tolled promise.

In the upheaval of yet another major life change, Coles returned to the comfort of crime novels, this time as a writer, not a reader. His debut novel, Murder Before Evensong, published in 2022, stars Canon

RICHARD COLES

Daniel Clement, a crime-solving rector of a rural parish, a sweet and nostalgic setting with an underlying darkness. Coles’s interest was, as a critic for The Guardian put it, “less about the shock and gore of murder than its ripple effect on a small, close-knit community.”

While Coles fills his books with swooshes of literary flair, they are accessible. “Writing crime fiction just means you can sell books in supermarkets,” he told me. “And I would love to be someone who’s read by people who buy books in supermarkets.” Coles is comfortable revealing his elevated tastes in mainstream spaces; he was a popular contestant in the most recent series of I’m a Celebrity….

When he entered the show, bookies placed his odds of winning at 40/1. By the final week, they had been slashed to 4/1. (He eventually placed third, described by several national newspapers as a “fan favourite”). A similar combination of talent, celebrity and genre proved winning with his books, too; Murder Before Evensong became a bestseller, and two sequels duly followed, A Death in the Parish, and Murder at the Monastery.

The trilogy is drawn, inevitably and profoundly, from his own experiences as a priest; the invented world provides a space in which Coles can revive and perhaps exorcise his time at the pulpit. The first novel, for example, opens with an extended comic passage in which a vicar announces he has secured permission and funding to install a toilet in the church.

The parishioners, however, do not share in his enthusiasm for the plan. “I did exactly that in front of my parish,” he told me. “Instead of people being pleased, they all lost their shit.” Likewise, the books feature intricate details of high church ritual and practice because Coles cares about such things. “I am fascinated with items of liturgy and monastic discipline,” he says. “And fortunately, the crime fiction audience is full of nerds.” →

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“NOVELS DON’T WRITE THEMSELVES EXACTLY, BUT YOU ARE LED INTO PLACES YOU HADN’T FORESEEN

BY CHARACTERS”

The lavatory scene is revealing. Coles is someone to whom heritage and tradition appeal; but he is also concerned with meaningful change and progressiveness.

This tension sits at the heart of his novels, which deal with human responses to change, a form of violence that can, at times, feel as affecting as a murder.

Change, after all, represents the death of one future, in exchange for another. Grief is inevitable.

Coles understands grief, not only from his years sitting with the freshly widowed, but as the one to whom it has been a frequent visitor. He has dealt not only with the death of his spouse, but also the dozens of friends and acquaintances who vanished in the dark cloud of the Aids crisis.

“It’s stuff which normally happens to

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people at the end of their lives, but we were nearer the beginning of our lives,” he says of that dark and bewildering decade.

“My grandfather was a teenager in the First World War. He told me how you were just haunted by this terrible, terrible sense of loss. It was like that for my generation growing up in the years of HIV.” Grief at that scale changes the kinds of stories a person can tell. And Coles admits that the books he is writing are, on some level, a way to reckon with loss in all its forms. “Novels don’t write themselves exactly, but you are led into places you hadn’t foreseen by characters,” he said.

“It’s only later, when you observe and reflect on what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it, that you begin to understand the non-conscious choices you’ve made.”

BACKSTORY

CLAIRE FULLER

The author suggested a headline. We changed it.

Of my five novels only the first has a title that was my original choice and this, I admit, I stole. Titles can’t be copyrighted, and in my case, Our Endless Numbered Days was – is – the title of an album by Iron and Wine.

I listened to their music while I was writing and realised that the title worked so well for the novel that I used it.

Books, though, aren’t just the work of the author. Agents, editors and sales and marketing departments all get a say about what will help a novel sell, including cover design and, of course, the title.

I wanted to call my second novel About 3.15pm on a Tuesday Afternoon. I still rather like it. I had hoped it would make readers curious about what happened, and why there was “about”. But my editor thought no one would remember it, and besides, it was too long to fit on the cover. It became Swimming Lessons.

Number three was published as Bitter Orange, but its working title was Blood Orange. Just before my publisher announced its publication, Harriet Tyce announced her debut: Blood Orange. Because both books were due to be published around the same time, I had to change mine. In the end, Bitter Orange works better for the book but there was a lot of rewriting involved

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in changing the tree from a blood orange tree to one that grows Sevilles.

Unsettled Ground was going to be called Just Like Your Mother, which works well with the ending. My UK publisher was on board, but the US thought it sounded like a comic novel (spoiler: it’s not!). And so I printed out all the significant-sounding words in the novel, put them on my desk and shuffled them for a day. Eventually Unsettled and Ground butted up against each other, and gave me the perfect combination for the story.

The Memory of Animals, originally called A Body of Water, faced similar issues, with US and UK publishers not agreeing for various reasons, and me stuck in the middle. Eventually we settled on something we were all happy with. Editors and agents have a history of being opinionated about titles.

Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel was originally Catch-18. His agent and editor considered 17 and 11, before settling on Catch-22.

I’m currently editing my sixth novel, and I have a list of titles a page long, but mostly I call it Book Six. I’m not setting my heart on any of the possibilities because I know it’s likely to be called something completely different when it’s published. Completely Different…now there’s a thought.

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Shelfie Ferdia Lennon

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FERDIA LENNON is the author of Glorious Exploits, which won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2024.

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BACKSTORY

My wife and I have moved around a lot, so most of our books are in boxes back in Ireland, awaiting more space and bookshelves. These bookshelves are in our living room, and a few more bookcases are scattered around the house. I keep meaning to organise all of these, either by subject, author or really just some connection between the books placed together beyond their being contiguous. My dream is to have a room just for reading, wall-to-wall books, a comfy chair, and no screens, but it will have to wait.

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HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

by Thucydides I read this book when I was sixteen, and it had a profound impact on me. So much so that for a while, my teenage self genuinely cared more about the political situation in 5th century BCE Athens than what was going on in the Dublin in which I lived. I have described it before as The Iliad meets Game of Thrones, and it’s certainly one of my favourite books.

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FRANNY AND ZOOEY

by JD Salinger I was gifted Salinger’s Franny and Zooey when I was a teenager. It’s a short novel comprised of a novella and a short story about a sister’s breakdown in the wake of her eldest brother’s suicide and her other brother’s attempts to help her. It’s a beautiful novel about grief and familial bonds. Salinger published four books in his lifetime, and for me, three of them are masterpieces. Franny and Zooey is certainly one of the three.

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THE GLORIOUS HERESIES

by Lisa McInerny I picked up Lisa McInerny’s The Glorious Heresies after reading the cover quote from Kevin Barry, no less. It went on to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction, amongst other awards, and it’s easy to see why. McInerny’s tale of young love, accidental murder, and gangsters in Cork is a riotous, free-wheeling joy of a novel with a cast of characters you’ll rail against and root for in equal measure.

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BRING UP THE BODIES

by Hilary Mantel The second instalment of Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy made her the only author to win the Booker Prize with consecutive novels. Bring up the Bodies moves the action from Anne Boleyn’s rise to her fall, all told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell. I don’t know if I have ever read a book that manages to be so thematically rich and narratively complex whilst being such pure page-turning fun. It’s a startling achievement.

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COLLECTED STORIES

by Frank O’Connor I read Frank O’Connor first at thirteen in an English textbook at school. The fact that when finishing the story, we were promptly assigned comprehension questions did little to dampen my excitement at the literary gold I had just discovered.

O’Connor wrote novels, but his reputation is based on his short stories, and this collection contains most of his finest work, including Guests of The Nation and A Study in History.

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A PARROT AND A PHOENIX

When flames tore through Camilla’s, it looked like it was game over for the shop – and its resident parrot. But then a whole community helped this very eccentric bookshop rise from the ashes.

Words by Stephen Dark

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Portraits by Vikram Kushwah

BACKSTORY

When Camilla Francombe was a child, she would pick up a stone and rub it to see what magic would transpire. A voracious reader who loved Edith Nesbit and C.S. Lewis, she would bang on the backs of wardrobes hoping for a chilly burst of winter air and the summons of light from a solitary lamppost.

Francombe’s devotion to the magical animates Camilla’s, the second-hand and antiquarian bookshop she co-owns in the English seaside resort of Eastbourne. It sits on the crest of a hill, a four-floor building crammed to the rafters with over a million books. In the front window a toy carousel endlessly turns amidst coffee table books, comic annuals and obscure titles. The smell of dusty tomes wafts out the front door. Inside you stop for a moment, not so much to adjust to the gloom as to the scale of what rises before you.

The sections closest to the front door are cookery, photography, film and collecting. Only the upper half of each bookcase is visible, the lower reaches hidden behind three, four or even five layers of stacked books. Such is the marvel of this spectacle, you might well miss Archie, the green and yellow parrot eyeballing you in his cage on a table facing the front door.

Julia Noakes, a regular for the last 25 years, likes the broad-strokes organisation and the buy-it-all and pile-it-high philosophy. “It’s an adventure. You can never tell what you’re going to find.”

For Noakes and the faithful, of whom there are many, Camilla’s is not only a gift for book foragers but a place of refuge and solace. “It’s actually a therapy centre,” says Noakes, who’s a psychologist. “Books are just the front.”

The beating heart of the place is Francombe, now 72. In her uniform of drainpipe jeans, thin, full-sleeved jumper and eagle-faced pandemic-era mask, it’s her flutey, mellifluous voice that draws you into the shop, with its mix of child-

A PARROT AND A PHOENIX

like wonder and gentle humour.

Her 80-year-old life and business partner, Stuart Broad, is distinguished by his wild white hair, braces and booming laugh. And then there’s Archie, their 29-year-old parrot. Together they have almost 130 years in the book trade. They seem not so much entombed in their book labyrinth as infused with its spirit.

In a world driven mad by the endless pursuit of the new, the next, their shop exists in a timewarp, marching only to the whisper of turned pages. You have to dedicate time to courting a parrot, to rolling up your sleeves to dig through pillar after pillar of crime fiction to find those gems you never knew existed.

Marmalade dropper When 28-year-old part time teacher Stuart Broad saw a strikingly attractive young woman reading outside Kim’s Bookshop in Worthing, East Sussex, he had to try his luck: “Any books on making marmalade?”

Francombe, who was sitting outside her mother’s bookshop, Kim’s, was 20 years old. She was studying to become a teacher but had become disillusioned by the bitterness of veteran teachers.

It wasn’t long before Francombe and Broad decided to open a bookshop in Brighton, which they liked for its bohemian nature and literary population – and for the then-cheap rent. Francombe credits her early success as a book seller in part to knowing little about what books were worth. “It meant people got bargains, so they came back,” she said.

The couple made a good partnership.

In Noakes’s telling, Broad is “the more grown-up one”, leaving Francombe to be “the maitre d’, the joy, the pleasure”.

Broad doesn’t demur. Francombe, he says, “is entirely impractical. That’s what I’m recruited for, the practical part of the partnership. She’s the dreamer part, which I think is better for customers more often.” →

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In 1978 the dream meant moving to bigger premises in the town. Seven years later, they moved to the current site further along the south coast in Eastbourne.

They called it Camilla’s because by then she was already a stalwart in the trade.

Enter parrot It was not until the 1990s that Archie joined the partnership (a part-time bookseller, Darren, later made it four).

By then, Francombe and Broad had bought a home in the country. One day Francombe discovered two baby mistle thrushes in the drive. She fed and nursed

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them. “When they were old enough I ran around the garden flapping my arms to teach them how to fly.” And off they flew.

She missed the birds so much they visited a pet shop in Sevenoaks in search of their replacement. Unbidden, a baby parrot ran up Francombe’s arm, sat on her shoulder and nibbled her ear. Sold.

Archie was soon a member of the family, Francombe said. “He identifies as a person. It’s who he’s been brought up with. They’re his gang.”

His gang quickly grew to incorporate many of the customers. Noakes, for instance, is “one of his favourite girl-

BACKSTORY

friends,” according to Francombe. When Noakes tra-la-la’d an opera aria to him, he stood up straighter, then as she leaned towards his cage, he spread his wings, crouched down to the bars and fanned out his tail feathers. He nibbles beetroot falafels, and dances to “Old McDonald”.

Men, however, are not so welcome in Archie’s gang. At the couple’s home he twice landed on Broad’s less-than-fulsome hair with his claws out. “It’s beyond painful,” he said.

This predilection is unfortunate given that men make up the majority of the bookshop’s customers; its regulars once included Laurence Olivier, Ian Paisley and Raymond Briggs.

Still, the men are every bit as crafty as the parrot. As weary partners insisted down the years “No more books,” they resorted to subterfuge. One local businessman started a library at his office. Another came in once a week in a long coat and strapped a volume of “Encyclopedia Britannica” to each shoulder and smuggled them home. “By the time my wife notices them, I’m going to say, ‘Well, they’ve been there for years,’” he told Broad.

higher reaches of the building and ruining thousands upon thousands of books.

The couple rushed over from their home and stood numbly, watching the firefighters battle on.

Once they were let back in, it was to a soot-black world that smelt of damp smoke and waterlogged books. “We thought we would never recover,” Francombe said. “It was the local people who made it alright for us.”

A slight, elderly woman gave Francombe a pound; a homeless man pressed 50p into her hand. One woman’s crowdfunding page raised £3,000. Comedian Susie Izzard, who had attended Eastbourne College and bought her first book at Camilla’s, donated money and the receipts from a show she did by the seafront.

A year later, Camilla’s was at last ready to re-open only to be faced by a new wave of pandemic restrictions. But customers remained loyal, asking for books from the pavement and ordering titles on football and trains via their website.

Archie sat on a table by the front door, cheering visitors with a song or two.

“So we survived,” Francombe said.

Forged in flames Broad estimates only 10% of Eastbourne’s 100,000 residents have ever ventured into the shop. And yet the outpouring of support it received when disaster struck suggests widespread support.

Camilla’s had always followed the bookseller tradition of leaving cheap books outside on shelves so late night passers-by could buy them, dropping the money through the letterbox. On the second day of the pandemic lockdown, in March 2020, an arsonist set some of these books alight. The bookshelves went up in flames, the heat scorching through the wall and setting fire to stock inside.

When the fire brigade arrived, water from their hoses poured down into the basement, forcing smoke up into the

Onwards The couple don’t celebrate their anniversaries. They didn’t even really celebrate their wedding day. They said their vows and went straight back to work.

“I don’t like holidays,” Francombe said. “You always think they’re going to be much more wonderful than they are and I like what I do.” As for retirement, forget it. Camilla’s is where the couple belong; nowhere else feels quite the same.

One recent Saturday morning, all three (human) staff members were outside sorting out the street-facing shelves when a regular turned up. She received hugs from Broad and Darren. Then Francombe and the customer walked into the shop together, holding hands.

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Alien Concepts

By TOM WHIPPLE

Books that explain extremely complicated physics sell in their millions.

But do they really do what they claim?

Once the thought entered my mind, that day in 2012, I could not shift it.

It was a beautiful spring evening, and I was sitting in the cafeteria at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory, looking at the pink glow of the sunset on a distant Mont Blanc.

In a few months I knew that this city of science, with its Einstein Boulevard and its Rutherford Crescent, was almost certainly set to attain its apotheosis. It would, by the summer, have enough data to declare the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the particle that, in the (not wholly correct) shorthand we writers had learned to use, gave other particles mass.

Before that happened the world’s science writers were here to speak to its scientists.

Those scientists were ready for us.

The most presentable physicists had been selected to meet us in the cafe, where they were drinking glasses of wine (in Switzerland, even academic cafeterias serve wine). They had readied their

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descriptions. They had practised the metaphors and the neat linguistic tricks that would be used to make the ungraspable graspable, to turn calculus into comprehension: that would forever provide the scaffolding for the “Higgs Boson” chapters of the world’s popular physics books.

Then we began, very much at the beginning. What, I asked, was the Higgs Boson? What does it mean to talk about a mechanism that gives other particles mass?

Well, said one of the physicists, imagine a field that acts on other particles “like selective treacle”. I tried to imagine it.

Another, courteously adapting his metaphor to my nationality, took another approach. Think, he said, about Margaret Thatcher. Against my better judgement, I followed his instruction.

Imagine her walking through a cocktail party, he said. She would, of course, be the person everyone wants to talk to. Imagine how people would stick to her, bend-

BACKSTORY

Photo: Federico Moreno / Alamy Stock Photo

ing her ear, slowing her down and pulling her back. Well, he said, that’s what’s going on. Really? Well, he said, if I preferred, I could describe the Higgs Boson as the quantum excitation of a putative scalar field that permeates space. I demurred.

Did I understand now? Did readers understand, when the world’s science writers turned conversations like these into articles and books? Did we even know that what we were passing on was the truth? Would we be able to spot a lie?

And this was the thought that niggled.

We, the public, love theoretical physics. Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics was a bestselling stocking filler.

When The Sunday Times celebrated the 50th anniversary of its bestsellers list, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was the book that had spent the longest on the list (264 weeks). Extremely hard physics is extremely popular.

But does any of this lead to any useful understanding? What were we actually trying to achieve, that day in Cern? What,

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in other words, was the point of science writers like me?

I am not alone in these thoughts. Dr Phillip Ball is a physicist by background, and now one of the world’s most prolific and respected science writers — he is to popular physics what Jilly Cooper is to sexy horse riding. And he is well aware of the limitations of his profession. Just as reading Cooper is unlikely to help you win the Grand National, so reading popular physics will, he says, leave you with a “superficial, impressionistic and quite possibly flawed understanding of what it’s all about”. Although, he adds, “I don’t think it matters too much…I don’t see it as my task to really get readers to understand the science in the way an undergraduate would have to.”

Which is lucky, because they won’t.

The problem, says Dr Rebecca Smethurst, Oxford astrophysicist and author, is pretty fundamental. “We get to a certain point at which we can’t describe it with words anymore.” Quantum me- →

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READING LIST SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS

by Carlo Rovelli The "brief" bit was very much an inducement. For readers seeking non-onerous enlightenment, this loo-book-sized volume promised the secrets of the universe in manageable chunks. Readers bought it in its hundreds of thousands. Unlike other pop physics books, thanks to Rovelli's writing and its brevity, readers also finished it in their hundreds of thousands.

BEYOND WEIRD

by Philip Ball Particles, we are told, can be in two places at once. They can be "entangled" across distances. They are also, at the same time, waves. Everything about quantum mechanics challenges our intuition. Ball — the king of well informed well actuallies — is here to tackle some of the lazier cliches, and explain not only what the quantum world is, but what it isn't.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLACK HOLES

by Becky Smethurst There is a great embarrassment at the heart of modern physics. We have a theory that is really good at describing big things: planets, stars, humans. We have a theory that is really good at describing small things: neutrons, electrons, protons. But the two theories completely contradict each other. Most of the time, practically, this doesn't matter. But in a black hole (a really big thing) quantum mechanics (really small things) become important. Black holes push matter, and physics, to its limits.

Smethurst's skill is to brief us on black holes, briefly, without being too scary.

PHILOSOPHIAE NATURALIS PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA Newton’s mathematics aren’t, actually, that hard. This was, for him, annoying. His Principia is among the most significant works ever to be printed. So significant he was worried. His fear was that too many people would read it and then bother him by wanting to talk about it. His intended publisher, which had recently made such a loss betting on “A history of fishes” that it was now paying people in remaindered copies of “A history of fishes”, was looking for a blockbuster. Newton was not. He resolved to tamp down sales, deliberately making it hard to understand “to avoid being baited by little smatterers in mathematics.”

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chanics, the physics of small things, and general relativity, the physics of big things aren’t merely derived using mathematics — they only make sense using mathematics. “If you can’t speak the language of maths, it will always feel like magic.”

Science writing, of course, is always about simplification. When I, science editor at The Times and author of science books, write about virology, I don’t kid myself that my readership will develop the next mRNA vaccine as a consequence.

Even so, what I say will relate to testable, sneezable, hypotheses that make sense and explain the world we live in. If virology was all lies, we would spot it.

But theoretical physics — a subject that, unlike virology, I studied at university — is different. Language is, as Wittgenstein put it, the limits of our understanding.

Language is a model for comprehending the world. The problem is, the language of everyday life is based on a reality that, since Einstein, physics has shown us does not exist. The reality of physics is far weirder than our language, the language in which books are written, allows.

So I can tell people about how a particle can, say, also be a wave. Or how cats belonging to Austrian physicists can be simultaneously alive and dead. I can talk about how the faster you go the slower time goes. I can pass on all of these frankly baffling factoids. I can do so by deploying variations on the forms of words developed by my writing predecessors over the century since physics got weird — forms that have evolved not so much because they are right, but because they aren’t wrong.

And after using them I sometimes feel grubby.

It feels less like I am imparting science, more like I am describing magic.

The motto of the Royal Society, the world’s most venerable scientific institution, is “Nullius in verba”, “On the word of no one”. Trust your own eyes, your own ex-

BACKSTORY

Photo: Horst Friedrichs / Alamy Stock Photo

periments: there is no priest class.

Here we are, trusting the word of scientists, and in turn asking readers to trust us — on subjects that almost all of us, myself included, will never truly understand.

Is this not the antithesis of science? Why do we even want to read it?

The second question is easier, perhaps, to answer than the first. “People are always fascinated by the unknown,” says Smethurst. With physics, things are about as unknown as is possible. “This is right on the edge of the boundary of human knowledge. We’re probing scales from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large.

So people will always be drawn to it.”

This, says Ball, is the key point. You can argue, if you like, that this physics is important because it explains our world — because satnav and computers wouldn’t work without it — but, he suspects, that’s a distraction. “Only a very small proportion of folk really care about that, just as only a very few cared that Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory ‘gave’ us radio telecommunication.”

ALIEN CONCEPTS

Instead, he says, “I think there are a surprising number of people who just have a genuine, intrinsic interest in exotic physics…People like what they take to be weirdness.”

Given this is the case, says Smethurst, really the first question — about whether it does a disservice to science to pass down this perplexing esoteric knowledge — answers itself. “If people are interested, we should tell them about it…The day we decide research is too hard to explain to the general public is never a good day. It feels like gatekeeping knowledge. Knowledge should never be guarded.”

We may have to accept that in a confusing world — where time is ever shifting and particles are ever whizzing — to understand a bit more we have to risk understanding a little less. And we might have to grudgingly concede that, to an extent, that involves taking somebody’s word for it. Sometimes, if you must, it might even involve imagining Margaret Thatcher at a cocktail party.

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Postcard from: Photo: Melissa Lunar

La Polilla, Mexico City Named after the moth, a creature that has been munching its way through books since time immemorial, La Polilla is a one-room bookshop on the edge of a fashionable neighbourhood of Mexico City.

The space is tiny, but they’ve squeezed in a cushioned bench and a world-class coffee machine, plus some wobbly chairs outside on the pavement so customers can peruse at leisure. When events are on, people spill out into the street, enjoying the city’s balmy evenings.

La Pollila specialises in Latin American literature, stocking books that you can’t get anywhere else in Mexico, despite the geographical and cultural closeness. Prohibitive delivery and customs costs, plus peculiarities in the way territorial rights are sold, means a book by a Chilean writer, say, is often more likely to be published in Spain than in Bolivia or Peru.

The project was dreamt up in 2020. Before they had a shop front, founders Daniel and Cecilia sold books through Instagram. To get around customs and delivery charges, friends and family would bring books back in their suitcases after travel-

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MEXICO ling to Bogotá or Buenos Aires. Their stock of 3,500 titles is strong on books from Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Argentina, where literature has flourished in recent years. They sell titles published by small and independent publishers and have a large selection of books “from the periphery”. So you’ll find Mariana Enriquez and Fernanda Melchor, but also pamphlets, fanzines and books without ISBNs. Daniel and Cecilia are an unlikely pair – on top of running the bookshop, Daniel works for an NGO that tackles corruption and Cecilia is a lawyer. But they are clearly prolific and incisive readers, and their success can be attributed to their expertise hand-selling titles to customers.

They’ve launched a publishing arm, starting with three short story collections by women from Colombia, Chile, and Paraguay.

Come for the workshops, or for the vermouth, craft beer, and discounts on a Saturday night. Come for the coffee and the staff recommendations, or just to sit and peruse as you listen to the roar of the metrobus, the Inca doves cooing, and the ragged beat of the fierro viejo trucks doing the rounds of the neighbourhood.

Ellen Jones

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