Backstory Issue 1

ISSUE 1 • A/W 23/24 • £2.95

JESSICA ANDREWS • STEPHEN BUSH • ALICE WINN • TOM CREWE • CAL FLYN

The Irish book boom Colin Walsh on the Celtic renaissance

DECOLONISE THE KITCHEN

SHOW US THE MONEY

I LEFT MY HEART IN CROYDON

IT’S NOT JUST NADINE!

Black cookbooks changing the menu - and the narrative

A debut novelist opens up her books

A photographic love letter to a maligned borough

The art of the political hatchet job

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Welcome

TOM ROWLEY BACKSTORY Magazine Issue 1 A/W 23/24 Editor TOM ROWLEY Art Director DARIO VERRENGIA darioverrengia.com Deputy Editor RORY MCNEILL Commissioning Editor DENISE WALLIN Contributing Editors DARBY BROWN MEGAN STELLER AMY STRONG Cover Art JORDY VAN DEN NIEUWENDIJK

71 Balham High Road London SW12 9AP — books@backstory.london — Instagram: @backstory.london Website: backstory.london

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Newsrooms are fun, but there’s nothing quite like ripping up then pulling together your own magazine Back in 2015 - when Donald Trump had just announced his joke candidacy, David Cameron was preparing to settle the European question for a generation and the Wuhan wet market was still doing a roaring trade - I spent the summer working at The Washington Post.

For a journo geek and West Wing aficionado like me, it was heaven: hammering out my copy in the office where Woodward and Bernstein broke Watergate, belonging to a reporting unit they actually called “Team America”, and the arduous assignment of covering a presidential vacation.

Perhaps the most striking thing, though, was the gulf between the British and American approaches to journalism. This was neatly captured when one of my editors from the Daily Telegraph flew over from London to visit. I was a fly on the wall when he told a senior editor at the Post he was surprised such-and-such story had only made page 3 of that day’s paper, rather than the front page. “I wanted it on the front,” the American editor agreed. “But when the copy came in, it wasn’t right.” Over a debrief coffee afterwards, his British counterpart was agog: “If the copy isn’t good enough, you make it good enough!”

The rigour and professionalism of American hacks trumped anything I ever saw this side of the Pond. Even so, I can’t help finding something admirable, irresistible even, in that rough-and-ready, copy-and-paste, seatof-the-pants, five-minutes-to-deadline British attitude.

And it’s in that same spirit that we present this first issue of Backstory’s very own magazine.

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I’d forgotten how much fun it is to play with words.

Chop them up, toss them about, see what sizzles. It’s only 18 months since I left behind the newsroom for good, but far longer since I had unquestioned power over what makes the cover. Putting together this mag has brought back memories of working on my uni and school mags, slapping the headmaster's salary in size 72 font on the front page in the name of press freedom.

It’s been a joy to commission some of our favourite contemporary writers — Jessica Andrews, Alice Winn, Colin Walsh, Tom Crewe — and to mix their words with some reliable pizzazz from old friends on Fleet Street.

If I’m honest, though, most fun was the scissors and glue bit: perching at the Backstory bar perilously close to deadline with my colleagues Rory and Amy, hearing them snort, guffaw and read aloud any gems as they marked up the proofs in different coloured pencils.

So, in 48 rough-and-ready pages, we’ve tried to distil the essence of Backstory itself. We hope it’s approachable, lively, informative – and just a little bit snarky.

Fancy another book?

L-R: Tom Rowley, Amy Strong, Rory McNeill, Darby Brown, Megan Steller and Denise Wallin (under table)

Enjoy!

Tom

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Backstory Magazine

STEPHEN BUSH

Leave it out! The art of the political hatchet job There are many reasons for politicians to write their memoirs: money and posterity, for two. But the best and the worst tend to be written for revenge.

(I’ll leave it to you which applies to Nadine Dorries’s latest volume.)

Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs are, by any standard, a slog: a forced march through a sea of acronyms and robotic I-spoke-to-the-permanent-secretary-and-we-agreed sentences. But the occasional oases in the desert of Dalek-esque writing are side-swipes at her enemies and allies. “When the Norman Fowlers of this world believe they can afford to rebel,” she writes, when the Cabinet minister opposes her over her plans for British Leyland, “you know that things are bad.”

David Cameron’s For The Record is a much more enjoyable read, particularly if, like me, you enjoy dad jokes.

It, too, is enlivened by potshots at any number of his enemies: at Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, of course, but also at a host of ministers he thought mediocre but felt necessary to have in Cabinet to keep his party happy.

The trouble with a political hatchet job is that it does as much damage to the person wielding it as to the subject.

That Thatcher appears to have nursed a grudge against Fowler, an effective presence throughout her government, for this one disagreement reveals her to have been an intolerant, authoritarian presence at the top of her govern-

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ment. Her insistence that Neil Kinnock never got under her skin does not become more convincing with repetition.

Cameron’s jibes at his right flank reveal a politician still nursing regret at never standing up to his internal opponents.

The Blairites have been well-served in New Labour’s memoir wars. They started writing their memoirs earlier, and as a result most of their books are consciously written to avoid charges of disloyalty, factional grudge-bearing or sabotaging the party’s prospects in the 2010 general election. The New Machiavelli, an insightful book by Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, comes with a title that makes it sound like homework, but is actually a fascinating read.

Its need to sound diplomatic about the feud at the top of the party makes both its author and his boss seem measured and sensible.

The same could not be said for Power Trip, the 2013 memoir by Gordon Brown’s spin doctor Damian McBride. It is a much more candid (and therefore enjoyable) book, but it comes at the cost of damaging McBride’s own reputation.

Ironically, the best way for politicians to take revenge is not to try: they will come across as reasonable and shrewd, rather than licking old wounds.

Failing that, they should publish their diaries instead. That way, long after the squalls over who said what have subsided, historians will love them forever.

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The new Irish writing

Pick a book, any book... so long as it’s Irish.

From Sally Rooney to Claire Keegan, Sebastian Barry to Megan Nolan, it's Ireland’s world and we just live in it.

words: Colin Walsh

Illustrations: Jordy van den Nieuwendijk

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New Irish Writers. There’s a lot of them about. Sally Rooney, Eimear McBride, Sara Baume, Nicole Flattery, Megan Nolan, Louise Kennedy, Naoise Dolan – the list goes on and on. The volume and quality of contemporary Irish literature has prompted Le Monde, The New York Times, The Guardian and others to pose the latest iteration of a longstanding question: how does this tiny country produce so many world-class books? It’s a fair question: I’m writing one day after it was announced that Irish writers make up a third of this year’s Booker Prize longlist.

Most new Irish writers are too busy writing and being Irish to reflect on the how and the why of New Irish Writing.

In their place, commentators find themselves rattling off twinkly-eyed clichés about “a nation of storytellers” with an “ancient oral tradition”. Still, the phenomenon is worth pondering, if only because it illuminates less about what Ireland has and more about what bigger countries like the UK increasingly lack. So here (as an official New Irish Writer™) I’m going to give you my necessarily incomplete and subjective insider take.

To understand where we are now, we first need to go back to the era of the

THE NEW IRISH WRITING

Celtic Tiger. From the late 90s into the noughties there was an unprecedented economic boom which flooded Ireland with cheap money. These years are widely regarded as a wasteland for Irish fiction.

Exciting new voices were a rarity, while established writers tended towards formal and thematic conservatism: comfortable and comforting books about the nation’s romantically poor past, a past which – like everything else in Celtic Tiger Ireland – was now just another resource to be neatly packaged and sold to the highest bidder.

Then came the financial crash of 2008, and its long aftermath. The prosperity of the boom was revealed to have been a mirage and, as our historical conveyor belt of mass emigration and domestic hardship juddered back to life, there was the collective sense that we’d all been taken for a ride. The status quo has never quite recovered. Ireland has spent much of the past decade dealing with the crash’s ripple effects, engaging in an intense dialogue with itself over social arrangements once perceived as “natural”. Received national myths, canonical cultural artefacts, previously unimpeachable historical figures, norms of gender and sexuality, etc.

– all these things are now up for question.

The one theme underpinning these disparate developments is the lack of deference to previously authoritative centres of power. This has found expression in every strand of Irish society, including our literature.

Enter Kevin Barry.

If one book could be held responsible for rewilding the literary landscape, it’s his debut short story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms. Published in 2007, Barry’s work was an arson attack on the genteel complacency of Celtic Tiger literature. In a sea of nostalgia-bait novels, Barry’s stories were utterly contemporary; he opened them with lines like “The way it is in this country, someone sees you out walking a hill and you’re a fucking eejit.”

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His paragraphs had a chin-out swagger, punkishly unburdened by the stodgy weight of literary heritage. Stylistically, their lack of deference to either the market or the classical model of Irish story-writing sparked an imaginative wildfire, one that tore through Ireland’s literary horizon and cleared a space into which all subsequent writers of note have ventured forth.

But here it’s important to dig deeper, beneath the magic of Barry’s writing itself. If I could communicate one fact to outsiders about the Irish literary ecosystem, it would be this: it’s a convenient myth to believe Irish writers are born and not made. Barry’s debut only came into being thanks to the efforts of Declan Meade, the visionary editor behind the Stinging Fly literary journal. And the Stinging Fly could only have published it with the funding it receives from the Irish Arts Council. Writing is magic, yes.

But magic needs an infrastructure within which to flourish. This is what Ireland currently offers its writers, and that is why we have a literary boom.

The current wave of Irish literature is the flowering of an ecosystem carefully tended by literary journals and magazines

like the Stinging Fly, Gorse, the Dublin Review, Banshee, Holy Show, Tolka and the Tangerine. These journals are led by the idiosyncratic editorial visions of their founders: there’s none of the “in-crowd” cliquiness of the London journals; none of the MFA-industrial-complex that characterises the US, where you need to blow tens of thousands of dollars on a creative writing degree just to submit a short story. With Irish journals, there are no connections or qualifications required. It really is this simple: you submit your work; if the editor likes it, you’re in.

However, none of this would be possible without the funding that comes from the Irish Arts Council. Funding is key for writers: I was only able to complete my novel Kala thanks to one of the Council’s bursaries. But it’s even more important for the infrastructure of journals and magazines, indie publishers, resource organisations and literary festivals that take place in Ireland all year round.

It’s this funding that allows for the maverick, who-cares-about-the-sales sensibility through which dynamic and individual works may flourish. Today, the fruits of this sort of long-term support are all around: Ireland is a small country, very much on the periphery in terms of geopolitical heft, but we’re increasingly at the centre of English-language fiction.

And this is great, no doubt. But being at the centre brings its own dangers.

The Unbearable Brightness of the Zeitgeist There’s an Irish word, foiseach, which refers to grass at the edges of a field which remains inaccessible to mowing machines. This grass is typically rich and thick, full of vital force. One of the reasons Irish writing thrives is precisely because it’s the foiseach; we’re not the UK,

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we’re not the US. We’re on the periphery – removed from the brittle orthodoxies of the London and New York literati – and great things can happen when you’re not trying to be the centre.

So let’s address the Sally Rooney effect.

First of all, a disclaimer: I love Sally Rooney’s work, without reservation. I think she deserves all of her success, and I think the brouhaha around that success has only obscured how good the work itself actually is. But if we look at the forces that nurtured her work, and the very different forces now seeking to capitalise on it, it might illuminate something about the current hype around Irish writing.

Rooney is a great example of a writer who was nourished by the ecosystem I have described. Her first publications were in the Stinging Fly. She was discovered by her agent thanks to an essay she wrote for the Dublin Review. When she first achieved success, she paid it forward by taking on the role of fiction editor with the Stinging Fly, giving individualised and encouraging feedback to hundreds of fiction submissions.

But her success has changed the international appetite for Irish writing. The big boys of corporate publishing have blundered into Eden and started trying to name all the animals. Every new Irish female writer bears the burden of being “the next Sally Rooney”. I know many of these writers. Their work is idiosyncratic; their voices and concerns are unique. Often, their only point of comparison with Rooney is that they are female, under 40, and Irish. But they all get marketed as though their books are Pepsi to Rooney’s Coke: if you liked that, you’ll love this!

Such techniques fulfil a target on a publisher’s sales graph, but do a disservice to readers – many of whom scorn the new writer because their work fails to reflect the disingenuous marketing – and can prove devastating to the mental and artistic health of the writers.

THE NEW IRISH WRITING

Perhaps the weirdest thing about this trend is that it pretends that Irish writing is reducible to a known quantity when the reality is that the writing is vital precisely because of its irreducible variety. So this is where I’d like to leave off: the work itself.

If I had to say what characterises the best of it, it would be an independence of spirit, a refusal to court the literary authorities, and an indifference to imperatives of fashion, marketplace, genre, received narrative grammar, and more.

But does this illuminate anything unique to new Irish writing? There’s nothing new about this: Joyce looked at the cultural orthodoxies of his time and famously declared non serviam (“I will not serve”) more than a century ago. And there’s nothing particularly “Irish” about such iconoclasm, either; I see the same riotous spirit – playful heresies of form, voice, and subject matter – in non-Irish writers like Eliza Clark and Sheena Patel, David Keenan and Adelle Stripe, Rebecca Watson and Graeme Macrae Burnet.

What distinguishes Ireland is not the doubtless quality of its literary output, but the opportunities afforded to the largest number of voices by its literary infra-

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COLIN RECOMMENDS ● CITY OF BOHANE (2011)

by Kevin Barry A visionary knife-fight of a novel in which sharp-dressed lunatics stalk the calypso-soundtracked streets of Bohane, settling old scores, yearning for the past, fighting for their survival.

Barry’s dazzling language, sentence by sentence, makes for one of those reading experiences you’ll never forget.

structure. The current media hype is only foam on the surface of a mighty ocean; great work will continue to thrive beyond this spotlight because the ecosystem is designed to sustain the work itself.

If you want to be even closer to the coalface of that new work, and get an early glimpse of future greats, order the latest issue of any of the Arts Council-funded magazines I have mentioned. You’re guaranteed to find something that will lead you to unknown treasures, and the unknown is what great writing, Irish or otherwise, is all about.

Colin Walsh’s debut novel, Kala, is available now from Backstory.

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● THE GLORIOUS HERESIES (2015)

by Lisa McInerney McInerney masterfully weaves together a dazzling cast of characters in this polyphonic chronicle of Cork city’s underbelly.

This novel combines linguistic verve and wrenching twists of fate with a plot that pulses with illicit nocturnal rhythms. It’s angry, sexy, violent, funny, and one hell of a good time. ● SOLAR BONES (2016)

by Mike McCormack Disgracefully neglected by the publishing mainstream for years, Mike McCormack was rescued from obscurity by the ingenious twowoman team of Tramp Press. Possibly the Irish novel of the past decade, by the Irish indie publisher of the past decade, Solar Bones is about the delicate structures holding everything together – a man, a marriage, a heart, a village, the cosmos itself. A genuine masterpiece. ● YOUTH (2023)

by Kevin Curran A novel following four teenagers in Balbriggan, Ireland’s most diverse town. It’s likely this novel will come to be seen as a watershed in Irish literature, the moment when the language and lives of the ‘New Irish’ first took centre stage in a novel. If you’re looking for Irish writing at the cutting edge of the present moment, this is the place.

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Lights! Camera! Auction!

The secret diary of a book-to-TV scout Another week, another pile of books: some old, some new. What binds them is their potential to be special, if not on the page, then on the screen. So with my iPad loaded with manuscripts, I get to work…on the sofa.

As a book-to-screen scout, my job is to give producers an idea of whether what I’ve read is worth their time. I read everything – fiction and fact, fantasy and romance, period and contemporary – to pick out stories, people and places I think will interest an audience.

This Monday morning I have a detailed chapter summary to begin, which I have told the client I can deliver by the end of Tuesday. By 9am, I fear I may have over-promised.

With my back against the wall, I decide to distract myself with an online game of Catan, and it’s at this point that an email comes through. It’s another scout asking if I might be able to read something for Friday. “Absolutely!” I say. Moments later, she revises that to Wednesday. Apparently the book has “suddenly got quite hot”. Responding with another enthusiastic “Absolutely!”, I concede that it’s probably best to do some work.

Up early on Tuesday, I start with coffee and a spreadsheet – a log of which books have been “optioned”, and by whom. Many are by established authors, and even more are about policemen in unhappy marriages, but it’s titles like Nicola’s Dinan’s Bellies that

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interest me most: relationship dramas that, without a source material, would struggle to break through the cutthroat TV commissioning process.

Literary “intellectual property” has had a meteoric rise. What could once have been optioned for a few thousand pounds now goes for five figures. Auctions take certain deals far beyond that.

It’s good news for authors — at least those lucky few whose work makes it to the screen.

I set aside Wednesday for the buzzy book, which I’m bemused to find tricky to get into. Knowing something is getting attention plays on your mind, especially if you don’t think the praise is warranted.

Thursday brings a research project for a broadcaster with a brief so broad I could probably send in some of my own handwritten poetry. Later, I speak to a producer about yesterday’s book, which his company has bid for. He agrees with my assessment, but as ever in TV, once word spreads that one of the big-hitters is interested in bidding, things all go rather Emperor’s New Clothes. Word on the street is that it goes for seven figures. Not bad for meh.

A nice romantic comedy rounds off the week. One of the best things about being a scout is being asked to read something I wouldn’t pick out myself but end up loving. This is definitely one of those: it’s fun, it’s heartfelt, it’s a little bit silly. A bit like this job, really.

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SEARCHING FOR

MR WRITE Words BO FRANKLIN

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Illustration SAMUEL NYHOLM

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WRITING CAN MAKE FOR A SOLITARY EXISTENCE, HUNCHED OVER A KEYBOARD: YOU DON’T OFTEN SEE AN AUTHOR ON LOVE ISLAND. BUT WHAT IF YOU DID? TONGUE FIRMLY IN CHEEK, BACKSTORY PLAYS CUPID. SALLY, 32, FROM CASTLEBAR IN IRELAND

MEETS

YUVAL, 47, FROM KIRYAT ATA IN ISRAEL

on Yuval:

on Sally:

What were you hoping for?

I don’t know what I was hoping for.

What were you hoping for?

About 4 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. Organisms belonging to the Homo sapiens species interacted with one another to create history. At some point in history, Homo sapiens invented a South African chain of Portuguese-inspired chicken restaurants, without which I would not have met Sally in Brixton on a Tuesday evening. I was hoping for a better understanding of how we got here, and also where to get the cutlery after I’d ordered.

Love.

Love?

I’m smirking now. I have a contempt for anyone naive enough to talk of wanting love. My ears feel hot. I give a short, unhappy laugh. Sorry.

First impressions?

Not my usual type (boyish, manly, brooding, hunky, sensitive, kind, sexy, brooding, INFJ). His glasses would probably get smashed on a GAA pitch.

SEARCHING FOR MR WRITE

First impressions?

Sexual attraction has an important biological role. Animals are said to belong to the same species if they mate with each other and give birth to fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys have a recent common ancestor and share many physical characteristics. But they show little sexual interest in one another. Seeing Sally for the first time was not unlike a horse meeting a donkey. That is to say, I prefer blondes.

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JACKIE, DECEASED, FROM LONDON

MEETS

JILLY, 86, FROM RUTSHIRE

on Jilly:

on Jackie:

What did you talk about?

Lust. Passion. Bonking. How today’s men don’t know what a woman really wants anymore—a good seeing to!

What did you talk about?

I had hoped to discuss the importance of intersectionality in feminism, whether our generation has done enough to redress the power imbalances in society, and what it means to be truly liberated as a woman. But she seemed fixated on the crotch of every man who walked up to the ice-cream station.

Most awkward moment?

When the waiter (a randy Latin stud brandishing a nine-inch meat feast with a steaming hot stuffed crust) approached our table, and we both reached for his ample bulge.

Good table manners?

Darling I have no idea, I was too distracted by what she was doing to me under the table.

Most awkward moment?

When the non-binary waiter tried to serve my pizza and she pounced on them, the poor love. What decade does she think she’s in, the 1970s?

Good table manners?

Appalling. She repeatedly tried to put her hand up my leg despite my asking her not to, and her ghastly leopard-print nail extensions laddered my tights.

AGATHA, DECEASED, FROM DEVON

MEETS

RICHARD, 52, FROM ESSEX

on Richard:

on Agatha:

Would you introduce Richard to your friends?

Unquestionably. I have it all planned out.

He would reach the manor house first, having taken the sleeper from London after he finished filming his little quiz.

Soon after the major would arrive, then Miss Gallant (the Hollywood starlet), Dr Woodrow (Miss Gallant’s jealous former husband), Monsieur Chevaux (her young lover) and Herr Schmidt (the renowned art dealer). And Miss Marple of course. And so the stage would be set.

Would you introduce Richard to your friends?

Yes, and I have very famous friends, many of whom you will have seen on my primetime BBC quiz show House of Games. Grace Dent would love Agatha, as I’m sure would Lawrence LlewelynBowen, Martin Lewis CBE, Melinda Messenger DBE and of course Alexander Armstrong, my best friend.

Describe Agatha in three words.

In a fugue.

Describe Richard in three words.

Tall. Derivative. Pointless.

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What do you think Richard made of you?

Made of whom? Me, Mrs Tressa Neele of Cape Town, South Africa? I have no idea.

Who is this Richard? Why am I in a Côte Brasserie in Harrogate? Who ordered this steak frites?

What do you think Agatha made of you?

I’m sure she found me energising company.

I told my famous Tony Robinson anecdote (of course), and our little grey cells sparked over potential crime capers. In fact I’m thinking of writing a book about a charming quiz host and a wily crime writer who team up to solve a crime in the Harrogate branch of Côte Brasserie. It will be called “The Moules Marinière Murder”.

BRAM, UNDEAD, FROM DUBLIN

ALAN, 89, FROM LEEDS

MEETS

on Alan: Did you go on somewhere?

Alas, I tried to invite him back to my ancestral home but he, being an oldfashioned type, insisted that we part ways after Wahaca.

And did you kiss?

A count never kisses and tells, but there may have been some nuzzling before he got on the number 53 bus.

Marks out of 10?

9. My only complaint is his order of a revoltingly garlicky quesadilla.

Would you meet again?

I hope so, ideally on a very dark night.

SEARCHING FOR MR WRITE

on Bram: Did you go on somewhere?

Well, no, though he was very insistent on going to The Castle (I presume the name of a pub) for a nightcap.

And did you kiss?

I wouldn’t call it a kiss. He lunged for my neck, and actually drew blood. The only other man who’s ever pounced on me with such ferocity is Dudley Moore when I told him that I thought Peter Cook a superior wit.

Marks out of 10?

1. Even by the standards of most men in London these days, he was monstrous.

Would you meet again?

There is a Thomas Hardy poem, “The Convergence of the Twain”, about the unavoidable coming together of the iceberg and the Titanic. Similarly I feel drawn to Mr Stoker, and I’ve relented to having supper with him at Vapiano next Thursday. Maggie Smith raves about their tiramisu.

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Words by JESSICA ANDREWS

It begins with

It begins with our bodies. Skin on skin. My first novel, Saltwater, opens with these words, which refer to the intimate bodily relationship between a mother and baby, yet they also capture a wider preoccupation of my work. Writing is a method of slowing down the world; it allows me to take a particular moment or emotion between my fingers and prise it apart. It is a mode of unravelling a tightly coiled

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question, and when I press my fingers into points of tension and discomfort, they always lead me back to the flesh.

When I first started writing, this compulsion felt natural. My own body was at the centre of my relationship to the world, in all its fraught contradictions. The protagonists of my novels twisted their bodies into uncomfortable shapes, elbowing their way into spaces that were too small

BACKSTORY

for them. They rubbed fake tan into their calves, scraped their knees on gravel, drew lipstick across their mouths, cycled through city streets in rotten summers and ate tinned peaches straight from the can with seawater drying in their hair, sucking salt and oil from their fingertips. They asked questions about need, belonging, abundance and denial. They wondered about shame. My answers were often troubling and inconclusive, but they returned to the body again and again.

Over time, I began to ask myself why the body repeatedly occupied the centre of my work. Of course, the flesh plays a vital role in our daily lives, yet for my characters, the body had become something much larger, dictating their thoughts and emotions. It seemed to demonstrate something key about the complex intersection of class and gender, and how this shaped the way I lived. I started to question the effects of these social constructs upon the body, and the ways in which they alter our experiences of the world.

Like myself, both protagonists of Saltwater and Milk Teeth, my second novel, are young women who grew up in working-class communities in the north-east of England during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their hometowns of Sunderland and Bishop Auckland are struggling to find new identities in the wake of the devastating impact of deindustrialisation.

These women feel a sense of hopelessness as they watch endless fields and housing estates through the bus window, dreaming of other places.

Their formative years are set against the New Labour government, Britpop and “Cool Britannia”, which offer the false hope of social mobility. My protagonists watch working-class celebrities like the Spice Girls and David Beckham gain increasing visibility and power. They read fashion magazines and trawl through strangers’ Myspace pages, ogling pictures of Kate Moss wrapped in a Union Jack and

Pete Doherty running through the streets of Whitechapel singing about love on the dole. They are convinced that real life, with its neon sex-shop lights and sweaty dancefloors, is happening elsewhere, and yet is almost within their reach. They simply need to work hard enough to escape their own lives and reinvent themselves as better people.

They grow up in a culture which fails to address the political problems that have caused fractures within their communities. They are sold the neoliberal message that working-class people should seek to improve their own lives and gain access to money, culture and opportunity through hard work and self-improvement. In Saltwater, when my protagonist, Lucy, is asked why she wants to go to university in London, she says: “I want to be at the centre of things”. She is keenly aware that Sunderland, the heart of her own world, is deemed insignificant by the rest of the country.

My protagonists’ teenage years are sticky with the glamour of reality TV and the cult of overnight celebrity, where working-class women such as Katie Price, Jade Goody and Coleen Rooney achieve wealth and fame as glamour models, reality stars or footballers’ wives. Tabloid magazines treat these women with contempt, scrutinising their lives and criticising their bodies. The unnamed protagonist of Milk Teeth observes: Celebrity magazines tore apart reality TV stars on the beach in their bikinis, circling their bellies in fluorescent rings of shame.

‘Jade’s kebab and pizza flab!’ the covers screamed at us as we queued in the newsagent for packets of Space Raiders. ‘Kerry’s shocker belly bulge!’

These outwardly successful women serve as inspiration for a generation of working-class girls who dream of changing their lives. However, their bodies are portrayed as grotesque, and my teenage protagonists absorb the message that

IT BEGINS WITH OUR BODIES

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beauty, so often equated with thinness, is a form of self-improvement which can help them to attain better lives.

Both my protagonists leave family, friends and familiarity behind, in order to “improve” themselves and find new opportunities in centres of finance, education and culture. In Saltwater, Lucy moves to London for university and encounters affluence. She goes to a party in a South Kensington mansion owned by a prince and flirts with the dazzling cast of artists and bankers who drink in the East End pub where she works. She understands her own class difference for the first time and is made to feel ashamed of her north-east accent, fake tan and false eyelashes. Due to the messages she absorbed in her teenage years about “bettering” herself and changing her body, she feels this sense of shame and dislocation as a bodily sensation, perceiving her skin as physically different from that of her peers: Still, I am wrong. There is another kind of skin that I did not know about. It is posh girl skin.

Expensive and gold. Look how it glows. It is lustrous and shiny where I am mottled.

Look at my bruises, my scratches, my scars.

Those girls do not have these things.

My protagonists struggle to keep up with their privileged peers and the shame this provokes manifests physically. Their bodies become symbols of the people and places they come from, reminders of everything they have been told they should leave behind. They attempt to escape their flesh through drinking and dancing in unruly pubs and clubs, seeking transcendence in sex and denial. They are always hungry, lacking food, sleep and emotional nourishment. The difficulties these women encounter are produced by the patriarchal class system and the sense of dislocation they feel at leaving their communities behind. Despite this, neoliberal capitalism teaches them that they must change themselves, instead of the societal structures which bind them.

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The body is knitted through my novels like muscle and sinew, holding everything together. Sentences ooze and drip, images are saturated in oil and sweat, landscapes leak and bleed. My characters are always in conflict with their physicality; they want to plunge their bodies into churning water, suck prawns from their shells, run their fingers across strangers’ skin, feel themselves in the world. Simultaneously, they resent their bodies for representing everything they deem to be “wrong” with them. They long to escape the constant maw of need inside them, in fear that it will never be filled. They are desperate for physical sensation and yet they also wish to detach themselves from their bodies, to rise above their unfulfilled desires and become weightless and still. They want to eschew their skin, which they are led to believe is the source of their problems, and yet they encounter their bodies everywhere, in landscapes, relationships and in the language of the novels itself.

My work cannot capture the multitude of ways in which working-class women move through society, yet I hope that by examining the relationship between class, gender and the body, I might offer a truth about the way I have lived. I want to create a space for my readers to connect with their own bodies; to feel hungry for sensation and deserving of pleasure. I hope that my depiction of working-class women’s bodies deems them worthy of serious attention and care. I want to take the shame and self-loathing that is cut through our blood and transform it into language, so we can offer it back to the world.

Jessica Andrews's second novel, Milk Teeth, is available now from Backstory.

BACKSTORY

ALICE WINN

Women without men My WWI novel, In Memoriam, focuses on the wartime experience of a group of young men at public school, so there isn’t much space for women. Yet one of my favourite characters is one of the only women: the protagonist’s sister, Maud. Her brother’s friend, Sidney Ellwood, is what might be termed a benign sexist: he thinks women are sweet, innocent, and fragile. He would like to protect them. Maud, who is a nurse in a war hospital, finds his letters from the front frustratingly euphemistic.

Like Maud, plenty of women understood how terrifying the war was.

Vera Brittain describes the torturous dread she felt on the ship to Malta, expecting to be torpedoed and drowned.

She worked endless hours tending to wounds near the front. When the armistice bells rang, she did not celebrate: her brother, her fiancé, and two close friends had been killed. She continued about her day, “a lonely survivor drowning in black waves of memory”.

The war left over a million “surplus women”: girls who statistically would never marry because the men they might have settled with had been killed.

Learning about these women recontextualized books I had loved as a child: all those maiden aunts in Agatha Christie stories. Miss Jean Brodie. They were everywhere: the government encouraged them to emigrate to the colonies, where there were more men.

I remember a story from Virginia

ISSUE 1

Nicholson’s excellent book Singled Out about an upper-class girl who went to a party. She got dressed up in evening clothes, but when she arrived it was only a girl’s night. She was disappointed and annoyed. Then, she spotted a tailcoat… a man. The only survivor in his social circle; the only man left available to this large group of single young women. Women would write to newspaper agony aunts about the problem of sexual frustration—masturbation was believed to be bad for your health.

They would receive awkward, helpless answers advising them to throw their energy into charity work.

The shortage of men created freedom among women, however. Lesbian partnerships thrived—women could spend their whole lives together without raising suspicion. It became necessary to grant women a greater degree of independence because there simply were not enough men to support them.

By the thirties, feminists were astonished to see how much progress they had made in their aims.

I doubt I would have the rights I have if it were not for WWI. This troubles me—it sounds so close to saying that all the suffering was somehow worth it—but sometimes it comforts me as well. Perhaps the worst, most frightening disasters of our own time may someday be seen as the indirect cause of some great good we cannot yet imagine.

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Words: Katie Hale

OPENING UP THE BOOKS What does a book pay?

£20K

£15K

£10K

£5K

2016/17

2017/18

2018/19

2019/20

It’s a well-worn trope that writers live in garrets, wearing fingerless gloves and subsisting on toast and instant noodles. Either that or, once published, we are made for life – like Jessica Fletcher, the novelist in Murder, She Wrote, off on swanky holidays paid for by her agent.

While there are extremes of wealth and poverty in many industries – and it’s true author income is decreasing – there is still some money in books. But there’s a culture of not talking about it. So, let’s talk more about the earning potential and earning limitations of a book. Because how can we make an industry more accessible if those of us inside it don’t talk about its practicalities? How can we ensure fair payment and varied income streams for authors if discussing money

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WHITE GHOSTS IS PUBLISHED

MY NAME IS MONSTER IS PUBLISHED

£25K

MY NAME IS MONSTER WHITE GHOSTS

2020/21

2021/22

2022/23

2023/24

on a personal level is taboo?

So here goes…

My debut novel, My Name is Monster, was published by Canongate four years ago. Since I started writing it in 2016, it has earned me £40,203: a respectable amount, though not enough to live on for seven years – or even for the three years between first sentence and publication.

Future income streams could include adaptation rights, such as for film or stage, and extract printing, but so far, the bulk of this income has come from the advance (which reflects the fact it was a World Rights deal, and means I don’t get any extra when a foreign publisher buys translation rights – or at least, not until I’ve “earned out” that initial advance, meaning the publisher has recouped their

BACKSTORY

MY NAME IS MONSTER

WHITE GHOSTS

Total: £37,743

Total: £18,131

Advance

Grants

* Not to scale

46.2% 87%

£32,799

Other sales

Events 8%

1.3%

£3,005

Library loans 1.4%

20.3%

£468

Events

£400

13.7%

Residencies £546

1%

investment). Other income has come from workshops and events, from personal sales (of copies I’ve purchased at an author discount and sold on individually), and from money collected from copying fees and library loans.

But my debut poetry collection, White Ghosts, published by Nine Arches earlier this year, tells a different story. While workshop and events money is not dissimilar (£2,480 compared with £3,005 for my novel), here the advance and personal sales are the lowest income streams, totalling just £184. This is not uncommon: poetry advances tend to be very low, when they exist at all. But there are other ways a poet can earn money for their work, such as prizes and publication fees for individual poems.

Add that to the fact that, with one

OPENING UP THE BOOKS

Individual poems

£525

Copying fees 1.2%

£8,373

£3,680

Residencies 18.8%

£3,414

Advance 0.5%

£2,480

£100

Other sales 0.5%

£84

book already published, I was able to access more work-in-progress grants and funded residencies, and it makes sense for White Ghosts’ income to be more varied, if less overall.

It was more consistent, too. I started writing both books in 2016 and they both first earned income two years later. But, aside from the lockdown year of 2020-21, White Ghosts has continued to pay fairly consistently across five years, compared with two for My Name is Monster, largely due to the greater variety of income streams.

Perhaps a writer reading this might discover an income stream they hadn’t considered for their book. Perhaps another might inform me of one in turn. Or perhaps we can just push the door of this conversation a tiny bit further ajar.

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WORDS&WINE SMALL WORLDS

NORMAL RULES DON’T APPLY

by Kate Atkinson

by Jennifer Saint

Backstory says: The most beautiful and musical novel about familial and romantic love, set across three summers in south London. For Stephen, dancing is the one thing that can solve life’s problems.

Backstory says: Atkinson mixes delightfully real characters with a light fairytale touch. A talking horse gives betting tips, a magic Queen grants (conditional) wishes, and someone watches their own autopsy.

Backstory says: This cutting Greek mythology retelling spends as much time with grapes and wine under the Cretian sun as it does doing justice to Ariadne, a woman so wronged by the famous Theseus.

Charlie chooses: BEAUJOLAIS NOUVEAU

Charlie chooses: JF COUTELOU ‘VIN DES AMIS’ 2022

Charlie chooses: ILIANA MALIHIN VIDIANO ‘OLD VINES AMYGDALOS’ 2021, CRETE

Having shaken off its naff image of old, Beaujolais Nouveau is being appreciated again for exactly what it is: party juice.

This is the very first fermented grape juice from the most recent vintage, given to vineyard workers at the end of a long harvest to celebrate the achievements of the summer and to brace oneself for the winter ahead. These bottles can officially only be opened from the third Thursday of November, and the wine is pure joy, lower in alcohol volume and consumed in government-defying quantities.

It will make you sing, dance and revel with people you love.

Jean-Francois, known as Jeff (JF), is an experimental and experiential winemaker. Labels come and go and blends change at his discretion. The wines are full of energy, challenging and unconventional, yet with a deep understanding of the land and the terroir he is from. A secret passage in the winery leads to his distillation room, where he makes all kinds of crazy eau de vie and grappa. You never know which way he is going to turn but it is always a joy to follow him.

Iliana makes wine from the beautiful, ancient bush vines of Vidiano grapes on the island of Crete. Like Ariadne, she was recently wronged by the gods as severe wildfires ravaged the vineyards in summer 2022. She’s not been perturbed, even turning to distilling to deal with some very smoke-damaged grapes, and it looks like the new vintages from 2023 onwards will be better than ever. This would surely be approved by the god of wine, Ariadne’s husband, Dionysus.

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

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ARIADNE

BACKSTORY

At Backstory, we reckon the only thing better than another book is a glass of wine to go with the first book. We challenged Charlie Blightman from our wine suppliers Keeling Andrew & Co to find the perfect boozy accompaniments to some of our house favourites.

CURSED BREAD

A WAITER IN PARIS

by Edward Chisholm

by Lawrence Osborne

Backstory says: A French town is gripped by obsession, a woman is poisoned with desire, and a string of strange events hang in the air.

Sophie’s writing is mesmerising and oozes intrigue.

Backstory says: The food is revolting and so are the chefs in this memoir of one young Englishman’s attempt to hold down a job in a brasserie despite speaking no French. Disgusting and utterly gripping.

Backstory says: A hedonistic expats’ weekend in Morocco goes awry when a guest runs over a young boy. This novel bursts with sin and sun.

Charlie chooses: MACLE CHATEAU CHALON, JURA

Charlie chooses: LOUIS ROEDERER ‘CRISTAL’ NV

Charlie chooses: A CLAPE CORNAS 2014, N RHONE

This style of wine, known as vin jaune, is truly unique. Where most wine barrels are “topped up” to keep the wines from oxidising, this is deliberately allowed to oxidise, and a veil of yeast develops on top of the wine that imparts an extremely complex array of nuts, honey and yeast… a “cursed bread”, if you will. To make up for the shortfall these wines are bottled in a “Clavelin”, a uniquely shaped 62cl bottle. This is an extreme and singular wine that needs to be approached with an open mind. One for the dreamers and the hedonists.

A waiter’s life is never easy: the long hours, little sleep and hard partying takes its toll. But every now and then they experience (sort of) what the punters on the other side of the swing door will be drinking. The pinnacle of Champagne and its overpriced, overhyped decadence is Cristal. I like to imagine the waiters back of house, glugging this from the bottle during service, after the millionaires on table 5 left a halfempty bottle behind because they needed to get to L’Arc before the coke dealers ran out.

Its exquisite perfume of violets and neroli are enchanting and glamorous, while underneath it is a brooding heap of dark berry fruits and meaty pepperiness.

Once humble, the wines from Clape now go for hundreds of pounds a bottle, meaning they are beyond the reach of most of us, and would likely grace the tables of the rich and famous, but only those with good taste and discerning palates.

by Sophie Mackintosh

WORDS&WINE

THE FORGIVEN

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–––––––––––– DECOLONISING THE KITCHEN –––––––––––– After decades of cultural appropriation and neglect from publishers, Black and brown cookbook authors are at long last finding a seat at the (kitchen) table

–––––––––––– Words: Susan Low

What are cookbooks for? Getting dinner on the table is one obvious answer, but a cookbook that’s worth its salt is so much more than a collection of meal-making instructions. For the reader, a cookbook can be like tapping into another person’s edible memory bank of dishes and experiences that can be recreated, cooked and shared.

For the author, writing one can be about discovering or recapturing traditions, or making sense of where you belong. “Displacement breeds its own kind of hunger,” observes Mayukh Sen in his book Tastemakers, about seven immigrant women cooks who changed the face and

24

the taste of American food. Or, as African American culinary historian Michael W Twitty puts it in The Cooking Gene, his ode to the culinary history of the American South, “There is no chef without a homeland… Your plate is your flag.” Writing about food can be one way of defining and connecting – to a time, a place or to other people.

“Those who tell the stories rule society,” goes a saying attributed to Plato. The inverse is equally true: those who rule society get to tell the stories – and that’s a truism that may help to explain the relative dearth of cookbooks written by Black

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Patricia Niven

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Riaz Phillips ––––––––––––––––– –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Melissa Thompson –––––––––––––– –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

authors in the English-speaking world. It’s no secret that the literary establishment is predominantly white, and that hegemony comes with consequences. In The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, Toni Tipton-Martin writes: “In that span of over two centuries, an estimated 100,000 recipe collections made it into print – but only 200, give or take a few, were credited to Black cooks and writers”.

This rather depressing statistic comes as no surprise to southeast London-based food writer Melissa Thompson, author of Motherland: A Jamaican Cookbook, published last year. Thompson was born in Dorset to a Maltese mother and a Jamaican father; her paternal grandparents moved to northeast England in the mid-1950s, part of the Windrush generation. “These statistics mirror every other aspect of society where Black and brown people are denied recognition because of racism, be it outright or institutional,” she says. “For example, the food of the American South is Black food, and yet for centuries Black people weren’t given the recognition or recompense. And in the UK, so many food outlets, restaurants, publi-

cations and cookbooks riff off Black and brown ingenuity and always have done.”

Thompson believes there are signs that things are changing – albeit slowly.

“It’s harder to just take from a community without giving something back,” she says.

“A lot of that is to do with the reaction following George Floyd’s murder – that massively changed the mindset and built on what a lot of people had been trying to say and achieve for years. But I don’t think people should get too complacent or excited. These racist attitudes were established over many centuries so it will take decades, if not longer, to undo the damage.”

Sobering though that may be, on both sides of the Atlantic, food writing is being used by a growing list of Black authors and media owners as a way of undoing some damage. Space on bookshelves is being made for new stories, or old stories told from different perspectives that put people of African and Caribbean heritage front and centre – and in control of disseminating those stories.

In the US, that list includes influential Black authors such as Tipton-Martin and Twitty. It also includes Bryant Terry,

DECOLONISING THE KITCHEN

25

Dave Brown

a chef, food justice activist and author of, among others, Black Food. Stephen Satterfield, founder of food media company Whetstone, puts global food origins and culture at the centre of his company’s podcasts and print magazines. Satterfield is also host of ‘High on the Hog’, the eye-opening Netflix docu-series based on the book of the same name by lauded food historian Jessica B Harris. The book and series trace the roots and culinary contributions of African American people to US culture.

In the UK, Thompson and others are using food as a means of telling their stories and changing the narrative, too – often taking on the effects of colonialism and bias in the process. Thompson first travelled to Jamaica as an adult, although the stories her father told her as a child – particularly those surrounding food – transported her (mentally at least) from England’s south coast to her father’s childhood home. Motherland is about the Jamaican journey that satisfied her yearning.

Thompson does not shy away from telling readers about Jamaica’s harsh

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Maria Bradford –––––––––––––––– –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

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historical realities – the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and indentured servitude, and the long-lasting legacy of colonialism. “In Motherland, I couldn’t tell the history of Jamaica’s food without telling the difficult parts”, she says. “For anyone who bought the book to just cook Jamaican food, there is an opportunity for them to also learn of the island’s history.

Getting the story in through the backdoor, if you like.”

She describes Jamaican cuisine as “a beautiful product of this violent chapter in world history” and the narrative is brought to life with recipes for Jamaican classics such as jerk chicken and peanut & sweet potato stew. London figures prominently, too. Brixton resident Maureen Tyne, who grew up in Jamaica, has contributed a recipe for cow foot, seasoned with pimento (allspice) and paprika and sharpened with vinegar. Maureen operates out of her home kitchen in Railton Road. To find her, “just look for the jerk pans”.

London-born author Riaz Phillips traces his family roots from Jamaica to Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago and beyond.

“There is a joke that Europe colonised the world for its spices only to barely use them,” he quips in his new book East Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from the Hidden Caribbean. Phillips’s debut cookbook, West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica, won the Jane Grigson Trust Award for first-time cookbook authors. His follow-up shifts the focus from Jamaica to other parts of the Caribbean: Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana and Suriname.

An eloquent writer, he unpicks the region’s strands of influence from Africa, China and India in dishes such as metemgee (Guyanese root vegetable stew) and Pomtajer (the Surinamese take on shepherd’s pie), enticing readers into an alluring and complex food culture. Some of London’s provisioners get a look in too: a recipe for plait bread references Mixed Blessings Caribbean bakery in south Lon-

BACKSTORY

don, and Phillips namechecks Roti Stop in Hackney, where he perfected his roti-making technique.

Maria Bradford was born in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown and now makes her home in Kent, where she runs catering company Shwen Shwen (Krio for ‘fancy’). Her debut book Sweet Salone: Recipes from the Heart of Sierra Leone was published earlier this year. Bradford details her country’s cuisine as a coming together of pan-African and European traditions and influences – ‘Afro-fusion’ she calls it.

The narrative reveals Sierra Leone’s complex and often painful history, including colonialism and civil war. Like her counterparts in the US, Bradford has an activist’s heart; she’s using her platform as a writer to call for improvement in the treatment of women in traditional societies. Bradford probes these topics gently, using food as a medium. “Food is a lens for culture”, she writes, “and you have to taste culture to understand it”.

Cookbooks can tell readers a lot more than how to prevent a soggy bottom or cook a creditable casserole. As Melissa Thompson puts it, “Food is so intertwined in a place’s history that it makes it the perfect vehicle for retelling the good and the bad”. To open the cover of a good cookbook is to open the mind to possibilities – to discovering a new place, a new taste – and a new perspective, too.

The red snapper recipe is extracted from Motherland

by Melissa Thompson, which is available now at Backstory.

DECOLONISING THE KITCHEN

THYME STUFFED SNAPPER Serves 2-4

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar 2 tbsp water 1 tsp sugar 1/2 red onion, finely sliced 1 red pepper, finely sliced 4 tomatoes, sliced olive or rapeseed oil 2–4 whole snapper (sea bream is a good alternative), gutted and cleaned 2 spring onions, green and white parts separated, finely sliced lengthways 1 large bunch of thyme 5cm piece of ginger, finely sliced into matchsticks sea salt and freshly ground black pepper –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– In a saucepan, heat the vinegar with the measured water and add the sugar and a pinch of salt.

Pour this over the red onion and red pepper in a bowl, scrunch and leave to cool.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Divide the tomatoes between each serving plate, or on a platter, top with the pickled red onion and red pepper and drizzle with oil. Set aside.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Divide the spring onions, thyme sprigs and ginger between the fish and stuff inside the cavities. Add pepper and season with salt.

Prepare a steamer with water and bring to the boil. Lay the fish on top, close the lid and steam for 10 minutes. Carefully peel a bit of flesh away from the bone to check it’s cooked through.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Carefully lift the fish and place on to the pile of tomatoes, pepper and onion. Serve.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– MELISSA THOMPSON

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I LEFT MY HEART IN CROYDON

28

Words and pictures: AMEENA ROJEE

BACKSTORY

Once upon a time, Croydon was full to the brim with red gold. Deep in colour and divine in taste, red gold is more commonly known as saffron – the most expensive spice in the world. This “red gold” has on occasion sold for more than three times the price of actual gold, and it’s thought to have once been cultivated in abundance in Croydon.

Yes, that Croydon. London’s much-maligned southern borough. Most will say it’s ugly, grey, and concrete, with deluded aspirations of being a city.

“The most crime-ridden borough.” I can tell you it’s not even in the top ten, babes. If it’s one of London’s mostest anything, it’s one of its greenest boroughs.

Hop on the tram and into the Croydon countryside where you can witness its rich natural heritage and unique chalk landscape, and the sheep, cattle, and goats who graze this land to conserve it. Thanks to them, it’s this borough where you can find eight types of orchid, rare to the rest of the country but found here in their hundreds and thousands. My new photobook, Crocus Valley, is a love letter to this many-faced place and my home, a collection of moments over the years now put together.

CROYDON

29

It was a challenge to figure out what story the photographs were telling – Croydon is full of so many unseen stories – but eventually I realised it was the unnoticed sweet side I wanted to represent: romantic, poetic, lyrical. Scenes never shown in the mainstream media, but which can be seen both in the borough’s plentiful wild spaces and in the rushing-bustlingspeakerphone-preaching nucleus of the urban sprawl.

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BACKSTORY

There’s a duality here that speaks to Croydon’s ancient wildness and fast growth as a borough of the UK’s capital: oil painting sunsets over the disappearing town centre; sweet moments human-to-human and human-towildlife; pinks, lilacs, and golden glows straight out of a California dream; jarring high-rise lights in the fog at night; a place full of manmade straight lines and sharp edges.

CROYDON

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BACKSTORY

MICK BROWN

The only thing worse than having a publisher?

Not having one.

In his marvellous novel, The Romantic, William Boyd imagines a conversation on the vagaries of London publishers between his hero, a putative author called Cashel Ross, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley describes his publisher as “both inefficient and a thief”, warning that the key tactic for any author is to secure as large an advance as possible because once a book is published they will hear nothing but lies.

And so it proves: Ross has his book published, and is feted in London society. But his publisher cheats him with a false accounting of how many copies he’s sold and disappears when Ross comes looking for his money.

No publisher today would be so venal, or at least so obviously so. But the relationship between authors and their publishers is ever vexatious and uncertain, built on a shaky edifice of co-dependence, neediness, blind hope and, occasionally, mutual respect and admiration.

A recent story in the Guardian reported that to pour balm on these often troubled waters, publishers are taking steps to address the “industry-wide mental health crisis” that apparently afflicts debut authors. The publishing house Orion is said to be establishing an academy for debut novelists with the aim of “demystifying the publishing process and ensuring expectations are clear”.

Clearly, this is a kindness — but is

ISSUE 1

it really necessary? The idea of preparing authors for disappointment, frustration and the possibility that among the 190,000-odd books published in the UK each year, theirs may not shoot to the top of the Sunday Times bestseller lists and provide an immediate Netflix deal is rather like warning North Sea oil-riggers that the work might involve some physical activity and it can sometimes rain.

So what did they expect? One first-time author had apparently complained that writing a book had been a lonely experience. Another, who had won one major book award and been shortlisted for another, lamented that “suddenly I was treated like the most important person in the room, and it really did a number on me”.

Being the most important person in the room is what most writers dream of. Writing a book is like bringing a child into the world. The moment of blissful conception (Eureka! I have an idea!) followed by the months — or years — of struggle and worry, and the final climatic moment of birth, commingling pain, joy and expectation.

And there it is! 250 pages, wrapped not in swaddling clothes but a handsome jacket, stamped with a price tag and its own ISBN. It can be like launching a finely crafted arrow into the air… and then see-

33

ing it vanish into an abyss. First comes the trail around bookshops, the sinking feeling when you discover that not only is your book not on the front table, but nowhere to be found on the shelves — “but we can order one for you…”

Meanwhile there is the long — and then interminable — wait for emails from your publisher telling you you’re wanted by this or that literary festival, that they’re planning an extensive tour of bookshops for talks and signings, and that you’ve been chosen as the Radio 4 Book of the Week. Finally an email does arrive, telling you none of the above but that regrettably the book has sold only 1,500 copies (Really?

That few? How can that be possible?) and they won’t be reprinting — but the book will be available in due course in remainder shops.

(Actually, the bookshop tour may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Many years ago I gave a talk at Waterstones in Manchester. The audience consisted of five people — three members of staff who had been told to stay behind and two people who had wandered in out of the rain.

The shop manager was most apologetic.

“United are playing at home tonight,” he said, explaining why 65,000 people had not been clamouring at the door.)

The website Jericho Writers conducted a survey asking more than 800 authors in Britain and the US what they thought about their publishers.

More than 70% thought their editorial skills “good or excellent”, but nearly half thought their publishers' marketing skills were “poor or non-existent”, and only 20% felt closely involved and well-informed on marketing strategy. To nobody's surprise, almost all the authors grumbled about not being paid enough: the average advance paid to authors with an agent selling their book to one of the “big five” publishers was just £13,000.

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Authors, of course, are a malcontented, insecure, egotistical lot — “a great nuisance to publishers,” as Fay Weldon once observed. “If they could do without them, they would.”

Wherever two or more of them are gathered together, the same complaints and grumbles are exchanged, about advances, promotion, sales. And don’t even get them started on why publishers are only interested in books about celebrities, politics, climate change, diet fads, inspirational stories, depression, therapy, positive thinking, serial killers, identity politics and Love Island.

But the writer suffering the sting of rejection can take consolation from the fact that publishers don’t always get it right. The first novel by Stephanie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, was rejected by 14 publishers. Ian Rankin’s first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers; he later wrote that even after having published five or six books he was not making enough money to live on and was considering giving up writing altogether.

The record for rejection slips belongs to Robert Pirsig. It took him five years to sell his epic philosophical meditation-cum-travel odyssey Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 121 publishers rejected the work. The 122nd paid Pirsig an advance of just $3,000, explaining that the book was hardly “a marketing man’s dream”. Published in 1974, it went on to sell more than five million copies.

And what of Cashel Ross? Finagled out of the money owed to him and mired in debt, he ends up in Marshalsea prison. Honestly, authors today have no idea how easy they have it…

Mick Brown is the author of The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West. He loves his publisher.

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MEGAN STELLER

Hail the unsung heroes of the backlist (but do it quietly and efficiently) For all the noise and froth generated by the hottest new releases, publishers make half or more of their sales in the rather more sedate world of backlist, as the industry terms solid older sellers that might have been published last year or last century. Far from the hype of the Sunday Times chart, auctions for the hottest manuscripts and celebratory champagne lunches, for much of the industry, backlist is where it’s at.

And it is, as I discovered from a friend who spent several seasons working for a major publisher, a world of spreadsheets and printing schedules.

My friend, who is deeply qualified at many things, from jazz to anthropology, had not worked in publishing in any way when she got the job of Production Planner for Backlist.

The job of production planner is one of overseeing: being responsible for the reproduction of all books already in circulation. She looked after the entire process, from receiving the reprint requests to making amendments, liaising with writers and negotiating with printers. There is a shelf in that publisher’s library stocked with books my friend helped recreate.

It is a quiet job without fanfare.

Your name is not published, nor do you get the accolades like those working on contemporary fiction. The satisfaction comes from appreciating a job effi-

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Issue n.01

ciently done. “You must be incredibly thorough,” she told me. “I created a tracker for each book that showed exactly where we were in the process at any given time.” It is imperative to have a feel for where in the world the books were — they could be stuck in a dock in China for weeks, and if they were, she would know about it. “The whole system is old-school on every level, and it lives and dies on attention to detail.”

What happens when errors are spotted? “The editorial department decides what is most important. If you’re publishing a maths book and the answer is incorrect, then yes, we’re going to have to reprint. But if there’s a grammar mistake?” She sighed, “we might just let that go.”

“I really hummed along, doing my own thing,” she told me. “In backlist, the focus is always on printing. When you’re working on new books, things take years, or at least months. It was just me, overseeing, working away.” But did she read the books she was publishing? “Sometimes! I could take books from the library to read.” My friend reads widely, her bookshelves boasting Tolstoy (a teenage obsession) and fantasy (a newer hobby), amongst tomes on history and politics and classical music. So the publisher’s wide interests made sense for her. “I’m cutting back on reading textbooks now, though,” she conceded, “too heavy.”

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THE PROBLEM WITH ‘HISTORICAL FICTION’ 1

Tom Crewe’s debut is set in the 1890s but, whatever you do, don’t call him a historical novelist

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Starting to write your second book, having published your first, is a bit like waking up after a night when you got howlingly drunk. You reckon you know what happened, and you feel as though you had fun, mostly, but aren’t quite sure how or at what time or in which way. But you’ve also read reviews, and heard from readers, which is like meeting up with some of the people you were out with, all of them eager to tell you when that thing happened and when you did this thing.

If you’re lucky, it might turn out that you were funnier, danced better, flirted more successfully than you thought. Still, it’s always a little disconcerting, if what you’re told doesn’t entirely fit your sense of things.

I’ve often been told, since my novel The New Life came out, that what I’ve written is “historical fiction”, because the story is set in the 1890s. But I don’t like this term, and it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s not that I have an objection to the idea of genre. A crime novel centres crime, a romance some romance. My problem with “historical fiction” is that it drags into its net books that range across the whole

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of human experience – both in terms of chronology and subject matter – purely on the basis that they share “the past” as a setting.

This is about as arbitrary as it would be to bunch together all the novels that contain cats. Of course, some people especially like novels not set in the present, just as they might especially like novels that contain cats, but when it comes to guiding readers, and to giving pleasure, turning either of these preferences into an organising principle would be to prioritise a small gain in ease of identification, over the larger loss that would come from the construction of borders across the literary landscape. The shame is that one of these preferences actually has become an organising principle, and that such a border does exist.

If this were all, if historical fiction existed merely as a border – putting some people off, creating a sense of difference, generating distrust or unease, as all borders do – it would be dispiriting enough.

I wrote a novel set in the 1890s because this was the story I wanted to tell: now I see myself described as a “historical nov-

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elist” and feel that I have been made “There is something intolerably a citizen of a country I’ve never knowingly visited, whose arrogant in the belief that only our own passport I’m obliged to flash narrow slice of time is worth writing as I travel through the world.

But this isn’t all, because about in fiction.” to be a historical novelist is also to be aware of a taint. There is still a strong presumption, at least in the literary pages of the papers, and probably among most critics, that the serious, major novelist deals with the present; that the novel’s business is to bring us the news, to show us how we are living now. The historical novelist, by shirking this challenge, offers us something that is likely nostalgic, escapist, or conservative.

(A recent review in the Times described a previously outré writer as having beaten a retreat to the “respectable pastures of the historical novel”.) They also court plaining of, say, Sally Rooney, that she had another kind of artistic failure, forced written yet another book set in the 21st into strained, often mannered efforts to century, or wonder when she might try a recreate a world and a language not their frock coat on for size. own. Hence, historical fiction is a “someIn making these points, I’m not, or what gimcrack genre” in the opinion of not only, having a moan. I want to clear the critic James Wood, himself operating away some of the obstacles that get put in under the sign of Henry James, who in a front of readers, by making the case for famous remark accused the “historic nov- the absolute relevance and importance el” of a “fatal cheapness”.

– the necessity – of fiction that is set in To be called a historical novelist, the past. Let’s admit from the off that no rather than just a novelist, feels like be- one can recreate the consciousness (what ing told that you are not playing in the James called “the soul, the sense, the hoPremier League. It is possible to stall at rizon, the vision”) of the long dead. If we the historical, or descend to it, but not to accept this without qualification, however, it invalidates not just histor“To be called a historical novelist, ical fiction but the practice rather than just ‘a novelist’, feels like of history itself. Both are attempts to inhabit and explain being told that you are not playing in the past consciousness, as far as it is possible.

Premier League.”

The objection to historical fiction in surpass the infinitely interesting present. this regard seems to be that historians Not long ago the Times asked whether I do have some access to the truth of hiswould “dish up more Victoriana” in my torical experience, and that novelists can second novel or “rip off the frock coat only mess about with it, muddying things. and try something more contemporary”. And yet every historian starts in the presIt’s impossible to imagine anyone com- ent – every work of history is shaped by

THE PROBLEM WITH ‘HISTORICAL FICTION’

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its place in time, as is its reception. There is no such thing as a clear, unfiltered view of the past. And the view we do have is founded on a haphazard scattering of evidence, the physical survivals of enormously complex and varied societies.

Historians know better than anyone else the value of imagination in research. It is imagination that leads them in search of facts, and which allows them, as A.J.P. Taylor put it, to “shape into a version a tangle of events that was not designed as a pattern”. Though facts, in whatever direction they are laid out, will only extend so far – eventually we reach the end of the plank, and curl our toes over the edge.

The outstanding qualities of the past are anonymity, vanishment, and silence.

For the novelist, the only alternative to reanimating the past is accepting vanishment, and an ever-lengthening silence.

There is something intolerable in this.

And something intolerably arrogant in the belief that only our own narrow slice of time is worth writing about in fiction or will justify the effort. Something myopic, too, in thinking that we can only write about our societies in one way, from one position of vantage. An effect of recent attempts to reckon with the UK’s slaving and imperial past has been an increasing awareness of the fact that we live in history, that the past is actively present in our daily lives, a shaping influence, enabling for some and inhibiting for others. To enter history via the imagination is to cast a light on the present; not the crude, reflective light of allegory (e.g. fall of Rome as decline of the West), but one that can help show us why we live the way we do now.

All that really matters is the quality of the attempt made. There is nothing unworthy or uncalled-for about the attempt itself. The failures of a novel set in the past will be novelistic failures, and its successes will be novelistic successes – they cannot have other kinds of significance. If we cannot get rid of the terminology, we

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can at least try not to create false distinctions. It is not a coincidence that engagement with the past has the same effects as engagement with fiction: it should project us outside of ourselves, stretch our sense of possibility; it should be an empathetic as well as an intellectual experience, a sensory as well as a literary one, private and personal as well as public and political. It should teach humility in addition to humanity, the virtues of uncertainty in addition to those of certainty. We should not scruple to leave our time behind; nor should we be afraid of trespass. The dead, after all, are dead, and we can only make the best of a bad situation.

Tom Crewe’s debut novel, The New Life, is available now from Backstory.

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JOHN FORDE

I’m sorry I’ll read that again One of the best things about having an independent bookshop nearby is rediscovering beloved old reads. I was delighted to spot Donna Tartt’s The Secret History a few months ago – a shocking 30 years old – and recommend it to Backstory’s young booksellers, promising them a fantastic read. One of the worst things is the daunting number of new titles on display, perched on tables like singles at a speed dating event, eager to be picked up.

While every new book is an adventure, it’s also a risk. What if, after slogging through 300 pages, it’s not as good as promised? What do you say to the well-meaning friend who recommended it? In our clock-watching age, few of us have such time to waste.

Re-reading has a much simpler agenda, being almost entirely about pleasure. It offers us the reassurance of a good time and connects us to earlier moments of happiness. It’s what we turn to when we’re ill or gloomy. During lockdown, our addled brains craved familiarity and comfort. As other friends ploughed valiantly through the new Hilary Mantel, out came my dog-eared Roald Dahl.

The great surprise of re-reading – especially as we get older – is that we never read the same book in the same way. Books read us as much as we read them. Returning to the same text can provide insights into how we grow and change.

ISSUE 1

In The Secret History, a group of college students commit a murder and get away with it, before disintegrating under the weight of their own guilt.

On my first reading, I identified with the protagonists’ romanticism and well-heeled ennui. Three decades later, they’re less charming, and their passivity and cowardice comes to the fore.

When I first read Middlemarch, I saw the characters as George Eliot intended: Dorothea was a saint, Casaubon an old fool and Tertius a reckless over-spender. Now the moral terrain is different: Dorothea seems naïve and priggish, while Tertius’s money worries are relatable to anyone trying to stay solvent in London. (Casaubon, though, is still a nincompoop).

Some books don’t stand up well the second time around. I was once mad for Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an existential love story set in Soviet-occupied Prague. In our MeToo age, what once seemed romantic now reads as misogyny, and Kundera’s philosophical musings are teeth-grindingly pretentious.

Other narratives improve on a revisit. Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a portrait of former lovers who meet again, resounds more powerfully for readers old enough to wish for a second chance.

So next time you’re in Backstory, give some love to your old friends, and take a trip back into your reading past.

You won’t regret it.

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TROUBLE IN PARADISE: A FILM DAY WITH

CAMILLA

GRUDOVA

Words: Rory McNeill Han’s thugs have broken several spines already, but when the cat looks at me sweetly as it is placed into the pillory of an old guillotine by the villain, moments from death, my hand is clasped firmly over my mouth. I’m quite glad when Camilla Grudova, author of Children of Paradise, gasps and writhes in her seat beside me until the cat is saved from danger. I find it comforting to know that even Grudova, a writer with a cunning eye for horror, has limits.

We’re sat in the Glasgow Film Theatre, watching Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon on its 50th anniversary, and Grudova and I may be among the youngest in the room.

A homemade message from Lee’s daughter introduces the film. Large pillars flank the seating, leading down to the screen.

Lee delivers punches as calmly as his dialogue, and as soon as the first strike lands with a whip crack, I’m smiling ear to ear.

It’s Grudova’s debut novel that brought me here. Children of Paradise is steeped in cult and classic film references that made me, an avowed film geek, want to run to my nearest independent cinema to catch up. Instead, I invited the author

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to hers. Her novel is a love letter to independent cinema, but not how you might expect. Paradise, her fictitious cinema, is haunted by death, and it’s filthy, covered in human fluids of every kind. Grudova zeroes in on anything gross. “Filth is a fact of life,” she explains over a pre-film drink, “why look away?”

The novel’s protagonist starts a job at a cherished but somewhat run-down cinema and slowly gets absorbed into the antics of its eccentric team of film buffs.

I can tell within ten minutes of meeting Grudova how personal the novel is. In writing the book, she drew on her own experience working in the Cameo, a formerly independent cinema in Edinburgh.

Every sight in the Film Theatre, from lobby and bar to screen, prompts a story. Grudova remembers waiting to usher out the final customers, still engaged with their post-film debrief, so they could all go home, praying that a straggler hadn’t dumped yet another popcorn box in the freshly-changed bins. Most revolting, perhaps, was the man who would regularly visit simply to decorate the toilets and

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leave, but not without singing “I left something for you”.

The Cameo was taken over by Picturehouse, a chain owned by Cineworld, in 2003. From the team’s perspective, this change gradually dismantled the heart and soul of the place. Grudova mourns the art deco sign that was removed. She notes how projectionists were let go, and says screenings in 35mm and 70mm film would then sometimes end early when the projector overheated and melted the film without someone to operate it. The team became less and less involved in programming, meaning more blockbusters taking up screens and fewer passion showings like the one we’re seeing today. Still, their horror all-nighters – which the team did programme – always sold out.

Grudova has lived in Edinburgh for five years now, but the place may be losing her. Cinema is how she met many of her friends there. The closure of one of the city’s last great independent cinemas, the Filmhouse, whose sign I find still hanging outside the scaffolded, empty building, means one less reason to stay. “It’s a huge

loss for the cultural and social life of the city,” she says. Now, Grudova and her friends mostly watch films on a projector at home, finding all manner of classics on the BFI Player.

I start to feel like I’m in her film gang at one of those nights, though unqualified. Her favourites are unfamiliar to me, and I add Badlands, An American Werewolf in London, and Drowning by Numbers to my watchlist while she talks.

Blimey, does she like horror. When I recall an electric post-Covid screening of Jordan Peele’s Nope, she tells me about the tunnels underneath the Cameo, where staff would scare each other like characters in one of Peele’s earlier films, Us. Later, when I finally charge my phone, I gush to anyone who will listen about my afternoon of shared film geekery.

Neither of us have seen Enter the Dragon before so the experience is new, and everyone in the cinema is wrapped up in it together. This hits home when the pearl white cat is carefully removed from danger and the room breathes a collective sigh.

You only have to visit somewhere like this cinema to see what we stand to lose when all that remains are chains: the smiling ushers, the bulb-lit sign over the entrance, even the elderly lady who arrives for her weekly fix of horror, asking the man at the box office “What have you got for me this week?” It’s familiarity, and it’s discovery. Still, I like to think good films will always put bums in seats – and, who knows, maybe the filthy seats will stick them there.

A FILM DAY WITH CAMILLA GRUDOVA

Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova is available now from Backstory.

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A

T HC TTEL RO I I N P K Words AMY STRONG

Prisons and pâtisserie don’t go hand-inhand. Yet once a week Backstory gets a delivery of cookies and brownies from The Clink bakery at HMP Brixton, baked by prisoners working towards NVQs in General and Professional Pâtisserie, and sold to you, our lovely customers, perhaps alongside a coffee with ever-improving latte art or a healthy dose of books.

I wanted to know more about the people making our nibbles, so I booked a visit to the bakery. Arriving at the prison, I handed over my phone and passport in return for a pass. I had forgotten I wouldn’t be allowed my water, so I had to empty that out of the window. Then I walked through a scanner, was patted down and escorted to the bakery.

The bakery is one of a number of projects run by The Clink that give people with six to 18 months left of their sentences the opportunity to earn City and Guilds qualifications. It sits in the centre of the prison in what was originally the governor’s house, an oppressive-looking building topped with razor wire and dingy brickwork that reminded me of my middle school. Inside, though, it was air-con-

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ditioned and bright and clean. As Abbie, the Head Pastry Chef Trainer, showed me around, the students (in the context of the bakery, they are students rather than prisoners) glanced at me and said a quick hello, but for the most part they were all focussed on their various tasks – measuring flour, mixing batter and washing up pots.

Someone was doing something fancy with half a dozen lemons; someone else was lamenting that their cake wouldn’t rise.

After making a decent start on a slice of delicious carrot cake, I met Kieran (all students’ names have been changed).

Personable and confident with an impish smile, he used to work as a painter and decorator. He told me he likes the design element of baking, of pairing flavours and perfecting presentation. I suggested it wasn’t too dissimilar from his decorator past. “Yeah,” he said, “but it tastes a lot better.” He had worked a few different jobs in the prison before, including in the kitchen, but he claimed the bakery felt different, more professional. Here you had to interview, you were treated as an employee, not a prisoner, and you had to be serious about the assessments, which

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are marked as pass, merit or distinction.

Despite not having any previous baking experience, Kieran assured me that the tests don’t make him nervous: “They’re a piece of cake, literally.” Who does he think is the best baker? He grinned and said everyone thinks they are the best here.

Paul was older and more reserved.

Gentle-mannered and conscientious, he explained he had applied for The Clink because he knew they worked to a high standard and described himself as a “willing worker”. Asked what bake he was proudest of, his face brightened and he shyly revealed that he is good at choux pastry.

But my favourite (don’t tell the others) was Theo: quiet with a slight stammer and a lisp and a whole lot of ambition. When I asked him if there was anything he was especially excited to learn how to make, he replied with touching sincerity: “Anything I haven’t done before.” His dream is to open a social space where friends can chat, smoke shisha and eat, and he has been asking Abbie and others for tips on how to make that happen. Between 2009 and 2016, the reoffending rate for graduates from the Brixton scheme was 11%

A TRIP TO THE CLINK

compared to 32% for offenders in general. Theo told me that he isn’t afraid of reoffending because he knows The Clink will be there to support him; the charity offers all sorts of assistance to their graduates post-release, from securing accommodation to obtaining ID to finding a GP to learning new technology.

Theo spoke earnestly about how he will be starting from scratch when he gets out, but pointed out that in a kitchen everything is from scratch: you start with flour, eggs, milk, and then, with some effort, you have a black forest gateau. On learning I work in a bookshop, Theo showed me the book he is currently reading: an intimidating doorstop of a textbook entitled Mastering Modern World History. “I might be in prison,” he told me, “but I’m not here to waste time.”

I left surprised by quite how much I had enjoyed myself. I hadn’t known what to expect, but the bakery had been full of warmth and humour and camaraderie. It felt entirely possible that the people I’d met might, under different circumstances, have been customers in the bookshop. They still might be; Theo has promised us a visit.

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When anyone asks me for children’s book recommendations, my mind immediately goes blank. I forget every book I have ever read, and even every book I have ever written. So my first instinct is to ask friends for THEIR recommendations and shamelessly pass them off as mine. ● LOKI recommends If you have already read all the vol-

umes of my most brilliantly written diary, then well done. You have great taste. But if you crave still more literary entertainment that is about a fascinating and handsome god, look no further than The Unmorrow Curse by Jasmine Richards. Now, the book is sadly not ENTIRELY about me, but a little Loki is better than no Loki, is it not?

● THOR recommends I don’t read a lot of books but I like the Worst Week Ever series by Eva Amores and Matt Cosgrove because every week is the worst week ever when Loki is around, therefore the main character is a bit like me. ● HYRROKKIN recommends I recently read a mortal volume

called Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. It’s not strictly a children’s book but would be suitable for people around Loki’s mortal age or older and what I liked about it was that it’s a) funny and b) about apocalypses. As Loki’s guardian, I face potential apocalypses on more or less a monthly basis, so I find it very relatable. Plus, I get enough of the Norse gods at home so it’s a bit of a relief to read about other divinities (and infernal beings) once in a while. It’s the story of a boy whose behaviour threatens to end the world (remind you of anyone??), and the angel and demon who are trying to stop him. Oh, and witches. I love stories about witches.

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● ODIN recommends I am the god of many things, from war to wisdom. But as the god of poetry, also, I would like to recommend Overheard in a Towerblock by Joseph Coelho. It combines two of my interests – poetry and sneakily eavesdropping people in search of secret wisdom. ● HEIMDALL recommends When I’m not reading parenting books, I like to sample some children’s fiction, in case I can find anything to give Loki that might encourage him to be more virtuous. Now, if I chose books that were too obviously about good children, he would smell a rat immediately and refuse to read the book. But I have discovered that, if the books are about characters who are full of flaws and yet still explore questions of morality, he won’t turn up his nose at them. So I recommend the books of AM Dassu, as her main characters are often rather Loki-like in their negative traits, but they are full of virtue nonetheless.

Kicked Out is her most recent – even Thor would read that one, as it’s about football. ● VALERIE recommends I recommend the Sticky Pines series by Dashe Roberts. It’s science fiction which is one of my favourite genres apart from stories about riding and it has lots of strange, alien goings on in a town on earth – a bit like our town, once Loki arrived! I love aliens, and also these books are really funny. The final book in the series is called The Wrath of the Blob but you should read them all. ● GEORGINA recommends I like reading to my younger brothers

before they go to bed and they loved Grimwood by Nadia Shireen. But for reading myself, I like adventure stories like Kòkú Akanbi and the Heart of Midnight by Maria Motunrayo Adebisi and I love Manga and comics, especially The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl because it has such dry humour.

And, look, I’m not too old to think fluffy animals are cute, OK?

● SIF recommeds As a nature goddess, I appreciate it when

mortals bother to care about their planet rather than wrecking it. So I highly recommend the work of Nicola Penfold. She writes speculative stories for children and her most recent story is about the frozen north – that is, the part of Midgard that most closely resembles Jotunheim, the (largely) frosty realm of the giants. It’s called Beyond the Frozen Horizon and it is beautiful.

Text and illustrations © 2023 Louie Stowell. Louie Stowell's latest book, Loki: A Bad God's Guide to Ruling the World, is available now from Backstory.

A BAD GOD’S GUIDE TO GOOD BOOKS

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Postcard from: ORKNEY Stromness Books & Prints My town, Stromness, is a very small town indeed. It clings to the west coast of the island we call ‘Mainland’—that is, the largest island in the Orkney archipelago. Stromness has a population of a little over 2,000 people, dozens of piers, jetties and slipways, a quaint and winding main street built of slabs and cobbles, and one of the very best bookshops in the world.

Stromness Books & Prints is also very small indeed: bigger than a cupboard but smaller than many kitchens. But this single room contains multitudes: lined from floor to high ceiling with books, Sheena Winter’s tightly packed and carefully curated offering includes every genre one can think of. Children’s books cluster in colourful stacks by the corner window; Orcadian authors (of which there are a surprising number) crowd the narrow cabinet by the door.

History, environment, biography, and other serious types march soberly around the upper perimeter. Fiction boasts a central, column-like bookcase.

There are no prints to be had—the name is a hangover from some previous incarnation—but this feels perfectly normal in a town where one learns to buy vegetables from the butchers,

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kitchenware from the fishing tackle shop, and baked goods from the post office. All this is to say: Stromness is a place where inside knowledge rules.

The same goes for accessing the bookshop. A sign on the door hazards at the opening hours: “approx. noon to 6pm.” It caveats this with a bracketed “allegedly” and further clarifies that the shop is “usually closed Sundays... but sometimes...?” Should you arrive outside this nebulous period, another, smaller, sign recommends you try the next door along, where friends have a key and might let you in to browse.

Despite its idiosyncracies, this little shop has survived for more than 50 years. “Just like a cat, you never really own a bookshop,” explains the website; instead, you become something like its handler, caring for it for as long as you can before handing it on to the next generation. And you can sense a self-governing spirit alive in this dreamlike space—a nook of a shop, rainbowed with cover art, where volumes are crammed into every available space, spines facing out and in and up and down—in this eccentric and inimitable town.

Cal Flyn

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