A long time ago, one late summer’s day, my mother took me to Goulden & Curry’s bookshop in Tunbridge Wells, left me in Children’s Fiction and headed on, up another flight of stairs, to the mysterious Non-fiction department.

- ‘Don’t rush,’ she said, ‘choose what you like.’

And I stood and looked at the rows and rows of paperbacks. I didn’t know what to choose at all: it always took me ages to decide in bookshops. But then after a while I put my hand up to a shelf and pulled down Finn Family Moomintroll.

The sky-blue cover was what appealed to me, I remember; and Moomintroll, with his hippo-ish snout and kind expression. And I recall the excitement of first seeing him – this creature I’d always felt must be out there somewhere.

I think this would have been 1974. There were ladybirds everywhere that summer, and flying ants; they landed huge and strange on my arms and legs as I sat reading in the garden on our clanky, spidery camp-bed – which sometimes half-folded up with people still on it. The ants made me think of the ‘lion-ants’ Tove Jansson described in my new book: lion-ants, she said, were ferocious beasts that could drag unsuspecting Moomins beneath the sand. (“You can read all about it in the Encyclopedia if you don’t believe me,” she’d added in an authoritative aside) – and I didn’t know whether to believe her. Did lion ants actually exist? Like the Moomins, they sounded very real; and I wanted the Moomins, very much, to be real.

My sister Ann, nearly three years older than me and a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder, was reading By the Shores of Silver Lake around this time, and The Long Winter; and I wanted the Moomins to be leading true lives somewhere, the way the Ingalls family had. There was something very appealing, in particular, about their hibernating rituals, and Moominmamma’s good coffee, and their solitary wanderings, and their fondness for pine-needles. (‘It is important to have your tummy full of pine if you intend to sleep all the winter …’)

I identified with Moomintroll, of course: I suppose most seven-year-olds see themselves as a book’s protagonist. And my mother was Moominmamma, the epitome of all wise, creative, practical mothers. Little My was a high pony-tailed girl at my primary school who administered Chinese burns; and one of our neighbours, Mrs Jolly, who always covered her cutlery up with table-cloths during thunderstorms – was the Fillyjonk. Then there was Snufkin, of course: free-spirit, hat-wearer, rambler, joker. I’ll tell you who Snufkin reminded me of later.

Sketch by Eric Thomas, ‘Ruth being read to by Liz’

My dad was working, at that time – for the whole of our childhood, in fact – upstairs in his studio. He was an illustrator – an occupation I’d grown up thinking was perfectly normal. And the summer I discovered the Moomins, like every summer, I’d creep upstairs, knock on the studio door and go in, inhaling the smell of pencil-shavings and fixative. He’d be sitting there on his high office chair, often with a pencil in each hand and an ink-pen between his teeth. He always seemed to be working to something called a ‘deadline’, from any number of publishers – Andre Deutsch, Jonathan Cape, Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Their names didn’t mean much to me then, but the seriousness of that word ‘deadline’ had already formed an impression.

- ‘Hello,’ he’d say after a moment, the pen still in his mouth.

- ‘Hello.’

And I’d just stand, on the other side of his sloping drawing board, and watch him work. We didn’t chat. What I recall most was the hush: the tiny noise of pencil on paper, low voices from The World at One or maybe Brain of Britain coming from the Pye radio – and the view through the window, of bright green larch trees. I remember him working around that time on a book called Hedgerow, for Dorling Kindersley. I remember all the tiny illustrations of the hedgerow’s inhabitants – the mice and the blackbirds and the toads and the robins.

- ‘It’s lunch,’ I might state after a while. Or: ‘It’s supper.’

- ‘Hmm? Is It? OK.’

Because my mother might have sent me up to tell him that. Most of all, though, I just went because I was intrigued by what he did. ‘What does your dad do in your house all day?’ a boy had asked incredulously at school the previous term; and I’d begun to wonder about having a room in your house called a studio. About being something called freelance. Maybe it was quite Hemulen–like, I conjectured. Or maybe my dad was a bit like Moominpappa writing his memoirs, inspired and absorbed, in his study.

Most of the grown-ups I knew in our village worked in the hop gardens or in the shops, or the plastics factory down the road. Some drove to Tonbridge or Maidstone or commuted to Charing Cross. But my dad drew pictures. Ann and I were models for him sometimes, standing very still for ages, to resemble, perhaps, Indian princesses or Victorian chamber-maids. (‘Can I move, yet?’ we’d ask, still as statues; and there’d be a small pause: ‘In a minute, Chickadee …’)

I never imagined then that somewhere in Finland, Tove Jansson might have a job, and a studio, and deadlines, just like my father. Tove’s life, spent inventing Moomin stories on some lonely island, was almost too extraordinary to believe.

The person like Snufkin was so like Snufkin he could have been him. He was a friend of my parents, a poet and journalist, and his name was John Talbot White. He wrote A Country Diary for the Guardian and lived an exciting, metropolitan existence, as far as I could see, in a flat in Blackheath – but he was a country person at heart, always off exploring. He would drive down to Kent at the weekends, walking through the fields and villages and across the South Downs in a khaki safari jacket and a canvas hat and walking-boots.

My mother had met John years earlier at Goldsmith’s Literary Society and had introduced him to my father. Which was how Hedgerow had begun – John writing the book and my father illustrating it. John often came to see him around that time to talk about how it was going. It always seemed to me, though, that he appeared on a whim. He preferred arriving and leaving places without warning … ‘Snufkin Leaves Moomindale: Mysterious Departure at Dawn…!’) He liked company but he also liked to be on his way again.

Anyway, I remember John turning up one evening that summer. My mother and sister and I were in the kitchen, probably listening to Jazz Record Requests, and my father was upstairs drawing a picture of a hawthorn tree or a wren – and suddenly, there was John, knocking at the kitchen door, and walking in.

- ‘Aha! You’re reading Tove Jansson!’ he boomed, striding towards me and turning over the front cover of my book – it was maybe Moominsummer Madness, by then, or Comet in Moominland.

I looked up.

- ‘I’m going to Tove’s island next week,’ John informed me.

Ann looked up, too. We both regarded him, speechless.

- ‘A friend of mine knows her, you see,’ he added.

- ‘You’ve got a friend who knows Tove Jansson …?’ my mother asked.

Which began the days of writing letters to Tove Jansson. It’s all jumbled up with that time in my life, when I was seven, and first aware of my dad having this strange job. Artist. Illustrator.

Tove Jansson’s first letter from Paris, dated February 1975

I don’t remember what I wrote in my first letter to Tove, and I don’t think I ever expected a reply – the image I had of Tove and her island was still too misty and Scandinavian to have anything to do with the GPO. But then one afternoon – winter by now – I came home from school and there was an envelope lying on my pillow. It was a very particular envelope, pure white and fine-papered, and larger than the Basildon Bond ones my mother used. And there was my name on it! – and my address! And there was a stamp from Finland.

I opened it – very carefully – with a butter-knife.

‘Dear Ruth,
I’m so glad to know that you like my stories, and I do promise trying to invent new ones …’

Over the next three years we wrote to each other four times. Which goes to show how extremely kind she was to the children who read her books. She sent one letter – unbelievably exotic! – from Paris, where she was on holiday with Tooticki. Another mentioned her latest book, The Summer Book – ‘… The grandmother is a picture of my mother…’ Her writing was beautiful, sloping, in black ink, and she always included drawings of Moomins.

Letter from Tove Jansson, dated October 1977
(the drawing of Psipsina the cat is by Tove’s partner Tooticki)

Tove’s last letter to me (which I’ve framed and placed – sensibly, in a grown-up way – on my bedroom wall) was inside a card she’d screen-printed. It depicted the Snork Maiden standing in a shallow sea.

Happy Spring to you! she wrote. Which is a phrase I still think of every Springtime. And still reminds me of being seven, and tiptoeing up to my dad’s studio.

Recently I’ve started reading the Moomin stories with my youngest son. And of course I’ve shown all three of my children the letters –

- ‘Wow! – that’s so cool …’

– But I suppose your parents’ old letters are like places where they once lived or people they used to know: to my children, my letters from Tove have something to do with the 1970s, and flying ants and hop gardens and deadlines and a studio. And there was a friend of their grandparents who was a lot like Snufkin –

Ruth Thomas aged about five, being given a piggy-back by her sister Ann

- ‘Do you think Tove Jansson thought he was like Snufkin?’ my son asked.

- ‘She might well have done.’

- ‘Wow.’

He’s more interested, though, in making bark boats like Moominmamma’s. Which of course is how it should be.

Ruth Thomas

Ruth Thomas was born in Kent and now lives in Edinburgh with her husband and three children. She is the author of the story collections Sea Monster Tattoo, The Dance Settee and Super Girl, and two novels – Things to Make and Mend and The Home Corner, which is published this month. Find out more at ruth-thomas.com.

In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane travelled with Roger Deakin to explore the holloways of South Dorset’s sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres and great strangeness. Six years later, after Deakin’s early death, Macfarlane teamed up with Donwood and Richards to return to those same holloways.

Here are some of Stanley Donwood’s sketches and paintings of holloways that you won’t find in the book …

Stanley talks us through the illustrations …

‘The first holloway drawing is what it is; and the dust jacket for Holloway is the most recent.

There are a few related things here too; Friday Woods is the first painting where trees appeared, whilst working on what was to become The King of Limbs, Radiohead’s latest record. It’s named after the woods in Essex where I used to play. Holding Hands was done for a children’s ABC book, for the letter H. Bad Wood I and II were done for the King of Limbs.

Larch Reflection was used on the merchandise for Radiohead’s tour in 2011/12. The Tiny Trees were drawn on business cards and sent to friends in tiny envelopes.

Some titles are self-explanatory; Drawn on the Train, February Holloway, Gold Holloway … I do a gold holloway each year now, for the winter solstice. They’re screenprinted with powdered gold in very small editions.’

More at www.slowlydownward.com.

It’s often said that starting a new novel is a bit like embarking on a fresh love affair. There’s the same tingle of anticipation, the same sense of endless possibility and hoped-for perfection. It used to be like this for me. It isn’t anymore. I don’t know where or when things changed but they did. Maybe it’s the burden of experience but these days starting a new novel feels like rowing up a hill backwards. The sea of possibilities that once seemed so seductive was now paralysing. If you can say anything what exactly do you say? Where do you begin?

You’d think it would get easier with each book. You’d think you’d develop a certain muscle memory that would see you through the early stages but it doesn’t work like that, at least not for me. Each book seems to get that much harder and each book is like having to learn to write all over again. T. S. Eliot said it better than I ever could in Four Quartets:

“Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion….
… For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

The other day I came to the horrible realisation that I’d started Book 5 the wrong way. I’d written 9,000 words, they weren’t very good – they never are at this stage – but it was hard to let them go. Hard to see the typed pile of paper disappear. But I had to do it. My sense of discomfort stemmed from the fact that deep down, when I was writing them, I knew they were wrong. The structure was exactly the same as my previous two novels. Even though all the details, characters and locations, were different it felt like I was writing the same book. That is one reason books get harder, especially if you’re writing a series. There are only so many expressions and ways to describe the same scene. How do you write them differently every time and still keep it realistic?

When I started again, it immediately felt much better. Like a pair of shoes you refuse to accept are uncomfortable until you slip on something else and realise the difference straight away. The words weren’t very good, the plotting was still shaky, I was trying something new, but at the same time it freed my writing to go into new territory. And that evening I felt the feeling all writers crave and strive for, that raw exhilaration after having written new material, the sense of possibilities unspooling like a highway into the dimmed horizon.

So, here are a few tips for starting that new novel:

1. Write every day – it seems superfluous to say and there will be bad days, there always are, but it’s only by creating a routine and a rhythm that books gets written. Like the proverbial shark, first drafts have to keep moving or they die.

2. Don’t Look Back! – Don’t ever look back at what you’ve written until you’ve finished the first draft. This is perhaps the most common cause of that strange disease, author paralysis. Hemingway said the first draft of anything was always crap and who’s to argue with Hem? So forget what you’ve written, don’t think about it until the next run-through, there’s going to be plenty of chances to re-write it.

3. Don’t second-guess your instincts. Go with whatever impulse you have. If the plot doesn’t work you can always fix it in the next draft.

4. Write what you don’t know you know. When you type fast enough the words begin to pour quicker than you can consciously think and the subconscious takes over. Most of my best plot twists and ideas have come from typing fast enough to short circuit the mind.

5. Everything can be fixed. This can’t be emphasised enough so don’t stress on how bad your first draft is, just finish it and then make it better in successive drafts.

Stav Sherez

You can read more from Stav Sherez at www.stavsherez.com or keep in touch via Twitter @stavsherez. He is the author of The Devil’s Playground, The Black Monastery, and the Carrigan & Miller crime novels A Dark Redemption and Eleven Days, which is published this month and about which Eva Dolan wrote previously on The Thought Fox.

James Bulley explains …

The piece is composed of material captured in South Dorset in late April 2013 over a 24-hour period, mapping dusk, night, dawn and day. Within the composition, subtle shifts in perspective and location are heard by utilising multiple microphones recording in synchronisation at different places along the pathway.

Holloway – the hollow way. A sunken path, a deep and shady lane. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed into the land. A track worn down by the traffic of ages and the fretting of water, and in places reduced sixteen or eighteen feet beneath the level of the fields.

In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset’s sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres and great strangeness. Six years later, after Deakin’s early death, Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. Holloway is available now in hardback.

www.jamesjbulley.com

Below is the second part of an extensive interview between the playwright and Graham Price from the English and Drama department at University College Dublin, following The Abbey Theatre’s production of McGuinness’s adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead.

Frank McGuinness and Graham Price in Conversation:

[GP] Do you see Lily as being one of those silenced Dublin voices, because her role in this play seems to be kind of tragic? She seems to have her own personal traumas and tragedies that she’s not allowed to articulate fully.

[FMcG] He starts the story with Lily, and she has her own with Gabriel, and what is really touching is that her and Gabriel really do seem to have a genuine friendship. She minds him in the course of the story. It’s pointed out that Lily serves at least two potatoes for Gabriel, so Lily knows how to sweeten an Irishman! And there’s so much that’s different about her, given the tips and the rest of it. I think Lily is a beautiful character – she’s her own woman, a working woman. And in a story of working women – in that house, there are three working women and Lily is the fourth. She is part of that female economy that Joyce respects enormously. And I feel she talks about men being full of palaver and whatnot, and she’s fifteen. I’m glad that she has an edge to her, that she’s nobody’s fool.

Still from ‘The Dead’, Abbey Theatre 2012-13. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

I love the beginning of the play. It opens with Lily, and you give Lily that line that is written in the third person in the story but, as the critic Hugh Kenner has argued, it’s an example of a third person narrator speaking in the first person. You don’t normally expect a third person omniscient narrator to use a line like ‘literally run off her feet’, so I think you’ve made quite clear what Joyce was hinting at in the story.

Lily’s a Dubliner and Dubliners love their words – they love using them, they love showing off with them. What I find extraordinary in the story is that he thinks with a camera, does Joyce, and in the magnificent and probably the best piece of writing – the description of the meal , the extraordinary intimate detailing of what’s served on the table – that is a pure piece of fiction. You can’t dramatise that – and I didn’t even attempt to speak that on stage. I have it in the stage directions of the published version. But what’s beautiful in this story is that that very exactness – that very intimacy – is clearly written by someone who has helped to prepare everything that is going out there, but also by someone who is seeing it for the first time. So to me Lily’s eyes are the eyes with which Joyce shows us the food that’s going to be eaten at this feast. And it’s Lily who’s going to partake in part of that feast, albeit afterwards in the servants’ kitchen.

But that is where he is so brilliant in giving vision to those without vision in Irish literature beforehand, and to giving voice to those without voice. That’s where his revolutionary status lies as a writer. She is an absolutely key character but I have to respect what Joyce does, which is that he keeps her at the beginning and she appears at the meal, and she appears at certain stages. She’s also very useful as a character in terms of her contempt for the likes of Freddy Malins and Browne, who are extremely dismissive of her. You know, when she’s serving them the drink. And I think that was a valid way of doing it, because you have never to forget the scale of prostitution in this town at the time. And Lily certainly is not that. But I wanted them to show an attitude to her that really would get across that, despite the grandeur of ladies and the rest of it, and the power of these women, there was a side to Dublin where that certainly was not the case.

Lily’s a survivor – I have no doubt that she’s a survivor. I also wanted to put her in the beginning purely in a shaft of light, where she was running up and down, and that was my homage to Beckett. There she would be – serving – and we did look at it for a bit but there was no way I could push it.

Were you heavily involved with the rehearsals and the direction of this play? How do you feel a playwright should be involved? Where should he end and other people begin –directors, actors – with their vision of it?

We stayed remarkably close to the text I submitted to The Abbey Theatre. Inevitably there’s been nipping and tucking, and inevitably particularly with music there’s been additions and reductions. But the biggest decision made between myself and The Abbey was the choice of director and it was automatic that it would be Joe Dowling, because we felt Joe would absolutely know this world, he would know this music, he would know this language. He’s a Dubliner – he comes from a very cultured Dublin background. He’s a former Artistic Director of The Abbey. He has all that cultural weight behind him, and I knew as a writer that Joe would be enormously careful and respectful with the text. I also knew he would cast impeccably. So once you get that decision made, and once you get the decision about casting made, and you get everybody you want – which is very rare but we did this time – you let them get on with it. I came in for the first week and we talked and we talked, and then I got out of it. But that is the way you behave really when you have an excellent company working on your play.

Still from ‘The Dead’, Abbey Theatre 2012-13. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

It’s just because you mentioned Beckett and I’ve heard of all the horror stories of people trying to direct and interpret Beckett’s work, and they have to stick so rigidly to what Beckett put on the page, otherwise the Beckett estate would be right down your throat …

Here’s a bit of contrary – Beckett was not a playwright. He was a painter and he was a choreographer who used theatre. And when you’re a choreographer and a painter, you have a very different set of standards of behaviour for those you’re working with than you do when you’re writing plays. He wrote very, very brilliant pieces of theatre – that’s what I would say. His great play is Waiting for Godot, but even then you’ve got to do what Beckett tells you! He knows what he’s doing. In the later plays when his vision had evolved into something very, very, very Samuel Beckett, then I believe he wrote himself into a corner, but that’s me actually. He made these beautiful, sterile pieces.

One of the most interesting production notes I ever read was yours at the beginning of The Dead where you say that the ghost of the Famine should haunt this play. How did you imagine that manifesting itself on the stage, because I remember reading it and thinking, that would be extremely difficult to portray?

But it’s good for theatre and for the actors onstage to remember the famine, because they’ve all survived it. And I guarantee you each one of those characters, including Mr Browne, they’ve lived with the threat of death, or their ancestors have.

So is that why in that opening scene you make sure that those singing actors cast shadows?

Absolutely. We are all ghosts of the Famine. When you survive the Holocaust you carry the dead with you forever.

Finally what’s next for Frank McGuinness? Have you any plays in the pipeline?

I have as always a load of projects. I shouldn’t tempt fate by saying what they’re going to be. The Match Box, my play which opened in Liverpool at the Playhouse – that will go on next in the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, London, which is a theatre I’ve worked in before and love working in. The same actress – Leanne Best – will perform it. With the same wonderful director, Lia Williams. We’re going to change the sets and look at it in a new way. That’s what’s next on the cards, and I’m hoping, hoping to work again at The Abbey. It’s been a long time – a long exile – from there with new work, but it would be lovely to do a new play there. The last one was done in 1999 – Dolly West’s Kitchen – and I’ve been wandering since then. It would be nice to come home. I’m 60 next year, and it would be good for the 60th birthday to do a big, tough play there. We’ll see.

Frank McGuinness

Frank McGuinness’s many plays (published by Faber) include Dolly West’s Kitchen, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me. Two collections of his plays are also available: Frank McGuinness Plays One and Plays Two.

The Match Box begins a new run at Kilburn’s Tricycle Theatre on 2nd May.

The decision was taken to use a monotype caster (which means that fresh type was cast from molten lead to print the book) and employ the font Plantin; first cut in 1913 for the Monotype Corporation, based on a face cut in the 16th century by Robert Granjon.

The type was made by using a large keyboard to punch holes in a paper tape about five inches high – tape akin to that of a player-piano. The text was input ‘blind’: the person doing it has only their memory to tell where they were in the text and whether or not they’d made any mistakes. All they had to show for hours of punching keys was a roll of white paper, pocked with small rectangular holes.

The roll of paper did not resemble a book, with text and a typeface, but it is where the book began, as it contained all the information needed to cast the type, which was done on the adjacent monotype caster – where brass dies impressed the typeforms on the molten lead.

Stanley’s drawings were photo-etched into metal plates and then printed on Richard’s Heidelberg presses.

It was a long, slow process, and an apt one, given that the book being created was about hollow ways worn into landscape by the passing of a hundred generations.

Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards

Holloway – the hollow way. A sunken path, a deep and shady lane. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed into the land …

In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset’s sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres and great strangeness. Six years later, after Deakin’s early death, Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. Holloway is a book about those journeys and that landscape. (Read more from Dan Richards on how the book and the collaboration came about and developed on his feature for The Quietus, Away from Prying Eyes).

Only 277 copies of the original edition were printed, but this month sees publication of a new (equally beautiful) hardback edition. Copies are available from the Faber website.

For more details and images see Stanley Donwood’s Holloway blog.

The Nobel laureate is talking about the art of fiction but composing a letter also constitutes giving in ways that other communications do not. Putting pen to paper, sealing your thoughts and dropping them in to a dark box is a bigger gesture than typing a few lines, clicking send. In Here and Now, the letters that Auster and Coetzee give each other, by post and by fax, become gifts to the reader.

Poets make great letter writers – Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, W. S. Graham spring to mind – but several novelists display varieties of intimacy in their correspondence too: Saul Bellow thanking dying John Cheever for his friendship; Joseph Roth imploring Stefan Zweig to publicly disavow Nazi Germany; F. Scott Fitzgerald helping his daughter with her college essays about the greatest letter writer of all – John Keats. These snapshots in words show artists living and, like photographs of people who are now dead, they inspire a mix of wonder and sympathy. Dates become irrelevant, years fly by in the author’s life, hours in our own.

The protagonists of Here and Now are very much alive. They discuss big subjects – economics, friendship, mortality – in relaxed, amusing tones. ‘What I see I see more clearly,’ the South African writes. ‘Am I deluded?’ Perhaps what’s true of the banal also applies to ageing; writers who don’t fear it have least to lose by confronting it. Philosophical inquiries stem from small questions: Why have they wasted thousands of hours watching televised sport? What is the origin of the phrase ‘to hell in a handcart’? Why is there no directory of mobile phone numbers?

Sanity and self-awareness are ever present but both men admit their bafflement in turbulent times. Coetzee recommends solving the financial crisis by replacing bad numbers with good ones, while Auster thinks Israel might relocate to Wyoming and bemoans technology’s impact on intellectual life. Moved by the Arab Spring, but fearful that the old orders will soon reassert themselves, Coetzee asks: ‘What do I really know about the people involved?’ This book articulates the importance of not knowing.

If you want wrenching letters which are doors to literature, read Bishop and Lowell. For an inventory of a modernist giant’s day to day existence go to T. S. Eliot. Want to see how a brave artist can make ignorant judgements? Try William Styron. The power of Here and Now is connected to what Henry James wrote in a rallying missive to Edith Wharton when he urged her to confront ‘the immediate’. In their seventh and eighth decades respectively, Auster and Coetzee remain committed to giving but what about the epistolary art? If we cease to write letters, will a mode of generosity vanish? Perhaps but as Coetzee reminds his friend: ‘The world keeps throwing up its surprises.’

Marble Season by Gilbert Hernandez

Comics legend Gilbert Hernandez makes his debut on the Faber list with a love-song to childhood. A graphic novel in which everything and nothing matters, Marble Season is a quietly profound delight from the man Junot Diaz described as ‘one of the greatest American storytellers’.

It’s also, fittingly, one of the most beautiful objects you’ll see this year …

A Dark Redemption

His third novel, A Dark Redemption, is a politically literate take on the police procedural, beginning with the savage murder of Ugandan student, Grace Okello, who has been held captive and tortured before having her heart cut out. DI Jack Carrigan is pressurised to make a fast closure but his sergeant, Geneva Miller, isn’t convinced by the sex-crime motive, and as she begins to dig into Grace’s PhD thesis she discovers that the young woman has made contact with some dangerous individuals linked to Ugandan warlords and the child soldiers they have recruited. Unknown to Miller Carrigan has his own links to the region and the ghosts of his past there are yet to be laid to rest.

As an non-Londoner what struck me immediately about A Dark Redemption was how unfamiliar Sherez rendered the city. There’s a tendency among crime writers to stick to the usual streets, whether it’s East End gangsters or the suburban middle class, and we open those books with a set of expectations which are generally fulfilled. It takes a brave author to step away from these certainties and explore communities the reader hasn’t seen before.

Sherez’s two previous novels were set abroad, but the story of the Ugandan diaspora demanded a return to his native London and he was determined to present a fresh version of the city, both for the reader and himself. ‘I ignored almost everything about the London I knew, the London I’d grown up in, and instead started to look at London’s underground communities, the things we pass by every day yet rarely notice, the marginalised and migrant communities, the dispossessed, the crazed, the lost, and those choosing to be.’

Crime fiction has been slow catching up to the possibilities inherent in immigration and post-colonialism, perhaps because those worlds feel too alien and remote, perhaps because they change so quickly that authors are wary of misrepresenting them, but London is a city shaped by immigration like no other.

Bayswater had always been a place for immigrants fleeing religious persecution, revolution and dictatorship. They took the last of their savings and bought a one-bedroom flat, somewhere they could lock the door, not answer the bell. Huguenots in Paddington and Romanovs in Queensway.

Now there was a new breed fleeing civil wars and uprisings across Africa and the Middle East. They lived lives of quiet solitude, sequestered in their flats, not really part of the city, occasionally meeting in émigré groups, rehashing old tales, their eyes always fixed on the door.

In A Dark Redemption Sherez presents London not as one city but many. ‘I was interested in how London, and all cities, are palimpsests where separate worlds exist side by side, in both space and time, mostly oblivious of each other, and the way a murder could chart the intersection of these worlds.’

Eleven Days

The investigation into Grace Okello’s death elegantly illustrates this idea, taking us from cramped tower blocks to the gated developments of Chiswick Pier, basement flats on roads defying regeneration, pungent street markets, and in one of the book’s most menace-infused scenes, a meeting room above a Hackney pub where a group of expat Ugandans are planning to take back their country from Joseph Kony and his child army. We also see how powerfully the past tugs at the present, as a single bad decision during Carrigan’s gap year derails his life and shapes him into a detective who’s sure to enter the genre’s top ranks.

The second Carrigan and Miller book, out soon (May 2013), promises a similarly complex journey, with Sherez once again seeking out hidden corners of the city and their dark histories. Eleven Days opens with a fire at a small convent tucked among the houses on a West London square. Ten nuns were resident but eleven bodies are discovered and Carrigan and Miller soon find themselves embroiled in a case which encompasses radical Liberation Theology in 1970s South America and contemporary battles over oil and land. It’s sure to be another gripping read, perfect for those who like their crime fiction to ask larger questions than simply ‘whodunnit.’

- A Dark Redemption by Stav Sherez is in paperback now. Eleven Days will be published in May 2013.

About Eva Dolan

Eva Dolan blogs, she writes, she talks about herself in the third person and feels vaguely uncomfortable about it. Find her reviewing at Crime Fiction Lover, Crime Factory and on Twitter. Her debut crime novel, Long Way Home, will be published by Harvill Secker in Spring 2014.

A small exhibition at the Faber offices in June 2011 featured the first series – just 8 poems – that were published by Faber in the autumn of 1927 (in all 38 Ariel poems were to appear by 1931), together with a little of the correspondence relating to them. The poets were asked to write verses either relating to Christmas or on something appropriately seasonal or magical (perhaps in homage to Shakespeare’s Ariel?), and the resulting poems are wonderfully varied. Beginning with Thomas Hardy – albeit not what he considered one of his best poems – the series included verse from older literary figures, whilst also giving space to newer voices in the final poems by Siegfried Sassoon and T. S. Eliot.

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The Ariel poems were a bold attempt at the most difficult of marriages, that of word and image. We owe the success or failure of this particularly bold experiment to one man: Richard de la Mare. He had joined Faber as a director in 1925 only a week after T. S. Eliot and, although responsible for all matters to do with the production of books, he was also a gifted commissioning editor in the areas of art, architecture, and the natural world. One of his earliest contributions to the firm, moreover, was to begin to bring the verse and prose works of his father, Walter de la Mare, to the Faber list; and he continued to be involved with other more traditional poetry editions (such as those of Edward Thomas).

In his attempt to persuade eminent poets to contribute an Ariel poem, Richard de la Mare was not shy at telling poets that his father, Walter, had agreed to participate. In any case, he had come to know the older poets concerned through his father: in the displayed draft of a letter to Sir Henry Newbolt, for example, he writes that ‘Daddy has promised to let me have a new poem and so has T. S. Eliot’. In 1927, moreover, several of the writers when replying make polite enquiries about how his father was recovering from a recent illness. Rudyard Kipling was not able to help, but ‘A. E’ and W. B. Yeats were, and many other important literary figures came up with short poems for the sequence.

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The freshness and vitality of the artwork that accompanied the poems was notably apparent in this first series. In nearly every case Richard de la Mare made the choice of artist, most of whom were young jobbing artists and illustrators already active in the world of printing and publishing. Most would have been recommended to him by Henry Curwen of the Curwen Press, whose firm printed all of the poems (including also a special limited edition on English hand-made paper, signed by each author). We don’t know whose idea it was to ask the sculptor and engraver Eric Gill to illustrate the poem by G. K. Chesterton, but it was an inspired conjunction of two prominent Catholic creative figures. The American designer E. McKnight Kauffer, who did the strikingly modernist design for Journey of the Magi, was an old friend of T. S. Eliot, and the poet almost certainly suggested his name to de la Mare. Kauffer’s artwork is a good indicator that T. S Eliot’s aesthetic interests were as radical as his poetic ones!

It is interesting for us to consider the manner in which the artists responded to the poems; but it is clear that this did not worry Richard de la Mare (or the poets, as none got to see the designs before publication). When he writes to Siegfried Sassoon enclosing a printed copy (see poem 7, Nativity), de la Mare wisely praises the poetry and not the wonderful design by Paul Nash: ‘it would be difficult to give your poem a garment even approaching in achievement its own perfect joy’. Thanking McKnight Kauffer for his design, de la Mare writes that ‘I was not sure about the cover design at first but it certainly grows upon me. Eliot’s poem, too, I think first rate’.

The Ariel Poems were an important component in the establishment of Faber’s reputation as a literary publishing house. Not only did they stimulate T. S. Eliot to write some of his most popular, and much-quoted, short verses, they were also part of that process of linking the name of Faber with poetry, so that the two are now almost synonymous. Their artistic impact was also significant, as it enhanced contact with a wider group of young artists, some of whom like Barnett Freedman produced iconic dust jackets for Faber and Faber throughout the next two decades.

- Robert Brown, June 2011