I meet Claire Messud at the London Review Bookshop one sodden evening in September when she is London to promote her latest novel, The Burning Girl. Her normal speaking voice is gentle anyway, but tonight she is speaking particularly softly so as not to disturb book browsers in the shop’s basement. I’m conscious we don’t have much time, so ask her to explain the genesis of the book.
“Why this book now?” she asks.
“Yes, exactly.”
“Should I explain what the book is about?”
“Sure.”
Anyone looking to the Booker Prize this year to affirm that dreams can come true would have seized on the example of Fiona Mozley, the 29 year bookseller who wrote the first chapter of her longlisted novel on a train. Her story seemed impossibly romantic: an unknown debut novelist, who wrote her book virtually in secret, was recognised alongside Paul Auster and Zadie Smith by one of the most famous literary prizes in the world. But while Mozley rather touchingly has said ‘I already feel like I’ve won,’ what about those writers who are always the bridesmaid but never the bride when it comes to literary prizes?
Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends is a fluent and impressive first novel. Still only twenty-six years old, Rooney says she wrote the book in a “huge rush”, and this has translated to the page, where urgency is crucial; the quartet of bourgeois artists that the book centres on are so introspective that, at times, it requires this sense of propulsion to stick with them. Frances, a twenty-one-year-old spoken-word poet, performs with her confident and beautiful ex-girlfriend Bobbi. Their work comes to the attention of Melissa, who hopes to write a profile on the pair. She also introduces them to her actor husband Nick.
Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the Victorian era in Gillespie and I, and now, a young slave in this third novel. Disenfranchised they may be, but her protagonists don’t lack agency. The narrator of Sugar Money is Lucien, a slave who is barely in his teens and whose voice is startlingly optimistic. In Martinique in 1765, Lucien and his older brother, Emile, are tasked by their French master with returning to Grenada — where they once lived — and smuggling back 42 slaves who are living under the rule of English invaders at a hospital plantation in Fort Royal.
Whilst we’ve been wanting to escape the news recently, we still want to learn and these gloriously mind-expanding podcasts are just the ticket.
Become a Pub Quiz Champ
If you ever find yourself wondering why people are ticklish, how perfume works and what exactly the Freemasons are, Stuff You Should Know is for you. It explains all the things we assume we know but actually don’t. It might also help you win the pub quiz. Hosted by jovial Americans Charles (Chuck) Bryant and Josh Clark, this is food for the brain and compulsive listening.
Kate Murray-Browne’s brilliantly suspenseful first novel The Upstairs Room has been described as a ‘property horror story’. Eleanor and Richard, an editor and lawyer respectively, move into a large four-bedroom house in East London with their two small daughters. The house is at the upper limit of what they can afford and Eleanor feels uneasy about it from the start. They take in a lodger, in the form of 27-year-old Zoe, the temp receptionist from Richard’s office, to help pay for the house, but Eleanor soon begins to feel the house is making her ill. She feels it is “rejecting her, like an unwelcome transplant.”