On Music
Here is a piece I wrote about music in Silver and Salt, for David Gutowski’s site, Largehearted Boy, “a literature and music website that explores that spot in the Venn diagram where the two arts overlap.”
On Epigraphs
On the first page of Silver and Salt there’s an epigraph taken from Browning. My novel began a long time ago, with a short story called the Glass-Bottomed Boat. When I wrote that story (a comic tale about a family holiday in Greece) I had no idea it would one day lose its comic thread,…
On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, according to David Mamet
My copy of David Mamet’s ‘Three Uses of the Knife’ is underlined in places, and certain pages are folded over. Sometimes when I go to take it down from the shelf, I feel like a cross-country skier reaching for wax. But rather than functioning as a piece of kit, it’s a book that answers questions…
On the return of a long-lost book
In her memoir, ‘What Language Do I Dream In?’ Elena Lappin recounts the tale of a novel being returned to her, years after she and her family had left behind their home in Prague. I’ll leave you to read the story in its entirety (and if you’ve not already done so, would urge you to…
On Julia Margaret Cameron, Making Mistakes
Julia Margaret Cameron championed errors. Her prints were contact prints, and her photographs made on glass. Starting out as a photographer at the age of 48, she used a coal-bunker for a darkroom, and a hen house as her studio.
On Finding Pennerton House
An early reader of Silver and Salt wrote to me yesterday: ‘I would like to go to Pennerton.’ ‘So would I!’ I wrote back, explaining there was no such place. The sprawling country house in Kent, where much of the novel is set, is made of fragments of memories of houses I’ve visited in my…
On a mystery object, found in a grove
One August in a Peloponnesian olive grove, I found this small, heavyish object hidden in the dry grass. I’ve no idea how long it had lain there; whether it was days, or years. The olive grove is where Ruthie and Vinny Hollingbourne live in Silver and Salt. When they were very young, their father built…
Feather-Clock
This is my first post. I’ll give you something different every time; today it’s the object that has hung above my desk since 2008. When someone asks me what it is, I’m surprised by the question. To me, it’s perfectly obvious. In a house-move, one of the feathers (the fluffy white one) was damaged. I…