Imagine this. An email, late one winter afternoon, asks if you’d be happy to receive two large boxfuls of brand new debut novels, and if you’d read them in return for what, on any view, would be described as a fair fee. Finding no reason to refuse (who would?) you accept. The deliveries arrive and…
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My first taste was unintended. Found by chance one evening in Istanbul, the pomegranate’s seeds had been crushed with orange juice. I took a train to Antalya a week later, by which time I was hooked
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 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,…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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…
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‘If you wish to make an apple pie, you must first create the universe.’ The first episode of Sagan’s series, Cosmos, aired in September 1980. I came to it late, through the clip I’ve posted here which shows the work of John D. Boswell, a musician based in Washington. Almost all the samples and footage…
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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…
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