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In this exclusive, Iain Hood and Renard Press surreptitiously brought Dame Muriel Spark and Jean Cocteau together to discuss their roles in My Book of Revelations. And they almost do.

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SPARK

Hello, Jean. Fancy meeting you here.

 

COCTEAU

How d’you mean, Muriel? It was arranged. Back in the Café Royal, they said. Eleven for half past.

 

SPARK

Did ‘they’? I heard nothing about it. I was just in for my customary early lunch, every Tuesday now for the last… oh, well, since I died. Now I am free of the fetters of a worldly life I like to keep a little part of myself for the city of my birth and formation. And who, pray tell, are these ‘they’?

 

COCTEAU

‘They’? ‘They’? Well, ken, I thoucht you knew. ‘They’ are, eh, let me see. I jotted it down somewhere… (Cocteau fumbles in a jacket pocket.)

 

SPARK

No I did not know. I do not know. I have a dreadful feeling we are back in the hands of some malign spirit.

 

COCTEAU

Aye? Aye. Sans doute. You may huv been ambushed, likesay. Someone has pulled the old  embuschier on you! Ha! Well, they told me to be here, onywise. If you’ve been making a regularity of it, nae doubt they took their opporchancity.

 

SPARK

‘They’ sound perfectly awful.

 

COCTEAU

They want us talkin aboot being in this lad Hood’s book. Yet another wee outing for our continuing legacies.

 

SPARK

Oh, that.

 

COCTEAU

Oh dear, Muriel. That sounded ominous.

 

SPARK

Yes, well, I wasn’t born to be a character in books, I was born rather to put them in books.

 

COCTEAU

C’mon. It wis like a wee holiday, that. Get tae huv a drink at New Year’s in here. I hud a great time, me.

 

SPARK

Did you now? I suppose it was all right. But the ‘lad’, as you call him, he has to put all the this and the that into his writing. A trickster. A huckster. A perfect fraud. And he puts that farmboy talk into his books. I cannot abide that.

 

COCTEAU

Aw, c’mon, Muriel. It’s all in fun.

 

SPARK

No. No. I don’t think it is, you see. He’s up to something. Oh, I’m not saying I don’t like it. Have you read Robbe-Grillet? (Spark’s eyes flash with a look of French nouveau roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s expression.)

 

COCTEAU

After my time.

 

SPARK

Oh, I love Robbe-Grillet. So cold, analytical. We need analysis. You know, I sometimes think we have had enough of the emotions, of the psychologies of characters. I mean, who wants to know? And anyway, writing is about writing, not about people.

 

COCTEAU

You’re sure?

 

SPARK

Not particularly. (Spark laughs her gentle, old lady, seen-it-all laugh.)

 

COCTEAU

You love a bit ay a plot, don’t you, Muriel? Nasty things happening to nasty people. I love yer plots.

 

SPARK

Well, I don’t know. I just start writing and I think I better liven things up. (More gentle laughter.)

 

COCTEAU

So, there ye go. This lad Hood was probably thinking, dum de dum dum, OK, Edinburgh. Millennium. Fireworks, Y2K hoaxer. Right, then, better liven things up a bit.

 

SPARK

Have you read it, this My Book of Revelations?

 

COCTEAU

Aye. Huv you?

 

SPARK

I have. Since I died and it would be too frightening for the reading public for me to be publishing more books I’ve taken to reading everything. I’m very catholic in my taste.

 

COCTEAU

So, yur still writing, then?

 

SPARK

Well, I channel my spirit through other writers, you know. Influences and all that.

 

COCTEAU

So that’s what you were doin here, through Hood, was it, aye?

 

SPARK

Certainly NOT! How dare you! What do you take me for?

 

COCTEAU

It’s jist, you said…

 

SPARK

Oh, I’m just joking, of course. My influence flies everywhere. I cannot control it. I wouldn’t bother trying if I could. How’s it all going for you, your influence on… things?

 

COCTEAU

Hing on. I’ll check the shopping website. (Cocteau pulls a vintage iPhone 1 out of his pocket.) Let’s see…

 

SPARK

Oh, I have one of those! Your phone. Exactly the same as mine!

 

COCTEAU

Aye. Who knew it, eh? The afterlife. Nuthin like anyone tells you. Everything like being a decade and a hauf out of date wi yer tech.

 

SPARK

Oh, I like it. So much more relaxing to be lo-fi, you know?

 

COCTEAU

Aye, well, here we go. Right-oh. What am I sellin, here? The English subtitle version of La Belle et la Bête; English translation of Les Enfants Terrible, a biography, Letter to the Americans, another biography, Orphée, the film not the novel; another biography, another bloody biography…

 

SPARK

What? What’s wrong?

 

COCTEAU

None of my greatest works, my poetry… My life looks more pruriently interestin to the swines than my work.

 

SPARK

Check Wikipedia.

 

COCTEAU

Oh aye. Hing on. (He scrolls and hits links.)

 

SPARK

Well?

 

COCTEAU

Dum dee dum… Right. Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau born blah blah blah, French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic blah blah blah… ane ay the foremost artists of the… influential figure in early twentieth-century art. Fair enough. Blah blah he is best known for his novels blah blah blah and films blah blah blah he was described as ‘one of the avant-garde’s most successful and influential filmmakers’! Why, this is outrageous! And look at this picture from 1923 they’re using. I look skelly! Look!

 

SPARK

You do not look skelly.

 

COCTEAU

I look bloody skelly, man! Look at me! I look skelly. Let’s look you up! (Cocteau starts frantically typing.)

 

SPARK

Oh, for God’s sake, Jean. Do not look me up. I really couldn’t care less.

 

COCTEAU

I’m looking you… AHA!!! Gorgeous photi, of COURSE!

 

SPARK

OMG!

 

COCTEAU

What’s this, OMG?

 

SPARK

I keep up with all linguistic trends, you know, but I only employ the most delightful. Anyway, OMG, that’s the bookish wistful toothache picture of me! Ha! How marvellously ridiculous! As though I ever wrote in that posture. I’d break my back! Between you and I, I think the photographer was trying to look down my top.

 

COCTEAU

And look what Wikipedia says about you. Poet… Poetry Society… poet… poetry… poet, poet, poet… poetic novels! Her grave describes her in one word… Spark died in 2006 and is buried in the cemetery of Sant’Andrea Apostolo in Oliveto with one word after her name, POETA!

 

SPARK

Well, what do you have at your grave?

 

COCTEAU

Well, I have this design of my own devising where one of my own line drawings of the suffering Christ approaching his cross and a little—

 

SPARK

You see, you overcomplicate things, Jean. Keep them simple in future.

 

COCTEAU

Whit wis that thing you had aw the oldies saying in Memento Mori, Muriel?

 

SPARK

Remember you must die, Jean.

 

COCTEAU

Oh aye, that was it.

 

SPARK
Ah, it’s no matter. The dead are as much members of the parish as the living, they’re just more… peaceful. Yes. Peaceful. Anyway, what have ‘they’ sent you for and what are we supposed to be saying about this chap Hood and his My Book of Revelations?

 

COCTEAU

Oh, aye, eh, what we think about being in his book.

 

SPARK

I suppose this Hood is an author like any other.

 

COCTEAU

An all authors are the gods over their ane books, int they?

 

SPARK

Yes, like The Book of Job, my most favoured text.

 

COCTEAU

Yur quite a capricious god yersel, urn’t ye? Over yer characters.

 

SPARK

Well, I do what I want with them. My Miss Jean Brodie, for example—

 

COCTEAU

She’s a fascist.

 

SPARK

Well, I don’t know. I don’t say that, you know. She was accused of that. She admired Mussolini, but then a lot of people did, you know, even the Italians…

 

COCTEAU

An egotist, then.

 

SPARK

Oh, absolutely. Well, she was made by Edinburgh, of course.

 

COCTEAU

Anyway, it’s us in the bloody book, not Brodie. How d’ye feel about being a character in a book? This Hood’s book?

 

SPARK

I don’t really know. What does it say about him in Wikipedia? I don’t know the man.

 

COCTEAU

Hmm… OK, let’s see… Iain Hook, Iain Wood, Eleventh Hour… Ian A. – Ian Alastair Hood… The page ‘Iain Hood‘ does not exist. You can create a draft and submit it for review, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered. Hmm…

 

SPARK

I think you and I have nothing to say about that, then.

 

COCTEAU

Either that or we already said it.

 

SPARK

Yes… quite. Lunch?

 

COCTEAU

Why not? Game’s a bogey, naw?

 

SPARK

Quite.

 

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My Book of Revelations

by Iain Hood

Also available in Renard Press Edition

Paperback

228pp

ISBN: 9781804470671

£10.00

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The countdown to the millennium has begun, and people are losing their heads. A so-called Y2K expert gives a presentation to Scotland’s eccentric Tech Laird T.S. Mole’s entourage in Edinburgh, and soon long hours, days, weeks and months fill with seemingly chaotic and frantic work on the ‘bug problem’. Soon enough it’ll be just minutes and seconds to go to midnight. Is the world about to end, or will everyone just wake up the next day with the same old New Year’s Day hangover?

A book about what we know and don’t know, about how we communicate and fail to, My Book of Revelations moves from historical revelations to the personal, and climaxes in the bang and flare of fireworks, exploding myths and offering a glimpse of a scandal that will rock Scotland into the twenty-first century. As embers fall silently to earth, all that is left to say is: Are we working in the early days of a better nation?

‘This novel is driven by an inexhaustible stream of imagination and Hood’s fearless desire to leave narrative conventions behind and fly unfettered into a realm of pure ideas. There are definite echoes of Lanark… and a sense that the Glasgow-born Hood is joining in, and extending, a conversation that’s been going on in the more adventurous Scots literature for the past century.’ — Alastair Mabbott The Herald

Also available by Iain Hood

Have you ever wondered how far animals can communicate, if the sea can hear and if the landscape bears pain and loss? Our questions may be legion. Why was The Ark of the Covenant lodged, for a while, in a corner of south-west Wales? Why do Rhesus Monkeys have a fondness for oysters? And what do hummingbirds hum? Is it true there is an Ethiopian silver thaler in the mud of the upper Daugleddau estuary in Pembrokeshire? Why do fascists show off in planes and when fencing? And which London lemur had a deckchair? Why should the aristocracy hobnob with Nazis when we have plenty of home-grown monsters?

Then, who was Matthews the Monk? And was there really an Allied Operation Zebra? Can the hardest heart learn? Who was the big idea behind some of Dylan Thomas’s finest poems? And what has this to do with Kit Marlowe, a dog called Rex and a clutch of chinchillas?

SO many questions.

So, The Zebra and Lord Jones is a book of mysteries, riddles and jokes – a true story and just a hint of a shaggy-dog tale for fun; a joyful exploration of grief, landscape and the wars that men make, because that is what they do: they are still doing it now. A love story, an examination of wealth, class and privilege, of why most days it is better to be Welsh and why one lonely man stole an escaped zebra in September 1940.

You will meet many real people and discover true things, times and places, and yet the world tilts on its axis and you see strange and beautiful things from the corner of your eye. I hope you can feel the magic, taste what is in the air and enjoy the more… preternatural elements of the book. It is magical realism, after all, which is a wonderful medium for exploring dark, difficult things, for hinting at things which are difficult to express and for exploring what happens, generation after generation, through trauma: war; not being loved; being crushed and lonely, brutal, bitter and desperate, and handing it on.

I hope you find it a beautiful book, but it is also unforgiving and brutal in places, and I want you to read all the end material and then you will see who told you the story.

Let’s tell you some more about what happens. A listless toff, the Baron of Jesmond (known to you as Lord Jones – it’s all explained), is in London attending to insurance matters following potential damage to extensive family property during the Blitz. It is September 1940. He meets an escaped zebra (this is based on a true event, because when London Zoo was bombed, the zebra escaped, ran away and was commemorated in a painting, running against the flames – you can see the pictures and hear a bit more about this here on the BBC.

Little loved by his fascist sympathiser parents, something in the man softens: he is lost, as is the zebra. He is soon to be dispatched to south-west Wales, where the family has extensive property and stabling (the name Lord Jones is given to him by the mocking locals); the zebra follows him, and on impulse he takes it with him. He steals her. Or perhaps she steals him.

What then ensues is a new episode in Lord Jones’s life, with a zebra and her child in tow; he manages to fall in love passionately with the housekeeper Anwen Llewelyn, the natural world, finds himself at the centre of a spy ring, because locals are spying on the family knowing his parents to be fascist and Nazi sympathisers; he is further softened by interactions with local people and a young evacuee boy called Ernest and, extraordinarily, spends Christmas with Haile Selassie, who, in exile (also true) comes to attend the Ark of the Covenant which had been smuggled out of Abyssinia (as was) when Mussolini invaded. (This was a rumour – and it probably wasn’t in Wales.)

While the book sweeps from London, to Dunkirk, to Lake Ziway in Ethiopia, to Lisbon and Dresden, its focus is largely on a small corner of south-west Wales. Why? Because it is where the good things happen. I have recreated the home on the Daugleddau in Pembrokeshire where my grandmother and great-grandmother lived – itself full of magic and storytelling and mystery. The story is an account of all this and of the lives of Lord Jones and Anwen Llewelyn and the love story which unfolds; of spy plots and an international spy investigation involving zebra keepers; of war, loss and grief. An account of real events and people – Mosley, the Mitfords, Hitler, Goebbels, Haile Selassie and several others – plus the true story of the zebra and that tiny quay on the Cleddau in Pembrokeshire. To me, this was always where the magic started; so I made it a book where miracles and cold facts met, shook hands, became friends – overseen by a zebra or two.

I hope you like the sound of the book. It’s a sweeping love story, a curiosity, an engaging fable, but at its heart it holds tough facts about the ravages of landscape, fascism, war, class, tolerance and prejudice, trauma and intergenerational trauma, colonisation and the suppression of indigenous culture. It’s playful, keeps you guessing, and it gave me the chance to live with my own grief and heartbreak – I wrote it often during the night, so you see, it was made in difficult circumstances – and it has a special touch of nerdiness in its scholarly footnotes and end material, and I hope readers love it.

One more thing: the zebra. She is real, and she did indeed escape from London Zoo when her enclosure took a direct hit during the Blitz. I first saw her in Carel Weight’s Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo during an Air Raid, 1941.* THERE is the very zebra the book is about! Now, in the papers it says she only got as far as Camden – but what did they know?

Ten Questions for book groups

1. Why is Mother important to Lord Jones, and why is he important to her?
2. What is your opinion of Earl Ashburn and Lady Ashburn? Did you expect — or hope! — that they would change in some way?
3. How important is the theme of landscape in the book?
4. Do you feel differently about zebras having read the book?
5. Did you think the zebras would be given her back to London Zoo?
6. How much of this is true? What about the footnotes?
7. Who was the narrator? Why do you think that?
8. What were your favourite scenes, and which were least satisfying for you?
9. Is it a convincing love-match between Anwen and Lord Jones?
10. Did you enjoy the way that the book wove in real history with magical realism (see point 6)?

Footnotes

* For copyright reasons we can’t include the picture(s) here, but you can see them, and hear a bit more about that story, here on the BBC.

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THE ZEBRA AND LORD JONES

ANNA VAUGHT

Paperback, 224pp

ISBN: 9781804470367

£9.99

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A listless aristocrat, Lord Jones, finds himself in London during the Blitz, attending to insurance matters. A zebra and her foal, having escaped from the London Zoo during a bombing, cross his path, and he decides to take them back to his estate in Pembrokeshire. Little loved by his fascist-sympathiser parents, something in Lord Jones softens, and he realises he is lost, just like these zebras.

The arrival of the zebras sparks a new lease of life on the Pembrokeshire estate, and it is not only Lord Jones but the families his dynasty has displaced that benefit from the transformation. Full of heart and mischief, The Zebra and Lord Jones is a hopeful exploration of class, wealth and privilege, grief, colonialism, the landscape, the wars that men make, the families we find for ourselves, and why one lonely man stole a zebra in September 1940 – or perhaps why she stole him.

‘I loved The Zebra and Lord Jones – it’s quirky, touching, original and heartfelt; a real breath of fresh air in the publishing landscape.’ — Joanne Harris

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words”

— Robert Frost

Our book, Way to the West, began life in late October 2020 when we managed to grab a week’s holiday in a remote National Trust cottage just outside St Just in the far west of Cornwall. We returned exactly one year later. Like everybody else – or just about everybody else – we had stayed at home through that first year of the Coronavirus pandemic, living on Zoom and actually ‘seeing’ very few other people as the country was subjected to various lockdown arrangements. Although allowed to travel during those Octobers, on both occasions very few public spaces were open and access to those that were was governed by elaborate, controlled procedures. We had, essentially, transported the isolated nature of our home life to this new and beautiful setting.

So, what were the origins of our joint book? What gave us the impetus to attempt a collaboration of paintings and poetry? Why at that time and why this particular subject?

Whenever we holiday, even on very short one- or two-days breaks, Vally brings her art materials and creates wonderful watercolour paintings. In my case, I have been writing and publishing, one way and another, for fun or in a professional capacity, all my life. I usually keep at least a diary record of such times. Reflecting now on what we did together, I think that the idea of trying to create a joint book evolved at some time after our first visit. At a later stage, we began to look more critically at each other’s work, to discuss it and make suggestions, and even to map a loose structure that a book might follow.

But, looking at the quotation from Robert Frost, it occurs to me that there were probably two different sets of emotions originally at work for me before and on our first visit.

One group was related to what we had been going through as a country – the pandemic, obviously, but also the turmoil over national identity and character. From the very western tip of the country, from a region with its own very distinctive history, character and culture, it was also hard not to look back and reflect upon the heart and nature of England itself.

But I also had strong feelings of a more personal and idiosyncratic nature. I had first rock climbed on the Cornish sea cliffs in the mid-1960s and was experiencing powerful memories of being young, cocky, full of life and with close friends sharing those intensely adventurous times. Friends who are no longer with us – but who were crowding close again as ghosts along that familiar shoreline.

With that jumble of strong feelings looking to express themselves, the final catalyst to the actual writing, and doing so in poetry, was watching Vally slowly recreate those landscapes back at the desk in our cottage. I find her silent concentration mesmerising and the slow emergence of scenes and views that I too have witnessed, sometimes only minutes earlier, powerfully moving. It is as if this recreation and interpretation pull at ill-formed thoughts that are somewhere inside my body, pull them out into the world in the shape of rough words and ill-formed phrases.

This process feels intensely physical and is matched by watching the paint and the composition evolve in its distinctive and, to me, mysterious manner. Writing then follows its own procedures – words, their selection and their combination, rhythm, emphasis and silence. Rejection, revision, re-writing. Round and round.

An emotional jumble first finds its thoughts and then its music, its poetry, to the steady accompaniment of brush strokes, ink and wash.

Creating the book together was a writing first for me – and a marvellous one at that.

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WAY TO THE WEST

Andy Christopher Miller and Vally Miller

Paperback • Large format: Crown Quarto (246mm x 189mm)

60pp

ISBN: 9781804470329

£15.00

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Nadia Kabir Barb is a British Bangladeshi writer and journalist whose work has been published in international literary journals and anthologies. She was longlisted for the 2021 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award for Walk in My Shadow. She has an MSc from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and has worked in the health and development sector in both the UK and Bangladesh. Truth or Dare is her debut collection of short stories.

We caught up with Nadia during South Asian History Month 2023 to talk about her latest book, Truth or Dare.

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What inspired you to write Truth or Dare?
For a long time I had characters inside my head, clamouring to be heard, and it took a major health scare in 2014 to finally give me the push I needed. I can’t say there was one particular moment where I decided to write a collection. I wrote one story at a time and somewhere down the line realised I had a manuscript.

Are there any main themes or points you want the reader to take away from your book?
The stories in the collection are snapshots of certain points in the lives of my characters. They are faced with situations where their actions or inactions show us who they are. Their truth, so to speak, and they deal with them in their unique ways. Despite not having set out to write Truth or Dare as a collection, the themes that recur are love, loss, longing and resilience. No matter what – we keep breathing, eating, laughing. Life goes on, we keep going.

Which other writers do you most admire and why?
My introduction and love of short stories was through Rabindranath Tagore’s collection Golpo Guchcho. He wrote about ordinary people in rural and urban Bengal, but through his writing he made their stories extraordinary. The sheer beauty of his language captured my imagination.

As a teenager I devoured almost every book written by Agatha Christie. She will always be the ‘Queen of Crime’ for me. I feel I have her to thank for my powers of intuition and deduction and hope to write a mystery novel one day!

Every sentence Rohinton Mistry writes is a masterpiece. He is an artist with words. After finishing A Fine Balance, which has an ending that leaves you reeling, I had to take some time to let it sink in.

The list is endless but I would also have to mention, Elif Shafak, Khaled Hosseini, Mohsin Hamid and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Are there any books which have changed your life? (And why?)
Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi had an immense impact on how I perceived myself as a British Bangladeshi. To read a book with a brown character in mainstream English literature in the 90s was liberating. Suddenly I was no longer invisible. Representation really does matter.

Another book with South Asian characters that came out in the 90s was A Suitable Boy. As a first-time parent living in Germany, where I spoke little of the language, it was a godsend. The characters in the book were so familiar to me and relatable, it made me feel closer to home.

The Stranger by Albert Camus made me question whether we are really ever a true version of ourselves or constantly presenting a façade which is acceptable to society.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.

If you could offer a budding writer one piece of advice, what would it be?
Dare to dream. It is never too late to become a writer.

What drew you to short stories?
I wrote a column for almost sixteen years, and when I decided to try my hand at fiction, short stories felt like the most natural progression. While with a column you’re constrained by certain parameters and have a definitive narrative – i.e. you have to stick to the facts – with short stories you are allowed creative freedom and the ability to choose what you write about. Which is why I don’t think I am loyal to any particular genre. My stories at times take a darker turn and comedic at others. It’s the freedom of thought and expression that I am drawn to.

What’s the strangest job (besides writing) that you’ve ever had?
I did a summer job at a fast-food place in my first year of university, and I was the only one who hated being at the till. Having to talk to customers terrified me, almost like a form of stage fright.

Where do you write?
Much to the displeasure of my family and orthopaedic consultant, I used to do my writing on my bed! But I am reformed, and have my own study and sit at a desk.

What’s the best place to read?
Nowadays a comfy sofa or, dare I say it, my bed. But the best place to read used to be our veranda at my mother’s house in Bangladesh. There is nothing like being curled up in a chair reading with the monsoon rain outside.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which famous writer do you invite?
If it was only one famous writer, it would have to be Shakespeare. I fell in love with his writing as a teenager, and he played a big part in bringing my husband and me together. It would be fascinating to find out how he would perceive the modern world, including the language, where so many of his words and phrases are now part of our day-to-day vocabulary, and how he would feel about his work being so relevant over four hundred years on. He is immortalised through his writing.

What’s the background music at your dinner party?
If my dinner guest is Shakespeare, I’m thinking ABBA, a band which has also stood the test of time, even after forty years. Or I’d ask Spotify to create a playlist for dinner with Shakespeare!

Any outlandish hobbies?
Not exactly outlandish hobbies, but I am a huge sci-fi fan, and tend to watch anything I can get my hands on. I am also a die-hard Trekkie.

What’s next?
I’m currently finishing my novel Walk in My Shadow. It has at times felt like a never-ending process, but I think I’m almost there. I’m still writing short stories, and am also developing an idea for my next novel.

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‘Right now, someone else’s life was in his hands. He couldn’t say whether it was a few seconds or minutes that they both stood staring at each other, but he had never been so scared in his life.’

In Truth or Dare we follow, spell-bound, as chance encounters bring violent pasts roaring into the present; we wait on tenterhooks as a woman sits by her husband’s hospital bed as both their lives hang in the balance; we watch anxiously as a homeless man begs a woman with her life and career stretching ahead of her not to jump to her death.

By turns comedic, heart-wrenching and moving, these stories paint powerful pictures of pain, love and empathy, and celebrate the power we have over one another. From the rain-soaked waterways of London to the bustling streets of Dhaka, Truth or Dare is a stunning collection that spans two continents and sees the best and worst in both.

Paperback
256pp
ISBN: 9781804470589
£9.99
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Reshma Ruia is an award-winning author and poet. Her first novel was described in the Sunday Times as ‘a gem of straight-faced comedy’. She has published a poetry collection and a short story collection; her work has appeared in international anthologies and journals, and she has had work commissioned by the BBC. She is the co-founder of The Whole Kahani – a writers’ collective of British South Asian writers. Born in India and brought up in Rome, her writing explores the preoccupations of those who possess a multiple sense of belonging.

We caught up with Reshma during South Asian History Month 2023 to talk about her latest novel, Still Lives.

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What inspired you to write Still Lives?
I have long wanted to write a novel based in my home town, Manchester, and to draw upon its rich multicultural history. I also wanted to present protagonists who broke the mould of a ‘typical’ South Asian immigrant narrative. My characters come from a middle-class socioeconomic background, and their concerns regarding ageing, loneliness and the search for love are universal preoccupations. Their ethnicity is not their only defining feature.

Are there any main themes or points you want the reader to take away from your book?
Still Lives is very much a character-driven novel. My writing is not so much about the immigrant experience as it is about displacement, in its existential sense. PK Malik, the main character in the novel, struggles with reconciling his inner needs with what society expects of him. I wanted to present characters in conflict. There are no heroes or villains, just ordinary people interrogating the world they live in both outside and within themselves. I want the reader to understand the dilemma of everyday people whose lives oscillate between worlds – geographical, cultural and emotional – in a constant flux, shaped and reshaped by an imperative to anchor to a map or a feeling.

Which other writers do you most admire and why?
I admire Jhumpa Lahiri and Elizabeth Strout for their nuanced understanding of the human condition, Raymond Carver for the clarity and luminosity of his prose and Rohinton Mistry for his ability to portray an entire universe in all its flawed grandeur and misery.

Are there any books which have changed your life? (And why?)
I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night at a young, impressionable age. As an introverted, timid, bookish child, the book swept me away into another world and time. I was dazzled by the brilliance of Scott’s prose and the trials and tribulations of the Divers, the fragile yet glittering central characters. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, a collection of short stories about first-generation Indian immigrants in America, was another formative book. It was the first book I’d read about the diaspora experience that presented multi-layered characters and did not stoop to clichéd stereotypes and predictable endings.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Keep writing. Keep reading. Believe you have a voice that needs to be heard.

If you could offer a budding writer one piece of advice, what would it be?
As above – and also don’t lose hope. This is a long game and there are no short cuts.

What drew you to your genre?
I write poetry, short stories and novels, and oscillate between different genres. There is no scientific formula as to what form my writing will take. It’s purely instinct.

What’s the strangest job (besides writing) that you’ve ever had?
I once manned a reception desk at a student residence hall in the days before mobile phones. I would scribble the messages and spend almost half the night going up and down corridors, slipping the message notes under doors.

Where do you write?
I write on an overcrowded messy desk in the corner of my kitchen. The desk looks out on my garden, where a beatific statue of the Buddha watches my every move.

What’s the best place to read?
Anywhere and everywhere. I like reading in bed especially.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which famous writer do you invite?
Can I be greedy and invite two? One would be Virginia Woolf and the other would be Pablo Neruda.

What’s the background music at your dinner party?
An eclectic list that would swing from Pink Floyd to Leonard Cohen, via old Sixties Bollywood music by RD Burman and Italian songs from the Eighties.

Any outlandish hobbies?
Hugging trees and collecting mismatched cutlery and milk jugs!

What’s next?
Another novel beckons. It’s fermenting inside at the moment and I just need to dive in…

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‘The glow of my cigarette picks out a dark shape lying on the ground. I bend down to take a closer look. It’s a dead sparrow. I wondered if I had become that bird, disoriented and lost.’

Young, handsome and contemptuous of his father’s traditional ways, PK Malik leaves Bombay to start a new life in America. Stopping in Manchester to visit an old friend, he thinks he sees a business opportunity, and decides to stay on. Now fifty-five, PK has fallen out of love with life. His business is struggling and his wife Geeta is lonely, pining for the India she’s left behind.

One day PK crosses the path of Esther, the wife of his business competitor, and they launch into an affair conducted in shabby hotel rooms, with the fear of discovery forever hanging in the air. Still Lives is a tightly woven, haunting work that pulls apart the threads of a family and plays with notions of identity.

Paperback
320pp
ISBN: 9781913724580
£10.00
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We’re delighted to say that Renard’s publisher, Will Dady, won this year’s Ola Gotkowska Young Publisher of the Year Award (2023) at the Independent Publishing Awards. More information can be found on the IPG’s website here. The judges said:

‘Will Dady of Renard Press has single-handedly built a new literary publisher on tiny resources and increased sales and acquired another small publisher in 2022. Judges liked his commitment to diversity and support of charities and LGBTQAI+ communities… Will is clearly very entrepreneurial and he publishes books with feeling and meaning.’

Renard Press was also shortlisted for the Nick Robinson Newcomer Award (along with our pals Guppy Books) and the HP Sustainability Award. Judges said:

‘Renard Press is shortlisted here for the second year in a row. It increased its sales and acquired another small publisher in 2022, and impressed with its support for under-represented authors and sustainability… Renard is a great example of an independent publisher that started out with few resources but a very strong sense of what they want to achieve. It’s got a philanthropic as well as entrepreneurial streak… it’s a force for good.’

‘Renard Press says it is among the world’s first climate-positive publishers, minimising its carbon footprint and offsetting the remainder. It funds one tree planting for every direct order, uses only renewable energy and has eliminated plastic from order processing… The ambition and commitment to sustainability from such a small operation is fantastic and commendable. A lot of thought has gone into the work.’

Renard Press was also a regional finalist for London in the 2023 British Book Awards.

Ann Morgan is an author, speaker and editor based in Folkestone. Ann’s writing has been published widely, including in the Guardian, Independent and Financial Times, and by the BBC. In 2012, she set herself the challenge of reading a book from every country in a year – a project that led to a TED talk and to the non-fiction book Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country. Her debut novel, Beside Myself, has been translated into eight languages. Crossing Over, her latest novel, draws on her experience living just a few minutes from where many of the small boats crossing the Channel land. She is Literary Explorer in Residence of the Cheltenham Literature Festival for 2022 and 2023.

We caught up with Ann as part of the blog tour for Crossing Over.

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What inspired you to write Crossing Over?
For years I’d wanted to write about the 1940 Little Ships Operation Dynamo mission. I found the idea of ordinary people risking their lives to bring soldiers back from Dunkirk during World War Two very moving, yet I also suspected that the story was somewhat idealised in the national imagination. Then, in 2016, I moved to Folkestone and started to hear about small boats of migrants crossing the English Channel. I knew about the tragedies in the Mediterranean and had been particularly moved by the BBC Exodus documentary series, which featured a number people who had made the treacherous journey to Europe. Surely it wouldn’t be long before such crossings became a common occurrence closer to home? At the same time, the rhetoric around immigration was hardening in parliament and in the media. I wondered what it would be like to write a story that brought these two very differently regarded kinds of Channel crossings together. Crossing Over was the result.

Are there any main themes or points you want the reader to take away from your book?
My main aim is to put the humanity back into the story of what is happening here. It’s too easy to retreat into statistics. But history is made up of people’s lives. That’s not to dismiss the difficulty of addressing some of the issues around immigration, but I think the decisions we take personally and nationally should keep the humanity of those involved in mind.

Which other writers do you most admire and why? Are there any books which have changed your life?
I love a huge range of writers from around the world. But a couple of authors whose work I keep coming back to are the Japanese author Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd) and the British-Tanzanian Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. I love Kawakami because of the humour and beauty in her writing, and the way she tackles taboos and extremes. I discovered Gurnah’s work in 2012. He was my Tanzanian choice for my A Year of Reading the World project (ayearofreadingtheworld.com), a journey through a book from every country in the world in one year. He writes extremely powerfully about race, difference and the legacy of empire, and he was saying a lot of things that have only recently come to mainstream awareness decades ago.

Are there any books which have changed your life?
The 197 books I read during my Year of Reading the World collectively changed my life. Not only did that project lead to my first published book (Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country), but reading such an inspiring and mind-expanding range of stories opened up my fiction writing. I was able to be much more fearless as a writer, and much more alive to the complexity and richness of other lives. It’s one of the reasons why reading the world is now a lifelong endeavour for me. I continue to update the blog with recommendations every month.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Oh crumbs. I’m not very good at listening to advice. A famous crime writer once told me: ‘This is the baton you must carry on: excessive drinking and booksellers who kick you in the face.’ Needless to say, we were already doing the first of the two when he said this.

If you could offer a budding writer one piece of advice, what would it be?
Keep going.

What drew you to your genre?
It’s what comes out when I sit down to write. And I suppose it’s mostly what I read. (Although I think genres are made up.)

What’s the strangest job (besides writing) that you’ve ever had?
A professional mourner, although not by choice. I used to be a freelance choral singer, and would regularly sing at people’s weddings and funerals. But at one funeral, I was told to sit in the congregation and say I was a friend of the family. It made me wonder how many of the other people there were also being paid…

Where do you write?
I’m very lucky to have my own writing room, looking out at the White Cliffs.

What’s the best place to read?
I get a lot done on my exercise bike. It’s a useful barometer for telling how good a book is. When a story really grabs me, I don’t notice the minutes passing.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which famous writer (from any point of history) do you invite?
Well, the writer I’d most like to meet is the Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie, an extraordinary man, who ran away from home as a teenager and went to live with the Inuit in Greenland. He wrote the amazing memoir An African in Greenland (translated by James Kirkup), and it was my Togolese choice back in 2012. Luckily, it looks as though I will get my wish to meet him later this year, although the event hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t share details for now…

What’s the background music at your dinner party?
I tend to be too flustered thinking about the logistics to remember to put music on. But I am partial to a spot of Joni Mitchell.

Any outlandish hobbies?
No. I was a campanologist as a teenager but I haven’t done it for years.

What’s next?
Another novel. (I’ve got several in the works at the moment.) And developing more of my reading workshops, which are designed to help curious booklovers read outside their comfort zones. I’m also looking forward to returning to the Cheltenham Literature Festival for another year as Literary Explorer in Residence.

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Edie finds the world around her increasingly difficult to comprehend. Words are no longer at her beck and call, old friends won’t mind their own business and workmen have appeared in the neighbouring fields, preparing to obliterate the landscape she has known all her life. Rattling around in an old farmhouse on the cliffs, she’s beginning to run out of excuses to stop do-gooders interfering when one day she finds an uninvited guest in the barn and is thrown back into the past.

Jonah has finally made it to England – where everything, he’s been told, will be better. But the journey was fraught with danger, and many of his fellow travellers didn’t make it. Sights firmly set on London, but unsure which way to turn, he is unprepared for what happens when he breaks into Edie’s barn.

Haunted by the prospect of being locked away and unable to trust anyone else, the elderly woman stubbornly battling dementia and the traumatised illegal immigrant find solace in an unlikely companionship that helps them make sense of their worlds even as they struggle to understand each other. Crossing Over is a delicately spun tale that celebrates compassion and considers the transcendent language of humanity.

272pp paperback
ISBN: 9781804470220
£9.99

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Iain Hood was born in Glasgow and grew up in the seaside town of Ayr. He attended the University of Glasgow and Jordanhill College, and later worked in education in Glasgow and the west country. He attended the University of Manchester after moving to Cambridge, where he continues to live with his wife and daughter. His first novel, This Good Book, was published by Renard in 2021, and his second novel, Every Trick in the Book was published in September 2022.

We caught up with Iain as part of the blog tour for Every Trick in the Book.

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What inspired you to write Every Trick in the Book?
No comment.

Are there any main themes or points you want the reader to take away from your book?
No comment. I’m making no statements until my lawyer’s present.

Which other writers do you most admire and why? Are there any books which have changed your life?
No comment.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Shouldn’t you be allowing me one phone call, yeah? Has my brief been called?

If you could offer a budding writer one piece of advice, what would it be?
I invoke my privilege to avoid self-incrimination. You people.

What drew you to your genre?
No comment.

What’s the strangest job (besides writing) that you’ve ever had?
What are you getting at?

Where do you write?
Where are you going with this?

What’s the best place to read?
I wasn’t even there. This is a stitch-up. I want my brief!

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which famous writer (from any point of history) do you invite?
What are you angling at? Why would this matter? No comment. No comment. No comment.

What’s the background music at your dinner party?
Oi! Keep your hands off me. Stop twisting the cuffs!

Any outlandish hobbies?
All right, all right! I confess! I wrote it. I wrote Every Trick in the Book! Are you happy now? And yeah, I was playing at it. Literary allusions, temporal sleights of hand, skewed mise-en-scène! I used…satire. I knew that no copper talks at length and in detail about Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band! But I couldn’t help myself. I admit it. The whole thing was just so ripe for… I couldn’t help it. It just got…out of control so quickly. Suddenly I found myself researching the Sugababes and focaccia recipes. I knew it was wrong, but it felt so right. Righteous, even. I’m not sorry. I won’t say it. You can’t make me, copper!

What’s next?
I suppose I’m going down, yeah? I’m not sorry. I’ll be back at it as soon as I’m out! I fought the law AND I WON!

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‘There’s only control, control of ourselves and others. And you have to decide what part you play in that control.’

Cast your eye over the comfortable north London home of a family of high ideals, radical politics and compassionate feelings. Julia, Paul and their two daughters, Olivia and Sophie, look to a better society, one they can effect through ORGAN:EYES, the campaigning group they fundraise for and march with, supporting various good causes.

But is it all too good to be true? When the surface has been scratched and Paul’s identity comes under the scrutiny of the press, a journey into the heart of the family begins. Who are these characters really? Are any of them the ‘real’ them at all? Every Trick in the Book is a genre-deconstructing novel that explodes the police procedural and undercover-cop story with nouveau romanish glee. Hood overturns the stone of our surveillance society to show what really lies beneath.

200pp paperback
ISBN: 9781913724924
£10.00

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Two hundred years ago Shelley and his companion Edward Williams sailed their boat Ariel out of the Gulf of Spezia towards Livorno and were never seen alive again. It is quite easy to see how they made the mistake of going out when they did. The bays of Lerici and La Spezia are protected from the Ligurian Sea by enclosing headlands and islands. The thunder storms that build up most summer evenings at nine o’clock crackle their lightning around the hills to the north towards Genoa without, more often than not, troubling these havens. In 1822 there were no weather forecasts, other than the opinions of local fisherman, who tend to be canny and quiet when advising foreigners.

Shelley left behind a tangle of love affairs and infant deaths that must have been emotional hell for everyone involved. Byron, who was involved but had a tougher hide, and Leigh Hunt arrived a few weeks later and found the villages where Shelley had been living – San Terenzo and the larger Lerici, ten minutes’ brisk walk round the bay – delightful. Since then an anthology of writers, mainly British and Italian, have passed through and agreed, with Sem Benelli naming it the Gulf of the Poets in 1910. D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster loved the place, and now, thanks to the new Lerici Music Festival (while in no way bracketing myself with them), so do I. This century Lerici Pea Prize has been given to writers who have contributed to the tradition, and they have little plaques on the railing of the seaside path between the two villages. Among them is Carol Ann Duffy.

When Leigh Hunt and Byron arrived from Livorno they were, like Shelley, not just coming for summer sun. They had spent months crossing Europe to escape the increasingly autocratic and censorious clutches of a Tory government in London that had been in power too long. Sound familiar? Shelley had been fulminating against it in pamphlets, to the fury of the Tory press, which seized on his private life to discredit his views. The answer was to start their own periodical, The Liberal, which Leigh Hunt backed and helped publish with his brother. The reason for Shelley sailing to Livorno was to discuss the idea for the journal with them – sailing down the coast was a much quicker way of getting about in the days before railways, when roads were bad and the ways through the hills difficult. Shelley was not on a pleasure cruise. When The Liberal did appear, though, it did not last long: barely a year. Tory money does not flow towards publications that are openly hostile, then as now.

A long time later, in 2004, Ben Ramm revived the title, feeling that the political atmosphere in Britain was ripe for some original thinking not tied to the Labour or Conservative parties. Once the Liberal Democrats allied themselves with the Conservatives in 2010, they found its views inconvenient too and it first dropped its print run, then closed on the Internet in 2012. 

I miss it, not only because The Liberal published my poems, but because it provided an opposition to orthodoxy, social and economic. Time it returned, two centuries after its birth on these glorious if rocky, Ligurian shores – and for a longer stint this time. The authoritarian forces across the world are having things too easy at the moment and they need confronting.

Lerici and San Terenzo are coming to life again, not only for tourists and those looking for yacht moorings. A new cultural foundation has been formed, the classical music festival is six years old and happens on the sea front, where any passing child can peep through the curtains and hear Bryn Terfel singing with the local student orchestra. It also uses the villas around the towns – the sort of places that Leigh Hunt (but not Shelley) could afford. The links with literature, London (the Artistic Director, Gianluca Marciano, is also the conductor of the Chelsea Opera Group, the company where Sir Colin Davis started his career) and contemporary intellectuals are being reforged. My week in Lerici has been inspiring, convincing me that it is the poet’s job, with musicians, to make the case for a saner and less judgemental world – not always with polemics but with works that give driving forces other than power and economics the space to take hold.

Main image: Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound in Italy by Joseph Severn, 1845

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Simon Mundy’s poetry collection Waiting for Music was published by Renard Press in 2021.

Jade Leaf Willetts is a writer from Llanbradach in South Wales. He writes about extraordinary characters in ordinary worlds and has a penchant for unreliable narrators. The Green Indian Problem is his first novel.

We caught up with Jade to talk about his new book, The Green Indian Problem.

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What inspired you to write The Green Indian Problem?
I read a few coming-of-age novels that focus on identity, but I was really interested in writing a younger child’s point of view. I think child narrators are compelling, and when I ‘found’ Green’s voice, I was hooked on his interpretation of the world. Kids are like little detectives with their incessant questions – I wanted to explore what happens when there are no easy answers.

Are there any main themes or points you want the reader to take away from your book?
I’d like the book to comfort readers, especially anyone struggling with their identity. I think reading the right book at the right time can be a special thing, and I like to think The Green Indian Problem will be the right book for someone.

Which other writers do you most admire and why?
Bukowski – for writing about the beauty in the ordinary. I also love Alan Sillitoe.

Are there any books which have changed your life?
The Catcher in the Rye was the first book that changed my life. It was my first experience relating to a character completely. I was so isolated in my feelings, it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t alone, that my weird thoughts were universal. It blew my mind that someone from another place and time had felt the same things and bothered to write about them. It was a revelation in shared experiences and emotions.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
The old classic ‘write what you know’. I initially approached writing as an escape and ignored this advice, but my writing fell flat. My mother kept telling me to use my background and experiences in my work. She was right, and so were the writers the advice is attributed to.

What’s the strangest job (besides writing) that you’ve ever had?
All my jobs have been strange and ill-suited. I think I’m allergic to money. I was a barber for a few years. I felt like the homicidal barber in that Monty Python sketch. I dreaded every day. Writing is the only ‘job’ that suits me.

Where do you write?
In the corner of the living room. I’ve got a tiny laptop and a child’s desk. It’s not Wonderland, but I can relate to Alice.

What’s the best place to read?
In bed, with a cup of tea (when it’s raining).

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which famous writer (from any point of history) do you invite?
It’s tempting to invite Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, or Jack Kerouac, but nobody could live up to my expectations of them, and I’d hate to find out over a curry. I’m a loner. The pressure would kill me.

What’s the background music at your dinner party?
Since I’m dining alone, Joni Mitchell would be perfect company.

Any outlandish hobbies?
All my hobbies involve sitting down. I am only adventurous with words. In another world, I would be a skateboarder.

What’s next?
I’m writing a coming-of-age follow-up to The Green Indian Problem. It’s going slowly. I need to finish a lot of things. I’ve got too many half-written stories.

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Set in the valleys of South Wales at the tail end of Thatcher’s Britain, The Green Indian Problem is the story of Green, a seven year-old with intelligence beyond his years – an ordinary boy with an extraordinary problem: everyone thinks he’s a girl. Green sets out to try and solve the mystery of his identity, but other issues keep cropping up – God, Father Christmas, cancer – and one day his best friend goes missing, leaving a rift in the community and even more unanswered questions.

Dealing with deep themes of friendship, identity, child abuse and grief, The Green Indian Problem is, at heart, an all-too-real story of a young boy trying to find out why he’s not like the other boys in his class.

Longlisted for the Bridport Prize (in the Peggy Chapman-Andrews category)

208pp paperback
ISBN: 9781913724528
£10.00

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