The Swiss Sketchbook - page 10

'Outside, the spring day was just beginning, spry blue, with great peals of sunshine, yet all of Lausanne was dusted with snow.'

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 374

***

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook, and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE. And for a closer look at the picture itself just click on the image...

My writing tips

A couple of years ago The Guardian ran a great series on Rules for Writing Fiction, inspired by Elmore Leonard's excellent book on the same subject. The book-loving website Novelicious does a similar thing week on week - go HERE to read my contribution... 

Lausanne, Ernest Hemingway, and Swiss chocolate...

Here's a short film that Headline, my UK publisher, made. In it I describe where the inspiration for my new novel came from, and why the Swiss city of Lausanne will always be one of my favourite places. 

The Swiss Sketchbook - page 9

‘They visited for a week in the full blushes of a Swiss spring, as the flowers along the lakeside popped pink and the steamships to Montreux passed on the hour.’

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 372

***

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook , and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE. And for a closer look at the picture itself just click on the image...

The Swiss Sketchbook - page 8

The streets were full of Saturday shoppers, and there was a pervading air of elegance about them; all sharp cheek bones, smartly tipped hats, and silk scarves tied with a flourish.

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 72 

***

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook, and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE. And for a closer look at the picture itself just click on the image...

The Swiss Sketchbook - page 7

‘On waking they peeped at the outside world and saw nothing but whitewash: swathes of mist and falling snow.’

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 300

***

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook, and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE.

The Swiss Sketchbook - page 6

‘Outside, the sun threw blue shadows on the snow. Winter-coated pines stood in gossiping clusters. Everything had an unreal quality.’

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 280

*** 

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook, and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE. And for a closer look at the picture itself just click on the image...

An interview with Novelicious

Here's an interview I did recently with Novelicious - go HERE to read about being methodical, the wisdom of Stephen King, and why writing what you love is the only thing that really matters... Oh, and the importance of starting the day with coffee, good strong coffee, served in a joy-giving vessel, like this one...

The Swiss Sketchbook - page 5

‘They looked up at the yellow squares of windows set beneath steeply tiled roofs, saw the shapes of people moving behind them, and once a child’s face peeping up at the night sky as though counting stars.’

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 169

***

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook, and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE. And for a closer look at the picture itself just click on the image...

A peep inside my writing room

Recently I invited the bookish website Novelicious inside my writing room, and explained why I favour a very hard chair and a lamp's happy glow... To read the piece go HERE.

Shortly after we moved in... far too spartan a room for my tastes...

Ah, that's better! Colour and paraphernalia everywhere...

The Swiss Sketchbook - page 4

‘With its arched windows, rows of wooden tables and scrubbed tiled floor it felt like a Parisian café; a place more day than night.’ 

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 109

***

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook, and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE. And for a closer look at the picture itself, just click on the image...

Podcasts, time machines, and mushroom biryani

The other day I talked to fellow writer & Bristol pal Nikesh Shukla for his excellent podcast, The Subaltern. He's interviewed some amazing authors down the years so it was a treat to be asked. We talked about the duff tag 'aspiring' when attached to 'writer', problematic searches for book titles, and, um, our mutual adoration of donkeys... You can listen to our podcast HERE.

Nikesh's novella, The Time Machine, was published just recently. It's a moving story about one man's mission to recreate the food his mother used to make. The Time Machine is available as an e-book and costs just £1, with all proceeds going to the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation. With its beautifully-described connections between the food we eat and the people we love, as well as enticing recipes, it'll soon have you craving Indian food... Buy it HERE - you'll be doing something good for charity, and yourself.

When I first moved to London, a country bumpkin lost in the city, my boyfriend and I discovered an amazing little neighbourhood restaurant called Hot Stuff. It remains one of my all-time favourite Indian restaurants, and I wrote about the experience of finding it (and finding our way in The Big Smoke) for Nikesh's blog - you can read my piece Bright Lights, Big City, Hot Stuff HERE. 

The Swiss Sketchbook - page 3

‘Turn-of-the-century apartment buildings, majestic and comely and pouting with balconies, sat alongside pastel-painted low-rises.’

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 16

***

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook, and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE.

The Swiss Sketchbook - page 2

‘She will probably always remember the Hôtel Le Nouveau Monde, its delicate bulk like a glamorous but portly femme d’un certain age.’

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 2

***

To see page 1 of my Swiss Sketchbook, and to read about the background to the project and its artist, go HERE. And for a closer look at the picture itself, just click on the image...

The Swiss Sketchbook - launch & page 1

This Thursday is the UK publication day for A Heart Bent Out of Shape, and I wanted to do something on my blog to mark the occasion. Last year, for The Book of Summers, my dad - the talented artist Alwyn Hall - painted a beautiful picture of Lake Balaton, one of the settings in the book. Throughout the summer I then ran recipes for some of the Hungarian food that appears in the story, from Marika's Raspberry Cake to Cucumber Salad and good old Goulash. So what to do for A Heart Bent Out of Shape? The answer, as it often does for me, lay in 'place'. 

The Swiss Sketchbook is a series of ten pictures that I've commissioned from Alwyn Hall (yep, My Dad again). Each image in the series is based on a line from the novel, and all revolve around location, location, location. Throughout the pages of The Swiss Sketchbook we’ll go from Hadley’s first giddying view of the city, to the Lausanne lakeside, to a snow-dipped mountain dreamscape, to a flower-bright spring. The mediums and styles will always be different too, from pen and ink, to watercolour, to thickly daubed poster paint. I’ll post a new picture every couple of days, through until the end of September, so do check back and see the landscape of the novel unfold.

When I’m writing, I almost always begin with place. Conjuring the spirit of somewhere, capturing its essence, painting a picture with words… these are a few of my favourite things. If reading A Heart Bent Out of Shape succeeds in bringing Lausanne and its environs to life for my readers, and I truly hope it does, then perhaps these sketches will go one step further. For me, they’re the perfect meeting of description on the page, and one reader’s imagination. A reader who just happens to be handy with a paintbrush…

I hope you enjoy this drawing tour of Lausanne and La Suisse. Without further ado, here’s the first page in our Swiss Sketchbook...

‘It is about a city; a place at once fairy-tale and reality-bitten, glorious and imperfect, sun-soaked and winter-whipped.’

From A Heart Bent Out of Shape, page 3

***

About the artist:

Alwyn Hall studied Illustration at Northampton followed by an Art Education degree in Manchester. He taught Art for several years and worked on the North West Region Curriculum Development Project.  This led to a year of educational research in Cardiff.   On returning to Manchester he exhibited paintings at the Northern Academy and other public and private galleries including a successful one-man show at the University. He and his wife then moved to Devon where he took up a Head of Department post in a large Comprehensive School. Much of his work, inspired by the rural area surrounding their home, consists of detailed representational drawings, paintings and linocut prints.  The most exciting project of the last decade, now nearing completion, is a lavishly illustrated collection of his own poems and songs.

Sheep whispering & snowboarding

A few months ago, journalism student Sarah Abrahams got in touch, asking if she could interview me for her final piece of work for her course. I'd met Sarah at a book signing in Exeter last summer, and was more than happy to oblige. I was delighted - for Sarah, and for me! - when she not only got a great grade, but successfully pitched the feature to the magazine Devon Life. Sarah's interview focuses on my Devon childhood, and the importance that that corner of the world continues to play in my writing. My thanks to Sarah, and to Devon Life, for such a lovely feature... may I be known from here on in as The Sheep Whisperer. And best of luck with the rest of your writing career, Sarah!

From the long-ago-past to the more recent past... I've also been chatting to the very cool Cooler Magazine (a snow & surf magazine for women). Back in 2005 I quit my job to go and live in the mountains, and in between the snowboarding, chalet graft, and resort revelry, I worked out what I really wanted to do... write a novel, and work as hard as I could to get it published. You can read the full interview HERE.

The Comeback Kid

I've written a new short story called The Comeback Kid, and last week it appeared in S Magazine (with the Sunday Express). Go HERE to read about the day that Cooper Clay, a faded tennis star, and his lovechild meet one another for the first time...

I heart Brizzle

The nice folk at Visit Bristol have set up a brand new Tumblr of Bristol-based creatives. I'm first up, and have written a piece about the connection between my move to Bristol, and my writing. Go HERE to read why I love living in this city... and, more importantly, to find out where to get the best almond croissants in town...

Emily Dickinson would have liked these skies over Bristol's Ashton Court - 'tell all the truth but tell it slant'

Edinburgh International Book Festival

Last saturday I was delighted to be back in Edinburgh for the International Book Festival. My event was on day one of the Festival fortnight, and this year it was the 30th anniversary - an especially special place and time to be there.

I was appearing with the acclaimed American author Lucy Ellmann, whose most recent book is called 'Mimi'. Our event, Literary Genius and Genius Loci, was chaired by the excellent Diana Hope, and we were back in the Writers' Retreat, the same stage I shared with Karl Ove Knausgaard last year - the setting for many happy memories of my first ever lit fest. Over the hour we talked about unlikely friendships, the isolating facets of grief, strong-minded female characters, conveying the spirit of a place, and a cat called Bubbles. As ever the Edinburgh crowd were a delight; lots of great questions, and friendly faces at the signing table in the bookshop afterwards. While A Heart Bent Out of Shape isn't out until September, an advance run of books were made available to Festival go-ers, and I couldn't resist a snap...

   

As soon as I'd finished one event, I was into the next. Like last year I'd volunteered to read for Amnesty, as part of their Imprisoned Writers series. Unlike last year... I didn't actually read... The piece that was given to me was by the Ugandan poet Jade Amoli-Jackson, from her collection Moving A Country. Jade's husband, sister and father were killed during a period of internal conflict, and her children abducted. She escaped from military captivity and sought refuge in England in 2001. In her poem 'Faded Dreams' she describes the experience of having to bribe soldiers for the release of her husband's headless body. It's an incredibly powerful poem. The language is sparse, each word weighty with emotion. It's graceful and heartbreaking and... very difficult to read. I'd practised it at home, and cried then, but I thought that on the day I'd be okay. The Amnesty events always attract great writers willing to read, and a packed audience wanting to listen, so I figured that I'd be able to rise to the occasion, and do Jade's words justice. In my introduction I talked about how, at a Festival such as Edinburgh, it's easy for a newbie author such as myself to get an inflated sense of their own worth. For a couple of days we get to swan about with our lanyards, enjoying our free coffee, surrounded by book lovers, talking about and signing our novels. And then we do an event like Amnesty and feel very small again - in the best possible way. Jade had spent a week at Totleigh Barton, the Devon Arvon house, just as I had, and I felt that that was a connection between us - just as by reading her poetry aloud on that day was another connection created. 

But... I was barely through her biography when my emotions got the better of me, and I knew that I couldn't carry on. I'm not a pretty crier, I can't maintain a just-cracking voice, instead once I'm gone, I'm gone. As the tears came I did the only thing I could think of in that split-second, I bent to the mic and croaked 'this is a bit unorthodox, but could I ask my husband to come and read for me instead...' Bobby jumped up from his seat, all the way down at the back, and without any warning or preparation took to the stage and launched into the most beautiful reading of 'Faded Dreams'. I sat listening, trying to collect myself, feeling a bit of an amateur, but immeasurably glad that Jade's words were being read fluently, powerfully, and affectingly - just as they deserved to be. Thinking about it now I feel a bit foolish, and wish I'd been able to carry on reading with strength and grace, instead of breaking down. But then, isn't that what such an event is really about - genuinely stopping and thinking and feeling - so often we're guilty of sleepwalking through our own small and comfortable worlds. On balance, I think I'd rather be the kind of person who is torn up by a poem like 'Faded Dreams', and doesn't mind showing it. Jade Amoli-Jackson's collection is available to buy on Amazon. You should buy it. I think it's probably important that you do.

That night we celebrated the opening of the Festival, and its 30th anniversary, with a fabulous party in the Guardian Spiegeltent, a jumping band, and abundant drinks. I was thrilled to catch up with Jenny Brown, Founder Director of the Festival, who chaired my event last year, and it was a real treat to chat to Peggy Riley, another Headline author and Twitter pal. My ace publicity manager Ben Willis kept the drinks, and the gags, flowing. We rolled home to bed, 20 hours after we'd woken up in Bristol, and slept the sleep of the happy and weary.

Then woke up to this... sunday morning over the Edinburgh skyline.

2013 was, for me, another very memorable Edinburgh experience. I'll be back again in two weeks to watch my husband and his brother - The Etherington Brothers - do their thing on stage. I'll sit poised, just in case I'm needed to step in... but somehow I doubt that'll happen. Meanwhile we'll be heading to the Fringe to catch some music, some comedy, some anything... It's always good in Edinburgh.

A pleasant fiction - a Book Slam blog

If you're off on holiday this summer, with books packed in your case, you might like to read THIS before you read them. Over on the Book Slam website I talk about the particular pleasures of holiday reading...