The Adele Geras Web Site

Adele

JUNE 2010

NEWSLETTER 35

WORK IN PROGRESS

Well, I’ve typed the words ‘The End’ typed at the bottom of a page of my adult novel, but of course it’s only a kind of beginning. The first draft is done but the real work starts here. Still, it won’t take me too long, now that I know the shape of what’s there to be dealt with.

Other news: DIDO came out in paperback at the end of April and two bloggers have reviewed it very kindly.

Sarah’s Reviews posted a poem of mine about our beloved late cat, as well as a review and the link to that poem is here and to the Dido review is here. A blog called The Bookette had a whole Adèle Geras week and that was fun. I’ve never had a week devoted to me before. The link to her site is here

There was also a good review in NEWBOOKS mag and here’s a link to that.

EVENTS

The St Hilda’s Day at the Oxford Festival was wonderful. It was great to meet up with Victoria Hislop and Anita Mason for our event, chaired by Nicolette Jones. This went very well, I think. It was also fun spending time with other Hildabeests, like Bettany Hughes, Gaynor Arnold, Juliet McKenna, and many more. Christ Church is a very beautiful college and my room in Blue Boar quad was comfortable and had a splendid view too. We had dinner at St Hilda’s by candlelight and that was a very good end to the day and a most delicious meal. Many thanks to Nicolette and Monica Popa and everyone involved. I’m posting photos here to give you a flavour of the day.

The St Hilda's table in the cafe

The breakfast table

In April, the Festival of Writing at York University was a really fantastic couple of days. I did two workshops there, one on women’s fiction and one on crossover fiction and also had about six 1-to-1 sessions with new writers which were very enjoyable. I was pleasantly surprised by the standard of all the work I read. The University of York has a lake and swans and ducks were wandering around all over the campus. This was delightful to see and there were even birds sleeping on the grass outside my overnight accomodation. Highlights of the weekend included Katie Fforde’s top ten tips for writers (all hugely sensible and delivered in her wonderfully humorous and warm style) and talks by all kinds of fascinating people such as Simon Trewin, the agent and Barry Cunningham of Chicken House. He’s famous for having discovered J. K Rowling but he too was very informative about the state of children’s books today. It was also a pleasure to meet other writers, most notably Emma Darwin, whose books I’ve enjoyed and Debi Alper . They both have wonderful blogs and the links are: Emma Darwin and Debi Alper. If you to their archives for April 10th/11th you’ll find much fuller and better accounts of the weekend than I’ve given. But many thanks to Harry Bingham, Tommy, Jez and all the others who organized it. The link to the Festival Website is here. I do recommend next year’s Festival to any aspiring writers out there.

Here are a couple of photos I took while at York.

The Lake on the York campus

Katie Fforde and Debi Alper

The deliberations of the Lancashire Book of the Year panel are over and the winner has been chosen. It’s BANG BANG YOU’RE DEAD by Narinder Dhami. (Corgi pbk) The Gala Dinner at UCLAN and the presentation of the prize happen on June 25/6th and I will take some photos of both events.

The Lancashire panel was shadowed by a group of adults and we voted for our favourite book about a month before the real judges. Our winner was GRASS by Cathy McPhail. (Bloomsbury pbk)

The Letterbox Club is an admirable organization which distributes packages of books to individual children who are in foster care. This is their website.

I was part of a lovely party at Monks Hall Primary School in Crewe to launch yet another branch. Here’s a picture of me with some of the ladies involved in the occasion.

The Letterbox Club

I read a story of mine to the children, who came after the school day had finished, with their foster carers, and ate cake and sandwiches and had a really good time. Thanks very much to Sandra Evans, Helen Campbell, Karen Dutton and the staff at Monks Hall School who made it such an enjoyable afternoon for the children and for me.

On May 17th, Linda Newbery and I were at Latymer Prep School on the banks of the river Thames in Hammersmith, London. We spoke to the children about our Historical House books and everyone was sorry that Ann Turnbull, who wrote two of the books in the series, couldn’t be there. After lunch, we each did a workshop with a class of children who were charming, polite, enthusiastic and eager to learn. During the session, who should come into my class but the writer Tabitha Suzuma. Linda and I both know Tabitha very well but we had no idea she was a teacher at the school, so much laughter and exclamation went on. The weather was good and the sun was shining, so we walked to the Underground along the riverbank and met up later for coffee with Jon Appleton, a very good friend of ours who used also to be Linda’s editor while he was at Orion Children’s Books. We sat outside the British Library in the sun and had good chat before I had to leave them and go for my train. It was a really wonderful day, and thanks to Nell and Asha, the two Latymer girls who liked the Historical House books enough to get their teacher Mr Pugh, to invite us to the school. Thanks also to Lone Turnbull, the excellent school librarian, to Mr Pugh himself and to Amy Dobson at Usborne for arranging the whole trip.

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

Manchester Metropolitan University is having a Children’s Book Festival. They have events lined up between July 1st – July 4th and the website is here.

If you’re in the Manchester area around this time, do consider coming to some of what’s on offer. On Saturday, July 3rd, Mary Hoffman and I are doing an hour on Historical Fiction which is followed immediately by a panel on teenage fiction with Melvin Burgess and Sherry Ashworth taking part. It promises to be a great few days.

From Sept 6-11th, Newbooks magazine, ( see above) is hosting a creative writing workshop in a beautiful farmhouse in Normandy and Linda Newbery and I are the tutors. More details of this from the magazine website, as before.

And does September count as summer? Probably not, but just in case I don’t get another newsletter up before then, I’d like to mention the Appledore Literary Festival in North Devon. I’m appearing there at the end of September. Their website is here.

though there’s not much information up there yet...I’m getting seriously ahead of myself.

BOOKS

Two books this time by friends, but I can’t help (I’ve said it before!) having pals who are good writers. Celia Rees, who has made lots of different historical times her own, turns to Shakespeare’s England for a most beautifully structured and imagined story called THE FOOL’S GIRL (Bloomsbury hbk). The conceit behind the novel is that the events Shakespeare describes in Twelfth Night were based on an actual history of an actual place and Illyria of the play is a kind of Balkan nation, somewhere in the Turkey/Venice neck of the woods. So we have Viola and Malvolio and so forth with us in Elizabethan London and Shakespeare himself as a character in the action. This takes place in the present (Elizabethan) day and the events of the play are first recounted to Shakespeare, and to us, as having happened some years ago. It all works brilliantly well and the novel is full of romance, adventure, excitement and for those who know their Shakespeare, many clever references to Twelfh Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet. It’s beautifully produced as usual. Bloomsbury have done all Celia’s books proud, I think, but this one is particularly striking. The hope is that any teenager who reads it will immediately seek out a production to watch. I studied Twelfth Night for O-level (anyone remember that?) and knowledge of the play adds greatly to the pleasures of reading this book.

Mary Hooper’s FALLEN GRACE (Bloomsbury hbk) is a vivid and moving evocation of Victorian London and in particular is good at describing poverty, privation, and the world of those whose business it is to bury the dead. This is constantly fascinating (viz the popularity of such programmes as Six Feet Under) and the Victorians took their funerals and the whole business of mourning extremely seriously. The story is about Grace and her sister, Lily and is full of the ingredients of melodrama: nefarious goings-on and scheming baddies and a wonderfully-described setting in London of the time, but at its heart it’s a story about sisterly devotion and bravery in bad circumstances and virtue winning out. The story begins quite dramatically with Grace attending to the burial of her dead baby....once you’ve read about that, you’re hooked for the rest of the book. Terrific stuff and another great cover from Bloomsbury. It seems they’ve embraced the historical novel enthusiastically and readers who love such books have a lot to thank them for.

I’m one of the jurors for a US prize. It’s called the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature and it’s given to a person for a whole body of work. Each of us jurors has to nominate a person whose contribution to children’s books merits the Award. More about the Prize here but the website hasn’t been updated for a long time. We are all busy reading one another’s nominations (one book per author) and will have a transatlantic conference call in mid-June to decide who is the winner. I’ll report on the books in the next newsletter. I’m not saying more about the nominees because I’m not altogether sure of whether their names are supposed to be kept secret at this stage.

Best books of the last three months are:

GOOD TO A FAULT (Windmill books, pbk) by Marina Endicott. I posted a review about it here and can only add that it’s marvellous and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you like Anne Tyler, this is one for you. (Also in this review, PAPER WINGS is by another friend of mine, Linda Sargent. This is a lovely book with another excellent cover. )

WHAT TO DO WHEN SOMEONE DIES (Penguin pbk) by Nicci French I found very exciting. A woman’s husband dies in a car crash. With him is a woman his wife has never even heard of. Everyone assumes he’s been having an affair but his wife is convinced he wasn’t. She sets out to prove it. I’ve always admired Nicci French enormously and am delighted when they (it’s a husband and wife team) produce another story.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS (Faber and Faber, pbk) by Lorrie Moore is a strange, sad and wonderfully-written book. It has lingered in my mind since I finished reading it and I’m still not 100% sure of what I think about it, beyond knowing that I couldn’t put it down and some things in it will stay in my mind forever. By the time this newsletter is posted, we’ll know whether or not it has won the Orange Prize but I think it well might. Watch the papers to see...and do read the book.

THE LESSONS (Viking, pbk) by Naomi Alderman is the book I’ve just finished reading. I read DISOBEDIENCE, her debut, when it came out and was fascinated by the picture she painted of Orthodox Jewish life in Britain. This novel is a Brideshead-y tale of students at Oxford (the first part) and after Oxford (the second part) and though the kind of book it is seems (and probably is) a bit predictable, the details are excellent and the way Alderman describes emotions, feelings, and especially desire is very compelling. She’s also outstanding at describing the pain of a wrecked knee. I read it in two sittings, but then I’m a sucker for anything about Oxford. I recognized some of what she describes but not all of it. The author is much younger than I am so clearly some aspects of University life have changed, but it’s a very good read.

I’ll keep the review of the latest Andrew Taylor historical thriller THE ANATOMY OF GHOSTS for the next newsletter as it’s only published in September but I read a proof and his many admirers are in for a real treat. It’s set in 18th century Cambridge which gives 20th century Oxford more than a run for its money.

On the TBR pile for next time, a novel by Theresa Breslin which has been very well-received It’s called PRISONER OF THE INQUISITION and is published in hardback by Doubleday. This book joins Linda Newbery’s LOB, reviewed in my last newsletter, on the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize longlist.