J.R. Thorp, author of Learwife, reveals why she chose to name her debut novel after the wife of Shakespeare’s famous King Lear.
‘People have been arguing over hip-hop ever since it first emerged, in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s. It was soon the most controversial genre in the country – a distinction that has not, somehow, been erased by time or by popularity. As the genre became successful, then mainstream, then finally dominant, it never became unobjectionable. Over the decades, hip-hop has retained a singular connection to poor Black neighbourhoods across the US – and, for that matter, poor and not-necessarily-Black neighbourhoods around the world. This connection accounts for some of the demands placed upon the music: many listeners have felt that the genre ought to be politically aware, or explicitly revolutionary’
Kelefa Sanneh
The Guardian
Salena Godden, author of Mrs Death Misses Death, reads an extract from Mrs Death’s story of The Red Tower at the Durham Book Festival.
The Book of Form and Emptiness
‘What she is best at conveying, though, is the tidal flood of human life and the absurd, unwieldy scurf of manufactured objects that has accompanied it through the Anthropocene. You hang on to your things in case you’re swept away by the water and become like a thing yourself. What can be relinquished and what can’t?
At base, this is a simple story about the links between poverty, mental health and loss. It’s often heartbreaking, but we would be wrong to interpret Annabelle and Benny’s struggles as a descent. Ozeki is carefully celebrating difference, not patronising dysfunction. Out of their fractured relations, she makes something so satisfying that it gave me the sense of being addressed not by an author but by a world’
M. John Harrison
Guardian
“I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here.”
“The cats began to walk on their hind legs, don fancy neckwear, and sport monocles and walking sticks – the Louis Wain cat had been born.”
“I was a child and believed that if I stood alone, quiet enough, long enough beside my grandfather’s coffin, he would speak to me.”
“Over the past half century, many musicians and listeners have belonged to tribes. What’s wrong with that?”
‘It is a novel, and I set that out very early… I new as someone in a wheelchair with a similar background to the main character I knew it’d always be conflated. So I call it kind of a land grab - I made the reader do the work, and kind of understand that to get to the book I wanted I had to y’know look at some very personal and intimite things in my life. And I couldn’t deny that the main character and I do share - he comes from me, and I didn’t want to have that degree of plausible denability that some other fiction writers utilise. I wanted to kind of admit that.’
Jarred McGinnis
Monocle Meet the Writers
“When a book and a reader are meant for each other, both of them know it.”
“He’s not a copper who happens to be a man. He’s a man who happens to be a copper, and he carries that weight with him everywhere he goes.”
“This is a story about a band. A band that lived and flourished and then died its own natural death. At that point it should have disappeared from the pages of the history books for ever, and would have done so if an extraordinary miracle had not occurred and brought the Kamanga Kings back to life.”
‘Rooted in a decolonised narrative style where every turn of phrase brings forth the weight of its cultural implications, A River Called Time is a deeply thoughtful, surprising and rewarding read … In short, much of the novel is less an imagined reality than a conditional one: a status quo that could well exist, had major historical events panned out differently. The achievement of Newland is to convey this reality so convincingly.’
Charlie Stone
The Arts Desk
‘To me, this book thematically is all about the importance of truth telling, particularly in uncertain times … And I think in each parallel Markriss has to tackle that, whether he should be involved in truth telling or not’ Courttia Newland speaks to Front Row about his new novel, A River Called Time
Courttia Newland
Front Row
‘A Derry writer’s powerful, unflinching account of her war-torn childhood and her quest for peace is part hymn to nature, part Troubles memoir’
Guardian, Book of the Day
Salena speaks to Nihal Arthanayake about Mrs Death Misses Death
‘Told in sparse, affecting prose interspersed with poetry, Godden produces a thought-provoking novel that travels across time and place to question the value of life, the experiences of womanhood, and grief in all its forms.’
The Observer