March Reading

This month, I was lucky enough to get advance copies of two novels by eminent Irish writers, both of which will be published in the coming months.

Colm Toibin’s new novel BROOKLYN, which will be published in May, tells the story of a young woman, Eilis Lacey, who moves from Enniscorthy to Brooklyn in the 1950s. It’s a moving and powerful novel, led by a protagonist whose journey is one of personal growth and emotional difficulties. I read the last 50 pages with my heart in my mouth, wondering how the story would be resolved. A simply beautiful novel which will no doubt be one of the finest published this year. As, I think, will Colum McCann’s LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN, which arrives in September. An extraordinary piece of writing, set in New York in the 1970s, this is a hugely ambitious work by a writer who never veers into sentimentality and allows complex stories and ideas to develop over the course of the novel. Both books deserve to reach a wide audience and I have little doubt that they will.

I didn’t get on quite so well with Tim Krabbe’s THE CAVE. I read THE VANISHING last month and loved it but this novel, centred around a particularly malevolent drug-dealing character, was less engaging.

Siobhan Dowd’s final novel, SOLACE OF THE ROAD, is told with her usual powerful level of storytelling and engaging voice. The story of a young girl, Holly, who flees her foster family in order to travel to Ireland to find her mother, it’s a great read, although I think BOG CHILD, which I read last month, remains Dowd’s masterpiece.

I’ve never read Stefan Zweig before and his novel CHESS has been sitting on my shelf for about 3 years and I’m pleased I finally got around to it. A highly charged, dramatic story about a chessgame on board a ship, with flashbacks to Nazi Germany, this is a psyschologically interesting story by a writer I plan on reading more of.

I followed this with Edmund White’s biography of RIMBAUD, which is an entertaining and lively read, less academic than one might expect and with the pace of a novel (not surprisingly, considering the author.) I didn’t know much about Rimbaud before and I’m not sure I care much for him now but it’s worth reading.

Then Anita Brookner’s new novel STRANGERS, the story of a retired bank manager and how two demanding, awkward women affect his humdrum and solitary life. This is a moving story with unexpected moments of great humour and pathos. It has to be said that none of the female characters come off very well in the book but Sturgis, the protagonist, is deeply sympathetic. Having never read Brookner’s work before I also went back to one of her earlier novels, the Booker prize-winning HOTEL DU LAC, which is a thoughtful account of a novelist who retires to a Swiss hotel for a short break after an embarrassing incident at home. It’s astonishing how much Brookner can get into these relatively short novels. And HOTEL DU LAC contains one of the most extraordinary sentences I’ve ever read in fiction, towards the end of the novel: ‘Edith,’ said Mr Neville. ‘Please don’t cry. I cannot bear to see a woman cry; it makes me want to hit her.’

After this I read LP Hartley’s THE GO-BETWEEN. One of those classic novels that I’ve heard so many people praise but which I’d never read myself, I was utterly charmed and moved by the story of young Leo Colston, who acts as a messenger between a young farmer and his paramour. It’s a beautifully written novel, at times funny and at times heartbreakingly sad. I can’t believe it’s taken me so many years to read this book.

Quite a change in tone next with Amos Oz’s novel RHYMING LIFE AND DEATH. This story of a famous writer who gives a reading and is alone with his thoughts on stage, followed by a walk through the city, it’s a contemplative story about the nature of fiction itself which didn’t move me particularly but is thought-provoking for its detailed analysis of storytelling and where characters come from.

And then THE WAY I FOUND HER, a novel by Rose Tremain, whose THE ROAD HOME was one of my favourite books of last year. This is an earlier novel, published in 1997, about a 13 year-old boy spending a summer in Paris with his mother who gets involved in a missing person mystery. The novel is at times funny, suspense-filled and dramatic but ultimately it’s a very moving left-of-field love story and a tremendously sad one too. Rose Tremain is really one of the finest English novelists at work today.

Festival News

I’ll be reading from my new novel THE HOUSE OF SPECIAL PURPOSE at a number of festivals over the next few months and tickets for two of them have just gone on sale.

On Friday May 15th I’ll be at the Lincoln Book Festival, in the Lincoln Drill Hall, Ruston Room at 6 pm.

The next day, Saturday May 16th, I’ll be hot-footing it to the Aberdeen Word Festival, where there’s a special screening of THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS at 4 pm in the Belmont Picturehouse. I’ll be there for a Q&A session after the film. The following morning, I’ll take part in a panel discussion on the e-book at 11 am at the King’s College Centre, while in the afternoon I’ll be reading from THE HOUSE OF SPECIAL PURPOSE at 3:30 pm at the same venue.

Tickets for all these events can be purchased from the Lincoln and Aberdeen websites.

Another Ennis Pic

Another picture from the great event at the Glor Theatre on Saturday night, with fellow author Salley Vickers

The End of the Road

Today sees the release in the UK and Ireland of the DVD of THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS.

It feels like a whole chapter of my life comes to an end with this but what a fantastic journey it was. I can remember meeting producers David Heyman and Rosie Alison in London and director Mark Herman in Leeds back in 2005, shortly before the novel was published, and being excited by their interest in making a film of my book but not entirely convinced it would ever happen.

And then the summer of 2007 in Budapest, watching the characters come to life as portrayed by David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Rupert Friend and the two boys, Asa and Jack. The highlights of the movie experience include the fantastic World Premiere in Dublin, the days we spent at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain where we received such an enthusiastic response from the audience, and then our city-hopping aroung the States in the run-up to film’s release.

But with the DVD release, it’s really come to an end. (Well, almost… there’s one final event to come in May, but more of that soon.) And unlike most novelists who come out the other end of such an experience, it has been a total blast from start to finish and I hope that many of the friends I made along the way will stay in my life. And who knows, maybe another movie some day… Oh, and the DVD contains some deleted scenes, an audio commentary by Mark and I, and a documentary on the process of making the film, featuring all of us who were involved along the way.

Here’s a few photos from along the whole journey:

On set in Budapest with Asa (Bruno)

On set with Vera and Amber

Wrap party, with Asa and Jack

World Premiere in Dublin

San Sebastian Photocall

San Sebastian Premiere

In Dallas with Mark

At the Hollywood sign with David

Ennis Book Club Festival

With Salley Vickers

I spent Saturday in Ennis, County Clare, at the Ennis Book Club Festival.

It was my first time to attend this terrific festival but I hope it won’t be the last as it was great fun. My event took place at the Glor Theatre and it was great to see the place completely full, about 400 or so people attending. Rachel English moderated the event, which was a joint reading and discussion between myself and English novelist Salley Vickers, author of Miss Garnet’s Angel. Salley gave a very moving reading from another novel of hers, The Other Side of You, while I read from THE HOUSE OF SPECIAL PURPOSE, even though it’s not out for a couple of months yet. This is the first time I’ve read the book for a large audience – I read an excerpt at the Hourglass Readings in Dublin a couple of months ago as part of readings from various books of mine – but I haven’t read it at a festival and it was great to get such a positive response as there will be many more festivals to attend in the upcoming months, which I will list on the Readings page of the website as and when those programmes are published.

Afterwards we all retreated to the festival hotel for an enjoyable post-reading drink. I’ll post a few more pictures from the festival when I get them.

The Dare

Today is World Book Day, which means that this year’s 10 Quick Reads books are published to coincide. This year, I was asked to write one of the Quick Reads and the resulting book, a short novella titled THE DARE, is my contribution.

THE DARE tells the story of Danny Delaney, a 12 year old boy who returns home from school one day to the unhappy news that his mother has knocked down a small child in her car, an accident which has left the child in hospital and his mother devastated with guit. The novella follows Danny’s life throughout that summer as he struggles to cope with a family falling apart around him.

You can buy it online from Amazon, Waterstone’s or Borders, or pick it up in your local bookstore.

You can see the full list of this year’s Quick Reads titles on their website and catch up with World Book Day activity here.

The View

I appeared as a guest on RTE Television’s arts review show The View last night where we discussed three films: Kisses, The International and Five Minutes of Heaven, as well as the art exhibition by Yinko Shonibare based on Guliver’s Travels which is currently showing at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, and the new U2 album No Line On The Horizon.

It’s the third time I’ve appeared on the show but the first time I wore a tie – a very nice black tie with white dots that was confiscated from me just before filming as it was producing a “strobing effect” on camera! I’ll have to make sure to leave that particular tie at home if I’m invited back.

You can watch the show in full or in parts on RTE’s The View website.