Simon appleby

‘I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.’ ― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

Whichever dates you prefer, Galentine’s or Valentine’s Day, this week is all about literary loving, and here at Serpent’s Tail we have fallen head over heels for our incredible feminist fiction. Marketing Manager Rachel Nobilo is here to tell you all about her top three reads.

Gather your gals and fall in love in the post-communist diaspora with Virtuoso, covet the wicked and exquisite in Her Body and Other Parties, and explore your desire to escape to unchartered territory with The Word for Woman is Wilderness.

Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso follows the relationship between Jana and Zorka, from the streets of 1980s Communist Prague, to the suburbs of 1990s Wisconsin and the lesbian bars of present-day Paris. Written with the dramatic tension of Euripidean tragedy and the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film, Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel and praised by the Guardian as having ‘the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song’. Find outwhy Yelena celebrates weirdness and its effect on literature.

In The Word for Woman is Wilderness, nineteen-year-old Erin embarks on a voyage into the wilderness, a one-woman challenge to the archetype of the rugged male explorer. Abi Andrews’ debut novel is filled with a sense of wonder for the natural world and a fierce love for preserving it. Discover how Abi has been influenced by Rachel Carson and her representation of our relationship with nature.

Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘impossible, imperfect, unforgettable’ debut Her Body and Other Parties, as praised by Roxane Gay, has met with worldwide acclaim. In these dark, shimmering stories, Carmen demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. Listen to Carmen discuss the books she loves and the bookshops she can’t resist.

From the provocatively monstrous to the mesmerizingly dreamlike, love appears in a myriad of forms in these three books. Read them with your loved one, read them with your besties, or, read them alone, perhaps in your favourite cafe – because, as Abi Andrews writes, ‘the small autonomy of just being alone in public for a woman is also a right that needs to be claimed and kept on being claimed until it is a given’.

However you choose to embrace these unforgettable novels, you’ll be romancing yourself in the best possible way this February.

Buy your copies of Virtuoso, Her Body and Other Parties, and The Word for Woman is Wilderness and receive 10% off and free UK postage.

WIN!

Want to win your new love match? Email [email protected] by midnight GMT on Friday 22 February, with the subject line ‘Galentines’ to be in to win all three books in the perfect Serpent’s Tail shelfie.*

*UK entries only. Prize is non-transferable. 

Share the love on Twitter with:

• Yelena Moskovich
• Abi Andrews
• Carmen Maria Machado

The Dylan Thomas Prize longlist has been announced and we’re thrilled that Sarah Perry’s Melmoth is one of the twelve on the list.

This year’s longlist comprises eight novels, two short story collections and two poetry collections:

• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black
• Michael Donkor, Hold 
• Clare Fisher, How the Light Gets In 
• Zoe Gilbert, Folk 
• Emma Glass, Peach 
• Guy Gunaratne, In Our Mad and Furious City 
• Louisa Hall, Trinity 
• Sarah Perry, Melmoth 
• Sally Rooney, Normal People 
• Richard Scott, Soho
• Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, House of Stone
• Jenny Xie, Eye Level 

About the 2019 longlist, Professor Dai Smith of Swansea University, Chair of the judging panel, said:“The longlist of twelve for the 2019 Swansea University Dylan Thomas International Prize is a starburst of young literary talent. Writers from across the world, from diverse communities and backgrounds, tackle challenging subject matter in ways both unexpected and exhilarating, through short stories, novels or poetry, in folk tale or Gothic mode, with a contemporary scalpel or an historical viewfinder. The list is a treat! And, from the shortlist to come with the spring, an exciting and worthy overall winner to be found by my distinguished panel of judges as summer opens up in May.”

Read more at the Dylan Thomas Prize website

‘Moments of high tension – involving closeted sexuality, unrequited love and hidden parentage – erupt from a narrative that wrongfoots you with its careful pace’ Daily Mail

Rebecca Kauffman’s The Gunners is the ultimate high school reunion novel, full of big characters, dark secrets and unfinished business. When a group of old school friends are forced back together at the funeral of a former friend, they must delve into why she left them all those years ago – and what it means for their lives, then and now.

The author answers our burning questions about this remarkable novel.

 

What is it about childhood friends that makes them so significant? 

Your childhood friends will likely be the first people who challenge the world view your parents have introduced to you. Your parents may have conditioned you to believe things such as, People can be trusted, or People can’t be trusted, or, If you behave this way, you can expect this reaction, etc. These notions are put to the test when you start to form relationships outside of your home. So not only will you absorb early ideas and interests from your childhood friends, but you’ll likely form new opinions about your parents and reassess how closely you hold their views.

Are you still in touch with your high school friends? Did it influence your writing? 

My closest friends in high school were my sister and two of my cousins, and I’m still in close touch with them. Otherwise, regrettably, I haven’t remained in touch with folks from high school. I avoid social media, and the difficulty of reconnecting and maintaining that sort of relationship without Facebook, etc. is an unfortunate side effect of steering clear of these networks. That said, the absence of those past friendships has certainly influenced my writing. In the book, Sally breaks contact with her friends for no discernible reason and they’re left to grapple and grieve. In less dramatic fashion, I’ve been on both ends of this with friends, as the one who leaves and the one who gets left. It’s a confusing and deeply affecting experience, and something I sought out to examine in my work. 

Why did you set The Gunners in Lackawanna? 

I lived in Buffalo, NY (Lackawanna is a suburb) for about two years, and have great fondness for it and the people I knew there. I love many things that Buffalo is known for: snow, football, chicken finger sandwiches, huge abandoned downtown venues. It’s a vibrant, distinct, tough-as-nails city. I set my first two books there versus Ohio or New York City (both of which I had lived in for much longer), because for some reason Buffalo was the most alive and precise in my mind.  

Each of the characters in The Gunners has a very distinctive voice. We couldn’t get Alice’s sassy tone our of our head, while we had great sympathy for Mikey, the protagonist, with his approaching blindness and sense of stasis. How did you feel about your characters while you were writing them? 

I have the trouble of loving every character I create. I see the best in them, I want the best for them. It’s easy for me to lose sight of whether or not the reader will find a character sympathetic, because my affection for my characters is so immediate and has little to do with how they actually behave on the page. 

In its rave review, NPR said of your writing, ‘When she explores an emotion, she does it with absolute candor. Her characters announce their grief and affection and rage in a way that few others do.’ Do you think it’s important to be open with emotion? Why? 

I do; I think it’s the clearest path to love. 

Find out more about The Gunners

‘Hypnotic … a bold feminist novel’ TLS
‘Arrestingly self-assured … hard to resist’ Guardian

Virtuoso is set in 1980s Prague. Just before Jana’s seventh birthday, a raven-haired girl named Zorka moves in to her building. As cracks begin to appear in the communist regime, Zorka teaches Jana to look beyond their building, beyond Czechoslovakia … and then, Zorka just disappears. As Jana and Zorka’s stories slowly circle across past and present, from Prague to Wisconsin to the lesbian bars of present-day Paris, they lead to a mysterious door on the Rue de Prague …

In the third of our new Postscript series, in which writers tell the story behind their book, Yelena Moskovich celebrates weirdness and the wonderful effect it can have on literature. 

My writing often gets called “weird” (a badge of honor, thank you). Though I don’t think it’s just a matter of content or style, but rather the sensation of weirdness itself. The feeling of feeling weird – one of my essential joys. And boy do I love to feel weird within words.

So here I am, wriggling language out of its good manners.

(After all, though I don’t like horses, I’ll get on my highest one: it is I who is validating language by using it how I want and need to use it, not the other way around. It is we, the living ones who speak and write. Never forget who’s boss. Well, okay, I’m not sure I can claim to be the boss, but I’m not the boss’s secretary either. I’m a hacker in the system, let’s just say. Cleaning lady gone rogue.)

I love the nudity of words, when they take off their administrative clothes. I love the sensuality of transgressive syntax. I love the petty things like the godly things, lingual tantrums that turn into gospel, grammatical pranks that resurrect poetry, the blinding grace that emerges from sidewalk profanity…

Maybe it’s the grudge of a Soviet upbringing or a natural sense of non-conformity, but I both hate being told what to do, and am very good at obeying. A simultaneous upright citizen and heretic. Weirdness is the gravitational sense I make of these opposing poles. It’s the way I advocate for the contradictions within me, without trying to resolve them. It’s the way I express my devotion and my rebellion.

And it is also a question of space. To be weird is to be strange to oneself, and you need to have room for that. It means consciously making room for myself to act out and to observe. Virtuoso is a novel about this type of weirdness. It’s about making room within authoritarian structures (political, familial, romantic, spiritual, sexual). But it’s not only through the story or characters or even the style, but through the prose itself that actively pushes back on the patrimony of language.

In sum, it’s a weird book written by a weird author.

And on this day of its official birth, I raise a toast to weirdness, to the book’s, to mine, to yours. Blessed be, we kind-hearted crooks of formality.

Follow @yelenamoskovich on Twitter
Find out more about Virtuoso

Casey Gerald’s story begins at the end of the world: on New Year’s Eve 1999, Casey gathers with the congregation of his grandfather’s black evangelical church to witness the rapture. The journey that follows is a beautiful and moving story of a young man learning to question the dreams of success and prosperity that are the foundation of modern America. There Will Be No Miracles Here, an inspiring, moving, surprising memoir, comes out on January 10th.

In Casey’s TED Talk, The Gospel of Doubt, he asks: What do you do when your firmly held beliefs turn out not to be true? When Casey Gerald’s religion failed him, he searched for something new to believe in — in business, in government, in philanthropy — but found only false saviors. In this moving talk, Gerald urges us all to question our beliefs and embrace uncertainty.

Watch his TED Talk below.

Buy your copy of There Will Be No Miracles Here with 10% off & free UK postage.

Rebecca Kauffman’s The Gunners is the ultimate high school reunion novel, full of big characters, dark secrets and unfinished business. When a group of old school friends are forced back together at the funeral of a former friend, they must delve into why she left them all those years ago – and what it means for their lives, then and now.

Read the opening pages below or download a PDF.

Buy your copy with 10% off + free UK postage.

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Chapter One

Mikey Callahan discovered something about himself when he was six years old.

Students from his first-grade class were taken one at a time from the classroom and ushered to the gymnasium for standard medical tests. The woman who barked his name (although she called for Michael, instead of Mikey, as his classmates knew him) held his hand as she walked him down the hall, and her fingers were as dry and cool as a husk. In the gymnasium, there were rectangular tables, screens, clipboards, grown-ups dressed in white. A man with a rust-colored mustache put a cold rubber point into Mikey’s ears, stared in at them, and led him through a series of easy tests: instructing Mikey to close his eyes and repeat words the man whispered, then listen to two recorded tones and tell him which was louder.

Mikey proceeded to the next station, where he was asked once again to close his eyes, and say “Now,” when he detected that he had been touched, on his face or his arm, by the tip of a pen. Easy. Mikey liked this better than sitting in a classroom, and he enjoyed being touched in this way. Gentle, clinical.

At the final station, an easel at the far end of a long table displayed a white piece of paper with a pyramid of black letters on it. A woman stood next to the paper and pointed at letters one at a time, and Mikey read the letters back to her. The letters got smaller as she moved down the page, and he struggled to read the final two rows. The woman made a note on her clipboard; then she handed him a black plastic spoon and asked him to cover his left eye with it. She replaced the set of letters with a fresh one and repeated the exercise, with similar results.

She said, “Cover your other eye now,” and turned the page on her easel once again.

Mikey did not raise the spoon to his face. He felt the heat of dark blood spreading up into his cheeks. He said, “But that’s my good one.”

The lady said, “What now, hon?”

“I can’t cover this one.” He gestured toward his right eye, puzzled by her request. “It’s the one that works.”

The lady came and knelt before him. She looked at his face and said, “Oh, dear.”

Mikey didn’t understand.

She explained to him that both eyes were supposed to work; most people had two good eyes.

Mikey nodded slowly as he considered this. He had a compulsion to nod when faced with unpleasant information.

He said, “Please, let’s not tell my dad.”

When Mikey got home from school that day, his father stared at his left eye, the bad one, with a look of mild distaste; then he led Mikey through a series of his own tests, as though the school had exaggerated the condition. He made Mikey close his right eye and tell him how many fingers he was holding up. Mikey tried to answer correctly, fluttering his right eye open to peek. He begged his father not to make him wear a patch like a pirate, and his father said, “What in the hell would that accomplish?”

Melmoth is full of snow: snow stamped from workmen’s boots, or banked against a familiar door; falling in the Old Town Square or being brushed against by a long skirt. We’ve chosen one of our favourite snowy passages to share with you here.

It is a white evening, with snow drifted up against bicycles and litter bins. None presently falls, but all the same the air contains, you might almost think, the dust of opals ground against a stone. Music both sacred and profane meets above the awnings where valiant men sit on sheepskin-covered chairs and shiver delightedly. ‘This is it!’ say the English: ‘Real winter, like when we were young, and on the doorstep birds pecked right through the foil milk-bottle tops.’ They pay over the odds for bad beer, and think it cheap.

Karel and Thea live just beyond the Old Town Square, where Helen slips through unseen and largely unseeing. She is more or less immune to the effect of the façades, which have a quality of impermanence, as though they might at any moment be drawn back like a curtain. She reaches her friends’ apartment out of breath, discovering that she has walked a little faster than she generally does, as though she heard against the cobblestones the rapping of a follower’s feet. Down an alley, beneath an arch – stooping, though the curved stones clear her head by inches – and there is the yard onto which four apartment buildings look out, and there the familiar door, much snow banked against it. She pauses, and puts her thumb beneath the satchel strap, which has begun to press against the bones of her shoulder. She makes a swift calculation. Either they have remained indoors for – let’s say, twelve hours? More? – or have left, and not returned. She steps forward, and at that moment the single light set beneath the arch goes out, and the yard and all around it is dark. Each of the thirty identical windows set above their identical sills is merely a pane of black in the blackness, and the effect is of a total emptiness, as though no lamps were ever lit there. The sole light is that which comes weakly in under the arch from the distant Old Town Square – weakly, as if very distant indeed; as if Helen has gone twenty miles from there, and not twenty paces. She stands very still. She listens, and it is her whole body that strains within the silence. What does she listen for – the drag of long skirts against the snow, the tread of boots – or of bare feet, perhaps: feet which have walked over continents and are indifferent to pain? She listens, and of course there is nothing, save for the distant skirl of Bohemian bock piping away in the dark. Then the arch light returns, some loose wire finding its fitting perhaps; and Helen blinks against it, and sees now what she did not see before: that the familiar door is open by barely the width of a forefinger.

Buy your copy with 10% off + free UK postage

 In a brand new chapter on Christmas eating – available only in the paperback edition of Eat Up, Ruby Tandoh’s bestselling manifesto on food, appetite and eating what you want – Ruby expounds on the joys of Christmas AND rest-of-the-year food.

‘There are some things in this world that we can set our clocks to,’ opens Nate, kicking off the Christmas episode of the pop music podcast Switched On Pop. ‘The sun rises and sets, the tides ebb and flow, stars are born and die in fiery novas. And there’s one other event in the universe that occurs with inexorable power, and that is that every December, Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You will be inescapable.’

Nate isn’t wrong. The opening bars of the song shimmy onto the airwaves sometime in late November and proliferate on every major radio station, advert and TV channel, spreading faster than a epidemic of winter flu. The quick 1-2-3-4 beat of those sleigh bells burrows so deep into your brain that by the time the first chorus rolls in, you find your tired winter legs breaking into a canter. Try keeping your cool in a supermarket when it comes on over the radio: what started as a quick milk and bread trip turns into a riotous ‘Oooh, Baileys’, ‘Look at that king prawn party wreath!’, ‘Shall we get one more Advocaat, just in case?’ spending spree, all the while tapping your feet in time with the beat.

More than Bethlehem or Lapland – more than the manger or the church pews or Santa’s lap – it’s supermarkets where Christmas really happens. They are where so many of the big festive battles are fought: to tinsel or not to tinsel, party platters versus a tray of cocktail sausages, turkey or a more modest chicken and the ever-contentious sprouts. It’s in the chaos of the pre-Christmas aisles of Tesco that I’ve made some of my finest decisions (those Malteser reindeer things) and hit my lowest ebbs (eight extra packs of those Malteser reindeer things). This is the place where so many of us decide what kind of Christmas we’re going to have, whether it’s a mindful back-to-basics affair or a Tesco Finest blowout.

I’ll admit that I struggle to keep my head when the Starbucks red cups come out and the Coke adverts are on TV. I fully subscribe to the madness: from the first winter rain until the last echo of the tubular bells, a Santa-red mist descends over me, and my rationale goes into hibernation. In those fugue-state supermarket trips and on television and blaring from every speaker up and down the nation, we’re encouraged to let loose and enjoy. There’s black forest mocha, sticky toffee latte, everything fortified with booze, mince pie ice cream, gingerbread praline, chocolate orange stollen, that Pret Christmas lunch sandwich, Brussels sprouts every way God never intended, peppermint yule log, Quality Street, more booze.

It’s novel, and it’s exciting, and I find myself buying even the most ghastly crap in the spirit of Christmas indulgence. The way I see Christmas, the whole thing is a national exercise in high camp. Everyone shimmers and sparkles, and it’s impossible to find a single item of clothing in any high street store that doesn’t have sequins on it for a full two months. All those special edition foods – yule log cream liqueur! – are inversions of the staid, familiar Christmas traditions they draw upon. They take one food genre and mash it into another, so Christmas cake becomes a hot drink, and yule log dessert becomes booze, and a Christmas pudding gets condensed into a chocolate in a selection box. Everything gets distilled to a surreal essence of itself and then repackaged in some new and ridiculous form. It is absurd. It is camp. It is amazing.

But excitement is exhausting. There’s a reason why our wide-eyed wonder drains from us as we creak out of youth and into the drudgery of adulthood: it just uses too much energy to be buzzing all day long. A friend once said we should have Christmas once every four years in the manner of Olympics and World Cups so we don’t all keel over from the sheer stress of it. We need moments of mundanity to stay afloat: these boring things smooth over the peaks and troughs to keep us sane. This is what rich tea biscuits and porridge are for. Sometimes it’ll be an episode of First Dates that soothes you, or some predictable tweets, or a cuppa. Other times you just need a packet of instant noodles and Brooklyn Nine-Nine reruns. But mundanity doesn’t fly at Christmas – it’s go big, or go home.

As Switched On Pop hosts Nate and Charlie go on to discuss in their Christmas special, this constant, enforced state of excitement is practically mandated in Mariah’s hit song. In between the brisk tempo and that dusting of sleigh bells and Mariah’s soaring vocals, Nate and Charlie point out that there’s no verse. The whole song is hook – dancing, spinning, euphoric chorus. Without slower verses to ground it, the song spins anchorless in this hyper-energetic, toe-tapping world of festive excess. Even the song’s bridge – a section that might usually provide a contrast to, or a context for, the more dynamic chorus – floats high as Mariah croons that ‘everyone is singing, I hear those sleigh bells ringing’. What makes the song both magical and awful is that it condenses the entirety of Christmas – unrelenting cheer and delirium, socially sanctioned indulgence, absolutely no respite from the chaos – into a peppy 3½ minutes. It’s no wonder plenty of people are sick of the whole thing barely a week into December.

The whole ordeal is even more fraught if you’re someone who struggles with your relationship with food: there’s a pressure to constantly eat, ignoring every internal regulatory cue your body gives you. For people who are comfortable with food and eating, this might just mean a harmless Christmas bloat. But if you have a hard time listening to your body’s hunger cues, this month of chaotic eating can undermine years of eating-disorder recovery and growth. There’s the important matter of money, too, and the fact that merry hedonism is only available to those who can afford the hefty shopping bills it brings. Those with histories of alcoholism may find the omni-booziness of the festive season difficult to weather. The lonely, the bereaved and the sick face a whole raft of anxieties: the compulsory jollity of Christmas leaves a lot of room for disappointment and unmet expectations. When something is this determinedly upbeat, it stands at odds with the grey, up-and-down, meandering realities of our lives.

I’m not advocating that we all ditch the excess and settle for a lump of coal and a clementine this Christmas. I enjoy a kitsch, ridiculous Christmas as much as anyone. I kind of love arriving breathless in January with no idea how I got there or where all the money went. I’m certainly not going to preach at you that you should renounce presents or have a ‘tasteful’ Christmas without tinsel or snow globes or Celebrations.

But maybe there’s something to be said for letting the everyday – the Weetabix and the pasta bakes and the blackcurrant squash – find a foothold in your Christmas time. Make room in your kitchen cupboards for the usual tins of beans, and make sure that you have at least one biscuit in the tin that doesn’t have stars or santas on it. Watch a non-Christmas film. Have a coffee that isn’t gingerbread flavour.

Do all the normal, useless things that you do all the rest of the year, like not talking to your family, or playing Sims 4, or ordering pizza. Let yourself languish in the peri-Christmas doldrums for a while and be thoroughly bored, if only for a few minutes. Enjoy these moments of nothingness while you can. Let your life be just verse for a while: plodding along, scrolling Instagram with a packet of hobnobs. Because when the chorus comes in and those Mariah sleigh bells starting ringing again, you will find your foot tapping, and your shoulders shimmying, and you’ll be dragged into the furore whether you like it or not.

We are delighted to announce that Sarah Perry has been shortlisted for Best Popular Fiction and UK Author of the Year at this year’s Specsavers National Book Awards for her Sunday Times bestselling third novel Melmoth.

The follow up to her #1 besteller The Essex Serpent which won Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2016 and was Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, Melmoth is a gothic masterpiece of moral complexity, asking us profound questions about mercy, redemption, and how to make the best of our conflicted world. 

The other books on the shortlists are:

Popular Fiction

Mythos by Stephen Fry
A Keeper by Graham Norton
Munich by Robert Harris
Faking Friends by Jane Fallon
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
The Break by Marian Keyes
Still Me by Jojo Moyes

UK Author

Sebastian Faulks – Paris Echo
Matt Haig – Notes on a Nervous Planet
Philip Pullman – La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Vol 1
JK Rowling and Robert Galbraith – Lethal White
Jacqueline Wilson – My Mum Tracy Beaker

www.nationalbookawards.co.uk

Follow the conversation on Twitter #NationalBookAwards

Buy your copy of Melmoth with free UK shipping

We couldn’t let National Baking Week kick off without sharing a recipe from our favourite baker, Ruby Tandoh. This delicious loaf cake that requires some TLC will make you fall in love with baking (if GBBO hasn’t already). 

Eat Up! is a passionate, fascinating, up-to-the-minute call to arms against fad diets and in support of eating what you want. It’ll make you feel moved, nostalgic, hungry for change and very ready for a delicious snack. It was a Sunday Times bestseller in hardback, with readers loving it for its honesty, wit, surprising pop culture references and easy recipes.

Buy your copy with 10% off + free UK shipping

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Time is the secret ingredient here. I often make mug cakes that cook in the microwave, packets of cake mix that come with little rice paper cartoon characters to go on top, cheerful chocolate Rice Krispie cakes. All of these things are perfect in that moment, but sometimes I need a different kind of sweet fix. This cake will test your patience and your commitment to the cause: after baking, it needs a full three days of TLC before it’s ready to eat. You’ll need to swaddle it in foil, ‘feed’ it whisky and keep it safe from hungry hands as though nursing a small, boozy baby.

Preheat the oven to 180°C/fan 160°C/gas mark 4. In a medium saucepan set over a low heat, combine 75g each of salted butter and black treacle, and 100g of light brown sugar, and stir until melted and smooth. Take the pan off the heat, and whisk in 100ml of full-fat milk and two lightly beaten eggs. In a large bowl, mix 140g of plain flour, two teaspoons of ground ginger, half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, half a teaspoon each of bicarbonate of soda and baking powder, and a good pinch of ground nutmeg. Pour the wet mixture slowly into the dry ingredients, stirring constantly until the batter is more or less smooth. Pour into a 2lb/900g loaf tin and bake for 30–40 minutes, or until a small knife inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Immediately brush the top of the cake with a little whisky and leave to cool, then remove from the tin and wrap in kitchen foil.

Once a day, for two more days, unwrap the heavy little bundle and brush with a little bit more whisky. Smell the treacly, subtly boozy kick of the cake, and feel the springy, tender sides with your fingers. Imagine what it will taste like once it’s had a chance to rest, and its flavour has matured. At the end of the third day, the cake is ready. Mix 125g of icing sugar with just enough whisky to make a smooth, pourable glaze, and stir in the zest of half an orange. Pour over the cake and leave to set for an hour or so. Once it’s ready, slice the cake thickly, sit down and happily, hungrily eat. Big enough for 6–8 chunky slices.

Follow @rubytandoh on Twitter

‘A beautiful, devastating, brilliant book’ Marian Keyes

‘Astonishingly dark, rich storytelling, exquisitely balanced between gothic shocks and emotional truth’ Francis Spufford

‘Mythic, ominous and sensitively human, Melmoth is haunting in all the best ways’ Frances Hardinge

Melmoth is the new novel from Sarah Perry, author of the number one bestselling The Essex Serpent.

Twenty years ago Helen Franklin did something she cannot forgive herself for, and she has spent every day since barricading herself against its memory. But her sheltered life is about to change. A strange manuscript has come into her possession, filled with testimonies recording sightings of a woman in black, with unblinking eyes and bleeding feet: Melmoth, the loneliest being in the world. Condemned to walk the Earth forever, she tries to beguile the guilty and lure them away for a lifetime wandering alongside her. Everyone that Melmoth seeks out must make a choice: to live with what they’ve done, or be led into the darkness. Helen can’t stop reading, or shake the feeling that someone is watching her. As her past finally catches up with her, she too must choose which path to take.

Read the opening pages of Melmoth – and watch Sarah Perry read them herself, filmed in the chapel of a cemetery – ahead of publication on 2nd October.

 

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MELMOTH

Look! It is winter in Prague: night is rising in the mother of cities and over her thousand spires. Look down at the darkness around your feet, in all the lanes and alleys, as if it were a soft black dust swept there by a broom; look at the stone apostles on the old Charles Bridge, and at all the blue-eyed jackdaws on the shoulders of St John of Nepomuk. Look! She is coming over the bridge, head bent down to the whitening cobblestones: Helen Franklin, forty-two, neither short nor tall, her hair neither dark nor fair; on her feet, boots which serve from November to March, and her mother’s steel watch on her wrist. A table-salt glitter of hard snow falling on her sleeve, her shoulder; her neat coat belted, as colourless as she is, nine years worn. Across her breast a narrow satchel strap; in the satchel, her afternoon’s work (instructions for the operation of a washing machine, translated from German into English) and a green uneaten apple.

What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split, and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk out on the river? Nothing at all – nothing, that is, but this: these hours, these long minutes of this short day, must be the last when she knows nothing of Melmoth – when thunder is just thunder, and a shadow only darkness on the wall. If you could tell her now (Step forward! Take her wrist, and whisper!) perhaps she’d pause, turn pale, and in confusion fix her eyes on yours; perhaps look at the lamp-lit castle high above the Vltava and down at white swans sleeping on the riverbank, then turn on her half-inch heel and beat back through the coming crowd. But – oh, it’s no use: she’d only smile, impassive, half-amused (this is her way), shake you off, and go on walking home.

Helen Franklin pauses where the bridge meets the embankment. Trams rattle on up to the National Theatre, where down
in the pit the oboists suck their reeds, and the first violin taps her bow three times against the music stand. It’s two weeks past
Christmas, but the mechanical tree in the Old Town Square turns and turns and plays one final pleasing strain of Strauss,
and women from Hove and Hartlepool clasp paper cups of steaming wine. Down Karlovy Lane comes the scent of ham and
woodsmoke, of sugar-studded dough burnt over coals; an owl on a gloved wrist may be addressed with the deference due to its
feathers, then gingerly held for a handful of coins. It is all a stage set, contrived by ropes and pulleys: it is pleasant enough for an evening’s self-deceit, but no more. Helen is not deceived, nor has she ever been – the pleasures of Bohemia are not for her. She has never stood and watched the chiming of the astronomical clock, whose maker was blinded by pins before he could shame the city by building a better device elsewhere; has never exchanged her money for a set of nesting dolls in the scarlet strip of an English football team; does not sit idly overlooking the Vltava at dusk.Guilty of a crime for which she fears no proper recompense can ever be made, she is in exile, and willingly serves her full life term, having been her own jury and judge.

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Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black is on the 2018 Man Booker Prize longlist. The judges said: ‘A book of extraordinary political and racial scope, Washington Black is wonderfully written, extremely imaginative, profoundly engaging’. Marketing manager Flora Willis asks Esi her burning questions about the book.

What drew you to the story of Washington Black? How did the original tale become your novel?

In fact I set out to write a novel about the Tichborne case, of all things, one of the longest-running criminal trials in British history. I wanted it told from the perspective of an ex-slave who had been a servant at the Tichborne estate, and who later acted as the defense’s main witness. But almost from the first, the story began to stray, the characters took on their own realities and dimensions. I understand now that it was the voice of its narrator that interested me, the complicated position he found himself in, racially, socially, intellectually. This is what I took from that initial idea. And out of this grew a story about a boy of sensitivity and intelligence, seeking his foothold in a world where there can be no real belonging for him. Looking back at my previous novels, I see now how they are both preoccupied with aftermaths, with the reconstructing of lives after great suffering. Washington Black, as a post-slavery narrative, is no different. But it became what it is only very gradually, and on its own terms.

When we at Serpent’s Tail first read the book, we were all emailing each other, trying to describe what the style reminded us of: Jules Verne, Charles Dickens and Colson Whitehead were all offered, but we couldn’t hit on one comparison – the voice is so unique and arresting. Who have been your influences while writing Washington Black?

That is very lovely to hear! Influences are tricky things to isolate and pin down, and they just seem to get trickier as I get older. I think the truest influences on this novel are works of nonfiction – popular histories such as Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, and Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature. I read such books assiduously during the writing. Certainly there is much of Thomas Clarkson buried within Titch, as well as a great deal of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. These histories, among others, opened something in me: I was transported, and wanted to capture some of what it meant to live in their worlds, with all their attendant brutality and wonder.

There’s incredible detail in the science in the book. Did you already have any knowledge about, for example, 19^th century flying machines? Can you tell us a bit about your research process?

Richard Holmes – one of the great historians of the possible – wrote a fascinating overview of hot-air ballooning called Falling Upwards. That was a trove of information. I also read much about the study of marine life in the 19^th century and the invention of the first aquarium. I enjoy research, and sometimes joke that writing books is just an excuse to read widely. It might be of use! I’ll tell myself, and immediately feel better. On my writing desk at present is a book on Patty Hearst, a book on cave art, and a book of poetry on eighteenth century gardens.

Later on in the novel Washington becomes very interested in marine biology. He is sent underwater to find a rare octopus and has the idea to hold an aquatic show in London. How did marine biology weave its way into the story, and what do you see as its place in the story?

I’m fascinated by historical science: discoveries, inventions, the dismissal of one theory in favour of a better one. There’s something in that which resembles, I think, the way we go through the world, the stages of a life. Washington’s relationship to marine life shifts constantly, and his ability to capture it – whether literally, or through paint – becomes an expression of his own changing self. Its study is how he comes to have a sense of purpose and worth in the world, even as he recognizes that science is an imperfect field, and that its infinite theories can be warped into evil, as in the case of John Willard. But Washington’s true subject is freedom, and so it is no accident that it is he who seizes that octopus, and he who dedicates himself to the world’s first aquarium.

In your CBC interview you said ‘Confronting the world as a Black woman is my particular reality, one that informs my work in both obvious and subtle ways’. It feels like an important time for writers of colour, with publishers being called out for non-diverse lists – for only publishing a certain type of ‘particular reality’. Do you feel there’s change in the air?

Certainly within the last twenty years or so a big push has been made to be more inclusionary. In Canada we are seeing more stories from previously unheard voices. I do think we can do better, and that many writers are still struggling to be heard. But it is a complicated and nuanced problem, and one that is made more complicated by the different cultures in the English-speaking world. An American friend of mine, a novelist, speaks for instance of the great divide she feels in her country between what she calls “different shades of black.” She has the sense that African American voices are being ignored in favour of immigrant African voices. In Canada I grew up with almost no African Canadian writers to emulate; my models came from abroad. That is changing now, slowly. My own feeling is that the rooms of literature are vast and deep, and we would do well to linger in them.

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Simon Rich’s latest collection of short stories is so full of lols you’ll be ROFLBSATR* like a librarian on laughing gas. Read a story from Hits & Misses below.

*Rolling on the floor laughing but still able to read

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PHYSICIANS’ LOUNGE, APRIL 1ST

– You wanted to see me, sir?

– Yes, Dr. Metzger. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. I’ve been receiving complaints from your patients. And I’ve decided I can’t allow you to make April Fool’s jokes this year.

– Oh my God.

– I know you’re disappointed, but my mind is made up.

– What about the one where I tell the patient I’m out of anesthetic?

– No.

– What about the one where I put on a janitor’s outfit, grab a scalpel, and walk into the operating room just as my patient loses consciousness? So he thinks he’s about to be operated on by a janitor?

– No.

– What about the one where the patient wakes up after his operation and I start shouting, “Where’s my
stethoscope? Where did I leave my stethoscope?” And then I stare at the patient’s torso, with a look of horror, like I maybe left it inside his body?

– No.

– You can’t do this to me! April Fool’s Day is the highlight of my year. It’s the only reason I finished medical school—to experience the holiday as a doctor.

– I’m sorry, Sam, but my hands are tied.

– What about the one where the patient wakes up and I’m wearing a robot costume, so he thinks he’s been in a coma for eighty years. And I’m like, “Welcome to the future, Mr. Greenbaum. The world you remember is gone.” You know, in a robot voice. So he thinks I’m a robot.

– I get it. The answer is still no.

– How could you be so cruel? I mean, for God’s sake, what happened to the Hippocratic oath?

– “First do no harm”?

– That’s what that meant?

– Yes.

– You sure it wasn’t something about April Fool’s?

– Yes.

– What about the one where I tell the patient his kidney operation was a grand success, but then, while I’m talking to him, I have an intern come in and say, “Dr. Metzger, you’ve got some dirt on your left shoulder.” And I start to brush my right shoulder. And the intern’s like, “No, your left shoulder.” And I’m like, “This is my left shoulder.” And he’s like, “No, it’s your right shoulder. What’s the matter with you, Dr. Metzger? Don’t you know your left from your right?” And then we both look at the patient’s torso, with a look of horror, to imply, like . . .

– I know where you’re going with this.

– . . . to imply, like, maybe I operated on the wrong kidney? Like, maybe I did the left one instead of the right one because I don’t know the difference between my—

– No.

– At least let me workshop it!

– I’m sorry, Sam, but my decision is final.

–  . . .

– April . . . Fool’s.

– No way!

– I can’t believe you bought that!

– Man, you got me good! Guess that’s why you’re the head of surgery.

– Pass me my robot mask. It’s time to make the rounds.

Hits & Misses by Simon Rich is out on 27th July 
Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

We are delighted to announce the acquisition of In the Dream House, a new memoir by Carmen Maria Machado, author of the bestselling and prize-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties.

An extraordinarily candid and radically inventive memoir about an abusive same-sex relationship in the author’s past, In the Dream House sees Machado tackle a dark and difficult subject with wit, inventiveness and an inquiring spirit, creating an entirely unique piece of work which is destined to become an instant classic.

We’ll be publishing Autumn 2019. Roll on next year!

Anne Lister was a wealthy Yorkshire heiress, a world traveller and an out lesbian during the Regency era – a time when it was difficult simply to be female. She wrote her diary in code derived from Ancient Greek, including details of her liaisons with women. Liberated by her money, she remained unmarried, opened a colliery and chose to dress all in black. Some locals referred to her as Gentleman Jack and sent her poison pen letters, but this did not dissuade her from living mostly as she pleased.

This Autumn we publish Gentleman Jack, the first substantial biography of Lister by Angela Steidele, combining excerpts of Lister’s own diaries with Steidele’s erudite and lively commentary. And, because it’s Pride month, we’re sharing an exclusive extract below. You’re welcome.

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Anne Lister was fourteen or fifteen when she fell in love for the first time. She and Eliza Raine were the same age and in the same class at Manor House School in York. They were both different to the other girls. Eliza had been born in Madras and had dark skin and black hair. Anne wore threadbare clothing and was subject to a lot of staring and quizzing for being an original. Care despised on my part! She wanted to learn more than befitted girls, and was called the Solomon of the school…

…For Anne and the other schoolgirls, Eliza may have been the first person they ever saw from another part of the world. Eliza’s father William Raine had been head surgeon at a hospital in Madras on the southeast coast of India, now Chennai. He and an Indian woman – her name is not documented – had two daughters, Jane and Eliza. Both girls were christened and considered illegitimate but British. They spoke Tamil with their mother and the servants, English with their father and his friends. The latter included William Raine’s colleague William Duffin. He had his wife did not have children and grew very fond of the Raine girls. In 1797, Duffin made Raine his successor as chief medical officer in Madras and returned home to York. When William Raine died only three years later, William Duffin was executor of his will and brought Eliza and Jane to York. The girls both attended Manor School, with Eliza boarding while Jane moved in with the Duffins at 58 Micklegate. Each of the girls had £4,000 in a London bank account. This capital, which generated enough interest to live on, was to go to them on their marriage or upon reaching the age of twenty-one. Some might have considered them good catches financially – but as illegitimate ‘half-castes’, they were not accepted by society.

Anne was besotted with Eliza’s beauty; thirty years and countless lovers later, she still called her the most beautiful girl I ever saw. Anne helped Eliza, who preferred French and drawing, with mathematics. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that the two of them were put in the same room. Or perhaps the staff wanted to set apart two girls who did not really fit in at the genteel boarding school. Whatever the case, Anne and Eliza came to enjoy the isolation of their room. My conduct & feelings being surely natural to me inasmuch as they were not taught, not fictitious but instinctive.20 I had always had the same turn from infancy […]. I had never varied & no effort on my part had been able to counteract it.21


Eliza and Anne swore to stay together forever. They planned to live together as soon as Eliza came into her inheritance in six years’ time. The girls exchanged rings to seal their promise. They were reluctant to be parted in the holidays, the two of them staying with Anne’s parents in a rented house in Halifax – Skelfler is not the neat place that it used to be.By this time, Jeremy had left the army. Eliza was given a friendly welcome by Anne’s family. Like at Manor School, Anne and Eliza shared a room and a bed at the Listers’ house, not only for practical reasons. Obsessed with virginity, early 19th-century society thought girls were best protected from male seduction by a close female friend, who would engage their heart and occupy their bed. This parental panic granted girls and women like Anne Lister and Eliza Raine a great many liberties.

After spending the summer holidays together, only Eliza returned to York to Manor School. Anne Lister is said to have been expelled, although there is no evidence of this. Perhaps Aunt Anne could no longer pay the fees for her niece? Until they could meet again, the girls agreed to write regular letters. To make sure every letter arrived and did not fall into the wrong hands, Anne kept a record of their correspondence. This list was the beginning of her diary.

Monday August 11 Eliza left us. Had a letter from her on Wednesday morning by Mr Ratcliffe.
Wrote to her on Thursday 14th by Mr Lund.
Wrote to her again on Sunday 17th – put into the Post Office at Leeds on the Monday following – that Evening the 18th had a parcel from her – Music, Letter & Lavender.23

Without Eliza, Anne consoled herself with her favourite brother Samuel over the daily disagreeables that forever beset our unfortunate family. Anne loved to pit herself against Sam, two years her junior, in ‘masculine’ arts: chess, fencing with wooden swords or translating from Latin. She would always win.