The Zimbabwe of Ian Smith and Robert Mugabe is there in the background of these stories, a country in turmoil, plagued by hyperinflation, corrupt politicians and propaganda-filled newspapers, but these are tales about people, not politics. The stories are sad, angry and funny, focusing on sharply drawn characters and suffused with love for Zimbabwe and frustration at its failings.

It takes a couple of stories to get properly immersed in the atmosphere and emotional turbulence of the collection. The first, At the Sound of the Last Post, told from the point of view of a disillusioned wife at the funeral of her politician husband, is rather a cold opening, and the eponymous second story, dealing with one woman’s desperate need for a baby and the illicit pregnancy of the local madwoman, is perhaps one of the least subtle in the collection. But after this the stories rapidly become deeply moving, full of emotional truth that leaves you breathless.

The stunning endings of stories such as Something Nice From London, in which a family await the arrival of the body of their youngest son from England, and My Aunt Juliana’s Indian, about a the relationship between an Indian shopkeeper and his Zimbabwean employee during the struggle for independence in 1980, stick in the memory. These are stories with twists, but they are twists of feeling, of despair, of fate, rather than of plot.

Gappah’s prose is sparse and economical, pared down to almost the barest observational essentials. But the thoughts and dialogue of the characters are a lyrical hybrid of Zimbabwean Shona and English, making the words on the page dance with life.

It is often the world of African women that the stories inhabit: wives, mothers and daughters tied to husbands, sons and fathers by love, money, tradition or family history. The women in the stories are often trapped in positions of dependence: a maid in a wealthy household, a rich woman with a cheating husband, a student sectioned in a mental hospital. There seems little chance of escape from these confinements, but these women are resilient all the same. They recount stories, pass on traditions, tell jokes, laugh. The voices are angry but never bitter, humorous but never mocking. These are gentle stories full of hard themes, and they will stick around and mutter in your ear long after you’ve finished reading.

Emily

I guess the thing that appeals to me most in fiction is an emphasis on expressionism: the literary equivalent of (bear with me) the German Expressionist painters from the start of the twentieth century.  Those painters broke with realist ways of depicting subject matter so that they could better convey emotion.  Think of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.   It’s not a realistic depiction of a man screaming, but nor is it some kind of fantasy.  Munch has altered the way a screaming man would realistically look in order to try to convey a more realistic expression of a scream.  To try to say this is what a scream feels like using colour and shape.

My favourite kind of fiction is anything that does a similar thing, albeit with sentences and paragraphs instead of oil and canvas.  Prose that breaks with reality in order to address it in a way that can carry more emotional weight than straightforward realism, especially in the shorter form.  Just as expressionism in painting can take many shapes, so too can expressionism in literature.  I’m not trying to lump the following too closely together, but they all have this common: they break realism’s hard and fast rules to better convey human feeling.  There are so many brilliant examples I could pick, but these five seem like quite a balanced bunch, ranging from the light-hearted to the heavyweight literary classic.

1. Dan Rhodes – Don’t Tell Me The Truth About Love.  Although it wasn’t his first to be published, this is the first book that Dan Rhodes wrote.  It contains seven exquisite love stories, each altering reality to express more poignantly or more humorously the feelings of the lovers they concern.  A stand out story is The Violoncello, in which a man takes it upon himself to transform into a cello to be played by the hands of the woman he loves.
2. Stanley Donwood – Slowly Downward: A Collection of Miserable Stories.  Stanley Donwood is probably best known as Radiohead’s in-house artist and designer of their record sleeves, but he is also a writer of short stories.  You can read most of his work on his website, or order it there in print.  Be warned, this stuff is as dark as midnight on Friday 13^th, but it’s full of striking, nightmarish imagery that cuts straight to your spinal chord.  Fingers is a good place to start.
3. Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Imaginary Beings.  There are several beautifully illustrated editions of this book that it would be worth investing in, but the words themselves will paint the brightest pictures.  Borges’ playfully academic style is the perfect medium for this tour-de-force of creatures drawn from the strange depths of human imagination.  You can fill a spare minute by opening it to a random page and reading about a weird and wonderful animal, or you can read the book in its entirety and immerse yourself in the monsters of humanity’s subconscious.  Either way Borges’ conviction is clear: these made-up animals are an important part of humanity’s expression of itself.  ‘Necessary monsters,’ he calls them.
4. Tim Burton – The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories.  This one is just plain fun (and it makes a good present if you’re ever stuck for an idea).  It’s a collection of simple, rhyming poems about children with magical and ghastly problems.   The Girl who Turned Into A Bed and Stick Boy and Match Girl in Love are two examples where the title says it all.  The book is as much about the accompanying cartoons as the poems, but set aside half an hour to read it in one sitting and you’ll be left with that glorious, pleasantly disturbed feeling unique to Tim Burton.
5. Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis and Other Stories.  What can I say about this?  Metamorphosis is the best short story I’ve ever read, and is justifiably as famous as it is.  But the Other Stories part of this collection is remarkable too.  I like dipping into the tiny pieces that make up Meditation and A Country Doctor (among these The Sudden Walk is a choice example, and Kafka in his less-publicised uplifting mode), but the dark masterpiece of the book is, for me, In The Penal Colony, in which a government inspector visits an isolated colony and is given a guided tour of the most elaborately grotesque execution contraption you’re ever likely to come across.   The sense of horror as the machine is described is compounded by the pride its operator feels in it.  So proud is this operator, in fact, that he is determined to demonstrate the machine’s virtues to the inspector, even if that means offering up his own body for a test run…   A perfect moment of expressionist literature – Kafka’s loathing of bureaucratic systems given mechanical form – but not for the faint-hearted.

I hope you enjoy checking out some of these short works if you decide to do so.  Likewise if you have any recommendations along these lines, please do post them below.

With that, it remains to thank you for reading this blog.  See you anon. 

Ali

The most widespread piece of news has been the case being brought against J K Rowling by the estate of the late author of Willy the Wizard.  It’s the latest and possibly most absurd in an occasional series of claims that the Harry Potter books have taken scenes or concepts from other books in the teenage witch/wizard genre.  In my opinion the case doesn’t have much to stand on.  All of that genre fantasy stuff is so widely used that nobody can claim they invented any of it (including J K Rowling).  The only people who might be able to bring a successful case of plagiarism on these grounds are Merlin, King Arthur, and perhaps the ghost of JRR Tolkien.

A more complicated case from this month is that of Helene Hegemann, a seventeen-year-old debut author from Berlin, whose has been accused of lifting entire chunks of other authors’ work to include them in her novel Axolotl Roadkill.  Hegemann’s defence is that she was carrying out the literary equivalent of musical sampling, and that she belongs to a generation who do this consistently.  In that case she should probably have written her novel under the name of Hegemann feat. and then a list of the authors of these samples, but when you think about it her argument does have some strength.  Is there really so much difference between mashing up the out-of-copyright works of a literary heavyweight with your own prose (see Pride and Prejudice with Zombies) and mixing a contemporary’s writing with your own for artistic effect?  Although the question of openness remains, the act itself is technically the same.  Interestingly, Hegemann does include a kind of equivalent to the sampler’s feat. in her novel itself, she just leaves out the name of the person she’s sampling (although new editions will include it).  This from one of her characters:

“I help myself wherever I find inspiration and ideas: Films, music, books, paintings, poetry about sausages, photos, conversations, dreams … Light and shadow, precisely because my work and my theft become authentic the moment something touches my soul. Who cares where I get things from? All that matters is what I do with them.”

It’s possible that Hegemann has touched there on an inherent conflict between creativity and things like structure, order, legality, etc.  Another interesting plagiarism story comes from the tail end of last year, where software developed to enforce the legality of authorship – specifically to spot plagiarism in the essays of students – helped unexpectedly to uncover the authors of a sixteenth century play.  The software checks the text for signature turns of phrase and grammatical style, and is able to then compare these characteristics with the stylistic fingerprints of multiple authors.  In the case of the play, The Reign of Edward III, one of these fingerprints turned out to be that of none other than William Shakespeare.

Speaking of Bill Shakespeare, Robert McCrum recently wrote a very interesting article for the Observer that highlighted how the world’s most famous author cribbed from all over the place.  A fellow called Robert Greene laid out the accusations in a 1593 pamphlet, fantastically titled A Groat’s-worth of Wit Bought With A Million of Repentance.

Perhaps it would be interesting to know whether the software found Shakespeare guilty of some of these crimes.  Perhaps Axolotl Roadkill should be run through that software.  Perhaps all new fiction should be checked in that manner.  But that would of course create a horribly suspicious atmosphere in the publishing industry, which would do no one any good at all.  The fact is that authors are professional liars, trying to make us believe that fiction is fact.  And that’s a great thing.  If we start holding them to account over issues of truth-telling we run the risk of destroying their output.

I hope Robert McCrum wouldn’t consider it plagiarism to end this post with the last few paragraphs of his article (but do go and read the preceding paragraphs here).  He concludes far better than I ever could, with a mention David Shields’ Reality Hunger.

“Bestselling writer David Shields has just published Reality Hunger, a passionate, ultra-hip manifesto on behalf of what he calls “appropriation art” in contemporary music, design and literature. Shields has several thrusts against copyright law which, he says, has protected “the creative property of artists”, but obstructed “the natural evolution of human creativity”.

He writes approvingly of the music business, in which “you steal somebody else’s beat, then – with just turntables and your mouth – you mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at”.

Stripped of its excitable rhetoric, Reality Hunger is really a cool restatement of “anything goes”, literature’s oldest, and most golden, rule. Whatever medium you choose, it’s still as difficult as ever to be truly original.”

Ali

Indeed, many of the stories in this book can be best described as resembling children’s drawings.  That isn’t to say that they lack sophistication, but that they feel unfettered and are full of bright lines and novel shapes.  There’s a dreamlike feel to everything in here.  For example, Terra Quod Mare by Stacie Withers is the tale of a girl transforming slowly into an island, while Sam Rawlings’ Upon The Burrator Valley Floor is a treatise on the customs and behaviour of a race of intelligent creatures no bigger than ants.  The rest of the works are as diverse a collection as you would expect from the let-loose imaginations of fourteen different human beings.  Sure, the range of styles and subjects will mean that not everything is to everybody’s taste, but keep an open mind and most readers should find something to intrigue them in The Book of Apertures.

The stand-out stories for me were Abby Stokes Is Going To Die by Charlie Cottrell and State Jam by P X Amphlett.  Cottrell’s story is a neat exchange of dialogue between the titular Abby and an unconventional grim reaper come to collect her soul.  The reason for this exchange is thanks to a brilliantly funny moment on the second page, but I’d spoil the joke for you if I told you what it was.  Suffice to say that the story is a touching look at ordinary human feelings, and is funny without satirising its characters. 

State Jam seemed to me the most sophisticated piece in the collection, both in terms of concept and quality of writing.  It has a shade of the science fiction of Philip K Dick or J G Ballard about it, gritty, hard-boiled and brimming with ideas.  Its premise is that the music industry has discovered a means to make music heard inside people’s heads: “Your favourite tunes, direct into your auditory centres: ‘Loud as you want, and no hearing damage!’ went the ads.”  Unfortunately, the government has got involved with this new technology, censoring certain kinds of music that it deems unhealthy to be played on-loop direct to the brain.  The story that ensues from the premise manages to be at once lightning-paced and lucid as it outlines the details of the conceit.  Amid all this, Amphlett finds the time to pack in vivid description and some great sentences, and I’m looking forward to whatever he writes next.

The artwork in the book is just as diverse as the writing.  Some of it is illustrative, other parts just thematically similar.  It’s hard to convey what art is like with words, so I’d urge you to simply pick up a copy of the book when it comes out and take a look.  Highlights are Dan Prescott’s illustrations for Matt Black’s The Magpie King (picture a gnarled, leafless tree above which flies a sphere of silhouetted birds, so that together their shapes make up the missing foliage of the tree) and Tom Harris’ picture at the end of Joanne Tedds’ The Apple Tree (another tree picture, splendidly composed – on the right hand side of the page, at the foot of a bare tree trunk, a man squats with his head in his hands.  As the trunk rises it bends to the left and droops its branches to form an arch above and to either side of the man.  From the lowest of these branches – the ones that scrape the floor to the man’s left – an apple grows, as if the tree itself is offering it up to him).

I could go on, but hopefully you by now have a sense of the range of material packed into this volume.  In a time when publishers are taking fewer and fewer risks on unknown writers, Lazy Gramophone are to be applauded for giving their collective a chance to shine.  I’d recommend grabbing a copy when it comes out on April 5^th.

Ali

Hemon opened with an introduction to the project, wherein he outlined the somewhat startling statistic that only three percent of the books published in the States every year are works in translation.   Apparently the statistics are similar in the UK and, when you consider that this fraction includes  translated classics, you’re looking at very few books reaching us from beyond the English-speaking world.

An audience member asked Hemon what could be done to improve the figures mentioned above.  Hemon raised a copy of Best European Fiction 2010 and tapped it.  And it’s true, this compilation is a step in a really positive direction.  It’s no surprise that a collection of literature drawn from across a continent of fifty countries is incredibly diverse.  I’m sure I’ll end up writing more about the authors therein (particularly one outstanding piece by Jean—Philippe Toussaint, Zidane’s Melancholy) but for now I’ll stick to what was read at the event, a suitably varied selection in itself.

Christine Montalbetti kicked things off with her story Hotel Komaba Eminence (with Haruki Murakami), reading from the original in French and then handing over to her interpreter to continue in English.  The other two writers likewise began in their native tongues, giving their listeners a chance to experience the rhythm of the piece and the feel of the language in which it was first composed.  It transpired that Montalbetti’s use of an interpreter was incredibly modest: her English was impeccable when it came to discussing her piece, which is an imagined conversation with Haruki Murakami in a Tokyo Hotel.  What’s interesting about the account of the conversation is that Montalbetti doesn’t focus on what was said.  She focuses instead on the experience of the exchange, the setting and the physical sensations of interacting with another person.  No dialogue, in fact, is presented.  I found that as I progressed through the story and realised that this would be the case I became utterly captivated.  Montalbetti documents an experience running parallel to the exchange of words, deeper and at times paradoxical: the experience of being incredibly distant from another person while still in close verbal communication with them.  It’s fun and clever and I look forward to reading Western, the only one of her novels currently translated into English.

Jon Fosse was up next, a very distinguished playwright in Norway, a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite in France, and a theatrical and entertaining presence at the event.  He was both outspoken (in one humorous exchange writing off crime fiction in its entirety as a kind of death porn) and able to draw on an incredibly successful career to add to the discussion of the nature of translated work that followed the readings.  Fosse writes in Nynorsk, a language spoken by only about ten percent of Norwegians and something he holds dear and ‘second only to God.’  He was able to talk at length about the ways translations reach us: with his work often passing through multiple translations to reach its audience (since it’s unlikely that a speaker of another small language will also speak Nynorsk, they’ll need to use the English translation as the basis of their own, leading them to create a kind of copy of a copy).  His contribution to the book is Waves of Stone, which in form is a kind of counterpoint to Hotel Komaba Eminence (with Haruki Murakami), since – as befits a playwright’s piece – it consists almost entirely of dialogue.  From just those two examples you can see what range there is in the compilation.

Slovenia’s Andrej Blatnik was the final reader.  I’m a big admirer of the kind of fiction he presented: the very short kind variously called flash fiction, the short short story or the prose poem.  Stories that are less than a page, perhaps just one paragraph, but which are dense in meaning and moment.  They require a poet’s sense of economy and structure, which is a rare thing to come by.  Blatnik read two of these: Separation and Sunday Dinners.  The latter is about the narrator’s grandmother’s stuffed duck dinners, and her insistence that they continue come rain or shine, war or peace.  But war is in fact breaking out, and the family are loathe to attend the dinners.  In the space of twenty three lines, Blatnik uses this domestic bone of contention to evoke the sense of uncertainty and distrust that modern conflicts create in everyday life.  This is done with the lightest of touches.  Indeed, Blatnik has thirteen stories in Best European Fiction 2010, all of which are so elegantly put together that you can scarcely believe he has managed to convey so much with so few words.

I could go on, and probably will do, about other stories in this book, but for now suffice to say that the positive side to the startling dearth of translated European works in English is that, should publishers start to do something about it, they’ll find whole heaps of hidden gems waiting for them.  That’s if the evidence of this volume is anything to go by. 

Ali

___

Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksander Hemon, is available from Dalkey Archive.

Without further ado, here are the stories, the first two courtesy of Laura and the third a tale I’ve come upon myself – a Brazilian take on The Tortoise and the Hare, in which outwitting your enemies, not relying on them to take a nap mid-race, is the key to victory.  Better advice than Aesop’s, I’d say.

The Tale of the Water Lily

The Vitoria Regia is a beautiful aquatic flower, typical of the Amazon river.  The Indians tell the legend of how it came into existence…

Naia was a thoughtful young girl who believed that a handsome warrior god lived on the moon.  She fell in love with the moon and tried to reach out to it, but she never could.  One night, Naia left her bed and went to the river and saw the moon, large and beautiful, reflected in the water.  She threw herself into the pool and drowned.  The moon felt sorry for Naia and decided to immortalise her on earth, transforming her into a star of the fresh flowing waters of the Amazon river.

The Creation of the Night

Once upon a time, there was only day and no night. The Big Cobra guarded the night at the bottom of the river.  One day, the cobra’s daughter asked her husband if she could see the night. So the husband sent some warriors to the cobra’s house. When they got there, the cobra gave them a coconut and warned them not to open it.  On the way back, the warriors heard strange noises coming from the coconut. Full of curiosity, they opened it, and they were plunged into darkness. The daughter said she would separate the day and night like strands of her hair. She pulled out a hair, the sky turned red and the night was born.

The Tortoise and the Stag

On a very hot day, a stag walking through the jungle came upon a tortoise basking in the sunshine.  When the stag’s shadow fell across the tortoise, interrupting its sunbathing, the tortoise slowly opened its eyes and greeted the stag with a challenge.  ‘You and I should race,’ it said, ‘and whoever wins shall have the right to kill the loser.’

‘Hah!’ scoffed the stag.  ‘Challenge accepted!  Make your peace, tortoise, for you’ll be worm food as soon as this contest is over.’

The tortoise shrugged its blunt limbs.  ‘Whatever you say.  Let’s race in three days time.  When the midday sun strikes the lightning-burned tree on the edge of the jungle, that’s our starting whistle.  The first to cross the great clearing beyond the tree line is the winner.’

‘Done!’ proclaimed the stag, and sauntered away.

When the tortoise had finished its sunbathing, it called together all of its brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, cousins and in-laws from throughout the jungle.  It found each of them a hiding place, under leaf or fern, along the course of the racetrack.  When all were in place it was time to start the contest.  The stag arrived punctually at the lightning-burned tree and, the instant the first ray of midday sun hit the trunk, shot away and left the tortoise trailing behind.

When the stag had been racing for a minute, he shouted over his shoulder, ‘How are you getting on?  I’m way ahead of you.’

‘No you’re not,’ said a voice from up ahead.  And there was the tortoise, a little further along the race course. 

Shocked, the stag spurred onwards and overtook the tortoise.  When he had covered some more distance, he yelled again over his shoulder, ‘How are you getting on?  I’m way ahead of you.’

‘No you’re not,’ said a voice from up ahead.  And there was the tortoise, a little further along the race course.

The stag put his head down and willed his legs to sprint faster than they had ever sprinted.  But it was no use.  Every time he called out ‘How are you getting on?’, there would be the tortoise maintaining its lead.  The stag forced his hooves to hammer the ground harder, his muscles to strain all the stronger, and in this fashion he pushed his body so hard that his heart burst, and he dropped down dead on the race course.

And whenever the tortoise looks back on that race, it brings a warm smile to its face.

Thanks again to Laura Nelson for her help with these.  Laura has a story, set in Brazil, coming up in Decongested Tales, and recently wrote a guest blog at Strictly Writing.

Ali

Worrying that I wasn’t getting very far, I changed tact and picked up a fat anthology of Brazilian short stories (specifically, the Oxford Anthology of Brazilian Short Stories).  It promises to cover everything through from the earliest to the most contemporary of Brazilian writers.  It’s reassuringly comprehensive and, to my delight, I have absolutely fallen in love with the stories of the first author it presents.

This is Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, usually referred to as the shortened Machado de Assis, enigmatically referred to by Wikipedia  as ‘The Warlock from Cosme Velho’ (I wish I could tell you why, but I’ve yet to find an explanation other than that was where he lived – maybe I’ll get one to you in a future post).  He’s a writer I quickly felt I should have heard of already, listed in the anthology and in several online potted biographies as the greatest writer in Brazil’s history.  That said, ‘the greatest’ is always a big claim to make about anything, and normally makes me a little wary of expecting too much.  But it turns out he’s brilliant.  Obviously I’m not qualified to comment on his historical rating, but I can merrily enthuse about his work. 

Machado is the first up in the anthology because it’s in chronological order and he’s credited as the founding father of the Brazilian short story.  As such he was publishing his writing in the late 1800s and first decade of the 1900s.  That’s interesting to me, because that’s the period in which literature in English really began to divide into the genres of the real and the fantastic.  People like Thomas Hardy were writing very detailed realism like Jude the Obscure, while others like H G Wells were effectively inventing the fantasy/sci-fi novel with works like The Time Machine.  In those days English literature started on its path towards the rigidly defined genre boundaries we’re lumped with today.  I don’t know much about Brazilian literature specifically, but I do know a little bit about magic realism, which is a concept with its roots very firmly dug in Latin American writing.  Magic realism is what it says on the tin: the coexistence of magic and reality.  In other words, it might be what you end up with if commercial factors don’t segregate your literature into realism and fantasy.  By these terms, Machado is a magic realist.  Little fantastical flourishes coexist effortlessly with the reality of his characters’ emotional lives.  As you may have gathered from the nature of my soap-boxing in the previous few sentences, this appeals to me immensely. 

A flavour of what Machado’s stories are about: The Siamese Academies tells of a king and his concubine who swap their souls so they can live as the opposite gender, The Secret Heart is about a cold, cold surgeon slicing the paws off of animals to see if he can mend them again, Wedding Song (my favourite so far) is about artistic frustration and a little supernatural connection that only music can make.  The stories are short but the characters are drawn with elegance and emotional truth.  Best of all, the prose has a crisp quality that seems to lend itself well to translation.  Its precision makes the writer in me deeply envious.  Machado cuts to the quick of human thought and feeling without breaking into a sweat.  I am delighted to have discovered him.

Next time I’m going to jump forward a few decades and see where that takes me, and so on the next week and the next, with a view to eventually reaching Clarice Lispector and beyond.  If I don’t get a chance to post again before Christmas, I’d like to take the opportunity to wish you all a very happy one and a whole lot of festive cheer.

Ali

Litro is spending the winter celebrating the literature of Brazil, and I’m going to be attempting to catch up with that next week.  I’d really love to write something about Brazilian folk tales or fairy stories, but my efforts to find some so far have only led me to two books of tales repackaged for English-speaking readers in 1917.  As such they’ve been injected with all kinds of horrid ideologies of their time, and I’d rather forget all about them.  I’m sure there is more representative, neater stuff out there, so this is a kind of a call to arms, as it were, to anybody reading this who might know some Brazilian folklore.  If that’s you, please let me know, by emailing me at ali@alishaw.co.uk

Ali 

The judges have done a good job of creating a shortlist diverse both in terms of subject matter and style.  I spent Friday evening listening to them one by one, and each bears its own distinct mark.  Other People’s Gods by Naomi Alderman takes a humorous look at personal religious belief, and the conflicts it can provoke with its more organised cousin.  Hitting Trees with Sticks by Jane Rogers also has its soft, light moments, provided in this instance by an endearing narrator whose memory is decaying severely, although the humour is laced with the sadness that comes from her acknowledgment that she is growing old and unsure of her place in the world.  The Not-Dead and the Saved by Kate Clanchy is a smoothly-paced, heart-rendingly sad study of terminal illness.  If you do put that one on your iPod for your journey to work, you might not want to listen to it on a Monday morning.  Nevertheless, set yourself in good stead for it and it will move you right to the bone marrow.  Lionel Shriver’s Exchange Rates explores the relationship between a father and his adult son, and contains the fantastic line: ‘There are only two bargains in the UK: marmalade and breakfast cereal.’

My favourite, though, the one that really jumped out, was Moss Witch by Sara Maitland.  I’m always drawn to stories that make me imagine strange and beautiful things.  Call that magic or fantasy or what you will (in my opinion the means is the same as that employed in any other kind of fiction), one of the reasons I like to read is to picture things hitherto unseen.  Maitland’s story ticked all those boxes, but her prose is equally enchanting.  On top of all that, her narrative takes a few neat twists that you might not expect.  Favourite bit?  The moss witch’s hands.

The winner is announced on Monday, so you have the space of the weekend to place your bets.

Ali

The book industry has been in a tricky place for some years now.  It’s been about three years since I worked as a bookseller, but back then bookshops had already been suffering for a long time.  Supermarket bonanza offers and insane chain price promotions were burning the heart out of the trade.  It was a kind of deforestation of the industry: everybody could tell it was unsustainable, but the chainsaws kept running nevertheless.  And all this is before anybody even talks about online competition or the approaching dilemma of electronic readers and their inherent dangers of piracy.  If the first decade of the twenty first century has seen wholesale changes in the way music and movies are distributed, marketed and copy-protected, the second decade could well be the one in which books run the same gauntlet.  My hope is that the market will split and specialise.  The celebrity biography and the mega-print-run pulp bestseller will compete in their own arena while the more literary titles carve out their own niche.  Ideally this would strengthen the specialist independent bookshop, and to that end (because booksellers are fantastic) I thought I would share with you today the addresses of three very different but impressive bookshops I’ve visited on my travels over the last few months.

First up is Much Ado About Books, in the flabbergastingly picturesque village of Alfriston, East Sussex (specifically High St, Alfriston, East Sussex, BN26 5TY).  It was indie bookseller of the year in 2007, and for good reason.  It’s one of those nooks-and-crannies bookshops that has you exploring every alcove and corner for hidden gems.  There are even books out in the garden, in special shelved cupboards.  Nigh on every subject is covered, and they also produce a fine range of notepads using old book covers.  Alfriston is only just beyond Brighton, so if you’re ever in that neck of the woods you could nip down there, grab some nosh in Badgers Tea House, then wander up onto the South Downs to read something from your purchase, overlooking the rolling countryside.  Perfect.

Next up, the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-On-Wye.  Given the state of the book industry, the fact that Hay continues to exist is beyond me.  Regardless, it’s a very good thing that it does.  I’m not an antiquarian or even a diehard fan of second hand books, but I know that Hay-On-Wye would be heaven if I was.  In a town crammed with booksellers, the Poetry Bookshop stood out for me because of its sheer range.  They’ve got every poet you’ve ever heard of in there, and about ten times as many that you haven’t, including swathes of international poetry and subject areas (such as Native American poetry) that might at best get a single volume in a regular bookstore.  It can be found on Brook St, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5BQ.

And finally, The Last Bookshop in Oxford (no website), which has just opened a second branch in the city centre.  Every single book in this shop costs two pounds, but it’s far from your average discount store.  The quality and range of the stock is superb, with everything represented: contemporary literature, classics, history, children’s books, you name it.  I have no idea how they make their money, but I hope they continue to do so.  You can go to either St. Aldates (the new one) or Walton Street in Jericho (the still-reasonably-new one).  Be warned that they don’t take cards, so come armed to the teeth with pound coins. 

And happy reading.

 
Ali