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I am delighted to tell you that I am in the Author Spotlight over at a lovely book review blog called, Jaffa Reads Too. I talk about the writing of Coffee and Vodka, and about what inspires me (apart from coffee!) and I even proffer some advice for aspiring writers.

 What's more, there's even a giveaway of a FREE copy of Coffee and Vodka!

So hop over to Jaffa Reads Too and enter the competition! There's only 6 days left...

 

Author interview: Gerard Woodward on Nourishment

Gerard Woodward is a prolific and interesting writer and poet. Since his first published collection of poetry in 1991 he has produced three more, the latest in 2005, We Were Pedestrians. In addition to this, he's written a collection a short stories, Caravan Thieves and trilogy of novels. He won a Somerset Maugham Award for his poetry collection Householder, and two of his books, based on his own family history, have been shortlisted for significant literary awards: August for the Whitbread First Book Award in 2001 and I'll Go To Bed At Noon for Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2004.

Some of his stories, although describing quite ordinary lives, are quirky with unexpected twists in the plot. For instance his collection of short stories begins with a tale of a couple who's caravan has been stolen - with the occupants still inside.    

Gerard Woodward's latest novel, Nourishment, is set in London during the 2nd World War. It tells the remarkable and tragic story of Tory, who while trying to survive the Blitz, receives a letter from her POW husband demanding a dirty letter by return. Neither her ageing mother, nor her female workmates at the local gelatine factory are willing - or able - to help Tory in her task, so she's forced to search for inspiration in the more seedy parts of the city. This quest for sexy vocabulary affects Tory's life in a way she could never have expected.

I'm a great fan of Woodward's quirky writing, and his latest novel certainly doesn't disappoint.  After I finished reading it, I had several burning questions for the author, the answers to which I'd like to share with you here (Beware there are spoilers in the interview):


I must first ask where you got your inspiration for this extraordinary book?

A family  story concerning a friend of my mother's who was in Tory's situation of being asked to write saucy letters for her POW husband. She asked my mother for advice on how to reply - but there the similarity ends.

The themes you explore in the book are so many: sense of duty, morality, poverty, war and its effects on people, family, love, feminism. Which of these would you say is the most important?

Most important - probably love - the way love is mediated by both physical and emotional desires - it is the conflict between these that drives the book.

                       

To me the book is as much about the relationship between Tory and her husband as it is about the one one she has with her mother, Mrs Head. Where did you get this character from? She is so multifaceted; yet she is almost a shadow throughout the story, with her true desires and dreams only becoming clear at the end of the book.

Like most of my characters she is an amalgam of people I've known, seen, read about and imagined.

           

Donald’s character is the most tragic one, in my opinion. He’s lost everything in the war, including his morality and humanity. The war turned him into a bitter, sad, selfish man without empathy. Where was your inspiration for him?

Same answer as above, really. I didn't have a specific person in mind. Do you think he's amore tragic figure than Tom? 

The thing with Donald is that he was unlikeable from the start. Tory is never sure if she loves him or not; she is more in awe than in love. 

He is my first attempt at a thoroughly bad character, though maybe he does have some redeeming qualities, in the way that he takes to Branson after the death of Tom, for instance.

                        

How did you decide to make Tory your main point of view? Nourishment is her story, but could it also have been told from Donald’s viewpoint? Isn’t a female voice often considered difficult for a male writer?

It is very much Tory's story, she is affected by Donald, not the other way round. I enjoy writing from viewpoints dissimilar to my own. It couldn't have been told from Donald's point of view, I don't think, because it's important that the reader doesn't know Donald's state of mind or motivations until later on.

                       

The tragic story is interspersed with black humour ‘Mrs Head is now Mrs Dead,’ and sexual innuendo, ‘Stiff red fruits, …entwining wreaths…erect little towers.’ Did you do that on purpose so that the book wouldn’t be too serious?

I see the novel as a dark comedy, but like (I hope) the best comedy, it is very serious.

                       

The sex scenes are done without ever actually mentioning the act. I believe this is one of the most difficult things to get ‘right’. Is there a secret to getting it right?

Yes, the sex scenes are suggested by people's reactions to the letters, though there is some suggestion in one of the chapters. In a book about taboo, prurience and suppression of emotion, it was important that the sex was conveyed in a way that fitted in with those themes. To have been explicit would have ruined the tension.

                       

Finally, the timeline – sometimes we start at a point in the future and work backwards, sometimes we start with a statement, ‘Tory was very proud of her son, Tom,’ and then go into his sad story. Is this something that comes naturally to you as a writer, or do you have to plan the structure of a chapter - or novel - in detail?

The movement of a story through its scenes and chapters is not something

that I plan much in advance but emerges through successive redrafting.

Thank you so much Gerard, for indulging my curiosity. 

Nourishment by Gerard Woodward is now in paperback.  

                                       

Shireen Jilla at West End Lane Books

The cover of Shireen Jilla's debut novel, Exiled, was what first attracted me to the book. The black and white view of a typical New York brownstones spoke to me in its simplicity, yet the red lettering implied of something sinister.

Last night when I met Shireen Jilla (dressed in smart New York style in a black sleeveless shirt-dress and high heeled nude shoes) at West End Lane Books she told me she had to fight hard to keep the understated design. Here's a debut novelist who knows her market and has guts, I thought.

Exiled is Jilla's third complete novel, and like so many new authors, she too had to wait, and wait, and yet wait some more, before she got her first book published. 'Patience is the most important quality a novelist can have,' she says.

Shireen Jilla

Exiled is a tightly knit, fast paced book that you just cannot put down. (I speak from experience) It tells the story of Anna, who together with her American diplomat husband, Jessie, and their 4-year-old son move to New York. But her 'romantic dream turns into a dark battle' when disaster after disaster falls upon her. The reason for her unhappiness isn't just the cultural difference between London and New York (where 4-year-olds can be 'under-scheduled' and a case of head lice is 'an infestation on the community'). It's also the overpowering presence of Anna's immaculate Upper East Side mother-in-law, 'the thinnest person I had seen who didn't have cancer'. As the plot thickens Nancy comes to play a 'crucial and destructive part' in Anna's demise.

Due to her journalistic background (she works for The Standard and The Times), Shireen Jilla places great importance on the editing process. 'I have no qualms about cutting out whole passages.' In fact the first draft of Exiled included another whole plot stream where the protagonist, Anna, back in England, reflects back to her New York life. 'All the action was in New York,' Jilla reflects. Removing those paragraphs caused a re-write, which in turn made the novel such a quick and enticing read.

Signed copies of Shireen Jilla's debut novel, Exiled are now available at West End Lane Books and England's Lane Books, at £12.00.

Shiren Jilla is also going to be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Tuesday 31st May 2011.

Author Interview - Naomi Alderman

Whenever I read a novel, or discuss it with my fellow book lovers, I'm left with unanswered questions which I'd love to pose to the author if his or her ghost was sitting in the corner listening to the conversation. Of course I'd not wish that kind of fate on any author - being a writer myself I know far too well how painful hearing people talk about your work can be. So instead I thought of posing these burning questions to an author afterwards.

I'm hoping this will become a series on this blog - that depends how willing the authors are to speak about their work. To that end I'm going to limit myself to just four questions - the main discussion points at the book groups or those that intrigued me the most.

The first of these author interviews is going to be with Naomi Alderman. She grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, published in 2006, is set in the orthodox Jewish community in Hendon, London. The novel won the Orange Award for New Writers. 

Naomi Alderman's second book, The Lessons deals with a very different kind of community, that of the rich and privileged students at Oxford. It is a subject that is well covered in English literature. But to condemn The Lessons to 'just another Brideshead' -category would do the book, an its author, a great injustice.

James Steiff comes from a family with comparatively modest means to study Physics at Oxford. He struggles to fit into the heated cauldron of its snobbish academia, and is instead sucked into the luxurious life of Mark Winters, who according to the author herself, 'has had a trust-fund upbringing which left him as troubled and as unpredictable as he is promiscuous'. As well as James, Mark gathers around him a group of adoring, beautiful friends: the darkly exotic Emmanuella who has a weakness for blonde, Nordic boyfriends, Franny and Simon, the on-and-off couple, and Jess, a talented musician whose calming influence brings new happiness to James.

The group of friends become isolated from the rest of university life. James finds himself completely dependent on Mark's money, as well as entangled in his erratic and increasingly  dangerous lifestyle. The sense of menace is never far away when Mark is around; he seems to invite it.  But when their time at university comes to an end, none of the group of friends wish to let go of their Oxford time and their post-university lives become even more complicated.

I found the book compelling, and very much enjoyed reading it. Some of us in the book group found the characters a little unbelievable, although particularly James induced a heated debate - a sign that the characterisation worked. Mark intrigued everyone, and as you will see from the interview below, this is no wonder. As a mother of an Oxford graduate, I recognised the academic challenges that studying at the university brings, although I, as well as many in the book group, craved some signs of the outside world to ground the book more firmly to a particular era.   

Here's the interview:

Is there anything in the characters, plot or setting of The Lessons that you found easy or difficult, or that you were compelled to write about? 
I started writing the novel with the sex scene, in fact! The one right in the centre of the book in the kitchen with the bacon. It just came into my head one day in about 2003, and I jotted it down, except that the narrator was a woman! Then a few years later I was going through my notebooks and found this scene and suddenly went... "ohhhh, the narrator is a *man*". And then over the course of a weekend the whole story spun out in my head.

The first half of the book was very difficult. I wrote it once, quite fast, but when I came to read it, it was just all really boring. I think I'd understood the book too well, hadn't surprised myself in the writing. I threw out the first 50,000 words and started again. That was pretty traumatic, but I learned something about my process - I have to surprise myself on the page or it becomes boring for the reader.

How did you decide on the main character of James? Was he very clear in your head before you started the book, or did he develop during the writing process? 
Hmmm. It was very obvious to me, one of the first things I knew about him was that he was lame. I felt he was a wounded soul. The process of creating a character is quite strange - you don't exactly *decide* on a character, it's more that you feel it out. Finding out what you seem, somehow, instinctively to know about them, and what's unclear. His voice was hard to get and I'm not convinced I got it completely right! But I had the sense from the start that he was damaged, and that further damage would be done to him, that he was in love with someone who it was a bad idea to be in love with - I've been in that position myself, so it was attractive to be able to write about him!

What about Mark? 

Oh, he turned up the first day, in that first scene that I wrote in 2003. There he was, being a fucked-up bastard. A sexy bastard, though. It's interesting, I still don't feel I've fully understood him. He remains mysterious to me - why on earth is he like that?

Is it true that you wrote the book as a homage to Brideshead Revisited?

I wouldn't say a homage, probably precisely the reverse! An argument with Brideshead, I think. A complaint against it. As if I were able to say to Evelyn Waugh "you ghastly snob, do you realise that by using your genius to write this extraordinary novel, you've sentenced generations of young people to arrive at Oxford expecting a transformational fairy tale, when it's just a university?" To shine some light on the things that Waugh totally ignores - like the academic work! I think Brideshead continues to have something of a malign influence, and I wanted to dissect that a bit. 

As always when I hear a beloved author speak, I was left wanting more. I could have spent a whole day and night discussing this complex novel with Naomi. Perhaps in another life?