Me And My Big Mouth

Typelists are Fucked

Typelists are the lists of books, blogs, movies, albums etc. that you can see over there on the right of the blog. I try to update these with all the new books I receive, mini reviews and other delightful snippets. It's a thing I do. You're welcome.

Unfortunately, typelists have been fucked for the past fortnight or so and I am not able to update any of them. Typepad were pretty slow to acknowledge the problem and have yet to give any sort of idea how long it will take to fix them.

Sorry about that.

Social Reading: The Vote

Every now and again I try to convince a bunch of you to read a book along with me. It is usually a somewhat daunting one that I may not have tackled otherwise and the joint participation thing proves to be a big help - checking in every day either here at the blog or on Twitter allows us to swap opinions, theories and gripes as well as a bit of moral support if things start to drag.

So far we have read The Blind Assassin (frustrating in places but I think we sort of felt it deserved its critical praise by the end), Middlesex (ditto) and The Quincunx (too fucking long, too fucking confusing, ridiculous plot twists). You can read some of the discussions here.

Here's how it works. I chuck up a shortlist of possible titles, everyone votes on which one we'd like to read and then we all try to read it at roughly the same pace, popping back here to discuss it at the end of each day. It is a bit like a reading group only without the canapes, house-envy and barely suppressed hatred.

Are you up for another one?

Glancing over my shelves here are some books that I might not get round to reading unless I had some additional motivation. Quite a varied selection, I grant you. Click on the one you think we should read, even if you have no intention of taking part. If you haven't heard of any of them, worry not, just Google it and I am sure all shall be revealed.

 

poll by twiigs.com

 

Voting closes on Wednesday and I suggest we start reading next Monday, so that should give everyone time to pick up a copy.

Any questions?

A Song for Sunday

Amends by Braids.

Reading Miss Read: Miss Clare Remembers

Forget Wolverine: Origins, this is Miss Clare: Origins, and it is much much better.

Miss Clare is the elderly infants teacher who retires in the very first Miss Read book, Village School. She remains an important peripheral character in the subsequent novels but here she gets one all to herself. In it, she relaxes in her garden on a summer's day and reminisces as she waits for her friend Emily to pay a visit.

It is a simple device but it is all that's needed to tell a life story which begins in the 1880s with Victoria on the throne, spans two World Wars, covers all manner of advances in technology and changes in village life, and brings us 'up to date' to the book's setting in the early 1960s. It is a fascinating portrait of a world which was vanishing even while the book was being written. Every bit as evocative and thoughtful as Cider With Rosie, and just as important.

Miss Clare Remembers may very well be my favourite Miss Read book yet and, interestingly, is one of the few of her novels not reissued by Orion.

Even more interestingly, it was also the inspiration for this track from Enya's Watermark album.

Almost certainly the first and last time music by that particular artist will appear on my blog. Having said that, it is rather nice. I may have to reassess my Enya aversion.

Party Invite!

I published Niven Govinden's novel Black Bread White Beer as an ebook back in September of last year. Since then it has been longlisted for the DSC Prize for South East Asian Literature, been picked as one of the Books of the Year in the Observer and has now been selected as one of the eight Fiction Uncovered titles for 2013.

Fiction Uncovered is an annual celebration of British fiction. Eight titles are chosen by the judges and these receive loads of press and media attention and promotion in bookshops. This year's list is a cracking array of books and I defy you not to find something on there to read.

Anyway, on the back of this news I have finally got my finger out and published Black Bread White Beer in print. It is available in all good bookshops now. If your local bookshop hasn't got it then it isn't very good.

One bookshop that definitely has a copy is Belgravia Books in London. They've got dozens. That's because we are having a launch party there next week.

Why not come along? You are all very welcome. There'll be free drinks and snacks.

Drinks, snacks and chatter with Niven Govinden

Wednesday 22nd May 7 - 9pm

Belgravia Books

59 Ebury Street, London SW1W 0NZ

If you can't make it but want to reserve a signed copy then give the shop a buzz on 020 7259 9336

Land of the Giants

Have you ever been to Bekonscot Model Village? It is an idyllic place, only half an hour by train from London. We try to go every couple of years if we can. I'd visit more often if I had my way.

I think the recently reissued Will Self backlist features photos from Bekonscot on the covers, and Liam Bailey's excellent Forever England is full of snaps from this charming model village. Given my project to read all the Miss Read novels during 2013, this is the perfect place for a weekend stroll - right back to the 1930s.

Haiku to Mars

The Mars MAVEN project is running a competition to take haiku to Mars. MAVEN is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft, being sent to the red planet at the end of this year to monitor its atmosphere. Anyone who enters will have their name on a DVD on board and three winners will have their haiku recorded and carried on the craft.

I wrote three Mars haiku for my weekly writing challenge last week and I think I shall enter one for the competition. But which one?

haiku A

light over Tharsis
a sunrise like no other
- first morning on Mars

haiku B

these words come from Earth
carried fifty million miles
- can you hear us, Mars?

haiku C

no Armstrong on Mars
but MAVEN brings him closer
- one day he will come

You can decide...

 

poll by twiigs.com

A Song for Sunday

Manhattan by Cat Power. Taken from my favourite album of last year, Sun.

Reading Miss Read: Winter in Thrush Green

Another week, another Miss Read book.

I have now read six of them. Only another thirty or so to go.

We return to Thrush Green to discover one death, one marriage, a birth and someone else up the duff. Nelly Tilling is making moves on grumpy widower Albert Piggott. Sam Curdle is up to his old thieving ways. And a new resident moves in opposite Ella and Dimity's place.

It is all go, I tell you.

Oh, and shock horror, remember that lovely old lesbian couple I mentioned when I read the last Thrush Green book? They are only revealed to be massively heterosexual. Can you believe it? I know, it is a shocker, although I am yet to be 100% convinced.

An entertaining slice of village life, not as barbed as some of her other books and lacking some of the dark wit which is a Miss Read strength but with a cracking cast of characters. There is some fine writing too. Here is the first snowfall:

A light powdering had settled along the branches of the chestnut trees, and round the many bird tables of Thrush Green the footsteps of dozens of small birds made hieroglyphics as they came seeking charity.

Winter in Thrush Green was not followed by another book set in that village for nearly a decade, so we are back to life in the school at Fairacre next week.

An Anchovy of a Book

I have read two J.M. Coetzee novels before. He won the Booker Prize for each of them. They were good, very good infact, but I found them hard to love. That is not to say I didn't enjoy reading them, sort of, but they very both pretty miserable books in terms of story - a series of not very nice things happen to characters who aren't all that nice themselves.

I am glad I read them but I have not kept them on my shelves as I have no plans to revist them. That being said, I do have a selection of his other books as yet unread and I am sure I will get round to them in due course.

Do you feel that way about any writers? You appreciate their work but don't really have any desire to re-read them? It is very different to disliking a book, I find.

Anyway, the unread paperbacks were leapfrogged by his new hardback, The Childhood of Jesus, which I finished reading last weekend. And guess what? I found it hard to love. I am so fucking predictable.

A man in his middle-40s turns up in an unspecified country (although we do know they speak Spanish so it could, assumes Mr Cleverclogs here, be Spain, but appears to be an imaginary land) with a small boy in tow. We are told that he is not the father, that they have arrived by boat, that the boy has lost a letter which contained details of his parentage and that the man has taken responsibility for the boy.

They are duly processed and after a few Kafka-esque hiccups are allocated rooms and also new names: the man becomes Simón, the boy David. They then proceed to eke out an existence, experiencing neither great hardship nor great comfort, meeting people who are neither happy nor sad. Simón is determined to find a mother for David, and when he does so he tries to walk away, to leave them to it, but finds himself returning to help them in times of need.

With a title such as The Childhood of Jesus, it is fair to assume this is an allegorical tale. And it hints as much, many times - a woman is asked to take on a son by a man she doesn't know, the son turns out to be unusually gifted in some respects, he expresses a desire to heal the sick, he is tempted by a devilish character, plus some others I may have forgotten or not noticed - but it is a bit too vague in that regard for any allegory to really stick, or have any substance. It has no sticky substance. There are moments when you think 'Oh, I see where he is going with this' only he doesn't go there. It goes nowhere really.

When he isn't being allegorical, Coetzee is being philosophical with Simon embarking upon numerous profound conversations including one about 'the pooness of poo' at one point. These are either interesting or pointless, I have yet to decide.

The book feels like an experiment that hasn't quite worked. I was reminded, at times, of Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium or Yann Martel's Beatrice & Virgil, two books that probably looked great on paper but then didn't end up looking all that great, you know, on paper. Your level of enjoyment will probably be determined by how frustrated you get when you realise that there really isn't any point, no real resolution.

All that being said, I didn't mind it. It didn't annoy me. It didn't anything me. I had resigned myself to the fact that it wouldn't deliver any real punch and that helped, I think. Coetzee, to his credit, keeps things simple in terms of prose. This would have been unbearable with more of a show-off at the helm. It will prove to be, I suspect, an acquired taste. Like anchovies.

Free Ebooks Galore

Over at my day job, running The Friday Project, I have made a number of ebooks free till the end of this week.

Why? Because I am lovely, that's why.

But also because every time we make an ebook free four things happen.

1. Lots of people download the ebooks.
2. A decent percentage of them tend to read the ebooks.
3. Each ebook gets lots more reviews on Amazon, GoodReads, iTunes etc.
4. The word-of-mouth this generates always leads to more sales of the ebook once it goes back to its normal price as well as more sales of the print book.

Some readers get a free ebook, the authors get more readers, we sell more books in the long run. Excellent.

So, what treats do we have waiting for you?

The Equivoque Principle is a Victorian adventure story, the first in the Cornelius Quaint Chronicles. Here's what The Times had to say about it:

‘Marvello's Travelling Circus brings light and colour to the foggy streets of Victorian London, but you can't hang about in fictional Victorian London for long without a series of brutal murders. One of the victims belongs to the circus, and suspicion falls upon Prometheus, the strongman. The boss, a brilliant conjuror named Cornelius Quaint, turns detective to clear the giant's name… boisterous comedy and hairpin plot twists.'

So there. If you download and enjoy this then the second in the series, The Eleventh Plague is only £1.99. There are also a new free short stories available: The Enthusiastic Amateur.

Perhaps you are feeling a little frisky after a long bank holiday weekend? Fancy dipping your naked toe into the world of swinging? I have just the thing for you. Swinging is frank and honest account of life on the sexually liberated circuit containing first-hand accounts of sex parties, a how-to guide for beginners as well as a look at the potential pitfalls and dangers. And the beauty of the ebook is that no one has to know you are reading it. Worth a peek if only for the rude bits, and there are plenty of them.

If sex with random strangers isn't your thing then perhaps you'd like to cook some wildebeest instead? 'A book of quite delicious treats' is how the Guardian described The Exotic Meat Cookbook: From Antelope to Zebra. The Kindle ebook edition doesn't have any of the lovely illustrations or photos but does have over 100 recipes for all sorts of unusual meat such as bison, kudu, kangaroo, camel, springbok and the aforementioned zebra. And every single recipe has an alternative, more common cut of meat you could use instead.

The ebook for TV Cream Toys, a nostalgic look at the toys and games of yesteryear, was made before the days of the iPad and Kindle Fires and suchlike so doesn't have very many pictures but is still a lovely trip down memory lane replete with Ricochet Racers, Big Yellow Teapots, Pocketeers, Escape from Colditz, Cabbage Patch Dolls and many many more. And it is free. And Harry Hill called it 'amazing'. So what's stopping you? Get downloading.

As the football season draws to a close may I alert you to one of the most honest and down-to-earth football memoirs you are likely to read? Where's Your Caravan? is written by Chris Hargreaves, a footballer who spent twenty years plying his trade in the lower leagues for Grimsby, Scarborough, Hull City, West Brom, Hereford United, Plymouth Argyle, Northampton Town, Brentford, Oxford United and Torquay United. It has proved to be hugely popular with footie fans, for very good reason.

And finally, we have the opening book in an award-winning series for children. Harry Pigg is the only survivor of the Big Bad Wolf attacks and he has set up business as a private eye. In The Third Pig Detective Agency he is employed by local businessman Aladdin to track down a missing lamp of immense personal value. The book won the Bisto Chidlren's Book of the Year First Novel Award and will probably entertain as many adults as it does kids.

So there you go, something there for everyone, surely? They are only free until Sunday at midnight so do pile in now if you fancy checking them out and please report back here and let me know what you thought.

Oh, and feel free to spread the word.

I Was Working in the Lab Late One Night

You may have seen my (sort of) review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein last week. If you didn't or require a recap: nice idea but full of ridiculous plot holes. Anyway, I was reading it in preparation for Frankenstein Unbound, one of the many Brian Aldiss novels I am republishing and one that I felt required some background reading beforehand.

It isn't really a sequel, more of a mash-up. The year is 2020 and Earth is undergoing a series of timeslips, quakes in time which mean that two periods crossover for a few moments. During one such timeslip, Joe Bodenland drives a short distance from his 21st century American home only to end up in 18th century Switzerland drinking in a tavern with none other then Victor Frankenstein. Fascinated to find himself face-to-face with a fictional character he tags along as Victor lives out scenes from Mary Shelley's book only for another timeslip to transport him to the villa in which the Shelleys and Byron are staying at the time Mary wrote her famous novel.

Still with me?

Joe flips back and forth from slip to slip, from fiction to history and finds himself embroiled in the plot of Frankenstein itself. It is like a mad horror version of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels and just as much fun.

The original Frankenstein frustrated me with its ridiculous plot holes. This reworking is just as far-fetched but has its own internal logic which does, just about, make sense. Of course, the latter could not exist without the former and as this version is so hugely entertaining I should be thankful to Mary Shelley for writing her novel in the first place.

Brian also wrote similar reworkings of Dracula and The Island of Doctor Moreau, both of whch I will be tackling soon.

A Song for Sunday

A gorgeous live version of Gorecki by Lamb

Reading Miss Read: Fresh from the Country

Most of her books form part of either the Fairacre or Thrush Green series but the latest in my Miss Read marathon is a standalone novel, Fresh from the Country.

It follows Anna Lacey, a country girl who takes her first teaching job in a big London junior school. Nothing in her upbringing or teacher training has prepared her for classses of 50+ or the grey monotony of town life compared to living on a farm. Nonethess, she surges on with nervous good cheer and is aided by the entertaining bunch who populate the staffroom. It is a classic fish-out-of-water tale with plenty of charm and enough of an edge to stop it falling into sentimentality. I particularly enjoyed Anna's battles with her miserly landlady and her gradual warming to Miss Enderby, the robust and majestic headmistress.

From a historical perspective, this was written and set at the end of the 1950s, it is interesting to see how many of the problems we associate with modern schooling - large class sizes being an obvious example - were prevalent, and perhaps even worse back then.

At this point in her career, Miss Read had written three Fairacre novels and one set in Thrush Green. She was to go on to write 20 of the former and 14 of the latter and I wonder why she chose to revist those stories and places and not this one, which does end on the perfect note for a sequel. Perhaps her tales of village life were what her fans really wanted, or maybe so only ever intended this as a one-off. Whatever the reason, it is a bit of a shame as this is every bit as good as her other work and I would have liked to read more. I notice that this is one of the few Miss Read novels which is not currently in print. Strikes me as the sort of 1950s classic that Persephone Books could bring back if Orion aren't going to add it to their extensive list.

Next up: Winter in Thrush Green.

Dear Mrs Shelley,

Thank you for sending me your novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, for consideration. I assume, given your age, that this is intended as a book for teenagers, or new adults as we seem to have to call them nowadays, and whilst I can see much in it to admire I do have a number of rather major issues with the plot.

1. At no point in your story do you explain how Victor Frankenstein actually builds his creature. He claims that 'after days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter' but there is no mention of how this process works. Does he use body parts? Does he make them from scratch? Does he use electricity to animate the monster? So many questions remain unanswered about the central premise of your story and this presents a problem, not least if I should ever look to sell the film rights to the book. Without this important information I fear that directors and screenwriters will come up with their own ideas and they may be somewhat far-fetched and not true to your original intentions.

2. Are we really to believe that Frankenstein's creation would be such an articulate man? He utters some of the best lines and finest poetry in your book and this seems a tad unlikely. He is technically only a couple of months old, after all.

3. What's more, do you expect us to accept that he learns to read by watching a family through a hole in the wall and by flicking through a discarded copy of Paradise Lost?

4. And while we are on the subject, how can an 8-foot giant hide in a tiny outhouse for weeks on end without anyone noticing him? You make the old man blind, which is rather convenient, but the son and daughter are both sighted and ambulant. Surely they would have spotted a giant in their midst?

5. Unbelievable coincidence: the monster happens to come across a young boy in the woods and kill him and this child just happens to be Frankenstein's brother.

6. Returning to the nuts and bolts of creating life. However it is that Victor is able to make a human from scratch it appears to be a process which requires no assistance from anyone else and no specialist tools or materials, seeing as how he is able to repeat the experiment in the comparative wilderness of the Orkneys all on his own.

7. More coincidence: Victor gets blown off course and ends up in Ireland, just hours after the monster who has murdered again. The victim? None other than Frankenstein's best friend. Oh come on, what are the chances of Clerval and the monster bumping into each other over a pint of Guinness?

8. Finally, and perhaps my biggest issue of all, Victor Frankenstein is an annoying and whiney little shit. I couldn't care less what happened to him or his miserable family.

All that being said, Mrs Shelley, I think you have an interesting novel hiding in here somewhere. The allegorical tale of man versus science is of universal appeal but I fear I cannot offer you a publishing deal until you fix these plot holes, plot holes of such size that Frankenstein's own monster could lumber through them without having to bend down.

Best wishes,

 

Scott Pack

Publisher
The Friday Project

Stepping Through Brilliant Shades

It should be no surprise these days when you come across a book published by a small independent press and find it to be as good, if not better, than much of the stuff coming from the big houses.

Neither, sadly, it it surprising to discover that it has been largely ignored by the books pages of the newspapers, with the notable exception of the TLS in this case. This is a real shame as I am sure that if Central Reservation had been published by Picador or Faber or Fourth Estate, which it is easily good enough to have been, then it would have been reviewed by everyone and I am willing to bet a tidy sum that those reviews would have been overwhelmingly positive.

Is this anyone's fault? Not really. The newspapers are overwhelmed with new titles to review so it is understandable, if regrettable, that they tend to favour books from the major literary imprints* and the publisher, Xelsion, has clearly worked hard if they've managed to get the TLS to take notice.

So why am I banging on about the issue? Quite simply, because this is one of the best debuts I have read in a long time and more people should know about it and it frustrates me that spreading the word can be so difficult.

Holly is a teenager growing up on a farm with her twin, Yvonne, and their mother, their father having died a few years before. After a school coach crash which kills a teacher, the boy with whom she has just shared her first kiss and her sister, Holly's life is thrown up in the air and the fact that this coincides with an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, bringing more death and destruction to her home, only compounds the sense of confusion and loss.

And then Yvonne appears, some sort of ghost that only Holly can see.

Central Reservation is a novel about those awkward teenage years, about family secrets, first love, the discomfort of adulthood, how grief affects a family. It might appear to be a ghost story but it isn't really, not in the traditional sense. It is much more than that. Beautifully crafted with some breathtaking scenes - the coach crash is chillingly described - this is a novel I will be recommending to anyone who will listen. Will le Fleming is definitely an author to watch and I cannot wait to see what he does next.

*For the record, this really isn't a whinge. I do understand why the literary pages of our newspapers miss a lot of really good books, there just isn't the time to read them all nor the space to review them but I do wonder sometimes what would happen if one of the broadsheets went out of their way to unearth new talent or unusual books for themselves rather than just sit back and read what they are sent.

Birdy: The True Story

William Wharton's son, Matt Du Aime, was over in the UK a couple of weeks ago. He was a guest on Radio 4's Midweek programme and you can hear him talking about his father, and specifically the book Shrapnel, here.

While he was in London I took him out to lunch and we chatted about my plans for publishing Wharton's work, including several unpublished manuscripts, and his plans to share his father's remarkable archive online.

You see, before he published Birdy at the age of 53 Wharton made a living as a painter but once the book came out he never sold another painting. He didn't try to. As a consequence there are over 800 pictures in the family collection and Matt is keen to create an online gallery of many of these works alongside excerpts from his writing. Apparently there is video footage of Wharton painting and discussing the process, and he also recorded himself reading all of his books. This amazing archive material just needs to be digitised and then it can be shared online.

At one point during our conversation Matt turned to me and said, 'You do know the story behind Birdy, don't you?'

I did not. So he told me.

When the young Albert Du Aime (Wharton's real name) was growing up he was good friends with an Italian American lad and they knocked about Philadelphia together until they were both drafted into the army towards the end of WW2, Bert being sent in Europe and his friend to the Pacific. Bert's war stories are told in Shrapnel and, to a certain extent, in his fiction. His friend's story was just as remarkable.

He was injured in an attack and found himself in an army hospital when the Japanese arrived, bayonetting men in their beds. He managed to escape into the jungle where he lived for some considerable time. When he was discovered, weeks later, he was acting like a wild animal and brought back to a psychiatric hospital in the US. Once Bert returned home he was asked to visit his friend to see if he could talk him out of this animal state.

And that's the true story that inspired Birdy.

Bert eventually settled down in France but would regularly visit America and meet up with his old friend, who was now a small-time Mafia mobster. His friend would always ask, 'Is anyone bothering you? If anyone ever bothers you, you let me know.' Bert never took him up on that offer.

I am republishing all of William Wharton's books in the UK over the coming year but the whole lot of them have already been released as ebooks. You can find them here.

A Song for Sunday

Wounded Bird by Heather Woods Broderick

Undertaking Love

As many of you know I head up the authonomy website, an online writing community where unpublished writers can post their work, get feedback and the five top-rated titles each month get read by the editorial team at HarperCollins.

Sometimes we publish books from the site. Undertaking Love is one such example.

Here's the blurb:

The moment love-phobic Marla Jacobs discovers that the shop next to her Little White Wedding Chapel is to become a funeral parlour, she declares all-out war.

Marla’s chapel in the sleepy Shropshire countryside has become a nation-wide sensation, but the arrival of Funeral Director Gabriel Ryan threatens everything Marla has worked for. She can picture the scene: wedding limos fighting for space in the street with hearses; brides bumping into widows; bouquets being swapped for wreaths

Marla’s not going down without a fight. She enlists a motley crew of weird and wonderful local supporters, and the battle lines are drawn. But, as soon as Marla meets her nemesis, she realises just how much trouble she’s really in. His gypsy curls and Irish lilt make her stomach fizz – how is she supposed to concentrate on destroying him, when half the time she’s struggling not to rip the shirt off his back?

Funny, romantic, and dangerously sexy, UNDERTAKING LOVE is a delightful debut from an exciting new voice in Women’s fiction.

I came across it quite by chance while browsing authonomy. It isn't the sort of novel I would usually read for pleasure but I know a decent story when I see one and this was easily as good as much of the published chicklit, or commercial women's fiction, or whatever you want to call it, that I have read in my time.

Anyway, it was published as an ebook last week and will be 99p for a limited period. It broke into the Kindle Top 100 yesterday and was #3 in the Movers & Shakers chart so it just shows what you can do by reading through some unpublished manuscripts online.

Guest Blogger: Tom Vowler

You’d better get it right. It’s your first contact with an agent / publisher / reader. It gives the first clue to style, genre, voice. It sets the tone and texture of your book. It doesn’t need to be extraordinary, or shocking, or outrageously funny. But it does need to be strong.

Here are a few first lines from novels around my house. See if you can guess where they’re from. You’ll find the answers in the comments section. Let me know how you got on there and Scott will pick one of you at random to win a copy of my novel. Anyone get 12/12?

An easy one to start with:

1. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

2. Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

3. There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

4. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

5. My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.

6. We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone.

7. For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.

8. The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born – we weren’t even conceived.

9. Chapter 2    It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house.

10. My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema.

11. The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

12. It was an exaggeration to term it a media invasion -  a couple of journalists from local papers loitered, a man she thought she recognised from the television spoke earnestly to a camera  - but the mood of the town had shifted.

---

Tom Vowler’s debut short story collection, The Method, won the international Scott Prize in 2010 and the Edge Hill Readers’ Award in 2011. Now an associate lecturer at Plymouth University, his debut novel, WHAT LIES WITHIN, is set on the uplands of Dartmoor and will be published in April 2013. Tom is also Assistant Editor for the literary journal Short FICTION and is studying for a PhD. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk