Ex Libris

For several years, Evie Wyld combined writing fiction with running an independent bookshop - Review, in Peckham, South London. “It seems like the perfect marriage, doesn’t it?” Evie says of the dual role of writer-bookseller, “but sadly you don’t absorb the books through your skin.” Although something about her routine must have worked because the two novels that Evie wrote between serving customers and managing the store - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice and All the Birds, Singing - led to widespread acclaim and, in 2013, she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. The Observer calls her ‘one of our most gifted novelists’. Evie has now stepped back from the day-to-day of running Review but maintains a close involvement with the shop. She has also written a third novel, The Bass Rock. It is an epic, bracing novel, full of anger and heart - one that Max Porter has called a ‘triumph… haunting, masterful.’ In this episode - released to coincide with the day of its publication - Evie and Ben explore theThe Bass Rock: they traverse its gothic landscape, touchstone themes and overlapping timeframes; they also browse Evie's bookshop; and, along the way, discuss everything in between - from the Me Too movement to tickling. ... A full transcript of this episode featuring Evie Wyld follows below: Ben Holden: Evie, thank you so much for hosting us here in your lovely home. Evie Wyld: Pleasure. Ben Holden: Can we talk initially though about Review, about the bookshop, where we'll head over to in a bit? I'm just curious how your involvement with the shop came about and the history of the place, etc. Evie Wyld: Well, Ros Simpson opened the shop about 12 years ago now when there really wasn't all that much in Peckham, and she just opened this nice little shop and I happened to live down the road from it, and I sort of wandered in a bit sort of fecklessly one day and was like, “Have you got any work?” [laughs] and she, she hired me - on the spot. And then I worked behind the till for about 10 years. I wrote my first book there when it was a lot quieter; we didn't quite have the footfall that we have today. And I worked there up until I got pregnant, and then we got my friend Katia Wengraf to manage it, who is a brilliant bookseller, and is much better than I ever was actually. Ben Holden: How so? Evie Wyld: I was much more of a silent, sort of glowering presence I think in the shop. I was much more Black Books and she's very good at remembering everyone's name and suggesting… Ben Holden: “If you like this, you'll like that” Evie Wyld: Yeah, and more than books really; she kind of orchestrates great friendships and relationships in Peckham, so she just sorts you out, whatever your problem is basically, she’s one of those people. And she was, at the time that we hired her, a milliner. She was making her own really beautiful hats. So the idea was, this would be a job that would enable her to carry on with that, but she loves bookselling so much that now she is a full on career bookseller. Ben Holden: So how did you juggle the writing and the shop over the years? Evie Wyld: Well, I mean, initially, with the first book, it was…we have a nice tall counter, and I just propped my laptop up and wrote a book, and ate sandwiches when no one can see [laughs]. And then with the second book, it was quite a lot more work, because with the second book, Ros had moved away to Ireland so I had more responsibility. I was managing it. And so then it was just a case of writing early in the morning, late at night, I guess. And then yeah, the third one, I was out. So then I discovered that writing with a baby is much harder than writing with a job. [Laughter] Ben Holden: And were you inspired in those early times, writing in the shop, by all the sort of plethora of books around you and voices? Evie Wyld: I'd love to say I was… Ben Holden: Or was it a hindrance? Evie Wyld: No, I don’t think it was either. I think it's one of those things that it seems like a perfect sort of marriage doesn't it? Ben Holden: There is a certain romance, kind of booky romance to this. Evie Wyld: Yeah, there is. Sadly you don't absorb the books through your skin [laughs]. So I think I looked at it much more like, it probably changed the way that I sold books rather than changed the way I wrote. A bit like if you're a butcher who rears the pig and butchers the pig you're going to sell it with more love perhaps than you would otherwise [laughs]. Ben Holden: So your new book – we’ll go to the bookshop later and have a have a proper browse - your new book, The Bass Rock, can you tell us a little bit about the novel and maybe you might read the opening for us? Evie Wyld: Sure. The Bass Rock is a volcanic plug just off the coast of Scotland, off the coast of North Berwick. It's this big, dark, sort of malevolent presence and it has borne witness to centuries, millennia of, of murder of women by men. And you've got Sarah in the 1700s, who is escaping through the forest from men who say that she's bewitched them and they want to burn her. And then in the 1950s, you've got Ruth, who is sort of a housewife living in this big house in North Berwick and trying to come to terms with the fact that her new widower husband is out of control, perhaps violent and very damaged. And then you've got, more or less present day, Viv, who is cleaning up after Ruth's death in North Berwick and beginning to realise there are things in the house that are very uncomfortable. Ben Holden: Yeah, good précis. Evie Wyld: So, a load of stuff [laughs]. Ben Holden: And would you mind reading the opening and we can then talk a little bit more? Evie Wyld: No, not at all. Sure. Ben Holden: Thank you. ~ Evie Wyld reads extract from The Bass Rock ~ I was six and just the two of us, my mother and I, took [B-] for a walk along the beach where she and dad grew up. The shore a mix of black rock and pale, cold sand. It was always cold, even in summer we wore wool jumpers and our noses ran and became scorched with wiping on our sleeves. But this was November and the wind made the dog walk close to us, her ears flat, her eyes squinted. I could see the top layer of sand skittering away so that it looked like a giant bed sheet billowing. We were looking for cowrie shells among the debris of the tideline. I had two digging into my palm, white like the throat of a herring girl. My mother had a keener eye and held six. I felt the pull of victory slackening. Resting in a rock pool was a black suitcase, bulging at the sides. The zip had split and where the teeth no longer held together, I saw two fingers tipped with red nails, and one grey knuckle where a third finger should have been. The stump of the finger, like the miniature plaster ham I had for my doll's house. The colour had been sucked from the knuckle by sea water, leaving just a cool grey and the white of the bone. It was the bone, I suppose, that made it so much like the tiny ham. I moved my arm to swat something away from my face and as I did, flies rose from the suitcase in a cloud thick and heavy. Behind me, my mother, “Another one”, she called, “I found another one”. And then the smell, like a dead cat in the chimney in summer; a smell so tall and so broad that you can't see over or around it. My mother walked up behind me “What’s…?” I kept looking at the fingers and trying to understand. My mother pulling me by the arm, “Come away, come away”, she said, and spitting over and over onto the sand, “Don't look, come away”. But the more I looked, the more I saw and peeking through the gaps between the white fingers was an eye that seemed to look back at me, that seemed to know something about me, and to ask a question and give an answer. In the memory, which is a child's memory and unreliable, that eye blinks. ~ Reading ends ~ Ben Holden: Woomph, and so it begins. It’s so great. So it's quite a swirling, epic novel that then unfolds from there; as you say, it’s a sort of triptych, three timelines and female protagonists, but their stories sort of ricochet and reverberate, and then the Bass Rock is sort of watching over, haunting everything. What inspired you to visit there and those three stories…I was trying to think of other novels that have adopted that sort of structure, The Hours sprang to mind. How did you settle on that structure and as a means to explore those themes that you wanted to get into? Evie Wyld: I always find structure a funny one, like, I don't settle on it until quite close to the end of writing the book. So with this book, I started writing it when my son was a newborn and so I would literally sit down at my desk while he slept, usually holding his hand [laughs] - so typing with one hand - and I didn't have the luxury of time to think about chronology or what I wanted the story to be or anything like that. I just had to sit down every day and write, you know, for an hour at a time, twice a day, whatever occurred to me, and so I think that's why we have the three different timelines. There are these three different things that just kept on coming up to me, and also, I think that I seem to remember there were quite a few more times, which have maybe been partly sort of translated into the eight murders that run throughout the book that kind of start in prehistoric times, and then go forward to sort of more or less present day. The structure, even though it seems like a very structured book, and even though the last book I wrote seems incredibly kind of, like I've thought about it a lot, it's more to do with, you know, the book will show you what its structure ought to be. You don't kind of think of a frame and then impose it on the fiction. Ben Holden: Yes, because the structure of the last novel was quite unusual and unexpected as a reader because you use…one, you were flipping between the two timeframes, but one of them was traveling backwards as well. Evie Wyld: Yeah, it was quite mathsy in that way. Ben Holden: Yeah, it was ingenious, is another word. Evie Wyld: Oh thanks. Or a fluke [laughs]. Yeah, I really think it's, it's to do with getting to a certain amount of words and a story and then playing with how it creates the most impact. It's quite a nice point when you're like, “And now I'm gonna think about structure”. Ben Holden: And then it coalesces. Evie Wyld: Yeah, and it inevitably means you have to lose a load of work, and you have to change the story and all that sort of thing. But I think so far, touch wood, it's always sort of made the novel, you know, it's made the story. Ben Holden: And the Bass Rock as well must have anchored some of this in terms of your character's movements and the stories that you were sort of swirling through there. I'm intrigued, again, still about the location because I confess, Mr Ignorant, I didn't know much about it, and looking into it I realised that David Attenborough, no less, has described it as one of the 12 wonders of the natural world, so it makes for quite a… Evie Wyld: Yeah, it’s a really stinky rock. [Laughter] Ben Holden: But it's quite a bracing foundation for your story and also, have to say, the title was intriguing to me because your previous titles are quite, sort of, quite lyrical, you know; ‘All the Birds’ comma ‘Singing’,  ‘After the Fire’, comma, ‘a Still Small Voice’ are beautiful. And then this one's: The Bass Rock… Evie Wyld: Comma, [laughter] full stop. Ben Holden: But it's just very emphatic, you know? Evie Wyld: Yeah. So the character of Ruth in the 1950s is based on my grandmother. We had a great aunt that lived in North Berwick and it meant that my father grew up with holidays there. There are lots of photographs of him and my grandmother together with the Bass Rock in the background. And my grandmother, you know, I borrowed her timeline; so she married a widower with two small boys quite soon after his wife had died of tuberculosis while he was at war. So he came back from war, no wife, traumatized boys, and then quite quickly married my grandmother and I'd always seen that as, he needed to marry someone so that the boys had a mother, which is quite an ungenerous kind of way of looking at it. But I knew my grandmother as a very, very intelligent woman who'd done nothing with her brain and was bored as hell. And she chain smoked, and she was a gin alcoholic, and she was, by my father's recollection, a terrible mother. And she went on to have three more kids and they all had interesting relationships with her, very different, but my father in particular found her very difficult. And so as his daughter, I sort of absorbed that and was like, it's one of those relations that you slightly roll your eyes at, and then inheriting these photo albums after her death and seeing her as a young woman - kind of really sort of vital and sexy and interesting - and you go, “Of course, there is so much more to her”. So the story, that thread, started off with me thinking about an alternative version of her, I think, and the setting of the Bass Rock felt important because it was kind of that linchpin where my father was, she was, I was as a child as well. And I think the landscape there has always really interested me because it's, it sort of always feels off-season somehow. It's like a, it's like a 1950s holiday destination, and it's carpeted and [-] golf course; and, and then there's, there are these great rocks out in the sea and there are oily gannets washing up and tar on the beach, and the wind blows sand in your face and, and they had an outdoor swimming pool, which as someone who is half Australian seems very weird to have that in Scotland, you know, even in the summer you're like, “I mean, he's going for that”. [Laughs] But people didn't, you know, it was like…it's all that kind of postcard seaside thing. And these strange landmarks: you've got the Bass Rock and Craigleith and Fidra; and then on the land, there's the Law, which is this really steep hill with a whalebone right at the top, like a little beacon. And it just seems like a strange, witchy place. And then there are the witch trials that happen there. There's an old church, St Andrew's Old Kirk, which is by the Seabird Centre and it's this little building where these witches were accused of all sorts of things and then they were killed and then, you know, it feels like all of the things I'm interested in, kind of pulled together in one place. Ben Holden: Yeah, well it works beautifully in the novel. Did you head up there while you were writing it? Because it is very, very, very vivid. And you know, just listening to you describe, in quite matter of fact terms, the place but then when it's transposed into your novel, it's very, very rich. Evie Wyld: Thanks. Well, I went there a lot when I was a kid so I kind of wrote a lot of that stuff from memory… Ben Holden: From memory, a bit like the opening of the novel as well, in terms of that filter or refraction. Evie Wyld: Yeah, exactly. And sort of the nostalgia is quite useful, and it always felt to me when I was a child like it was the 1950s there. But then, before I had my son, I knew that I was, that was kind of the area that I was going to be writing in, and I sort of went on a mad eight months-pregnant scramble over the rocks there and took loads of photographs and recorded the sound of the wind on the beach and picked up little smelly bits of tar [laughs]. Yeah, and I stayed in the golfing hotel, which is this really like imposing gothic hotel which is just for golfers and their wives, it's got a spa in, so the men go and play golf and the women go and have manicures and stuff. And I got a really cheap deal, and was there very, very pregnant and felt like I was being looked at like I’ve very bad luck… Ben Holden: Yeah, they must have wondered [laughs]. Evie Wyld: Sort of deliberately having a drink in the evening so everyone could see [laughs]. Ben Holden: Yeah, you mentioned the word Gothic, you know, some of your other novels as well have Gothic elements, but this really does feel very much in keeping with some Gothic tradition, you know, it's very modern in being a contemporary novel, but of course there's…Du Maurier sprang to mind a little bit for me, but M. R. James clearly, and there have been beaches in your other books, but here that beach…and Henry James as well, a little bit. How much were you interested in exploring some of those sorts of tropes or traditions, not consciously, but that sort of tradition? Evie Wyld: I shouldn't say this because I lecture at university, but I got a D in English at A-level and that's the last time I studied it. So these are all things that obviously I pick up on because, like subconsciously, because I love horror. I'm not any good at categorizing books. It’s just that, I don't know, maybe it's a thriller, maybe it’s…I just write the stuff that interests me and it turns out that psych, gothicy stuff; there's very little deliberate about what I do, it just… Ben Holden: Yeah, but the Gothic lends itself to that in the sense of the subconscious and the sort of ricochets between the timeframes that you've got and the identity but also, of course, the threat and the looming violence and male violence in all its different forms, and the visitations of the past and the present and future and between those generations. It's all very Gothic and you know, that is Gothic in its best sense should be coming from that subconscious anyway. Evie Wyld: I don't know. I mean, I've always read a lot. I remember a, like a driving holiday when I was a little kid, like really quite small, maybe six, and my mum had an audio cassette of Jamaica Inn, and I think we were driving in France, so we're driving for hours and we just listened to it over and over again. And something about that, and I haven't read it since, but something about Jamaica Inn stays with me like an atmosphere I think. Ben Holden: I mentioned that the different tropes, but the mirrors as well; there's a lot of different moments where reflections aren’t recognisable but again, it's those…the three character’s stories are spilling over into each other's timeframes or narratives, until they're kind of, do feel like one story. Evie Wyld I was probably about three quarters of the way through writing it and then Me too happened and there was something about that moment where I was just like “Witch hunting, and it's all the same thing. It has changed shape, but it's all the same.” Ben Holden: Again, there's the instinctive threat of violence etc. and the patterns are all still the same, in essence, yeah, I mean that does come through. There was a fantastic section in particular, quite late in the novel, that I was struck by, in this sense. If you don't mind if it's not too presumptuous, I'll just read it back to you. Like I say it is quite late in the novel. ~ Ben Holden reads extract from The Bass Rock ~ There is no other point in our lives when either of us would follow these instructions, but I see Catherine close her eyes without hesitating and it feels good to follow orders. When my eyes are closed, Maggie starts humming and then chanting. I am surprised that I'm not embarrassed. “Diana, goddess of the moon, light the light; Pan, horned god of the world Earth, light the light.” She squeezes our hands and we join in and we just say these sentences over and over; and there's the feeling that you get when you're crying and shouting in the car on the motorway, but also later a feeling of elation, and all there is is the rosy black of my closed eyes and the sounds reverberating in my teeth, and it feels good. I am just my hands joined to my sisters and my eyeballs safe in their sockets, my tongue, and my spine all the way down to my base. I don't know how long we chant for, but it is like I'm a bat or a whale and I can see that there are people in the kitchen with us. There are children and women, all holding hands like us and I wonder is this the ghost everyone sees? Is it in fact 100,000 different ghosts? It's only possible to focus on one at a time. They spill out of the door way and I see through the wall that they fill the house top to bottom. They're locked in wardrobes, they're under the floorboards, they crowd out of the back door and into the garden. They're on the golf course and on the beach, and their heads bob out of the sea, and when we walk, we're walking right through them. The birds on the Bass Rock, they fill it. They are replaced by more; their numbers do not diminish with time. They nest on the bones of the dead. ~ Reading ends ~ It's so good. It's such good stuff. Evie Wyld: A chuckle a minute isn’t it? [Laughs] Ben Holden: I love it. No but, actually you say that, but your book, I have to say, is really, really funny, and almost made me laugh out loud, and I say that as someone who never laughs out loud at a book and I want to ask you whether you do? Evie Wyld: What, at my own books? Ben Holden: No, not at your own books [laughs]. Yeah, sitting there making yourself cry with laughter, no. Evie Wyld: What did I read recently that made me laugh a lot? Ben Holden: I like, by the way, them carrying the ashes in the bag for life, that was great, for instance. And the supermarket queue kind of ‘rom-com gone wrong’ sort of interaction was hilarious as well. It's a very, very funny novel in fairness. Evie Wyld: Thank you, that's really kind. I think, I don't know how you get away from humour. You know, if you're dealing with dark stuff, I just think it's such a natural thing for us to laugh in moments of horror, you know, even if it's nervousness, but life is so ridiculous, most of the time. I think because Viv, the woman in the more or less contemporary strand, is a very thinly veiled version of me, I think I was able to put in quite a lot of pratfalls and, you know, just like, just moments that you privately sort of smack yourself on the forehead for – it was quite therapeutic in that way. Ben Holden: They're very funny. They worked really, really well. And yeah, they bring it sort of down to earth; again, they feel very real and again, contemporary as well as, you know, the different timeframes going right back to the kind of witchery and onward. And you mentioned Me too and of course there's a strong streak of anger running through the novel as well as there was in All the Birds, Singing in terms of the looming threat of male violence, and here, there's all sorts of forms of abuse from gaslighting all the way through to rape. Again, how conscious is this? Because there is, you know, Me too, as well - there's a strong message here. Evie Wyld: Yeah, there is. And it's not that I set out to write a book about that stuff, and neither did I set out with the other two books to write about, you know, toxic masculinity, or…I feel like this is the book that those two books were sort of running up at in a funny way, like I was kind of thinking about all of those things, in a way, all three of them are about exactly the same thing. I don't think you, as a writer, write one book about something and then you're done with it. I think it kind of snowballs in a way. And this book, you know, as I said, I had a young baby when I was writing most of it, and that makes you very angry - I mean, you have twins, you understand the anger there. But, just trying to carry on with your life once you've had a baby as a woman - it's quite amazing how many people want to get involved and tell you you're doing it incorrectly. So, I would go and breastfeed my son to sleep, which you're not supposed to apparently, but he's fine [laughs], on a bench outside the National Theatre, and then I’d go in once he was asleep and write for an hour while he slept, and the amount of times I had people sitting down next to me saying things along the line of “You'd both be much more comfortable at home”, you know, “what are you doing?”, “He's cold”, “Why are you doing this in public…” and there's that level of rage. Then there's the level of rage of the kind of various abuses that I think in my last book, I was looking at being like a young woman and the confusion of the message that you are supposed to be, you're supposed to appear sexy, you're supposed to want sex, but you're not supposed to enjoy sex, like that kind of weird juxtaposition of like, you know, it kind of pulls young women apart, I think, and I think it has a lot to do with that anger; binge drinking, self-harm, all of that stuff, and the way that they approach sex, the weird aggression that we have towards men when we're quite young, because we're being told all of these different things that pull in different directions. Something that happened while I was publicising All the Birds, Singing is I had my drink spiked at a party and thankfully nothing happened, I just felt very unwell for several weeks, and talking to a lot of my good friends about that, and you know, being like, “Ooh, that's lucky”, you know, “Don't know who did it”… Ben Holden: That’s scary. Evie Wyld: Yeah. The amount of them who had had their drink spiked and it hadn't ended as well as it did for me. It just really amazed me. And the more that we talk about it, you know, that's why that extract you just read is an important one for me because it's showing the hope of the book, which is Viv might survive because she's talking about stuff and noticing the deaths. And there's so much power in women speaking about it and that's why Me too was such a ground-breaking, incredible thing is that it got us talking about it. And I saw last night on Sex Education, the Netflix series, that they have this scene where one of the young women gets wanked on on a bus. And nearly every woman who's made it to adulthood has had that, maybe not to completion, but you know, you've had a raw penis wiped on you, at least on the tube. And you just don't mention it. Because you're just like, that is part of being a woman, you know, and the thing that you should do is you can move down the tube, you can make sure that you're always, all your flesh is covered, you can, you know, there are things you can do, but you know, everyone's had it and you just absorb that and carry it with you and then that, I don’t know, there were just layers and layers of little things like that, that affect you massively, but at the time, you're like, “This is just a little thing. I'm not physically injured”. And it's really embarrassing to tell people that “Somebody wiped his willy on me on my way to school” [laughs]. And you just don't talk about it and you cover it up, and then there are just these little rocks in you that never really get shown the light. There are these podcasts, there's My Favourite Murder, I don’t know if you've heard of that one. That started about three years ago, and it's just two women talking about murder that they're interested in, serial killers and that sort of thing. And they're very, very funny. What was totally unexpected about it is there are women all over the world who are really fascinated by murder, and nobody knew. You know, we're all like secretly googling ‘Murderpedia’ and you know, ‘Are there any active serial killers in Peckham?’ and things like that. What happened was this community grew up around My Favourite Murder and around All Killer, No Filler, the British version, and it's given a huge amount of power to women to pay attention to their own instinct. And it sounds like such a simple thing and why weren't we doing it before, but their catchphrase “fuck politeness” is one of those things that you realise as a woman you are…it's ingrained in you that whatever happens, you have to be polite. If a man starts talking to you on the tube while you're reading a book, and they're like, “What's your book about?” And you say, “I'm really sorry, I'm reading my book, can you leave me alone?” you get this tirade of fury, this like, “Huh, you know, I'm just trying to be friendly, and I don't fancy you and I'm not trying to do anything”. And it becomes aggressive very, very quickly, and really uncomfortable. And so I think we've all kind of, to an extent, we just look up and we smile, and we're like, “Oh, it's a book about blah, blah, blah”, and we end up in conversation with someone we don't want to talk to, and why are they talking to us anyway? What's their plan? You know, it's all these, kind of, these little moments in your everyday life as a woman that you have to make way and be polite, and actually it really affects your day and it really exhausts you. And the amount of women, including me, who would get home after a day's work, and come in and not take their coat or their shoes off or turn the lights on or make any dinner or anything, and just sit on the sofa and just feel like “Jesus Christ”, and you know, stare at a wall. I think it's a big load; it's a big depressing load. And the more we talk about it, the more you can see it happening. And I feel like other women looking out for other women and connecting with other women, all that stuff is so important, and I've seen a huge change in it of women looking on public transport to see if that woman’s okay with the attention she's getting from that person. There was a YouTube clip recently of a woman telling some drunk men to shut up because they were singing a song about how best to fuck a woman on the tube and she just stood up and just shouted at them. And then the rest of the passengers are all like, shout at them too, and it's this wonderful moment of like, you know, “We see you, and we hear you, and if you're going to say that you can fuck off” - it feels incredibly powerful. Ben Holden: Yes. And do you feel positive then that things are changing a little bit? As you say, there is a sort of sense that there's a spell or a circle that is perpetuating itself in your novel, but that there are little openings of, as you're describing, change. Evie Wyld: There's going to be, stretching into the future, murders and murders and murders. You know, of course, it's not good, that's not going to change. But there is that hope of survival, I think, and that feeling of sisterhood I suppose, which sounds like a really weird word. Ben Holden: I think I should say also, for the blokes out there listening that, you know, the men in the novel, although there's a sort of core…again, it's that sort of instinctive thing that you're tapping into a lot of the time in terms of the violence and the threat of violence, they're also damaged, and there is abuse that is visited upon them along the way. And you can see why these fractured male egos, or whatever, are being forced upon the women and how this circle of violence, again, is perpetuating itself. Evie Wyld: Yeah, I mean, I think that it's one of the big misunderstandings of when people talk about toxic masculinity; they're not saying women are abused by men, they're saying it's terrible for everyone. That's the point and it's the male suicide rate - you only have to look at that. Ben Holden: Of course. And you mentioned the war as well, which features in terms of the backdrop to one strand. Evie Wyld: Yeah, I think the trickle-down effect of war is quite astounding. And, you know, I am of a generation where my grandfather fought in the war, my uncle fought in Vietnam, and, you know, it's really at arm's length, but you can see it in the children and the grandchildren. It's still there. Ben Holden: It percolates through. Speaking of children, there was one, again, in terms of how the novel is stitched together, there are lots of motifs that, as we've talked about, sort of came about, organically, but tickling was one of them and I was really struck by it. Do you know the essay on tickling by Adam Phillips? Evie Wyld: No Ben Holden: I brought you a copy because it's amazing, and I was just struck by tickling. Again, I know you were writing this while you're pregnant and your kids were young, but tickling, it's such a great expression of the threat of physical abuse and that sort of strange netherworld between pleasure and pain and as the child is laughing, and it often involves them being pinned down. But he's amazing, I mean, Adam Phillips is an amazing psychoanalyst writer. But let me just read, if I may, a paragraph because you'll like it. Evie Wyld: Please do. ~ Ben Holden reads extract from Adam Phillips’s essay ~ Ben Holden: Helpless with pleasure, and usually inviting this helplessness, the child in the ordinary, affectionate, perverse scenario of being tickled, is wholly exploitable. Particular adults know where the child is ticklish. It is, of course only too easy to find out. But it is always idiosyncratic, a piece of personal history, and rarely what Freud called one of the ‘predestined erotogenic zones’. Through tickling, the child will be initiated in a distinctive way into the helplessness and disarray of a certain primitive kind of pleasure, dependent on the adult to hold and not to exploit the experience and this means to stop at that blurred point. So acutely felt in tickling, at which pleasure becomes pain, and the child experiences an intensely anguished confusion, because the tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax. It has to stop or the real humiliation begins. The child, as the mother says, will get hysterical. ~ Reading ends ~ Ben Holden: It's really good stuff. Evie Wyld It’s really good. Ben Holden: But you tapped into that, it comes up more than once in the novel. And again, there's a great scene between one couple who are fighting after they've had sex and he tickles her and she gets mad about it. She hates…“I fucking hate tickling”. And he's baffled by this because they've just had sex and then she's having a go at him for tickling her. But again, it's that sort of, a bit like the opening of your novel, it's that childish thing, it's sort of in there, instinctive, and then we as conscious human beings have to know when to stop or when it's not funny, or can you see that someone's actually not laughing, they're actually struggling to breathe. Evie Wyld: Yeah. Well, with my son, we have a safe word. He screams “sandwich” whenever he wants it stop. And we're really, really strict about like keeping to that. But yeah, I think tickling, the after sex tickling you're talking about, there are so many things that a man can do to a woman and then afterwards just go like, “I was only joking, what are you getting upset about?” and that's really what that is. For me that is tickling, it encompasses, “What are you going to report?” And do you know, because the reaction is laughter, even though it is, like you say, hysterical laughter, you don't have a leg stand on it. I don't see many steps between that and somebody being like, “Oh, she loved it. You know, she says she didn't want to have sex with me now. But at the time she was well into it.” Ben Holden: It is a sort of very earliest expression of those sorts of, that sort of routine, yeah, that can in an adult, darker spectrum lead to rape. Evie Wyld: Yeah, absolutely. Ben Holden: There is, by the way, a little rejoinder on tickling, in Adam Phillips, as I say, because he has an eight year old in a session who talks about tickling, and she says “When we play monsters and mummy catches me, she never kills me, she only tickles me.” Evie Wyld: [Shudders] Well, I think when you're a kid you can't imagine what somebody would do when they catch you. That is the thing that people do when those kind of chasing…you can't imagine what the next step is. So it is, it's like when you have a dream when you're a little kid, and you're like “The monster’s chasing me, and it's gonna tickle me”, why does that fill me with such dread? Ben Holden: Yes, and you mentioned that this is partly inspired by your family. I was curious what they…and it's dedicated to the Wylds. And by the way, your first novel After the Fire, a Still Small Voice was dedicated to the Strangers. Can this be that your families are called the Wylds and the Strangers? Evie Wyld: They are. Ben Holden: That’s so cool. Evie Wyld: That's why they got married [laughs]. Ben Holden: Perfect, perfect, yeah. How have your family reacted to this one so far? Evie Wyld: They haven’t read it yet [laughs]. They all understand, I hope, that this is a reimagining of something. They understand by now about what fiction writing means and though there are always going to be things that you draw on from real life, I don't think I'm exposing anyone in any way that they wouldn't kind of feel comfortable with. Ben Holden: Do you feel like your grandmother, who I assume is no longer with us, would feel a sense of validation or in some way gratified or grateful that you've given her some sort of voice that perhaps she wasn't afforded? Evie Wyld: That’s a really interesting question. I'd love to say yes, I think she would probably not read the book and just go, “Darling, isn't it marvellous?”, and that would be it. I think she had kind of checked out a long time ago. Maybe the person she was in the old photographs would feel a link. But really, the Ruth in the book, you know, I allow her to do a lot more things than my grandmother ever allowed herself to do. And I don't think Ruth is ever bored; she's anxious and confused and angry, but she's never bored like my grandmother was. Ben Holden: Well maybe we should think about heading over to Review shortly? Normally, there are three of us because I meet with an author and a librarian or bookseller, but here we are in your home and it's just you because you're wearing both hats, you wear both hats. But normally, I ask in the venue in situ, how our guests decide to catalogue their books or organise their shelves, but I feel really sort of nosy and wary of being prying as we're in your place, looking around at the books. But it’s coals to Newcastle, you work in the shop, or worked, and then, how would you then fashion your shelves here? Or how are the books here? Is it sort of like “Oh whatever, they're just going to go where they're going to go?” because they're so regimented there? Evie Wyld: Well yeah, in our last flat we alphabetised them, and you know, in fiction, nonfiction, and we spent several weeks doing that. Ben Holden: And your husband, your partner…your husband's in publishing? Evie Wyld: He is yeah, so now we just have piles and piles of books round the place, and then if I need a book to teach with at Kent, I generally end up buying it again [laughs], which is a bit aggravating. I sort of don't know who I was when I had the time to sort them out, which feels really sad. But there is no order sadly, there's just lots. Ben Holden: Yes, yes. It would be lovely to have a browse of Review with you and perhaps you'd let me buy you a book? Although again, it feels like coals to Newcastle, at least I can support the shop or you, if you don't want to choose one there, you can recommend one for me or whatever you like, but I do like to celebrate these places and as well as the serendipity of the shelves there and the browsing process, so that'd be fun. Thank you so much. Evie Wyld: Pleasure. ~ Evie Wyld is invited to select a book of her choice from Review bookshop ~ Ben Holden: This is so great, love it. Do you have customers come in and buying your book, asking for your book? Have you ever had anyone ask for your book and not realise that it’s you? Evie Wyld: Yeah, quite a lot, which is the much more comfortable way round [laughs]. Ben Holden: Yeah. Do say, “Do you want me to sign it?” Evie Wyld: No Ben Holden: You just let them buy it? Evie Wyld: Yeah. I mean, I have in the past, if we've been in a conversation, you know, if we’re kind of getting on well, and occasionally they'll be like, “Why would I want you to sign it?” [laughs]. Ben Holden: Do they get a bit spooked? Evie Wyld: Yeah. Ben Holden: I can understand that. Evie Wyld: Yeah, it’s like why do you want just a perfect stranger to sign this book you’ve bought? It’s very odd [laughs]. Ben Holden: But then you must get a fair number of local…being a local sort of author figure in the community as well? Evie Wyld: Yeah, ‘a figure in the community’ – that’s how I like to think of myself [laughs]. Ben Holden: It's a beautiful shop though and it smells of new books. Evie Wyld: Thank you. Yeah, well you'd hope so [laughs]. Ben Holden: It's lovely. Evie Wyld: I’ll just close the door to the toilet [laughs]. Ben Holden: It's tough to know where would you begin if you were going to choose a book for pleasure. Does that feel funny to be coming in here to choose a book for pleasure, because it’s a worky place? Evie Wyld: It does. Yeah, I think most of the books that I read at the minute are to do with helping other people learn to write. Ben Holden: Right, because you're teaching… Evie Wyld: Because I’m teaching creative writing at Kent. It sort of changes how you think about books. You're kind of like, “Oh, is there a section in there that I can photocopy and it will show them how to do a good image or significant detail?” or, or something like that. Ben Holden: Are there texts that you return to? Evie Wyld: Yeah, I'm a big fan of, and it's a very old one, but the Artist’s Way. I just think is really useful in terms of kind of relaxing people into a sort of creative process and it's all really embarrassing talking about it, as it makes it sound… Ben Holden: Why? Evie Wyld: I think, because writers often want to keep it quite mystical and actually, the reality of writing a novel is it's a lot of hard work and a lot of time and graft. Ben Holden: Application. Evie Wyld: Yeah. I always feel like it's better to try and err on the side of being a bit kind of brutal about it, rather than, you know, have a nice drink and smoke a pipe and, you know, wait for the muse, you know. [Laughter] But I think the Artist’s Way is really good, because it has practical stuff about if you're sat looking at a blank page, you know, do this, and I find that it's useful. But I think Max Porter is really good for people writing now, to just show that you can really do whatever you want with the page. I think that's really inspiring. It seems to surprise students quite a lot which is nice. Ben Holden: Yeah. Have you read The Diary of a Bookseller? Evie Wyld: No, I haven't. Ben Holden: Talk about again, coals to Newcastle… Evie Wyld: This is very good, actually, Easier Ways to say I Love You by Lucy Fry. And it's a memoir. I think it's literally just come out and it's about her learning to live within a polyamorous marriage with her wife and her son. Yeah, it's quite a startling book I think. Ben Holden: You absolutely loved it, according to the cover. Evie Wyld: I absolutely loved it - such a great quote [laughter]. I do hate writing quotes for people. Ben Holden: An important voice and beautifully written. It’s a fantastic cover as well. Evie Wyld: Yeah. Ben Holden: Easier Ways to say I Love You - it’s a nice title as well. Well thank you. That's, I think, as good a recommendation as I could want for. Evie Wyld: Good. Ben Holden: Thank you.

“It’s strange and haunting to be back here after a very, very long time,” says Tessa Hadley of heading inside seminal childhood destination, Redland Library. " I can still remember the feeling of entering the new book, the first page like a threshold, that excitement and thrill… And  at some point thinking ‘I want to make my own stories...’” Those stories that Tessa has gone on to write - thus far, three collections of short stories and six acclaimed novels - continue to garner widespread acclaim. She engenders similar wonder today in her own readers. Her peers are unanimous in their praise. She is ‘one of the best fiction writers writing today,’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie declares. In the words of Hilary Mantel, Tessa ‘recruits admirers with each book: she is one of those writers a reader trusts.’ And few writers give Zadie Smith ‘such consistent pleasure’. Tessa’s writing came to prominence partly via the pages of The New Yorker magazine, to which she continues to contribute short stories. Her most recent novel is Late in the Day and her awards include the Windham-Campbell Prize. She lives in London but chose to meet with Ex Libris in Bristol. Tessa first went to Redland Library with her school, as an infant. Before long, she was going there by herself - devouring the entire children’s section of books before, around the age of 12, foraying further into the library, travelling alphabetically around the adult shelves (Elizabeth Bowen’s writing, first encountered on those forays, remains a key inspiration). Redland is a striking building, established in the 1880s. Like so many libraries in the UK, it has faced challenges during recent years of austerity. Yet the place has not buckled and remains a vital destination. A proper palace for the people. Joining Tessa to put all of that into vital context is Councillor Asher Craig, who also grew up visiting the library as a kid and now is responsible for the library services in Bristol. Asher explains Redland’s situation today and lays bare those challenges of recent years. The two share fond, nostalgic memories of growing up in Bristol. They pore over sepia photos from the archives of the old place in its pomp, compare notes on Anne of Green Gables, and delight - all these years later - in exploring the shelves anew. ... A full transcript of this episode, featuring Tessa Hadley, follows: Few writers give me such consistent pleasure as Tessa Hadley.  These are Zadie Smith’s words, but I second them wholeheartedly: “I'm a big fan, as are many other readers. Indeed, Hilary Mantel has observed that Tessa recruits admirers with each book. She is one of those writers a reader trusts”. Damn right.  And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls her “one of the best fiction writers writing today”. Tessa Hadley is the author of three collections of short stories - that's how I first discovered her work via those stories in the pages of the New Yorker magazine, to which she frequently contributes. She has also written six acclaimed novels, most recently, ‘Late in the Day’. Tessa lives in London and is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She has chosen though to meet today in Bristol, at Redland Library, which she would frequent as a child. It's a handsome old place, built in the 1880s. It's faced a few challenges during recent years of austerity that have led to campaigns by Friends groups for its preservation. But Redland has not buckled and stands proud. Indeed, today, it's in scaffolding, they're doing some more works to keep it strong as ever. Like so many libraries up and down the land, it's a vital destination, a proper palace for the people - it has been for well over a century. Joining us with Tessa to put all of that into some context is local Councillor, Asher Craig, who also grew up visiting the library. Without further ado, let's head on in and get talking with them both. Interview Ben Holden: Tessa, Asher, thank you very, very much for joining us and meeting here in Redland Library. Tessa, I know it's a special place for you and you immediately chose it as the venue for today. Can you tell us what it signifies and perhaps also a bit of background, describe the place - it's a very striking library. Perhaps you could evoke it a little bit for our listeners. Tessa Hadley: Built in the late 19th century of sort of big, chunky red stone, and with handsome great, grand windows letting in lots of light on the books inside; it's quite a tiny library, although books are small so you can pack an awful lot of books into a small library. Exactly as I remember it from my childhood - you come in through the front door, and both Asher and I, it was that metal door handle on the door that brought memories of long ago rushing back. You come in through the door and the children's section, I think it's still as it was, is laid out to right and left. And then ahead of you, up the stairs is the adult section. It's strange and haunting to be back here after a very, very long time. Ben Holden: And we've found the team here have pulled some really beautiful photos, which I'll post online for anyone who's listening and wants to check them out, but they're very evocative, very handsomely framed. Someone knew what they were doing, but they evoke, again, a bygone era of this library. Tessa Hadley: They're a little bit before my time even, but it's wonderful in these photographs to look at all the men and women sitting, reading with their hats on, in the women's cases, though I think the men have taken them off. And what spills out from these black and white pictures to me is the quiet of the library, which as a child is so important as you come in, because you recognise this space set apart from the noise and bustle of the street outside and school. I used to come here every week with my school. We came in a crocodile two-by-two holding hands, and we were brought here every Friday afternoon it seems to be in my memory. We all took out books, not just the bookish ones; every child took out at least one book and brought it back the following week. And the sense that you entered this hushed, quiet space, I could see that could be scary if books weren't your thing, and it wasn't your space, but I have to say I was such a bookish, shy child, so to me, it felt kind of like coming home coming into this respectful, absorbed quiet; that was really a place I wanted to be. Ben Holden: Some sort of inner sanctum... Tessa Hadley: Yes, a place that took reading so seriously, put it at the centre of things. There was no commercial thing going on, there was no money being exchanged, just thought and absorption in words inside books. Ben Holden: Yes, and of course they still offer that sanctuary today, and it's still very quiet space or somewhere that people can come into the warm and focus on whatever it may be. But it's obviously changed. In those photos it looks quite stately and like a destination. The librarians at the front look like they're running some sort of department store counter [laughter]; the patrons look like they've sort of put their Sunday best on, it's almost sort of going to church. Asher Craig: The area really hasn't changed, I mean, Redland itself. I was saying earlier that I've never revealed to everybody, even in my time as a councillor, that both Redland and Cheltenham Road Library were my local libraries, because I was brought up in Redland, and I was thinking about when you were talking about what things that were evoked, so I had that kind of déjà-vu moment when I was walking through the doors. Because when you're little, the stairs even though there are few stairs, they seem quite big. And I always remember being afraid to go into the adult section, because we were so little, you're not allowed to go into the adult section. But I was a very early reader, I was reading maybe from about four or five. I just loved reading. And so I enjoyed our visits to the library. We'd all sit down quietly in the corner, we’d choose a book, the book would be read to us, and then we could, “right now you can go off and choose a book that you want to take out”. Just the enjoyment of just, you know, the librarian opening the book, putting that little stamp in there with the date in there to tell you when… you know, it was just all part of that. So, yeah, I mean, everybody's journey is very different. But yeah, fond memories… Tessa Hadley: Do you know, I used to do it at home - I used to stick little sheets inside the few books I actually owned and from somewhere had a date stamp and used to make little cardboard ticket holders. [Laughter] That is a bit sad as a childhood play! [Laughs] Ben Holden: It's very sweet. And did you, Tessa, come here at a similarly early age? You said you were coming here with school, but was it part of the family routine? Tessa Hadley: Yeah, it was. I can't really remember when I was coming with school except this once a week thing, and then when it began to be with my family or whether it both coexisted, I'm really not sure. But certainly I've been here with family as well, yes. Ben Holden: And was it this place that really fostered your love of reading and writing as well? Was this where those seeds were sown for you wanting to become a writer? Tessa Hadley: Absolutely, because we weren't really a bookish family at home; we had books and my parents read but they weren't the sort of parents that said, “Oh, you have to do this. You have to read this person and this person”. So I was free inside this building to pick and choose and I really just devoured the children's books and used to take home this pile of five, I think we were allowed, and I can still remember the feeling - unspoiled by adult criticism because, of course, it's not so straightforward now - of just entering the new book; the first page like a threshold and you cross it, and then you're inside. That excitement and thrill, which, to me is, again, perhaps slightly sadly sort of not surpassed by anything, and mixed up with that love of reading somewhere at some point, quite innocently without any grandeur, thinking “I want to also make my own stories”. Asher Craig: So you know what’s really interesting as you’re speaking Tess, I was trying to think about, “well, what books did we even have in my home?” And do you know something; we really didn't have any books. The only books that we had at my house was this beautiful Bible. It was huge, bound, beautiful pictures…oh, I just loved reading it, or just looking at the pictures. I remember one, there's a specific picture in the Bible of one of Jesus's disciples and somebody who had been stabbed in the heart and you can see him being held by Jesus. Yeah, I remember all of that and the other book was the dictionary, equally as big, huge. Those are the two kind of big staples… Tessa Hadley: Wonderful, they were like the authority books in your house. Asher Craig: They were! And you know something, I've been thinking, “I wonder what happened to it” because obviously you know, my parents have passed away - I might go and Google and see if I can find something that looks like it; but it was beautiful like leather-bound, brown Bible and gold embellished, you know, and the leaves were gold embellished on the side. Tessa Hadley: And I actually think that's a better beginning in books than you go into a child's house now, often they have a thousand books, piled up, most of them unread. You had one precious book with wonderful language inside it and great pictures what's more. Asher Craig: Exactly, exactly. Tessa Hadley: In the beginning of ‘Mill on the Floss’ Maggie Tulliver is reading a religious book - they only have two or three books in the house - and she is obsessed with certain pictures of devils and saints being martyred, exactly like you being drawn to that picture of violence. And these feed the imagination. Asher Craig: Well, that was it, because I think that's what made the words come to life. When you were looking at the pictures, and then I will be trying to find the story that related to the picture, because maybe the story was a couple of pages away, because obviously they've put the leaves in, but you know, I was really fascinated because I looked at the picture and then I wanted to know “what is the story behind the picture?” So yeah, my first kind of real excursion into reading and books was the Bible. Ben Holden: Yeah. And then you could supplement it, obviously with this place with all sorts and Tessa, you found one or two books here that made a big impact on you, and one or two also that perhaps the librarians were a little…unimpressed by? Tessa Hadley: Oh, yes, that was a funny thing happened. When I was, I think about 11 or 12 and I'd been using the library for a long time, I borrowed a book called Young Mother, and I kind of didn't really, it was just one of my five for that week, but when I got home I was slightly startled in my innocence to discover it was a very pious and solemn story about a girl who got pregnant and then had the child. Even the cover, I can actually remember, sort of pastel and a girl with a tragic face, you know. Anyway, when I brought it back in, I was already embarrassed as I stood in the queue to hand the book back to the librarian. I remember being slightly, shuffling forward and feeling a bit hot under the collar. She took this book away from me and then she sort of turned to the other librarian and murmured something to her and then they both took it into the backroom; I just felt as if I'd been found out in my salacious imagination. And then she brought it back and she was sniffing it and she said, “Definitely smells of paraffin”. [Laughter] And it turned out it was because my dad had had the paraffin tank from the oil heater that we had at home in the back of the car with the book. But I just, I still to this day think it wasn't just that; it was her reacting to me reading that. Ben Holden: The fumes of transgression. Tessa Hadley: The fumes of transgression, exactly. Ben Holden: So which books really made an impact? I think you've talked about Swallows and Amazons, but from this library, are there some that stand out? Tessa Hadley: I can almost seem to see them and I did love the books that there was a whole series of, because that was like, once you liked it and you'd got into it, there were loads of them. So, Swallows and Amazons, which were truly huge for me; Anne of Green Gables, did you read that? Asher Craig: Oh I read…I loved Anne of Green Gables. Tessa Hadley: We probably had the same book in our house! Asher Craig: We could have had the same book! Love that story. Tessa Hadley: I loved it so much and cried about it of course and you know, not just the first book but, it never occurred to me that they probably got less good as they went on, as they scrape the bottom of the barrel, but I just took them all in. I also remember books from the non-fiction side. There was a great series called The Young Victoria, and The Young Wolfe, The Young…you know, all great figures from British history as we understood it then. I mean, probably I should think wince-making now in their inappropriateness, but filling out the shapes of time and history and giving on a first sense of different eras, and of the past; that's one of the things we get from our reading more than anything, I think, is a sense of the past. Asher Craig: I think that's one of the things that I love about reading, just getting lost in it and just the imagination and it takes you to the places… Ben Holden: That's the special thing about libraries is that they're a place where you can be alone, together; they’re full of contradictions, nice contradictions in that sense and you can get lost in your own world, but they’re a safe space. Tessa Hadley: As in this wonderful photograph; all these people are not sitting talking, they are all alone, together. And yet, they are a community of readers together, sharing but private. Ben Holden: And here we are, however many years later, with you two who grew up coming here and we're in the library… Tessa Hadley: …holding the same volume of Anne of Green Gables, which I love! Asher Craig: [Laughs] Yes. Ben Holden: We’ll go and have a look in a minute to see if it’s still there. Asher Craig: Oh, yeah, let's see if we can find it. And that was the other thing, I also liked - you know you have the little drawers where they had the details of the books and where you could find them, and I used to love opening the drawers and just flicking through the little cards, yeah, the card index system, and kind of flicking through that and knowing where to go and find the book that you were looking for. Tessa Hadley: Because all of that is about authority and power in a good way, isn't it? Asher Craig: The early computer days. [Laughs] Tessa Hadley: Yeah, yeah, but I think those cards were more enchanting somehow than flicking through a computer screen, although that works perfectly well. Asher Craig: Yeah, that’s what I was saying; I loved it because it was you know, you know you have to go to A to D or wherever and then just kind of flicking through it. Yeah, loved all of that. [Laughs] Ben Holden: We talked about the past, and Tessa, you're a bit of a laureate if you ask me in terms of our relationship with the past; you've looked at it closely in so many of your novels and short stories, but Late in the Day, your newest novel, is very much in that zone. It tells a story of four friends - two married couples - and their intertwined relationships as a quartet, as well as their children. But you flip between the past and the present. For anyone who has not yet had the joy of reading it, do you want to just give us a little snapshot, and perhaps, if you don't mind, read something from it? Tessa Hadley: Sure. Yes, it is these two couples and my first idea when I conceived the novel, before I started writing, was that I would run it chronologically and begin with these four in their twenties, then have them in their thirties, then in their forties. Then I thought, “A novel just can't be a line, it has to also be a circle - I have to have a big thing that sort of pulls all this together”. And I knew one of my four had to die, in that slightly merciless way that writers do with their characters. And once I knew that he had to die - I've made the nicest one of the four die I think, the sweetest man, sorry - I knew that I had to put his death right at the beginning of the book, that it would feel really malevolent to write the whole story and make you involved with the characters and then suddenly kill one of them, that doesn't work for me. So I had to begin at the beginning when these characters are in their fifties, one of the four drops dead, and then I had to do this thing that is a little bit tricky structurally, but I think I got away with it, where we're partly running the story in their fifties, in the present, with the fallout from the death and what it does to the three left behind, and how they re-make their relationships around his absence. And then I also dip back into their youth, into their thirties and into their forties, so it's a little bit complex in time structure. Ben Holden: The non-linear structure’s brilliant, it works really, really well. And the title of the novel is again redolent of the past. There's a sort of autumnal quality to it. Tessa Hadley: Well, I think I've always been interested in that. It's funny, even when I was a child, and it was probably because of reading, I would look at an old person on the bus and I would think “they were young once”. And I've always had that layered perception. I talked to my grandparents intently, almost interrogating them about their childhood and their youth. So I've always been fascinated in the different layers of people's lives and how they unfold and have youth inside age. So I can't resist writing about it, it seems to make the present so much thicker. Ben Holden: That’s quite unusual, quite perspicacious, or perceptive of you as a young person to think of someone as having a youth. Hats off. Tessa Hadley: That’s funny, isn't it? I don't know why, I mean, I'd almost say it was a bit obsessive, and odd. [Laughter] But that's how I was made somehow. So shall I read a little bit? Ben Holden: That would be amazing, thank you. Tessa Hadley: It's not particularly relevant to anything we've been discussing, but it's in the present part of the book, and this is Christine, and her husband Alex is still alive. Alex is not here, he's gone up to Glasgow, he's on his way home. Actually, something momentous is going to happen on his way home. Not an accident, but something that will change the dynamic between these remaining three and sort of break the pattern that exists. But really, this is just a passage about ‘waiting’. ~ Tessa Hadley reads extract from Late in the Day ~ Her perception was a skin stretched taught, prickling with response to each change in the light outside as it ran through the drama of its sunset performance at the end of the street in a mass of gilded pink cloud. When eventually the copper beech was only a silhouette cut out against the blue of the last light, Christine pulled down the blinds, put on all the lamps, turned her awareness inwards. From half past 10 she began to think she heard Alex's car draw up outside. Each time she braced herself. The more a homecoming was anticipated, the more disconcerting the actuality was prone to be - she knew that. The arriving one walked into a shape prepared for him, not actually his own. Just because she was relieved to be free of Lydia and looking forward to seeing Alex, the reality of him would be an affront; he wouldn't fit into her preparations or even notice them, would arrive burdened with purposes of his own breaking into the tension of her waiting. Men didn't care anyway about clean sheets or scented soap, both of which she's put out for him. It would be better really if she watched telly and forgot she was waiting. But in the summer night, the spell of her expectation was too strong. She lost herself inside short passages of her novel then couldn't proceed because they affected her too much. She dropped the book and looked about her restlessly, filled up her glass again. It was only once midnight had come and gone that panic lifted up in Christine's chest like a great bird between one moment of it not occurring to her to worry, and the next when she was certain something must have happened. He'd said he might be home by 10 o'clock, hadn't he? No doubt the traffic was bad, and he wouldn't have called to let her know because Alex never used his phone while he was driving, and also he despised that whole infantile obsession with calling, needing to be in touch at every moment. Yet her imagination, working outside her control began to conjure disasters that were more awful for being indefinite. The poised perfection of her scene was spoiled, a mockery, and yet she couldn't possibly go to bed - sleeplessness there would be worse. And anyway, he would surely arrive any minute and there wouldn't have been anything to be afraid of after all. When he did arrive she would never forgive him, she thought, for putting her through this. In interludes of respite, she forced her awareness down into her novel then awoke from its dream in palpitations of dread. She hadn't eaten anything since cake at lunchtime - she'd waited to have something with Alex - so the white wine she'd been drinking had given her a headache. There was nothing to think about except the worst. For a long time she wouldn't let herself call his phone then she tried it and found it was switched off. Her helpless fear was a paralysis hollowing her out, and yet was probably absurd. She kept hearing a car whose drones seem familiar which then drone past; or a car would park in the street outside, a car door slam, her heart would lift in paroxysms of relief. But Alex didn't come. This madness of anxiety was her own to bear. And at any moment Alex would turn up, it would have all been for nothing. But by two o'clock she couldn't help herself. She rang Lydia. She told herself Lydia often stayed awake late reading, and indeed she picked up the phone almost at once spoke into it wearily. Christine knew there was a handset on the bedside table at Garrets Lane. She poured out her distress, so glad to talk to someone. “Lyd, I'm so really, really sorry to call at this time of night. I know it's completely selfish of me but I'm so stuck, I don't know what to do, I don't know who else to call, I don't want to bother the children. It's Alex, he's not back yet, I don't know where he is. He said he'd be back by 10 and he isn't here and his phone's turned off. I've got myself worked up into a state imagining every kind of disaster. Do you think he’s had an accident?” Lydia's voice was hesitant, but not as if she'd been woken from sleep. “Oh, Chris”, she said. “Don't worry. He's all right.” “I know it's stupid, he'll be fine, but I am worrying.” “Don't worry, though, really. Alex is here.” She could hardly take in what she heard at first. “What do you mean he's there? What's he doing there? Why hasn't he rung me?” “I don't know what to say. I don't know how to tell you.” It was as if dark forms crowded suddenly into the room around Christine; recognition was so violent. One stark and ghastly white face showed in the mirror. She didn't know her own self for a moment. Lydia ploughed on as if bemused by wonders. “Everything's so strange Chris. I'm so sorry.” ~ Reading ends ~ Ben Holden: Thank you. It's an absolutely stunning passage. It’s very dramatic as well, you read that so beautifully. But, I was blown away by the sort of James-ion shifting lights and the sort of stretching of time in that interior world, but then you explode it late in the day, like the title, for this person in terms of their lives; late in the day, these lives are changing. Tessa Hadley: At a point when you hadn’t thought they were going to. When you think you’re settled and you’ve got what you've got, and that's how it is. Ben Holden: Yes, but the timing of the passage as well; there's a lovely moment later on when the younger character says, “up until now, my life's been so straightforward, almost too straightforward. I wish you'd known me in the past.” And of course we do know them in the past because you flip back to those lovely ironies, but here you have a passage where the present is punching through, in such an emphatic way. Tessa Hadley: Yes, because one never wants to just celebrate the past as if it's a kind of lavender scented, better time. It was only the present then, it was violent and it punched through then and then all those things, they build bricks of ourselves and bricks of our story and it amounts finally to, if we live a full life, it amounts finally to building a place, a whole story, if we get given the whole story, which not everybody does of course. Asher Craig: Well you've left me completely fascinated so I am definitely purchasing your book. Ben Holden: Oh you must. Asher Craig: Oh no, I don't need to purchase I just need to take it out of the library. [Laughs] Tessa Hadley: You can take it from the library, yes. And in fact I’ve just, to be completely sordid, I've just had my lovely PLR payment, which is Public Lending Right payment. Ben Holden: Yes, very important for authors. Tessa Hadley: Very important for authors - a great victory for authors and very valuable. Asher Craig: Is that a new…? Tessa Hadley: It's quite a long time now but, I'm afraid I’m not going to know which decade it was achieved in, but every author is paid an allotted amount according to how many times their book is borrowed. Asher Craig: So, interesting because my daughter worked for PRS the Performing Rights Society, so it’s exactly the same kind of, same thing. Well, that's brilliant. Well done. Tessa Hadley: It’s wonderful, I know. Ben Holden: I got mine as well. It's amazing reading actually, seeing…it's really lovely to see each title, how many people take them out. Tessa Hadley: Yeah, it is. And of course it invests in the most literal writers in libraries and of course, writers want their books to be in libraries anyway, more for better reasons. But it does, it gives a solid material connection between us and the books we write and these places. Asher Craig: Does that also relate to kind of online reading and all of your books online? Ben Holden: Yes, it does take into account digital borrowing. Asher Craig: Oh, excellent. Tessa Hadley: Yes, it does. They worked out a complicated system for that. And then there's also ALCS which is the Author's Licensing and Copyright Society and wherever your books are used for copywriting, teaching, or anything like that, you also get a payment. Asher Craig: Excellent. Ben Holden: There is one, as we’re on library books as well and borrowings, there is one library reference in Late in the Day that I spotted, with my eagle eyed library lenses on it. Tessa Hadley: I don’t know that I can remember it! Ben Holden: I couldn’t help but notice it but one of your, I think it's Christine or Lydia, I forget, sorry, which character but one of your characters says, they compare people to library books and so “people aren't available, are they, to be taken out, and given back like a library book, date stamped”. Which is great. And completely right of course! But again, it's that sort of conditionality of life or the provisionality of how time passes and our relationships, how they evolve, which you so beautifully explore in the book. Tessa Hadley: Well I love both Asher and I being so taken as little girls by the bureaucracy of the library: the stamp, the card index, the tickets.  And obviously, I suppose the irony is that what you're doing inside a library is crazy and free and you can travel anywhere in your head and you can go there, but there is this other side of it, this controlling side, you know. So I suppose that's what my character is saying there, that the crazy and free with people is great, and the trying to control it and thinking you own people and you've got their card in the index, or their card is in your ticket – that’s not on. Asher Craig: Yeah, do you know, just as you're talking, it's just these little snapshots that are coming through. Because do you remember they used to, it was those little things that you slotted into the… oh it was just, it was a great system! Tessa Hadley: It was a good system, it was very appealing! They took the little thing out of the library book, and put it in your ticket and put it in their box and I think on this photograph, here is where those boxes were, they were all held inside that place. Asher Craig: Yes! So the times when we used to sneak, you know, hopefully they weren't seeing and I used to open up the drawers, because I was just really fascinated not just about the books, but yes, even administratively, the bureaucracy and how it was managed and how it worked. Tessa Hadley: A councillor in the making, obviously! Asher Craig: Do you know something, I was sitting there thinking to myself, you know, where does it kind of come from because, but yeah, I suppose I had no idea that my visits to the library, would end up with me overseeing the management of the very said library! Tessa Hadley: Yeah, I know. But you were looking straightaway at the system, you see, weren’t you? Asher Craig: I did, I did - it’s terrible! [Laughs] Tessa Hadley: No, no! But we need a system in order to have libraries, in order to get inside books and escape, and be free. Ben Holden: And it's lovely listening to you both now, looking back, reminiscing; it's almost like you're looking at your childhood selves, out in the library space there - a bit like your novels, Tessa, you know the interplay between past, present, future and how they collide, ricochet. Asher Craig: Yeah. Because the other thing that I used to do when I used to come to the library, we used to go to ABC Whiteladies Road cinema. Yeah, and we used to sing - oh my god it was great! [Laughter] So, every Saturday, you know, me and my brothers and sisters and all the children in and around the community Redland. ABC Whiteladies Road, the cinema, and they used to have a kind of like the children's - I think it was in between like 10 and 12… Tessa Hadley: Pretty chaotic and rowdy… Asher Craig: ...very chaotic, very rowdy…watch cartoons, watching films. It was just, again, another great escape and then after, you know, we'd maybe run up here and come into the library and have a read and have a look at the books. Tessa Hadley: This is how community is made. Asher Craig: Yeah. Ben Holden: One other element of the novel Tessa is the again, in terms of the generations, but also the non-linear approach, is the interplay between those generations. In one moment, one of the older characters says “they're more puritanical than us, this generation of children”. Again, listening to you talk about you guys and your youth - now, of course, this is a novel, it's not your memoir, so I get that it's not necessarily your opinion - but I was quite struck by that. And obviously, there are three generations at play, I should say also, because their elderly parents as well are in the mix and they're fantastic characters there. But, were you consciously wanting to sort of traverse the intergenerational dynamics and explore that a bit? Tessa Hadley: Yeah, and again, honestly, I think that goes back to Anne of Green Gables. Not so much Swallows and Amazons which is one of those children's books fixed in a child time where the adults are peripheral, they give permission, don't they.  At the beginning of Swallows and Amazons, I don’t know if you remember the telegram, but it said: “If not duffers”, the mother telegrams to the dad who's away in the Navy, “can the children go out on the boat?” He replies: “If not duffers won't drown, if duffers best drowned.” Speaks from another era [laughs]. Anyway, enough of that. That's children's world. But Anne of Green Gables wasn't. The reason one loved it was that it was a taste of the adult world in which children grew up, fell in love, got married and had children. And from early, I had a hunger for that. Again, this is like me looking at the old people in thinking they were young once, a hunger for that generational thing. So that when I came to write my own books, I've always written about families, and I think my very, very first book Accidents in the Home, actually had a family tree at the beginning of it. As a reader I love books with the family tree in them. Asher Craig: Do you? So, again, the last three, four years I have been looking at my own ancestry, okay, because my children keep saying to me, “Listen Mum, you have actually done so much in your life, you need to write this down. People need to understand the history; what's happened in Bristol, what's happened in our life.” You know, my parents died at an early age, so my children didn't grow up with their maternal grandparents. But I have all this information in here and I want to pass it on, and actually a couple of days ago, I was talking to my middle daughter, Khadija, and she says, “Mum, do you know something, I mean, we've got snippets, but I don't think we've really sat down and you’ve really told us everything there is about Granddad and Grandma, and who we are and our history.” And in doing my ancestry, I mean, you do get obsessed, once you start you somehow can't stop. And for me, it was a revelation because it has revealed that on my father's side, where I thought was a very small family, has actually turned out to be a flippin’ village [laughs] you know going back, and I also, my great-great-great-grandfather is a white Irishman [laughs], called David Craig. Tessa Hadley: So that’s where Craig comes from. Asher Craig: Yeah, that's where Craig, that's kind of where Craig comes from. But then going back, it's just been fascinating. Ben Holden: The most important sort of cornerstones or repositories for accessing those kinds of stories and preserving those stories are where we are today and these libraries and the archival service they offer local communities and preserving those stories so that we can all do it but also, they're not forgotten. Asher Craig: Yeah, exactly. And libraries are fundamentally really, really important. And yes, in the last couple of years have been quite testing for us here in the city, but I'm glad we've kind of come through it and we're looking positively at how we can make libraries a real kind of hub, particularly in those areas of the city where the footfall or the use of libraries has actually gone down for the use of books, you know, kind of repository for books. Because somewhere like here, Redland, local councillors and obviously Friends of Library groups - very vocal group... Ben Holden: They, by the way, planted a beautiful herb garden, I noticed on the way in as well - hats off to them too. Asher Craig: Oh, I'll have a look at that. Two years ago, there was the whole thing about the £30 million hole that we had. I'm going to go politics now because I, I think it's important that people understand the journey. Ben Holden: Yeah, do talk us through it because I mean, it's heartening that Bristol hasn't closed a library. Asher Craig: And we're not going to, because I think there's this kind of view, “Oh, it's gonna happen and you've only saved them up until a certain point”. I got elected in 2016 and I understand that back in 2015 the libraries had gone through a big consultation. I think they closed the library, what was the old library in Eastville, and that became a kind of community run library, and they were just tinkering around the edges. But when our administration arrived, you know, we thought everything was rosy in the garden, and then, you know, Marvin calls a meeting and says, “Hey, there's a huge financial hole in the budget.” Promises that were made around savings had just been kicked into the long grass by the previous administration and we were faced with this 30 million hole, and we had to find some way of saving it, and I think we did the sums and if we just wanted to make one cut, it would have meant getting rid of 1000 members of staff - that is the equivalent to how big a hole it was. And so obviously, we had to look right across the whole organization. We put the shutters down; staff couldn't spend any money because we really needed to get to the bottom of what was happening and what we were going to do to steady the ship. It took nearly two years. The first two years of our administration was spent trying to kind of manage the huge deficit that we had. And I have to say we've come out the other end and we always said that what we've got to do is try and protect the most vulnerable and the most disadvantaged, but we do acknowledge that whatever we do, it's going to be painful for everybody in the city, but what we want to do is lessen the pain for those who are going to be impacted the worst. So yes, we made some really difficult decisions. One of them, we were looking at the libraries - and I had responsibility for libraries - I was looking at the numbers, the footfall, you know, we have all of this information. And we were really looking at how we could kind of restructure the libraries; I talked to other counterparts in different cities. So listening to them, I was trying to come up with a model that would work, so maybe having a series of like super libraries, and then you know, that kind of hub and spoke model but, you know, less is more kind of thing. I had no idea that it would unleash the beast [laughs]. And, you know, I talk about Bristol as being global, local, and vocal [laughs], vocal being the key word there, and obviously it just kind of unleashed this barrage. Ben Holden: The idea that you might close some of these libraries? Asher Craig: Yeah, of course. And I do get it, particularly from those who had a voice because it was interesting that those who have a voice, who have the social capital to be able to kind of make the noise, come to the council, etc. But when you go to St Paul’s, when you go to Hartcliffe, where there was hardly any footfall, you can see it for yourselves. So it was trying to look at a kind of different model, but then at the same time thinking, “Well, if we do take out libraries from those particular communities, then it will be gone forever”. So the one thing I will say is we do listen, you know. I'm somebody who listens. I'm poacher turned gamekeeper, so I come from the community, I get it. I'm Bristolian so I understand how much people care about libraries. It just got to a stage where we've got to find a solution but we also have to try and bring our libraries up to date because in some areas, the library, or the building known as the library, is the only escape for all communities; there's no community centres, there are no sports centres, there’s nothing. And Marvin put the funding back in and he said, “Okay, let's halt it but we also have to look fundamentally at a new strategy for the library service.” So we're looking at still sustaining the 27 libraries as they are, and the libraries being at the heart of that, and each library will be different. So there will be a whole set of services that will continue to be delivered. We had a series of conversations last year with the community and as a result of that, again, thank you to the Mayor, he found another £110,000 pounds. So each Friends of Library group, we've allocated £1,000 to those groups, do with it what you will; then we have £3,000 that they can kind of bid into to develop programmes, ideas, projects, etc. Do you think that we want to make cuts? We want to invest, you know, but the budgets have been squeezed - we've lost 70% of the overall income of grants that used to come to the local authority over 10 years. So we've got less money, but the demand is ridiculously more. Ben Holden: To commend you, it’s great for Bristol that you haven't cut or closed any of those libraries. The trick, of course, is to ensure that you can maximize them. Asher Craig: Most definitely. Ben Holden: As you're saying, for the communities and, you know, it's so short sighted. We've travelled up and down the land going to different libraries and meeting librarians and authors and the word that often comes up is “short sighted” in terms of the closures because it's myopic, in terms of the holistic benefits, but also the returns for communities and for councils and jurisdictions or authorities for what is often seen as low hanging fruit and it’s absolutely nuts to regard it in that way. So I'm very pleased that you haven't closed them now you can invest in them. Asher Craig: No, we haven’t closed them and not only will we invest in what we have, but obviously, there are, there's a lot of new kind of developments happening. So there is also opportunities, you know, that some Friends of groups and councillors have come to me and said, “Ooh, Asher, do you know something, we want a new library, you could actually potentially close this one, but build a brand new one”, which is, you know, again, to try and increase the footfall. So having the library in an area where, you know, people go to the supermarket or go to the GP surgery; “Ooh, I can nip into the library”. If you're just sitting standalone in the middle of nowhere, then obviously the footfall is going to remain where it is. So in some regards, some may be replaced because we don't own every single library; some of them we do lease; the majority we do own, but there is scope for us to also purposely design in new library spaces in some of the new developments that are happening over in Hartcliffe for example, Hengrove, Lockleaze will get a brand new library so the one that they have there, that will move into kind of the new development. So, yeah. Ben Holden: It’s important that, you know, this was built in 1880 and of course, these buildings need to be fit for purpose for 2020 usage in terms of access, etc. At the same time, you know, this is such a striking building, as Tessa was describing at the top of the conversation, and such a beacon, you know, listening to both what it meant to you growing up, here we are, again, you've come back, and there's a real power to it, this building. Tessa Hadley: And knowing when you do come in as a child or a young person that you are coming to a place that's been used by your community for a hundred, getting on for a hundred and fifty years, has enormous significance. Space is not just a utility; space is history and meaning and if you come to this place where others have used it before you and maybe your grandmother says, “Oh, I used to go there” or your mother says “I used that”… Ben Holden: Yes, and I have to say in your novel, you know, the buildings and in your other novels, you know, like The Past, the house in The Past, that's such a big hub for that story; but in Late in the Day, you know the studio but also just listening to you describing that room as Christine waits, you know, your usage of the architecture physically and how it informs psychologically on your characters is always such a joy in your writing. Tessa Hadley: Space is a metaphor; you don't have to work at that, it just is. The spaces that we inhabit are full of our story and what we're doing with them and what we feel about them. Asher Craig: It’s history. You know, this building is history, it's full of history, it evokes a lot of really good memories for me, and everyone, and Tess, and everyone else who uses it, so I get it [Laughs]. I definitely get it. Ben Holden: Yeah, we know, we can hear that coming through loud and clear. Well, as this is a podcast about libraries and bookshops, I always like to ask my guests, without wishing to pry, how you choose to organise, and obviously you quite enjoyed the cataloguing when you were kids, but how do you - and Tessa you even were cataloguing, literally a mini librarian at home, playing librarian. Tessa Hadley: Literally, mini librarian - letting my brother borrow books, but making sure he looked after them well. Ben Holden: And books have obviously become your life's work, so this begs the question how you choose to organise your reading life. Tessa Hadley: I mean, one of the weird things that happens when you're a writer is that people send you an incredible amount of books for free and almost to the point of, “What am I going to do with all these?!” and having to get rid of them. Luckily, we have, I live in London now, and at Kilburn station, there's a library exchange where you can just take books down, and I'm doing it all the time, taking the books that I don't want to keep down, somebody else has them. I love that, that's a lovely model of free exchange. But on the books I do love and want to keep and have, in many cases lived with now for forty and fifty years, I think I do it by nationality, by cultural coherence, so I've got a sort of Russian shelf, and an African shelf and a couple of Irish shelves. That's odd, isn't it? Ben Holden: Interesting, it’s like a cartography. Tessa Hadley: It is, and it's not, you know, consistent and I obviously haven't got a British shelf because that's all the rest, so in other places it will be “These writers” and it's kind of “These writers that I think that way about; these writers I'm very close to their work, they’re in a special place”. And then, actually, we have this cottage in Somerset, and it's “Oh, those writers that I quite like but I don't care about”, they go down to Somerset - actually I probably shouldn't say that out loud because then I’ll have friends coming to stay in Somerset thinking “There's my book on the shelf of the books she doesn't care for so much”. It's not a system I've really worked out. It's been arrived at in an impromptu way over the years. Ben Holden: Do you read, because we're talking about the tactileness, do you read e-books? Tessa Hadley: I don't, I mean I have on occasion but really, I don't like them. I'm perfectly happy with them existing, they’re another way of reading and young kids are so electronic, but actually, the truth is about the market is that it's simply plateaued and nobody now thinks that physical books are going to be replaced by e-books, not in Britain, it’s not going to happen. Ben Holden: Yeah, having been mooted as the second coming or the new vanguard. Tessa Hadley: Exactly, absolutely, that didn't happen, because the book is a perfect technology: portable, physically attractive, incredibly good to read. Whereas an electronic book, you don't, for instance, know how far away…you do know how far through the book you are by a horrible little line, but it's not the same as feeling the pages in your hands, sticking something in there, turning a corner down. I’ve no doubt that there's some horrible electronic thing called ‘turn the corner down’, but that’s not as good [laughs]. So everything about a physical book works to a reading experience with perfection, so much better than scrolls, this invention of the codex, that is the kind of book we read, is a genius in itself. And it's here to stay and I love them. I’m fine with e-books, but myself I very rarely read them, don't like them. Ben Holden: Agreed. Well, you're preaching to the choir. Asher? Asher Craig: Okay, so for a child who was obsessed [laughs] with the systems of library books, that is just not how it works in my house. So I've got quite a large house and in my back room, I actually, when I bought the house, there was already a ready-made beautiful bookcase already built in, you know, glass windows, open. Tessa Hadley: Oh, lovely. Asher Craig: So when I arrived, I stuck all of my books in there, but out of sight out of mind, because my children keep saying to me, “Mum, you need to do something with these books. You're never going to read them again, or you need to donate them or you need to…” and they're right, I do need to, because in my living room, those are the books that I actually read. So I have another bookshelf, but I actually do it in order of size of the book [laughs]. Tessa Hadley: Perfectly valid way! Asher Craig: I just like the largest book first, and yeah, I just make it go down to the smallest, tiny, little inspirational pamphlets and then somebody gives me a book and then I shove it in I think “Oh, right this is the size of the book” and that is how… Ben Holden: Well, if you do, you know, read them in one sitting as you're saying then that makes total sense. Thank you for letting me pry in that way. And if it's alright, we might go and browse as we're doing this trip down memory lane if you don't mind, and you could choose a book, Tessa, from the shelves of Redmond Library and see if Anne of Green Gables is still there. Tessa Hadley: I've got a feeling she'll have been banished but I'm hoping to be proved wrong. Ben Holden: Let's go and see if she is – maybe not the exact same copy, but you never know. Asher Craig: Well, you never know. Ben Holden: And then yeah, we can see, I don't know if you'll still be on the system, but I'm sure they'll loan you a book. Tessa Hadley: But I’m trying to remember who - I just got it – who wrote it, I was thinking, because we need to…its L M Montgomery. I think I'm right, that just flooded back into my mind. I wouldn't have known I knew it, but I think that's right. Ben Holden: Sounds right. Well, let's go see. Thank you. Asher Craig: Thank you very much. Tessa Hadley: Thank you, Ben. ~ Tessa Hadley is invited to browse the shelves of Redland Library and select a book of her choice ~ Asher Craig: The librarian did say that somebody had taken out Anne of Green Gables recently so they have one copy then. Tessa Hadley: Right, good. Good. Ben Holden: Well, that's good to know. Is there anything else Tessa that you wanted to browse? The famous line from this one was on my mind re-reading your work; “The past is a foreign country.” Tessa Hadley: Yes, great line, isn't it? Even though much quoted, but it remains so resonant. Ben Holden: The Go-Between. Tessa Hadley: Yes, wonderful. I'd love to re-read that sometime soon. I do still love a library. Without a library, you can't go around the shelves, having a look at what things are like. That's a very underrated, that’s an absolutely super book. Ben Holden: Oh really? Early One Morning by Virginia Bailey. Now you're browsing for me which wasn't really the idea. I'll take that recommendation, thank you. Well, I'm sorry they don’t have Anne of Green Gables. Tessa Hadley: I know. I feel a bit…it would have just been lovely to find it. Ben Holden: But they could order it in principle, so it would still be possible Tessa Hadley: Yes, yes. And they had an Anne of Green Gables party, which I think is almost better than finding the book itself. [Laughter] [END] Thanks for listening to Ex libris. If you've made it this far, chances are you've enjoyed some of this episode, featuring superb Tessa Hadley. So please, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your brain food. That way you'll help us champion libraries. You can win signed copies of not one, but three of Tessa's novels, including the brilliant Late in the Day, via social media. Find me on Twitter and Instagram: @thatbenholden. To see those handsome photos of Redland Library yesteryear that we were admiring and discover loads more about this show, please visit our website: exlibrispodcast.com [https://www.exlibrispodcast.com/]. Ex libris is produced by Chris Sharp and myself. Its music is composed and performed by Adam Pleath. Ex libris is brought to you in association with the Lightbulb Trust which illuminates lives via literacy and learning, providing opportunities to shine. Until the next time, see you at the library!

Gyles Brandreth has been entertaining Brits for decades - charming multiple generations on shows such as Just A Minute, The One Show, Celebrity Gogglebox and Countdown. His many books include a series of novels featuring his fellow wit Oscar Wilde and a recent best-selling celebration of good punctuation, spelling and grammar,Have you Eaten Grandma? His latest offering is the anthologyDancing by the Light of the Moon,which celebrates the magic of learning poetry by heart. ‘Words have been my life,’ Gyles says during this episode’s conversation. He also describes bookshops as ‘safe havens in an uncivilised world’ and talks of his time in government, during the 1990s, when his remit at the Department of Culture included crafting policy for libraries. Gyles lives in West London and selected Barnes Bookshop, run by Venetia Vyvyan, as his home-from-home venue for Ex Libris. It is a beautiful local bookshop of more than 30 years’ standing. When making that choice, Gyles described Venetia as ‘a model of everything a brilliant independent bookseller should be.’ ... A full transcript of this episode of Ex Libris, featuring Gyles Brandreth, runs below: Gyles Brandreth has been entertaining Brits for decades and his broadcasting brilliance continues to charm multiple generations, be it on ‘Just a Minute’, ‘The One Show’, ‘Celebrity Gogglebox’ or his regular appearances on the likes of ‘QI’ and ‘Have I Got News for you’.  Gyles is also an actor and Chancellor of the University of Chester.  He served in government as Lord Commissioner of the Treasury.  It is primarily his writer hat, though, that I want him to don today.  Charles’s many books include a series of novels about his fellow wit, Oscar Wilde, and a recent best-selling celebration of good punctuation, spelling and grammar, ‘Have you eaten grandma’?  His latest offering is the anthology ‘Dancing by the Light of the Moon’, which celebrates the magic of learning poetry by heart.  Gyles lives in West London and has selected Barnes bookshop run by Venetia Vyvyan as his home from home for today.  When making the choice, Gyles described Venetia to me as:  “a model of everything a brilliant independent bookseller should be”. So here's a really bad, unwitty, little poem for you: “lest there be repetition, or repetition or dread deviation, oh, and by the way, we happen to be recording this on Valentine's Day, let alone hesitation, let's commence this very minute... the conversation." Interview Ben Holden: Gyles, Venetia, thank you so much for seeing us here in beautiful Barnes bookshop today.   Gyles, question number one, obviously, is why Barnes bookshop, it was the first place you wanted to come to today? Gyles Brandreth: Because I love a bookshop, anyway.  A bookshop for me is one of the safe havens in an uncivilised world.  If one is feeling low, you've got to walk down the high street or side street, or whatever, and find a bookshop.  And suddenly, as you go through the door, you'll feel less low.  As you begin to browse the shelves, your spirits lift.  As you come down into the basement of this bookshop, you think, “Oh, the world's a good place.  After all, everything's all right”.  And that's been part and parcel of my life, all my life. As a child, I was brought up in London, and Barnes is in south-west London, and it's south of the river.  And, of course, until I was an adult, I'd never been south of the river, didn't think one dared go south of the river; and I was brought up really in the West End; my parents lived in a block of flats, Victorian mansion flats, in Baker Street.  Near us there was a bookshop called ‘Bumpus’, older listeners will remember Bumpus, but almost all your listeners really, whatever vintage, will remember ‘Foyles’.  ‘Foyles’ bookshop still exists on the Charing Cross road, they now have other branches, but when I was a boy, going back a long way now, in the 1950s, as a child, I discovered Foyles bookshop.  It was heaven on earth, because it was chaotic, it was completely chaotic.  Did you go to Foyles in the old days? Venetia Vyvyan: I did, but I was more of a John Sandoe person, I'm afraid. Gyles Brandreth: That's good.  We have got middlebrow, I represent middlebrow, and we have highbrow.  Let me tell you what the middlebrow child did, the middlebrow child went to Foyles.  Now, Foyles bookshop was run then by a lady called Miss Foyle, Christina Foyle, who lived to a great age, and she ran this chaotic bookshop, I say chaotic, it truly was.  Books were never properly unpacked, never properly put on the shelf; there were boxes everywhere, books, trailing everywhere, and to get a book was quite a complicated process - you chose your book, you then took your book to one counter where you got a receipt for the book, you took that receipt to a till, you paid at the till, your money was then sent in a tube around the shop, you got another receipt back, you took that receipt back to the person to get your book, but by then the person will have often put your book back on the shelf or sold it to somebody else; it was complete chaos!  And sadly, it was discovered, one of the reasons it was chaos, was that ultimately Miss Foyle did not have her..., ultimately she was being taken advantage of, in fact, I think some of the staff eventually had their hands in the till and it all became a little bit, anyway... Fortunately, her nephew, Christpher Foyle, came on board and put the whole thing pointing in the right direction.  But I loved going there, and what was wonderful about it was, on many floors, you could spend a whole day in the bookshop, and I realised my parents didn't really like me very much, because I was sent out every day after breakfast, I was sent out, on Sundays it was alright, because I could go to church, and I would go to several churches, I would sing in two choirs, I was the server at St Stephen’s, Gloucester road, - when we come to dropping literary names, that was when I met T.S. Eliot, but we'll come on to that -, because she's got better names to drop than me, because of her John Sandoe years; but, eventually, I discovered Foyles on a weekday, and I could go in there literally at ten in the morning, and be there at five - so many departments, so much to discover, coffee shops nearby.  There's nothing more fun than going into a bookshop.  And you meet lovely people, the other customers by definition, and the staff.  Tell us about your childhood in bookshops. Venetia Vyvyan: Well, I was brought up in Chelsea, my parents built their own house just off Cheyne Walk, and so, I had John Sandoe near Sloane Square. Gyles Brandreth: What kind of bookshop was it? Venetia Vyvyan: That was shambolic in the days of John Sandoe himself.  Now it's much cleaner, but I remember going in there, and I preferred it to WH Smith, which was in Sloane Square, and in those days, WH Smith were proper book shops.  And I suppose, we also had a place in the country, and in Wantage, there was also a wonderful bookshop, and it was there first that I really found a bookseller who understood me, and he would always put things on one side and say, “I have this, it's just come in”, and my father would raise his eyes to the heavens, because it meant another book being brought into the house. Ben Holden: And your fate was sealed.  You've since become a great bookseller yourself, was that where it all started? Venetia Vyvyan: It was, but actually I couldn't read by the age of nine, because I had dyslexia, and nobody knew and it wasn't really very well known in those days.  And so I memorised things at school, and that's how I got away with not being able to read until I was nine. Gyles Brandreth: I’m surprised you weren't sent to my mother.  My mother was a pioneer teacher of people with dyslexia.  She worked with a man called MacDonald Critchley in the 1950s, and through the sixties and seventies, she was one of the leading people in London helping children with dyslexia. Venetia Vyvyan: Was she at the Helen Arkell Centre? Gyles Brandreth: She was indeed! Venetia Vyvyan: I went to the Helen Arkell Centre. Gyles Brandreth: Well, I'm surprised you weren't put under her charge. Venetia Vyvyan: I might have been. Gyles Brandreth: You would have remembered, people did remember my mother.  My parents did, of course, like me, but when I was sent away to boarding school, I started a school bookshop.  And the mistake I made, bless my heart, was, because I could order all the books, you see, to sell in the school bookshop, so I ordered the books I wanted, I couldn't understand why none of them were selling, because I was just ordering the books I liked.  And I quickly learned that you actually have got to choose books that the customers want.  How did you learn about book selling? Venetia Vyvyan: Well, I learned from the greatest bookseller I've known, which was John Saumarez Smith at Heywood Hill books (in Mayfair), and he was very generous with his knowledge. Gyles Brandreth: How do you stock a bookshop?  How do you choose what to have? Venetia Vyvyan: Well, he would say you start with the things that you enjoy, because those are the things you can recommend, but then you learn from other people, you learn from the customers, you learn from the authors that come in.  And I learned a tremendous amount from him. Ben Holden: So which books in your youth, or childhood in Foyles, which are the key ones? Gyles Brandreth: Well, formative books, I do remember 1960 when I was at my prep school, ordering the copy of ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover’.  ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was originally published in the 1920s by D. H. Lawrence, and it was a banned book, it couldn't be published in this country, and it was prosecuted.  Penguin decided that they were going to publish ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in 1960, and a prosecution was taken out, because it was deemed to be obscene.  There was a great, famous court case, and it was found not guilty.  So Penguin published it.  I was about 11 at the time, but I read about this, I was an enthusiastic book collector, I loved books, books have been my life.  I'm much happier with books than with people, to be honest, I'm coping with you; and Venetia, I'm happy with her, because she basically smells of books in a good way! So I wrote off, because I thought I can't, don't dare go into the shop, because they’re not going to sell it to a 11 year old, I wrote off to Penguin, and I got a copy sent to my prep school, and unfortunately, it was in a brown envelope, but it had a Penguin label on it.  So, clearly, the teachers saw and they guessed, but well done them.  The teacher read it first, and then let me have my own copy, and said, “You may read it”.  So that's the book I remember buying. But I love physically having books; I've got tens of thousands of books at home.  My wife says, “You must get rid of them all”, or most of them, because she's told me that I keep everything.  I've got 1000 jumpers, 1000 teddy-bears, tens of thousands of books.  She says, “When you die, before I call the undertaker, I'll be calling the people who supply the skips and it's all going!”  Because I've acquired books, most of which I've never read.  I don't think you need to read a book, but owning a book is part of it. Interestingly, my preference for schoolboy books was Frank Richards, do you know who I mean by Frank Richards?  Now, Frank Richards was the most prolific English author of the 20th century and nobody's heard of him.  Frank Richards - in excess of 80 million words.  His real name was Charles Hamilton; he lived, he died; I saw him once at a distance in about 1960 just before he died, in Broadstairs.  I couldn't believe it, my hero.  He created one of the great characters of the 20th century, in about 1904; he inspired Harry Potter, his books, in fact, are very like the world of Harry Potter.  Frank Richards created ‘Billie Bunter’, ‘Greyfriars school’, ‘Fat Owl of the Remove’, ‘Mr Quelch’- all those boys, those schoolboy yarns; he also created a series about a girl who was tubby called Bessie Bunter.  He wrote two comics - ‘Magnet and Gem’, they call them comics, they weren't strip cartoon comics, they were like stories for boys and girls; and he wrote those in the first decade of the 20th century, in the teens, in the twenties and thirties.  He had a bit of a gambling addiction, lost all his money, made a lot of money on the tables in the south of France, and then wrote novels about Billie Bunter.  And I'm one of the presidents of the Billie Bunter Society. But I'm also involved, I think, in the Enid Blyton Society, the Rupert Bear society, I’m into all that, I've never really left my childhood, and I think that probably is why I like being in a bookshop.  This used to be the children's….we’re downstairs at your bookshop. Venetia Vyvyan: We are, well, we do have a whole wall of children's books, but it was because the perambulators got bigger and bigger, and parents didn't want to leave their babies upstairs. Gyles Brandreth: Where’s the new shop going to be, still in Barnes? Venetia Vyvyan: Oh yes, it's going to be just down the road near the Wetland Centre. Ben Holden: So the shop’s been here for thirty plus years? Venetia Vyvyan: Yes, it has. Ben Holden: You're the latest custodian. Venetia Vyvyan: I am the latest custodian. Gyles Brandreth: Just to finish on childhood reading, I discovered when I was quite young at prep school, Agatha Christie, and I adored Agatha Christie.  The more sophisticated teachers said, “You should try Ngaio Marsh, because you're a bright boy”, and they felt Agatha Christie was a bit… Ben Holden: Ngaio Marsh? Gyles Brandreth: I think she's a New Zealand writer. Venetia Vyvyan: Yes, she is. Gyles Brandreth: And she wrote murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie vein.  I loved Agatha Christie, it’s rather like people are snobbish about Enid Blyton as well.  But some of Enid Blyton, particularly ‘The Faraway Tree’, - you remember that one?-, are magical stories, and I was lucky enough to become friendly with Enid Blyton's daughters, who had a very different view about Enid Blyton.  One adored her mother, thought she was the best thing who ever lived; the other had reservations about her mother, felt she’d rather blighted her childhood and wasn't necessarily a good influence on either her or the world.  So there are two views about Enid Blyton, but I'm on the side of Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie.  I'm on the side of people who popularise things, I think it's good to get children into reading, and I think it's good to read everything and anything. Venetia Vyvyan: Oh absolutely, and I would almost go so far as to say that you have to beware of school reading lists, because, very often, they're not updated.  And it's meant to be entertainment, reading; it's not meant to improve a childish mind, it's meant to be fun.  And with so many, you know, competitive things in this world, you know, screens and such like, it has to be fun above all. Ben Holden: Are you happy not to finish the book when you've started one, speaking of it being fun? Venetia Vyvyan: I’m a reluctant non-finisher of books.  I'd rather get to the end and then say, “That was rubbish!”. Gyles Brandreth: I think it may be a generational thing.  I think once you’ve made a commitment, you keep going with it.  But I'm an unfortunately very slow reader.  It's two minutes in a page, whether it's Tolstoy or Tom and Jerry, for me, I’m just very, very slow. I'm currently reading amazingly, ‘The Diaries of Harold Macmillan’, who was the prime minister in the late fifties and early 1960s, in fact, at the time that Lady Chatterley was published - maybe I just can't escape my childhood!  And I'm reading this book, I've got it for research purposes in a second-hand copy, because I was writing about Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and I heard there was some quite interesting stuff about cabinet discussions about what Prince Philip, what his title should be in the 1950s when the Queen became queen, what were they going to call him?  Were they going to call him Prince Consort, Prince of the Commonwealth...Anyway, I got this book, and Harold Macmillan was a voracious reader from the Macmillan publishing family; he would, even when he was Prime Minister, be reading 50 books a year, but he is now Minister for Housing and he's reading about 150 books a year, two or three books a week, and we're talking about big books.  Comfort reading for him was Anthony Trollope, he would go back to the Barsetshire Chronicles.  Every time there was a crisis, Winston Churchill playing up, he turns to Dr. Thorne, but he's also reading people like Macaulay, great Victorian history books, extraordinary, and it's clear for him, affairs of state weighing him down, he goes into his study or library, gets out one of these books, and it solves the problem. Ben Holden: Do you find it reassuring for a leader to be a great reader?  In the Obama vein?  Obama is a great reader and a great writer.  Nicola Sturgeon is a great reader. Venetia Vyvyan: And David Cameron too - he reads a lot. Gyles Brandreth: And the present Prime Minister has read quite a lot, in his time. Ben Holden: There’s something reassuring about that. Gyles Brandreth: Well, I think that it shows that they’ve got what people used to call a ‘hinterland’ which is good.  I was lucky enough, when I was an MP, to know Denis Healey who was the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Defence Secretary, blessed with a marvellous wife and a great constitution, but he had a great hinterland, he was a photographer, he read voraciously.  I mean, books furnish your mind as well, you want to feel that people have lived a little bit. So I'm glad you're a slow reader too.  What do you read now? Venetia Vyvyan: I just finished in proof, so it's coming out in April, the new Anne Tyler.  I enjoyed it very much.  Nobody writes about middle America, the invisible people, better than she does.  And I have to say that whatever time I get to bed, I always read, whether it's two o'clock in the morning, I will always read for maybe 10 minutes, half an hour. Gyles Brandreth: I can't go to sleep without reading, even if it's for 30 seconds, even if, as it were, my wife has already gone to sleep, the lights are out, I have to almost with a torch.  But I remember as a child loving going around with one of those torches that has three colours - red, green, as well as the yellow.  And I remember, this will amuse you, I do remember reading ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, at my prep school, red blankets, I remember, white sheets, green duvet, and going down there with this torch, and I made it green to make it more spooky. Venetia Vyvyan: Conan-Doyle is wonderful. Gyles Brandreth: Isn’t he?  Conan-Doyle changed my life.  I discovered the autobiography of Arthur Conan-Doyle in the library of the House of Commons, and I read that book and it changed my life.  But before we get to that, one of the things I keep on my bedside, are diaries, I write a diary, I’ve published two volumes of diaries, and there's talk of a third.  But anyway, I read other people's diaries, and the reason is they're perfect bedside reading, because often the entry is quite short.  I love Virginia Woolf’s diaries.  I love political diaries, I love Chipps Channon, I love Harold Nicolson, I quite like Alan Clark. Ben Holden: Current diarists? Gyles Brandreth: Oh, the world since 1959 has been a closed book to me.  Who are the current diarists?  To be honest, if I can't be in my childhood, I want to be in the 1890s.  But I love coming into a bookshop like this, because it's timeless and it's like going into a time free zone.  You can be here, as modern as tomorrow, Venetia has got all the latest bestsellers; she's got books that are merely collections of emojis, hardly any words in them at all, she does all that, she needs to make her money, fair enough, but it's as modern as tomorrow, with a lot of time for yesterday.  And that's what I love about a bookshop, you can get it all. Ben Holden: Your new anthology is in the window upstairs and on the counter. Gyles Brandreth: Thank you for putting it in the window!  But in fairness, Venetia really does support local authors.  Does it make a difference having a book in the window? Venetia Vyvyan: Yes, I would say so. Gyles Brandreth: But you need to change them, because often my wife and I go for a walk of an evening, we say we'll walk as far as the bookshop and back, and we come to look in the window. Ben Holden: You were changing the window when we arrived… Venetia Vyvyan: Yes, we were putting fake grass in it.  Harper Collins have given us fake grass and fake spring flowers, because it's the anniversary of Judith Kerr’s birth, or rather ‘The Tiger who came to Tea’.  So we have a Judith Kerr window and a little bit of Roger McGough who's a local author. Gyles Brandreth: Come to Barnes Church Street.  When’s the moving happening? Venetia Vyvyan: In a month's time. On your birthday. Ben Holden: Also your wife's birthday as I discovered. Gyles Brandreth: The 14th of March, also the birthday of Albert Einstein and Michael Caine, not a lot of people know that.  And speaking of poets, who is the best selling English poet today, without a doubt, a lady poet, with a new anthology out last Christmas? Ben Holden: I know, I know the answer to this. Pam Ayres. Gyles Brandreth: Pam Ayres.  [14th March] is also her birthday.  Tom Stoppard’s new play just opened; great writer; gave me a poem, I told him my wife was born on the 14th of March; he said, “I'll give you a poem for your wife. It's actually Albert Einstein's birthday too. I've written a poem called the 14th of March”.  This is the poem which I will repeat with permission, no royalties required, given to me by Tom Stoppard, I can recite it to you: 14th of March Einstein born quite unprepared for e to equal MC squared. Ben Holden: And it's Pi Day.  Did your wife know that?  Every day has to be a celebration of some sort. So it's because of the American ordering of month-day-year, but 0314 means that our birthday is also Pi Day. Gyles Brandreth: Well, I'm pleased to hear that.  Isn't it also the Mad Hatter's birthday?  The day of the tea party? Ben Holden: I looked up, because your new anthology is also about memory, I looked up the record for the number of digits remembered of Pi, because obviously it goes on and on and on.  Can you guess how many roughly? Gyles Brandreth: Tell us. Ben Holden: 70,000. Gyles Brandreth: Wow, and was there somebody who could remember them all? This book that I've done is called ‘Dancing by the Light of the Moon’, which is a reference, of course, to the lovely poem by Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.  And it came about, it's a spin off really of a radio programme I did about memory, because I was banging on about how poetry is good for you, and a friend of mine is a radio producer, he said, “Yeah, we know it's good for you Gyles, you know, you banging on about how you were at school with Robert Graves’s son and all the rest of it, and you shook hands with T.S. Eliot when you were nine, and we know all that. But is it good for everybody”?  And I said, “Yes, I believe it is”.  “So will you prove it”?  So I went out on a mission to prove it. And we went to see some neuroscientists at Cambridge University and learned from them that if you speak poetry to newborn babies, unborn babies in the womb, and in the last three months before they're born, speak poetry to them, rhythmical poetry - it will improve their facility with the language, including children with dyslexia; it will make them speak more easily and more quickly, sooner; later it will help them with their reading and their writing - lots of research on this.  It's the rhythm in the poetry.  Judi Dench took part in this programme, and she told me that the first thing she learned as a little girl was Shakespeare.  And I said, “Oh, come on, we know you're Judi Dench, but come on”.  And the neuroscientist said to me, “No, it's quite possible because, of course, the iambic pentameter is the rhythm of your heart - it’s not called learning by heart for nothing”.  She may not have understood it when she was a little baby, but you could easily learn it. And at the other end of the spectrum, I also learned that with older people, you can actually help delay the onset of dementia by learning poetry by heart, keeping the synapses supple, the brain is a muscle, if you don't use it, you lose it.  So all else being equal, you could help keep dementia at bay by working that muscle that is your learning poetry. And so I started a scheme called ‘Poetry together’, and if you're listening to this and interested, please go to poetrytogether.com [http://poetrytogether.com], and if you know of a school or any old folks who might like to take part, basically we get children from schools and old people from old folks homes to learn the same poem, and then during National Poetry Day, that time of year in October, the schools and the old folk get together and have tea, cake and perform their poem together. So I put together an anthology of poems that you could learn by heart - fun ones, silly ones, old ones, the classics, all the favourites.  What’s the poem you remember first learning when you were little? Venetia Vyvyan: Oh ‘Sea Fever’ by John Masefield, which is wonderful.  And again, it's the rhythm: I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and sky. And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by. It's just wonderful, really beautiful. Ben Holden: You led me to find a video that I had somewhere in the bowels of my computer of my son, aged, I think three, performing from memory, because he couldn't read obviously, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, and we'd read it enough to him that it had gone in, and I found this video, it's incredibly cute, where he's sort of in pidgen, early words, reciting ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.  And also, it was around two years later that we, I was very struck, I went to a funeral, a family funeral, sadly, and the sons performed in honour of their mother who passed away ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, because it was what they'd always been read as a child by her.  And then, the same month, same family, my in-laws, we went to, it was actually my sister-in-law was getting married, and she asked that my kids, partly because said video, would perform ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ with us, and they were then aged five, so they were able to do it; so we stood up and we all did it as a family.  But isn't it interesting that the same poem in the same month could hit the same notes in such different circumstances and not a dry eye in the house both occasions, and it was the first one you learned? Gyles Brandreth: It is, and it's a good one for people to learn again, people, older people think, “Oh, I can’t learn poetry”.  To re-learn a poem from your childhood is a good place to start, because it's actually in there, in the memory muscle somewhere, so you can revive it.  People often think it's impossible to learn a poem after a certain age - it is if you try to learn the whole poem; if you take two lines a day, anybody can do it.  I’ll give you an example.  Now, I'm going to teach Venetia a poem: “There once was a man from Peru…”, - I’ll make it easy, to see if you repeat this after me. There once was a man from Peru, [Venetia repeats] Whose limericks stopped at line two, [Venetia repeats] That’s the end of the poem!  The point is, you'll remember that now, because it's short and sweet.  But all you need to do, at the end of the day, you learned it instantly.  You can learn two lines instantly.  Don't try and learn more than two lines.  Tomorrow, learn the next two lines, and gradually within a week, at two lines a day, you can learn a sonnet. Ben Holden: Yes, and then you'll have it forever. Gyles Brandreth: I like things in the evening to read that are short and easy, so a poem to read before you go to bed or a diary is quite good.  Sometimes, when I'm in a real hurry, I just read from a book of quotations, because they're very short the entries there, but they're a bit moreish.  It's like eating a box of chocolates with a book of quotations, you read one, then you read another. Venetia Vyvyan: But there is another thing you can learn by heart and that's hymns.  I love hymns.  They're really good. Ben Holden: And actually, lyrics somehow often get implanted because of the music.  I feel like I have a better facility for lyrics than perhaps poetry. Gyles Brandreth: In ‘Dancing by the Light of the Moon’, I've got quite a few song lyrics.  Sometimes they do stand up, [-] reads as well as he sounds actually, but you're right, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’, I mean, it's wonderful. Venetia Vyvyan: But I love the imagery. Gyles Brandreth: What is your favourite hymn? Venetia Vyvyan: ‘Hills of the North Rejoice’ Gyles Brandreth: Oh, do I know that? Venetia Vyvyan: It's an advent hymn, and it's got lots of very un-pc things in it, which is why it's not often sung in its original form, but it is marvellous.  I do recommend it. Gyles Brandreth: It’s like the national anthem, some of the verses are so un-pc that it's only the Duke of Edinburgh who still sings them. Ben Holden: But Gyles, do you not have a sort of elephantine memory anyway?  I sort of imagine you as someone who's got a great memory for jokes and for these, you know, quotations etc.  Is it something that you find relatively easy compared to other people? Gyles Brandreth: I mean, it's just using it all the time.  And I do a lot of after dinner speaking, and I host a lot of award ceremonies, so I try, as it were, to listen to what I'm being told, and I mean, I suppose I do a little bit of that American thing of repeating what I’ve just been told. It can be challenging.  I was told a joke recently that made me smile, so I'll share it with you.  It's about remembering things.  A fellow’s at home with his friends, and his wife’s in the kitchen preparing supper, and they're having supper, and he's talking about the restaurant that they'd been to the previous night.  And the fellow is saying “It’s a fantastic new restaurant, and it's in Barnes, and it's fantastic, and it's quite near where your bookshop is”.  So, “It’s a fantastic new restaurant, the food is completely superb, we had a brilliant starter - prawns - sounds old fashioned, but it was just wonderful.  And then the main course, I'm a vegetarian normally, but I just ran riot on the fish.  And then there was this incredible souffle of the pudding.  Anyway, fantastic, you must go!” And his friend said, “Well, we'd love to go, what's it called”? “What’s it called? Oh, god. Oh, come on, what is it? Oh, I know, em, think of a flower with a long stem and red petals at the top, smells lovely, thorns at the side. A stork with thorns, rose, oh, oh, ah yeah, Rose! What was the restaurant called?” So the point about my book is it solves your memory problems, and also gives to light... I've been writing a series of murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde as my detective.  And Venetia has very sweetly stocked all of these and the joy, and I know readers like this, if they find something they like, they want more of it, don’t they?  Which is why, for some authors, it is exhausting, because they’ve got to keep churning out the same, really, people want the same book again and again.  Is that fair to say?  And it disappoints them,you know, they want another Hercule Poirot mystery, and if it's an Agatha Christie without Hercule Poirot, they’re disappointed, they really want the same thing again and again. So I've created a series of murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde as my detective, and it was born in a library, because when I was a member of parliament in the 1990s, my favourite room of the House of Commons, I took refuge in the library; the building, fantastic building, House of Commons, lovely interiors designed by Pugin, famous architect, and this library overlooks the River Thames, and the first two rooms are full of political books and biographies; the last room is really a room where the books aren't relevant to politics, a lot of fiction and biography that isn't political.  And I, in my day, they used to have all night sittings, so you’d be there literally all night waiting for votes, and the big leather chairs where people fell asleep, and I shared a table I think with Peter Mandelson, remember Peter Mandelson? still with us.  So he would sit on one side of the table, I'd sit on the other side of the table, writing my diary, making sure he wasn't looking at what I was saying; and we would chat, but he would fall asleep and I would think, “What am I going to read?”, and I climbed up wonderful library steps and discovered the autobiography of Arthur Conan-Doyle, written in about 1926. Quite early on, I discovered him describing an evening at the Langham Hotel, which is opposite now to the BBC, still exists.  He'd gone for a dinner with an American publisher who had invited him and Oscar Wilde to have dinner.  And he didn't know Oscar Wilde at that stage, he was a few years older than him in his thirties, Oscar; Arthur Conan-Doyle was in his late twenties, he’d only written one Sherlock Holmes story.  This was the year after the Jack the Ripper murders, and this American publisher who published Lippincott’s monthly magazine was looking for murder mysteries set in London to capitalise on the interest in Jack the Ripper, and wanted to commission these two young up and coming writers, the Scotsman Arthur Conan-Doyle, the Irishman Oscar Wilde, to write murder mysteries for him.   And as a result of that dinner at the Langham Hotel, Arthur Conan-Doyle was persuaded to write the second Sherlock Holmes story, there might never have been any more Sherlock Holmes had it not been for this dinner, and Oscar Wilde was persuaded to write what eventually became ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. So I discovered this in this book written in 1926.  What I also discovered that amazed me, because think of Arthur Conan-Doyle who was very, you know, butch and stocky with a moustache, you know, rather looked like a white hunter fresh from the jungle, you didn't think that he would necessarily get on well with the dandy that was Oscar Wilde; but he fell for him immediately, admired him, spoke of his delicacy, his gentlemanly qualities, but also what a great conversationalist he was, saying that he was able to, he listened, he gave, as well as took.  And he remembered it as the ‘golden evening’, and it suddenly occurred to me, let's make these my Holmes and Watson, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan-Doyle.  And that led to a series of seven murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde, and so that was the result of being locked in a library overnight. Ben Holden: So which other libraries, then?  This was obviously a seminal moment, but which other libraries for both of you over the years have been key places? Venetia Vyvyan: Well, I was in a boarding school in Sussex at a place called Southover Manor, which is happily no more, and the library was my refuge.  Nobody else went in there.  It was the sort of rather dim girls boarding school that had seen better days.  But the library was a place where I could actually escape the girls, escape any problems I had.  I read all sorts of things in there, Frances Parkinson Keyes, she was wonderful, not in print, but I remember finding this dusty volume and reading it and enjoying it. Ben Holden: What about you, Gyles, because you mentioned Foyles, but there must have been a library nearby? Gyles Brandreth: Yes, there was.  Well, my parents, as I mentioned, lived in a mansion flat in Baker Street, which is near the Marylebone road, and there was Marylebone Public Library; great, mighty Victorian building, and I spent hours there, hours and hours there; they had and still have a Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan-Doyle collection.  Because out of my bedroom window, I could see the building that was believed to be 221B Baker Street.  So my childhood obsessions were Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan-Doyle.  So I really have never left my childhood, so I would go there to get into Sherlock Holmes in a big way. I was then sent to a boarding school, this place called Bedales in Hampshire, which was founded in the 1890s by a man called John Badley, and he was still alive in the 1960s, born in 1863, died in 1965 aged 102.  And I knew this man, because I would go and play Scrabble with him in his cottage on the grounds on a Wednesday afternoon, you know, a child was sent out to play Scrabble with him.  And we would have tea and scones made by his housekeeper and we would play Scrabble, and he won one every game.  I said he cheated, because he was using these words that were obsolete, and he said, “They were current when I learned them in the 1850s”.  Anyway, he was a delightful old gentleman, and he told me that among his first parents at the school which he founded in the 1890s was Oscar Wilde.  So Oscar Wilde's eldest son went to this school, Bedales.  So I, when I was a teenager, I was a friend of a friend of Oscar Wilde, Venetia, shake my hand.  You're now shaking the hand that shook the hand that wrote ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’. Venetia Vyvyan: Well, and Oscar Wilde named one of his sons Vyvyan, and I named our eldest daughter, well, her first name’s Charlotte, but her second name is Constance, after Constance Wilde, in homage. Gyles Brandreth: Constance Wilde was the wife of Oscar Wilde and the mother of Vyvyan and Vyvyan’s son, Merlin Holland, who now lives in France, I'm proud to say is a friend of mine, and has kindly read all my Oscar Wilde novels and given them his blessing.  So at this school, Bedales, founded in the 1890s, was this old gentleman who was young then, and it was very much in those days a Christian socialist school, blessed by people like Bernard Shaw, who, you know, founder of Fabians, lots of vegetarianism going on, open toed sandals, wholesome naked bathing, that kind of thing! And when the school moved to its present site, which is near Petersfield in Hampshire, they built a library that is undoubtedly the finest school library anywhere in the world; built by a man called Lumpton.  Lupton built this library, it's wonderful, made of wood, you must google it, anyone listening to this, google the library designed by Lupton at Bedales school; it's on two floors, there’s an arcade around the top floor of all wood and there are alcoves in this library.  And it was, like you, for me it was the safe haven.  It's still there, it's a reason to send your children to this school, and there was a wonderful librarian who herself had been a pupil at the school many years before, called ‘Gonda’; it was a funny school, we’d call the teachers by their first names, it was one of those places, yeah I know, there you go.  And as I say, all the parents seemed to be famous.  I mean, literally, I've got a photograph of three parents talking to one another, and I think it was Robert Graves, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Lawrence Durrell. Ben Holden: And the poem, ‘Walking Away’ by Cecil Day-Lewis which is one of my favourites, is in your anthology, which is about Sean Day-Lewis, another of his sons, Daniel is also his son.  That's a beautiful, beautiful, poem. Gyles Brandreth: It’s a poem about losing your child growing up and parting.  Anyway, so the Bedales library was, I'd say, a formative library.  I'm a great campaigner for libraries, and they don't need to be traditional libraries, like the ones we've been talking about, which are very traditional.  Libraries can and should change, and those that do thrive.  I say this advisedly, because there's a sentimental streak; whenever a library is threatened, people emerge from the woodwork and say, “Don't close the library!”.  I then say to them, “When did you last visit the library? How many books have you borrowed from this library?” and the words are still on their lips.  People love having a library, but today, it's like people who say, “Oh, I love a local shop”, well then, use it!  The only way you're going to keep a bookshop alive is actually saying, I’m not going to take the shortcut and go on Amazon,- sometimes, you may need to, sometimes you may want to -, but there is no independent bookshop in this country that won't deliver for you tomorrow the book you order by five o'clock today, and you'll get a human being in there who understands what you are wanting.  And the book shops that are delivering are growing.  There are now more bookshops, independent bookshops in this country this year than there were last year; more last year than there were the year before, I think that is true.  And it's the bookshops that are providing the service that Venetia is providing us that thrive. The same goes for libraries.  In the 1990s, I worked at the Department of Culture, and I remember sitting down with Danny Finkelstein who now works for The Times.  But anyway, we were at the Department of National Culture, or whatever it is, and we were looking at library policy, and Danny was saying, “Well, maybe we should get libraries to get coffee shops and maybe we should get Costa or Starbucks to come into the libraries.  Let's make them places where we get a computer company to...”, - this is before computers were everywhere -, “...store computers, let’s put creches, let's put fun nursery schools in, let's make it a place where people go as well”.  And I think you mustn't get locked into the library that we knew in our childhood as the library of the future - a library is a place where you can borrow books and where you can read.  That's all it has to be.  It can be done in a multitude of ways.  Do you agree with that? Venetia Vyvyan: Absolutely.  We have a local library at the top of our road at home.  I can't go to the local supermarket without my youngest, who's 10, say, “Can’t we go to the library?”, and I have been known to leave her there while I do the shopping, because she absolutely adores it. Ben Holden: And you're absolutely right, Gyles, also in terms of going in there and just using the service is one way to help ensure they survive, because they do rely on those issue figures for renewal, and to prove their worth to the council rightly or wrongly. Gyles Brandreth: You and I, because we're sentimental, good-hearted people, think they also should be there as a warm place for people with nowhere else to go to sit in a corner near the radiator flicking through a newspaper, that has a social function too, but for a library to be a library, people must use it for its core purpose. Ben Holden: They do also provide all manner of amazing services, because we've been up and down the land to different libraries, and it's incredible, the multi-purpose, diverse elements that they bring to the communities as well. Gyles Brandreth: And you will be familiar with the word serendipity.  And you will know, because you probably listen to ‘Something Rhymes with Purple’, the podcast that I do with Susie Dent, a girl from dictionary corner, she's brilliant.  And she reminded me that serendipity comes from Horace Walpole, one of his novels, and serendip was the old name for Sri Lanka.  And if you research something on Google, yes, you can get the answer.  But if you go to the library, and you go to, let's say I'm researching one of my Oscar Wilde books, and I want to know what was in the theatre in the spring of January 1895, that's not easy to find on Google; but you go to a biography from that year, you go to an old newspaper from that year, and serendipity will take you to other incidental things.  That's what a library can give you. Ben Holden: And in the era of the dreaded fake news as well to actually go in and ensure that what you're looking at is correct, the information is accurate and authentic, and also the librarian or bookshop manager will help you navigate that as well. Venetia Vyvyan: When I was about eight or nine, I became absolutely fixated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and I went to my local library, and I told the librarian, I said, “Do you have a biography?”, because it had been on Blue Peter, and she said, “No, but there's something in the stacks.  Come back in a couple of days, and I'll find it for you”.  And she placed in my hands later that week a copy of ‘Flush’ by Virginia Woolf.  And she'd gone down into the stacks and she'd found it for me, and I never forgot that. Gyles Brandreth: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘How do I love thee?’ And what's interesting about that, it's one of the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, and I assumed they were translations of Portuguese sonnets, as you would, and that's how they were published.  She published them as that, because they were original sonnets, but it was more acceptable for a woman to be seen as a translator, than as a poet.  Isn't that shocking, but fascinating?  And people always think, “Oh, these are songs from the Portuguese - they were translations”, they weren't, they were inspired by the Portuguese, but they are her own work. Ben Holden: And how apt you should recite that, because we're recording this on Valentine's Day.  And I have to thank you and Susie and your brilliant podcast, because I may have written in my wife's Valentine's card today, ‘Be my macushla’. Gyles Brandreth: Oh, there you are. Ben Holden: Because that word is beautiful, and a discovery from your excellent podcast. Gyles Brandreth: Tell us, we haven't asked you, what is your latest anthology?  Because you've done two at least with your father. Ben Holden: Yes, yes, we edited two poetry anthologies, ‘Poems that make grown men cry’, ‘Poems that make grown women cry’, tapping into emotion, freedom of expression, and that was with amnesty, partly hence the freedom of expression and gender identity, but also just celebrating beautiful poetry, and like your anthology, actually, I love an anthology where there are introductions, or there's a little bit of help and you're led by the hand; you don't talk over them, you do wonderfully in this one, you don't talk over the poems, so everyone can pull their own truths out of these gorgeous universal works of literature.  But if someone brilliant is leading you by the hand towards the poem, and you can't help but read it. Gyles Brandreth: There’s a book by Lord Wavell who was a general during the Second World War, famous general, he fought in the First World War, and he, well remind us what the anthology was... Venetia Vyvyan: Well, it was said to be all, and I believe it was all the poems he knew off by heart. Gyles Brandreth: He remembered these poems, and he composed the anthology in his head, was he in a prisoner of war camp or something?  And he kept himself going by remembering these poems, and then, after the war, produced this wonderful anthology that people did love, and people have been generous enough, this is the ultimate compliment, to say that ‘Dancing by the Light of the Moon’ echoes that. Ben Holden: You're very kind to mention the other anthologies.  My latest anthology, again, touches on similar areas because it's called ‘My first memory’, and it's a collection of the first memories of great figures from history, literature, etc, and watershed moments of how they became who they became.  What about you, Gyles, do you have a first memory? Gyles Brandreth: My first memory is, I was born in Germany, my parents were part of the, something called the Allied Control Commission after the Second World War, where British forces, Germany was divided into regions, the Russians had a bit, the French had a bit, the Americans and the British, and my father was a lawyer; he was a magistrate in one of the British areas, but I don’t remember being in Germany.  I know I was in Germany, because I had a governess, a nanny who was a man who'd been a circus clown, but there wasn't much work for circus clowns in Germany, I can tell you immediately after the Second World War [laughs], and he applied, my parents advertised for a nanny for their little boy, and this bloke turned up, and my mother interviewed him and thought he seemed decent, and, I think, felt sorry for this fellow who couldn't get any work.  And so my first nanny, I was brought up by a German circus clown, this explains everything! [laughs].  It does explain how I could walk the tightrope as a child, which was useful when I was an MP, and I can still to this day stand on my head.  But I don't, I don't remember any of that. I do remember, it must have been the early 1950s when I was three or four when they came back to England, my father was then a barrister, and being by the River Thames, Kings Bench Walk, and he was either moving into or out of the building there; I remember the building. Ben Holden: You were around three, because the average is 3.2 or three and a quarter.  And people think that's because one, the hippocampus which you write about, and those parts of the brain that function for memory are developed sufficiently for longer autobiographical memories to implant, but also because we start to speak, and we can start fashioning narrative and, obviously, as you said, books have been your life and words have been your life. Gyles Brandreth: My problem too is how many of my memories are false memories, because I tell stories, and fortunately I keep a diary, so I can check against the diary, but two things have happened recently; one, I went to the French Lycée, and I was a pupil at the French Lycée when President De Gaulle of France came on a state visit, and I described this, - they interviewed me for documentary, you know, they found children who were there at the time -, and I described him coming to the school, in his uniform, this is a great man, the leader of the free French in the Second World War, later, the President of France, a formidable figure, tall with a great stomach and a huge nose, and his uniform, I described all this; and then they showed me the footage, and there he was in a large suit, and I described the uniform vividly, how I'd been overwhelmed by the uniform shaking his hand, so you know… Ben Holden: You mentioned serendipity, I'd love it if you would browse the shelves and choose something with Venetia. Gyles Brandreth: Speaking of my favourite bookshops, do you know Shakespeare and Company? Ben Holden: We've recorded an episode of this podcast there, with the great poet, Imtiaz Dharker. Gyles Brandreth: You’ve met them all, you’re slumming with us! Anyway, I went to Shakespeare and Company with my wife a couple of years ago, and we spend a lot of time in Paris, and we love going to Shakespeare and Company, and my wife knows that I'm never really happy in a bookshop, unless I'm sure they've got one of my books.  So what she does is she quickly scouts around the bookshop and says, “Don’t worry Gyles, they've got all the books, it's fine, you can relax and enjoy your visit”;  otherwise, she sees me hovering near where my books might be, trying to eye the shelves; and she found this book by me, and Shakespeare and Company is a secondhand bookshop.  So I pull down this book from the shelf quite excited, and there it was and I opened it, and I read the words, “Dear John, with love on your birthday, from your old friend Gyles”, and it was dated four days previously! [Laughs].  I had given it to someone we went for dinner with on the Monday, and by Thursday night, it was already for sale at the secondhand bookshop.  I have dropped them!  I bought the book back, I put “With renewed admiration”, and sent it back to him.  I've not heard from him since, and I don't wish to. But a lot of precious things I've given away because of my wife, did I mention that when we began this podcast two days ago?  I may have mentioned that my wife has got the skips ordered.  So precious things I'm giving away, and I've given away all my teddy-bears to Newby Hall in Yorkshire; it's a beautiful stately home built by Christopher Wren, and so all the teddy-bears they live in the Brandreth Bear House.  So, some of the precious things, like I was lucky enough to know A. A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was a bookseller, of course, wrote a couple of lovely books himself, and he, for example, my Winnie the Pooh was blessed by Christopher Robin, by Christopher Robin!  My Winnie the Pooh held the paw of Christopher Robin!  And so things like that are too precious to have at home, and I don't want them to end up on the skip, so precious things have all gone to Newby Hall in Yorkshire, so other people can try them. ~ Gyles Brandreth is invited to browse the shelves of Barnes Bookshop and select a book of his choice ~ Gyles Brandreth: We’re browsing, and normally when I come in here with Venetia, she knows me, she just shows me my own books. Venetia Vyvyan: I love that, ‘Sisters of Sinai’ by Janet Soskice; it's about two redoubtable Scots women whose father was equally enlightened, and once they learned a language, he allowed them to travel, -this was in the Victorian age -, allowed them to travel to the country, and they actually ended up in Egypt, and they discovered a palimpsest with one of the Gospels on one side, which they were so excited by that they took back to Britain, on Mount Sinai.  So I do recommend that. Gyles Brandreth: Ok, anything else? Ben Holden: Do you know, Venetia, when a local author’s been in, because their books have suddenly moved more prominently? Venetia Vyvyan: Oh, we only have a couple of authors who do that!  No names!  I think you might enjoy that...Andrea di Robilant.  It’s about… Gyles Brandreth: Ernest Hemingway and his last muse.  Oh, that’s up my street!  I’m liking the idea of that, so I think maybe ‘Autumn in Venice’ is what I’m going to have. Ben Holden: What a fun and fantastic duo Gyles and Venetia make, I could barely keep up with Gyles, so I hope you could!  And if you're wondering, ‘macushla’ is an Irish word meaning heartbeat, and my new favourite term of endearment. [END] Thank you for listening to this Ex Libris podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe wherever it is you get your brainfood. That way, not only will you keep up with the podcasts, but you’ll also help us champion libraries and independent bookshops.  To find out more about the authors and venues, as well as libraries and independent bookshops, please visit our website: www.exlibris.com [http://www.exlibris.com]You can also get updates on twitter and instagram, not to mention, win a signed copy of both Gyle’s superb anthology, ‘Dancing by the Light of the Moon’ and my own recent collection, ‘My First Memory.’  Find me @thatbenholden. Ex Libris is produced by Chris Sharp and Ben Holden. Ex Libris is brought to you in association with The Lightbulb Trust [http://lightbulbtrust.org/] - which illuminates lives via literacy and learning, providing opportunities to shine.

Candice Carty-Williams is a trailblazer. That trail, in many respects, started at Lewisham Library in South London. This big, cornerstone library provided Candice a ‘safe place’ during her childhood. Passing by the library at night, she’d gaze with wonder at the lights illuminating the library's sign. Later, during her teenage years, the place provided her a sanctuary. It became a home-from-home, a seminal venue. Candice describes in moving and compelling terms for Ex Libris how it feels to return to the library now, after some busy intervening years. Candice makes that return as a bestselling author. Her hit novel Queenie compellingly charts a year in the life of a 25-year-old woman, Queenie Jenkins, as she navigates life, love, race and family. Booker Prize winner Bernadine Evaristo calls the book ‘a deliciously funny, characterful, topical and thrilling novel for our times.’ Like her eponymous heroine, Candice Carty-Williams is someone full of honesty, humour and heart. Her breakout creation has captured the imaginations of countless readers: Queenie was the highest-earning debut hardback novel in the UK last year and was shortlisted, among other prizes, for the Costa First Novel Award. It is now out in paperback (in a range of colours). Joining Ben and Candice for this episode are Lewisham’s Library Manager, Chris Moore, and Rachel New, Outreach Officer for Lewisham Libraries. ... A full transcript of this episode of Ex Libris, featuring Candice Carty-Williams, runs below: Candice Carty-Williams’s novel, Queenie, compellingly charts a year in the life of a 25 year old black woman, Queenie Jenkins, as she navigates life, love, family, friendship, money, bad dates, sex, mental health, social media, work pressures, race, politics, and, well, London.  Queenie is a wonderful creation - funny, clever, unforgettable, and for me, most notably, brim full of heart.  She has captured the imaginations of countless readers.  The book was the highest earning debut hardback novel in the UK last year.  It was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and is now out in paperback.  Candice, like her eponymous heroine, is a trailblazer, no question.  That trail, in many respects, started here at Lewisham library in South London.  Let's go inside and hear more about that with Candice, but also Lewisham Library Operations Officer, Chris Moore, and Rachel New, Outreach Officer for Lewisham libraries. Interview Ben Holden: Candice, thank you so much for joining us in Lewisham library, and Rachel and Chris, thank you both too.  Candice, when we asked you where you wanted to meet, of all the libraries and of all the bookshops in the world, you immediately chose Lewisham library. Can you tell us why? Candice Carty-Williams: I grew up in Streatham initially and then we moved to Ladywell, which is just down the road, when I was around eight, and I got into reading in a big way just because my childhood was quite a lonely one, and so books were sort of my saviour and my solace, and all these worlds to escape into.  And when I was at school, that was the same thing, so I spent a lot of time in the school library.  When I was in secondary school, something happened that, actually, I really wasn't involved in genuinely, but a group of us were excluded, and my stepdad at the time said, “You can leave the house when school begins and come home when school ends, because you can't be here”.  And so I came to Lewisham library every day, which was an amazing thing for me.  And so I have a lot of feels, because it was a really safe place when I didn't feel safe. Ben Holden: And so you’d come here every day for that period, and you continue to come here after that? Candice Carty-Williams: Exactly, but I’d come here before.  I mean, who says to a child, “Go and just find somewhere to be for the whole day”?  And luckily, I wasn't involved in any bad situations, because the library was here. Ben Holden: So you would be here all day and you'd be reading? Candice Carty-Williams: I'd be reading all day. I was reading, at the time, one book a day, and sometimes I would read two when I was here, just because I read so quickly, I always have, and so it was amazing just to feel safe in this space, because it does, it still feels like a safe place.  And I remember when I was a child, I'd always go past it in the car in the night time, even when I wasn't going to be there in the day, and see the Lewisham Library sign in lights, and think it was the most incredible, glamorous thing that Lewisham had to offer.  And so, of all the places that I thought I could go, because, you know, like a child's mind is kind of like, “What do I do? Where do I go?”, but immediately, I was like, “That place is going to look after me”. Ben Holden: You know, I like to say that they are society’s safe spaces.  I love the lights, as well.  Carnegie always insisted that there be a light outside each of his libraries, the Carnegie libraries, - “Let there be light and enlightenment as well”.  And I love the lights in that sign.  It kind of like it reminds me of the stage mirrors, there's a kind of glamour to it, as well.  So I can imagine it felt like a bit of a beacon.  And you would read omnivorously?  Can you remember any of the books?  Were there any that sort of struck a chord in that period, or even earlier, or after this library, that were really influential for you? Candice Carty-Williams: It was every Malorie Blackman book that I could find here, any Jacqueline Wilson book, Judy Blume also, and my nan was a real reader of Catherine Cookson books, and I didn't like those, but she also read Virginia Andrews books, and so I would read those.  So I started with ‘Flowers in the Attic’, and then I would find anything that I could to do with Virgina Andrews here.  So my reading sort of jumped up in such a big way when I was younger.  But I think that's the case, isn't it?  You just always end up reading or watching stuff that's too old for you. Ben Holden: It's kind of a great advertisement for exclusions.  But kudos, you used the time well.  And Chris, maybe you could explain a little bit about the library?  It's a pretty big place.  It's a well stocked, really welcoming place, and the building is '60s? Chris Moore: Yes 1960s, it actually just celebrated its 50th anniversary.  In fact, I think around about the time Candice was describing, it used to have a light sculpture as well.  So lights used to swirl around the building, and it was actually operated by a sort of wind mechanism, it was moving, so you would see the Lewisham Library in lights, as you've already said, and there were these lights that would actually go in bars down the building.  So I think it really is a beautifully sited building.  And I think, as Candice has described, it’s a sort of beacon.  It welcomes people in and has been doing that for many years, and we're here for education, for culture, crucially, I think, for peace and quiet, as well, when people need that sort of space to be able to sit and study, work, but also for, you know, getting the kids in and having all their activities as well.  So it is a big building, that's why we have so many floors to sort of try and segregate those functions out a little bit.  I think what you described as your sort of journey is music to my ears, because that's what a library is here for.  It's basically to help people develop, discover, grow, move on.  And, you know, you've obviously gained a lot from that experience, so absolutely, what we're here for is what you've described. Candice Carty-Williams: I think there's something about where it's placed on the High Street, as well, that makes it, it's like before you get to the hustle and bustle of like, big Lewisham and the shopping centre, and also when you leave, you're just like, “Okay, there it is”. Ben Holden: It’s on the corner...from a crossroads, you can see it from, you're sort of coming at it from all different angles. Candice Carty-Williams: Yeah, by the roundabout. Ben Holden: How is it coming back, Candice? Candice Carty-Williams: It’s weird.  So when I was on the way here, I was going through Ladywell, and I was like, “Okay, so nothing has changed in all the years…”  I've lived in many places since I lived in Lewisham.  I would say that I'm a blue borough girl.  I met someone once at a party and I was like, “Can you guess where I grew up”?  And he was like, “You grew up in Lewisham, innit?” [laughs] and I said, “Yes, I did”.  But yeah, it feels really nice to be back.  But I think I'm probably one of the most nostalgic people I've ever met, so I will probably cry on the way home.  So, you know, it's amazing to be back and also to be back as someone who's like, I guess as an author, but it feels like quite a nice thing. Ben Holden: So you worked in journalism, and then publishing.  Can you talk a little bit about Queenie? You've had this incredible success, and congratulations, and it is a fantastic read, and she's an amazing character.  But can you talk a little bit about what compelled you to write Queenie, and where Queenie sprang from? Candice Carty-Williams: Of course, I guess, you know, I read so much when I was growing up, and when I was in my teens, there was a lot of young adult fiction that I saw myself in, so Malorie Blackman was amazing for that, many other authors too, but when I got to my early twenties, I was like, “Ooh, I'm not really seeing myself as much” - and that is a real problem, because you start to feel invisible.  If you're not seen by society, then you're just kind of finding yourself in the pockets that you do see yourself.  And so when I was seeing black women in TV and film, the depictions were all these sexy or sassy or strong women, and I was like, “Oh, I don't really fit into any of those brackets of what a person should be”, and so then you end up being like, “What is my identity”?  And so I was like, “Okay, so maybe we need more fiction like this”, and I was working in publishing at the time, and was always on the hunt for new voices. Ben Holden: You founded the Guardian and 4th Estate BAME short story prize? Candice Carty-Williams: Right, exactly.  And so I was like, “Okay, let's get some more voices in”, because I know that lots of writers having met them and spoken to them just at events, before I did any book stuff, and they didn't really understand the process.  So I'd say, “Have you got an agent?” and they'd be like, “Oh, what's an agent?”  And, you know, an agent is the person who says to an editor who's going to acquire a book, “Oh okay, well, you know, this is to your taste, you should read it, you should buy it, you should publish it”.  And if these writers don't know how to get their stories to agents, then there's a problem.  And so I thought, okay, let's cut the agent out, and let's do a prize so that people could just submit their story straight to us. And even if someone hasn't won the story, then at least we have a pool of writers and we can continue to grow that pool, and we can look at all these amazing stories and potentially publish them. And so I did that, and things were happening, and it was really great, but I was like, okay, it's not happening fast enough.  And so I was like, “Oh, how about you just write a book?”, which sounds really simple [laughs].  So I went away, and I applied to a writer's retreat that Jojo Moyes was running, and I remember, I think the day before I got an email to say that I was accepted onto it.  And so I went and did that.  And as I was driving, I borrowed my friend's car and I drove all the way to this house, which is, I think three hours away, and I hadn't driven since I passed my test, but I made it, thank goodness!  But I got there and her husband greeted me and said, “You know, this is where we're going to be staying, if you need anything, let me know, JoJo is gonna be back in a bit”.  And I said, “I don't know how to thank you”, because I hadn't been in a place like that before, it was so far from London and it was just peaceful, and there was so much green around.  I've been in South London all my life, apart from the three years when I was at university in Brighton, and so I was like I don't really know what to do, or how to be in this space.  It was so quiet, like I'm used to, like I can hear so much noise now, and we grew up near the hospital, and so there were always sirens. So I said, “I don't know how to thank you” and he was like, “Oh, just write a bestseller”.  And I sat down, and I just wrote, and I ended up writing, I think, 8000 words, but I didn't plan any of it.  My main thing that I was thinking about as I was driving was, “What do you want to say?”  And what I wanted to say was that black women contain multitudes, and that we have different stories and different ways of being, and we're not all strong, and we can't endure everything, and we go through lots of stuff.  And we go through this stuff that everyone else goes through, but people see us differently.  So that will always change how we receive ourselves and how we are received and how we navigate things.  And so that was really it.  That was the jumping off point. Ben Holden: It was relatively fast in terms of the first draft? Candice Carty-Williams: Six months for the first draft. Ben Holden: Queenie just sort of poured out.  It wasn't planned or plotted like some authors do? Candice Carty-Williams: Oh, no no. Ben Holden: As a reader, that's part of the joy, I think, as well, as it's just the energy and the rhythm and the drive, but also the honesty and the sort of rawness and the dynamism is all there, and that must have been stemming from that process.  And you were writing, presumably, while you were obviously working your day job? Candice Carty-Williams: Yeah, so I would leave work on Friday, I would go and get my food shopping, and then I would go and sit in this horrible studio in Streatham that I was living in, and I would not come out until Monday morning, and go back to work.  And so I did that for months, and all my friends were like, “Okay, well, we guess you’re fine”. Ben Holden: And the foundation was laid on that retreat, so you had this sort of cornerstone, and then you built out from there.  Did you enjoy it?  I mean, it was obviously sort of, as these things can be, almost like a trance.  Or, you know, do you look back and you think that was a very happy or enjoyable process, or was it tough, because it's a very honest, raw story, and it's a fictional book, but it must have been quite personally exhausting or challenging along the way? Candice Carty Williams: I just loved it.  I really loved it.  I really just sat and it was such escapism, because, you know, I was working a full time job, and you're always tired.  And, you know, life is just doing what it's doing, and those things were quite hard, but to escape into writing is always the way, it's like escaping into reading, I can just shut everything else out.  And so I loved it.  That was when I felt happiest when I was writing. Ben Holden: And remains the case? Candice Carty-Willaims: Yeah, most of the time, because when I was writing it, there was no pressure, because I was like, well, I want to write it, and what I've achieved will be to have written a book, I didn't know anything would happen with it, when you're writing your first book you don't.  And then when you're contractually bound to write a second, you know what you have to do.  And so yeah, so it was a really wonderful time for me.  And I always felt very happy.  And so, yeah, it's a different thing now… Ben Holden: I think that shows in the sort of exuberance of the prose… Candice Carty-Williams: Well, it’s also, I think because I was younger, as I wrote it when I was 26, I'm 30 now.  I was obviously like, just a bit more confident back then as well, because some of the stuff that people tell me that's in the book, I’m like, “Oh my God, I can't believe I wrote that”.  Right now, in the second one I'm writing now, I'm paring everything back, and I'm like, “No, it's okay, you're allowed to”.  But yeah, the first one, I was like, there's an energy to it, because I could just say what I wanted to say and not think about it. I was at an event and a girl came up to me and she was really upset.  I was like, “Are you okay?, and she was like, “Well, you know, your book’s really traumatic”.  And I was like, “Yeah?”.  And she was like, “Yeah, but it was really painful”.  And I was like, “Oh God, I'm really sorry”.  Because I think when I was writing it, I just hadn't considered that someone could read it and take that much pain from it. Ben Holden: Yeah, I mean, it is a tough read, in a sense, in terms of it's very, very funny and incredibly charming.  But then, I was quite struck by, you know, on page eight, Queenie, and it's a first person narrative, but Queenie confides right up front that she is not a person who ever felt particularly safe.  And I think, for me anyway, that immediately set that and also, of course, the manner of the opening, maybe you should tell listeners or people who haven't read it, where we start, because she's having an examination right up front and it's an intrusive, invasive, full-on sort of opening, in terms of circumstances as well. Candice Carty-Williams: It opens in Lewisham hospital, and she is having an examination.  I mean, it's kind of a spoiler, but she's had a miscarriage and she doesn't realise it.  And I started it with her having an examination of that nature, because I really wanted immediately readers to understand this black woman is vulnerable, because I don't think that happens ever.  I think that black women have always had to be strong, and to carry loads of things, and, as I said, to weather everything, and I think, for me, it was like, “Okay, but I just want people to understand that even physically immediately, this girl is in a position of vulnerability, and we're going to stay there with her for most of it, most of the book”. Ben Holden: Yeah, and we do, and you put her through the wringer.  But she's such a strong character in many ways, obviously, vulnerable too, and there's a mental health element, but she moves through these challenges.  She's sort of a catastrophist as well.  And I know you've talked about her having a quarter life crisis, which is great, and is something that isn't often explored, something else as well as Queenie as a black 25 year old protagonists woman, but also the quarter life circumstances, and the social pressures on top of everything else that she's has to put up with.  Roxane Gay, has written that “It's an amazing novel about what it means to be a black girl whose world is falling apart, and needs to find the strength to put it back together”, which is lovely.  It's really, I mean, you've got some incredible quotes, but that one stood out for me as well, and sums up the sort of strength that Queenie brings to the read. Candice Carty-Williams: I think it's also the strength that comes from being vulnerable, rather than this upfront ability to just navigate everything.  And that's what I wanted to show through her character, is that whole thing about being darkest before the dawn, like you just have to get to that place in order to be able to see things and bring yourself out of them. Ben Holden: Yeah, and like I say, you wrote it in a sort of burst of creativity.  But was it tough to get the thing finished and out there, and also I’m cognizant that you're working within publishing and you have a certain persona, you'd reached a fairly high level in the profession, Marketing Exec, was it tough to then put it out there? Or what was that process like? Candice Carty-Williams: So I got an agent, but I hadn't met my agent before, but I’d followed her on Twitter, she's amazing, but I did everything through the proper channels, because even though I worked in publishing, I wanted to do it properly.  And so, we did an edit together, which was really great, because I really, I mean, I quite enjoy the editing process.  I don't really, I'm not scared of it.  I think that, things like that, because you just work on it by yourself, - there could be an understanding that it's just done and it's perfect -, but I think these things are still collaborative, and they need to have other eyes and voices, because you're so in it that you can't see what isn't making it the best thing it could be. But then she pitched the novel to a load of editors, and there was like a solid week of rejection, where loads of editors were like, “We can't see where it would be placed.  We don't have any books like it, so we don't know how we’d publish it”.  My favourite one was “We don't have any black editors, and it would require one, so it's not for us”.  So there was lots of stuff in there.  And my agent said it was fine, because when it's published and everything's happening, you won't even remember those people.  And I was like, “Oh, I will...and I do!”  And so that was quite hard, but then it was fine, because it did get published, and I work with such an amazing team, my editor’s incredible, and I really like her as a person and an editor. And I wouldn't have worked with anyone who I didn't trust, because I trust her, because she's so funny, and because she really gets the story, and because the book is so, it's not led by humour, but it's such a big part of it, and it needed it.  And I don't think I could have had an editor who couldn't make me laugh. Ben Holden: And Rachel, you were saying before we sat down and started talking with Candice about your reading experience, and you'd marked all the parts that you found funny, which is, you know, almost every other page there's, there's a gag or, you know, it's hilarious.  But in that sense. Rachel New: I was just telling Ben about the bit where Queenie spent two hours telling her date what racism means and why black lives matter, and that should not happen on the first date.  And then there's the bit where she says to somebody:  “Don't forget to wash your sheets, and your penis”. Candice Carty-Williams: That is a Spaced quote, so I can't take credit for that, because I loved the TV show Spaced, but I had to get it in there somehow. Ben Holden: And so then the book comes out, and it's this phenomenon.  Without design, you'd identified in publishing that there was a gap in terms of voices that you could recognise, but Queenie just sort of storms into that gap.  And it's a phenomenon.  How was that?  Obviously very pleasurable, I imagine, and rewarding, but such a big success for your debut, as well.  That brings with it all sorts of unexpected pressures I imagine? Candice Carty-Williams: It was great.  I mean, it's really hard not to, I was very grateful, and I'm still very grateful, but it is really overwhelming.  So I was talking to Bernardine Evaristo about this, I just find it really hard, because I'm quite shy, and so having to do events, - the first event I did was the showcase for my publishers, and I had to go out and talk to an audience of 1,500 people, and I did not sleep the night before.  I didn't eat the day before.  I think I cried myself into oblivion on the way there.  And then I just had to do this thing, and I was like, “What’s happened?”, you know, because you just go from just being solitary and quiet in your house or in a library, and then you’re just in front of all these people. Ben Holden: You had seen it though, from the other position of the Marketing Exec representing the authors, so at least you knew the world.  But of course, that doesn't necessarily prepare you for actually, the spotlights on you suddenly, and 1500 people look at you, I get it. Candice Carty-Williams: It's not harder, but it's different, because you are supporting loads of authors and being like, this is what you need to do, and then when it's you suddenly, and you still recognise that world, it's so terrifying for that, it’s kind of worse for the eyes to then be on you who's always been in the background, and as a writer in the background.  I mean, I really just love the writing.  And I do the events, because I think they’re important, because I want to talk to people and my favourite part of the event is when it's over, and I can do the Q&A, and talk to all the people that wait and want to have a chat about what they want to do, or what they want to write, or ask me questions about where the character came from, or what she means, or what this thing meant and why haven't you done this properly?  So that's my favourite part of it is talking to the people.  But that whole thing about being on a stage is terrifying. Ben Holden: And if your natural disposition also is shy or not extrovert, in that sense, I guess we're all a little bit extrovert and introvert in different measures as well. Candice Carty-Williams I think there's an element of me just having to be like, “You've just got to act now”.  And so just having to perform on the stage.  And that's fine, and then come off, and then I immediately go to sleep. Ben Holden: And is it getting easier? Candice Carty-Williams: No.  I mean, it's still, I guess I'm less nervous.  I'm not doing the crying anymore, which is good.  It’s kind of in a different way, because I get stressed about everything else.  It’s just one of those things, but I just love talking to the people about the work. Ben Holden: And what are the most rewarding responses you’ve had or interactions with readers, because it is a very meaningful book, and you are a bit of a trailblazer?  I don't mean that in a glib or sycophantic way, it's just a fact, you know, but it also is a book that speaks to not just black women, but again, the quarter life crisis element speaks to all sorts of people in that time of life, women, obviously more than men, but what are the most rewarding responses that you've had? Candice Carty-Williams: I have hundreds of messages a month from black women who are like, “I read this and I connected with this and I felt less alone”.  And that was really important to me.  But I also, remember one of the first questions I got was this younger white woman who messaged me to say that she had a mixed race daughter, because her partner was black, and that she just assumed that because her daughter was half white, her daughter would just navigate the world the same way that she did.  But she was like, “Reading your book, I understand that there is a difference and that she will come up against stuff that I wasn't familiar with and didn't understand, but now I know that I have to sort of…” I think she said, “I have to give her the fortitude to be able to deal with things that I have never had to deal with”.  And that was amazing for me.  Because it was like, yeah, like things are, there's not, there's nothing wrong with being like, “Yeah, there's a difference there”.  It's about accommodating that difference, understanding it, that's what it's about.  And I got a message from, my Twitter DMs were open, because when I worked in publishing still, people would ask me for advice about how to get into publishing or how to do certain things... Ben Holden: So you were still working in publishing when the book came out? Candice Carty-Williams: Oh, yeah, for, I think, two months.  I was so tired all the time.  But my Twitter DMs were open, they're not anymore, sorry everyone.  I got this message from this white guy who looked like this kind of like American dude bro, and I saw that he was American, and I thought, “Oh God, he's come to say something horrible”, and he said, “Hey, look, I know this book isn't technically for me, but I read it, and I had to take some time out of work because of my mental health, and reading your book has made me realise that it's okay, and that it’s not just happened to me, because I thought I was the only person this has ever happened to”.  And I was like,”Oh shit”, I didn't realise that people, I guess, when you just do this thing that, as you say, it's all just been a sort of like big burst of like, rush and storytelling and energy and being like, “This is what I want to say”, but I think, probably, I hadn't really stopped to think about how people would actually receive it, how everyone might receive it, and then sort of realising that was really overwhelming in a good way. Ben Holden: And like any great novel or poem or work of art, you know, you poured your heart and soul into it, but then we as readers, we put our own personal spins on it as soon as we pick it up and open it, and take our own truth from it, even though there are plenty of universal things in there ,as well as very specific socio-political, economic, etc. circumstantial things that Queenie has to deal with.  I was again struck right at the top in terms of your dedication, which is “To all the Queenies out there, you are enough, trust me”, which is defiant and inspiring in equal measure.  And there must be a fair few Queenies who still walked through this door downstairs I imagine, Chris, you must recognise Queenie? Chris Moore: Absolutely.  And if this can inspire those Queenies out there, then you've done a fantastic job.  Working in a library, you know, you always want to feel that you are helping people somehow to achieve something, something better in their lives maybe, or just the next stage in their development.  But I think there's an awful lot of people who probably don't think they can ever get themselves out of whatever rut or situation they're in.  So I think this story is obviously going to be great help to all of those people. Ben Holden: Candice, your book sort of says it all, but what would you say to any listeners in Lewisham and further afield, but who are experiencing what Chris is talking about?  And you know, the challenges that Queenie or other kids here might face back in the day when you were excluded and found your way to the library?  What would you say to any of them listening? Candice Carty-Williams: I think I always operated under the illusion, it very much was an illusion, that I wasn't valid and that my life wasn't valid and my story wasn't valid.  And even though our stories are valid in a literal sense, in that, yes, you can write a book about them, they're also valid in your existence.  I think we all have something really special about us and that we are here, and that we're doing what we can is enough.  I mean, mainly, I just want people to understand that they are enough, and that you don't have to be extraordinary or strong or spectacular or like, you know, socially desirable to be the best person that you are.  I think that you just are by virtue of being you.  And I don't think enough people know that.  And that's why I want people to understand. Ben Holden: And I think also well said in the building that we're in, because if you walk into the library downstairs, the notice boards are awash with opportunities and reminders in different sort of pursuits and opportunities and initiatives that may enable people whatever age they are, old and young, to see that or learn that about themselves.  That's what libraries are partly all about.  How much would you say Queenie herself in terms of the fictional character was born here in this library?  Or am I now sort of over-egging things? Candice Carty-Williams: No, not at all.  I think like, you know, she's always been within me.  She's not me, but there's definitely a part of her that was a part of me.  And so her background is the same, she grew up in Lewisham in that way.  I mean, she grew up more in Lewisham than I did.  So, you know, we're just doing artistic licence, but I think there is no way that she wouldn't have been that lonely child that I was and in the book, you understand that.  But yeah, I think this would be a safe space for her for sure.  She doesn't do enough work, so she wouldn't do her work here, but she would like it here. Ben Holden: No, she doesn't come here in the novel, but outside the novel she does.  And what about your mates and friends from back home here around these parts, and your family?  How have they responded to your amazing success with the book? Candice Carty-Williams: They’re quite good.  My friends are really amazing, my friends are incredible.  I have a really amazing set of friends who are very proud and very excited, but also they do more work to sort of like gas me up than I do, they’re always like “Look, there’s your poster, there's your thing!” and I’m always like, “Yeah, whatever.  That’s my job like, that's my job, and I don't want to talk about my job like, we're hanging out”, but they do a lot to celebrate me, and I don't really do that. And my family, they don't really, I don't think anyone in my family's actually read it, which is fine.  My Nan calls it ‘my little project’, and the other day, because I’m now the Guardian Review of Books Columnist, but my nan called me up and said, “I've just seen that, that's good”.  She says, “When the ancestors look down at us, at least we can show our face”, and I was like, “Yeah, all right”.  So um, my family don't really, they’re just kind of like, “Yeah, do your job”.  But, you know, it's okay.  It's what it is. Ben Holden: Yeah.  And I should say also we're looking at copies of the book, and the paperback is out imminently, or by the time this podcast is released, will be out.  And the cover itself, I don't know who designed it, but hats off and literally hats off, because it's Queenie’s hair, but it's absolutely beautiful, and also the colours.  So I luckily found some early release paperbacks.  Today, there was a table at Waterstones of them where I passed by, and they're beautiful colours as well.   And I suddenly, I've never had this before, I had this moment where I had to pick what colour I was going to go for, which I’ve never had with a book, but they're stunning. Candice Carty-Williams: And my publishers were like, “We're really gonna go for this” in a way that I didn't think, because I worked in publishing and I was like, “They're doing a lot of stuff that I've never seen before”. Ben Holden: It is quite innovative and it is eye catching, but also really beautiful, actually, the hair is quite fine… Candice Carty-Williams: It's an illustrator called Gerrel Saunders, who does all these beautiful illustrations of black women's hair, and my American editor found it. Ben Holden: And of course Queenie’s hair is a feature… Candice Carty-Williams: Such a feature, but also she's on the covers, she's faceless, which was really important to me, because I think it's just that thing where she could be any of us. Ben Holden: Yes, every woman in many ways.  So I have to ask, this was such a transformative year for you personally, professionally, but also with Bernardine Evaristo winning the Booker, Stormzy starting an imprint, you mentioned Malorie Blackman, Noughts and Crosses has been adapted, much excitement, - my kids, amongst many others, will be looking forward to seeing that, Stormzy’s in it, I understand.  But where do you, you know, it's not that long ago that you launched that short story award initiative as a publisher, pre you becoming an author, where do you see the landscape now, because it feels like last year was a bit of a game-changer in sort of correcting things a bit within publishing and the broader reading sort of consciousness of this country.  Would that be fair, do you think? Candice Carty-Williams: I think so.  And I think that, you know, I've seen and understood that these things go in cycles, and that you get these initiatives and you get these big bursts of activity around diversifying reading, but, you know, that goes away after a year.  But I don't think it's going away, because I think that people are demanding to see change now.  And I think that social media has really helped that, because social media calls out every institution, every paper, every TV channel that does anything wrong.  I think that's amazing, because it's something that hasn't happened before -  people actually being taken to task now.  I think that what we're doing, many of us are laying the foundations for what should be a more representative society in many ways.  And I don't know if that's happened before, because initiatives are really great, but, I think, you know, the work is to be sustained and it is hard work.  I think that everyone is committed, but it's irritating because people that have to do these things like me, like Stormzy, [laughs], it's not our jobs.  We do it because we know it needs to be done.  You know, Stormzy is a musician, I was a marketing person, but you see these things and if I guess if you've got the energy and you've got the drive, you just have to work to put out and I think a lot more people have that, and I think when you see more people doing it, it gives you the energy to do it yourself.  So I think that there's a really long way to go, but I think that if we lay the groundwork, and you know, make it so that it's like fertile land for like, actual representative, I guess redressing, then things could be good. Ben Holden: And those 10 publishers who shall remain nameless, who turned down Queenie are probably now saying, “You know, where's our Queenie”? There might be some imitator Queenie’s in the pipeline. Candice Carty-Williams: But you know, I look forward to seeing their stories, and that's what, you know, any young black author who is thinking about writing a book or has been signed after Queenie, they reach out to me and I always meet them for coffee, I don’t drink coffee, but I have tea, and I make them buy me a tea, but we always have a chat about like, what it's going to look like and what this could be, and what they can do, so I think it's really important to do that.  You know, I think it was also about saying to the industry that yeah, this book can sell, get more. Ben Holden: And so that sort of begs the question, what's next out of curiosity, or is it a top secret project, but Queenie is being adapted for TV right? Candice Carty-Williams: Yeah, that was a secret and it just got leaked, so everyone knows. Ben Holden: That's exciting.  And it does actually also, I should say, anyone who hasn't read it yet will discover that it does sort of read very cinematically, or certainly in terms of a TV show. The way you intercut, the non-linear structure and the sort of flashbacks to her relationship with Tom, does lend itself, I would think, to an adaptation, although it's a big challenge.  Are you writing that? Candice Carty Williams: I'm writing it for the screen, which is actually really fun, I really like it, I like it in a different form. Ben Holden: I used to work in film and my day job was screenwriting, so it's a very different sort of rhythm, but like I said, I do think the blueprint is, more than in many other novels, you do have some of it there. Candice Carty-Williams: Yeah, so it's being adapted for the screen.  I am writing it, which is a really great thing, because I had lots of meetings about it, and production companies were giving me different writers, because the pool of black female writers is so small, they were saying, you know, what about this person who wrote this play?  And it was like, “Yeah, okay, cool.  Let's think about that”, and then the production company I went with were like, “You have to write it”.  And I was like, “What?”, I hadn't considered that at all.  And they were like, “That's kind of your job, right? Because otherwise we'll just lose your voice.”  So I've been doing that, and it's been a really, you learn a lot about like, stuff, but also it helps I watch every single TV show that has ever come out.  So it's been an enjoyable thing and exciting.   And the thing I'm looking forward to most that kind of gets me through this sort of like, weird screenwriter’s writer's block, which I never had with novel writing, is the idea of like casting and music, and just actually how it’s going to jump out at people?  So that's what keeps me entertained. Ben Holden: I have to ask, because the podcast is library and bookshop based, and I hate to sort of drag things down a little bit, but, you know, we've talked about all sorts of positive developments over last year, but equally, there have been over the last 10 years or so since austerity really hit, all kinds of problems for libraries, and it's fantastic that we're here in this amazing landmark library in Lewisham, it's very lively, downstairs and vibrant, fantastic offering for the community; but what do you make of the nationwide sort of scourge that we've had to deal with over the last decade or so, bearing in mind, again, that time of your life when this library provided such sanctuary? Candice Carty-Williams: I think when I started hearing about library closures a few years ago, like a sort of mourning, like it hit very personally, because I knew how much libraries had saved me, I felt really heartbroken for all of the children who wouldn't be able to go to this as a safe place, and who wouldn't be able to experience reading, you know that reading is such a privilege, being able to buy a book is a huge privilege.  Not everyone has that.  I couldn't afford to buy books all the time, that's why I spent all my time in libraries.  You know, I couldn't be the author that I was, without having read so much, and I read so much, because I could read books for free. But I think the problem is that the people who are doing these things are just not in these positions of understanding how impactful it is on so many levels, because they don't have those lives.  They have the schooling where everything is available for them, and then they have jobs where things are available for them.  And so many people don't have that, you know like, when you go and look in libraries and you see, yeah, some people are there just to use the internet, and that's fine, because not everyone, you know, job applications, people are like, “Why don’t you apply for that job”?  And it's like, well, not everyone has the internet, that is the reality of things, and I think that, you know, I think it's not a problem until it's yours.  And I think that there are too many people working in positions of power that don't understand that, and don't have the lens to see that not everything is available and accessible.  And so library closures, I couldn't and can't believe it.  It's very painful.  It's very heartbreaking, because libraries are obviously hubs for learning, but also they are safe places, and also, they give worlds to people who can't just go and buy them.  So it hits me on many different levels. Ben Holden: Well, it's great that we can be here today and celebrate Lewisham Library which stands proud and the lights are still twinkling on at night, providing a beacon for other budding Queenie’s and authors out there.  And, again, because this is a booky podcast, without meaning to pry or be too nosy, I do like to ask guests, and that's all our guests, how they choose to organise their shelves of books, and whether you're quite a regimented, sort of catalogued person, or whether it’s all sort of colour coded like your beautiful novels, covers... Candice Carty-Williams: It’s chaos.  Everything about me is sort of like quiet chaos.  I got some bookshelves built the other day, which is a really exciting thing for me.  They are pink, because that’s my favourite colour and my novel is pink, but I've got some shelves in and then I basically just shove all my books in so they just look nice, but there’s no colour coding but it’s just like, you don't want to have like two yellow books next to each other, you want to like space that out, you know?  So it's like a nice catalogue, but like looks good rather than, there's no order, there's no order to anything in my life. Ben Holden: I turn to the librarian, Chris, presumably there's some order to your books? Chris Moore: I'm afraid I’m a typical librarian.  Everything is strict A-Z.  I’ve even attempted the Dewey Decimal Classification for my non-fiction.  So that's pretty much the way I do it at home.  It's more categorization than classification.  But the fiction’s got to be A to Z.  And if anything's out of place… Ben Holden: It would be madness!  Rachel? Rachel New: I like my guests when they come to visit me to be able to browse the books and generate some interesting discussion, so I try to have some philosophy books and all sorts of different topics, psychology as well as fiction, so that people can just pick up a book and for it to lead to a conversation.  So I think I like to have variety, I have lots of bookshelves in different rooms in my flat, and I like to have a variety on each of the bookshelves, so that people can then see what represents me.  So it's important that my bookshelves represent everything that I like about books. Ben Holden: And continuing this, if it's all right, Candice, would you mind browsing the shelves?  The fabled, precious shelves of Lewisham Library for another spin, all these years later, and choose a book, and see what you gravitate towards today? Candice Carty-Williams: Yeah, I'd love to thank you. Ben Holden: And thank you all for joining us. ~ Candice Carty-Williams is invited to browse the shelves of Lewisham Library and select a book of her choice ~ Ben Holden: Non-fiction, which is quite nicely categorised. Candice Carty-Williams: So many amazing books here.  I worked on this from the beginning before I left, which is the definitive history of racism, from the very beginning.  And also I love ‘Stuart:  A life backwards’ by Alexander Monster.  I finished that and I cried for about 10 days. Ben Holden: The great thing about doing these browses is that I get recommendations. Rachel New: That's one of my favourite books. Candice Carty-Williams: ‘Feminists don’t wear pink’ - another great one.  This is such a well stocked library. Ben Holden: Although you’re a feminist, and pink’s your favourite colour? Candice Carty-Williams: Exactly, and it’s ‘and other lies’, sorry, I should have finished the title [of the book]. Ben Holden: So we’re hovering around sociology and politics. Candice Carty-Williams: ‘Riot City: Protest and Rebellion in the Capital.’  I think this is my choice. Ben Holden: This is not something you’ve come across before? Candice Carty-Williams: No, never, but I think it's always good to understand, I mean, riot culture is really interesting, right?  And I think when you try to capture anything like riots or protest in art, it's always a bit tricky, because, like riots and protesters, they’re just fuelled by energy, and I don't think it's easy to put that on the page.  But I'd like to know more about them and where they came from, so this is my choice. Ben Holden: ‘Riot City’ by Clive Bloom. Candice Carty-Williams: Thanks Clive! [END] Thank you for listening to this Ex Libris podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe wherever it is you get your brainfood. That way, not only will you keep up with the podcasts, but you’ll also help us champion libraries and independent bookshops.  To find out more about the authors and venues, as well as libraries and independent bookshops, please visit our website: www.exlibris.com [http://www.exlibris.com]You can also get updates on twitter and instagram, not to mention, win a signed copy there of Candice’s brilliant novel ‘Queenie’.  Find me @thatbenholden. Ex Libris is produced by Chris Sharp and Ben Holden. Ex Libris is brought to you in association with The Lightbulb Trust [http://lightbulbtrust.org/] - which illuminates lives via literacy and learning, providing opportunities to shine.

Val McDermid was so young when she first visited her local library in Fife that she couldn’t even say the word, calling it the ‘labrador’ (after her family’s pet). Kirkcaldy Library rapidly became, though, a home-from-home. Soon enough, young Val was working her way methodically around the shelves. She would come up with ingenious, cheeky ways to bypass the librarians and gain access to the forbidden grown-up shelves. This education laid the foundations for the illustrious writing career that has followed: with over sixteen million copies sold in more than thirty languages, today Val is often called ‘The Queen of Crime’. Bluntly, this career would not have been possible without the public library system (in Val’s own words). This episode covers those formative years - how the library helped Val not only escape herself but also find a sense of identity - before broadening into an exploration of the library’s continuing legacy for Val, exemplified by her campaigning efforts to save other such ‘palaces for the people’. We also learn about her writing process: Ben unpacks with Val the similarities therein with the professional workings of her fictitious criminal profiler, Tony Hill. How she must always be several steps ahead of her readers… Val speaks to Ben not at the library, though, but within a cosy nook of her favourite indie bookshop - Topping & Company in St Andrews. It’s a beautiful shop. Val is old pals with founder Robert Topping. She loves this place so much that she even arranged for her home bookshelves to be handcrafted by the shop’s go-to joiners. Joining the conversation is Topping’s Senior Bookseller (and poet), Michael Grieve.  Kirkcaldy Library was Michael’s local branch too while growing up. The duo make for warm, kindred spirits amid the shop’s artisan shelves, sliding ladders and seemingly endless signed first editions. ... Please find below a full transcript of this episode of Ex Libris, featuring Val McDermid in Topping & Co: This episode of Ex Libris comes to you from bonny St. Andrews.  We're here to meet the queen of crime herself.  Val McDermid’s books have sold 16 million times over in more than 40 languages.  So it's a garlanded career, and one that is owed to the public library system, in Val’s own words.  I can't wait to ask her more about that debt to libraries.  She has elected, however, to meet in a bookshop.  The scene of today's crime is Topping and Company here on Greyfriars Garden.  Joining the conversation today is Michael Grieve, senior bookseller at Toppings.  Let's head inside now into the book-lined warmth. The fires are on and books are the best sort of insulation after all, not just from the cold. Interview Ben Holden: Val, Michael, thank you so much for meeting us and talking here in this lovely nook in Toppings.  Val, why is the shop personally special to you?  I know you have fond attachments to libraries, but it's a beautiful, beautiful store. Val McDermid: It is a beautiful shop, but my relationship with Toppings goes back a very long time.  I've known Robert Topping since the early 1990s, when he was running Waterstones in Deansgate, their flagship store there.  And when my first books were coming out, Robert was incredibly supportive.  That, for me, sort of forged our friendship and we've stayed in touch ever since.  And then when Robert started opening wonderful, independent bookshops, because that was huge for those of us who love his style of bookselling, and this one is very dear to me, because, you know, I grew up in Fife, and to have a bookshop like this in Fife would have been an absolute dream for me growing up. The first time I came into the shop, I just fell in love with the shelves, beautiful shelves, all handmade, different levels, and beautiful beading.  I said to my partner, I said, “We need to have a house that will go with these shelves”.  Subsequently, we do now, we have a townhouse in Edinburgh, and we have sorted shelves all over the house.  We have a library basically on the first floor that was made by the same joiners who installed the shelves here. We have ladders that go around corners.  It's lovely, and it's what I've always dreamed of, I suppose, to have that kind of place, to have a room of books in that way.  I walk in there and sit down in my reading chair, and I just think it's all worthwhile. Ben Holden: And Michael, can you speak a little bit more to the history of the store? Michael Grieve: Well, as Val was talking about, Robert used to run Manchester Deansgate, and it was by all accounts the best stocked, most richly diverse Waterstones in the country at the time.  And it was when they started slimming down their operation, when they were taken over by HMV.  Robert refused to slim down with them, and was shown the door, and he decided to set up to show them how to do it, and opened the first bookshop, first Topping and Company in Ely in Cambridgeshire, in about 2002.  And it was between Ely and St. Andrews, they opened up a shop in Bath, but St. Andrews came about when Cornelia Topping was going to university in St. Andrews, and Robert walked past this shop with a big ‘For sale’ sign on the front of it, and thought he and Louise Topping had met in St. Andrews, they were planning on coming up here later on in their life, and all the stars aligned, I think. Val McDermid: And Robert also has a very distinctive style as a bookseller; he believes in the book and so he gets passionate about it.  I remember at Deansgate when he was there, someone had published a book about the architecture of Manchester, and it was a very beautiful book, it was a lovely object and Head Office had said he could order 20.  So Robert ordered 1000.  They sold every one.  They were in stacks around the shop! Ben Holden: It’s very homely, actually, the way the books are sort of everywhere here, sort of toppling over, but also beautifully, a huge number of signed first editions of all these, I mean, almost everything seems to be signed by the author. Michael Grieve: All of the four bookshops in the company have their own events programmes.  So when we get somebody like Val in to sign a stack of books, they get shared equally. Ben Holden: And Val, we are in a shop, and obviously with our podcast, we celebrate both libraries and bookshops, but I know that the library growing up was a very important place for you in Kirkcaldy. Val McDermid: Yeah, I grew up very much in a working class family, and there wasn't money to spare for books.  This was the days before cheap mass market paperbacks were everywhere.  And there just wasn't money to spare.  But my parents were of a generation where they really believed that the way to make sure your kids had a better life was through education and through reading.  And my mum used to take me to the library, in fact, before I could read, she took me to the library before I could say library.  In fact, I used to say we were going to the ‘labrador’, that was the kind of dog we had.  So she’d take me to the library and read me books, and then, of course, when I was six years old, they did an astonishing thing, and this was not the reason why they moved, but they moved to live opposite the central library in Kirkcaldy, which is a very good library. In Fife, we have a tradition of philanthropy towards public buildings, you know, Carnegie’s first public library in Dunfermline, and the library in Kirkcaldy was given by the Nairn family, who were the big linoleum magnates.  Kirkcaldy was famous.  It was the world capital of linoleum.  And so I would just go to the library pretty much every night after school and read my way around the shelves. Ben Holden: ‘My Scotland’, your beautiful book, which gives you a sort of tour of the country via your life and your writing.  There's a very special section right at the outset about the library.  Would you mind reading that for us? ~ Val McDermid reads an extract from her book, ‘My Scotland’ ~ Much more important from my perspective is the impressive neoclassical sandstone building that sits above the verdant Memorial Gardens and houses the library and art gallery.  It was a byproduct of linoleum, a gift from the Nairn family, the principal of a dozen manufacturers in the town. When I was six, my parents moved house to live across the road from the library, and my fate was sealed.  My parents were working class, that cohort of respectable poor, who believed that education was the way to a better life for their children.  We couldn't afford books, but when I was still a toddler, my mother used to trail me half a mile across the council housing estate to the branch library to read me picture books.  By the time we moved to the town centre, I could read by myself and I was already enthralled to stories. The library became my home from home, and I read my way around the shelves.  Back then, you could only take out four books at a time, and in presbyterian Scotland, two of them had to be non-fiction.  The line had to be held against the relentless encroachment of frivolity.  But even on the non-fiction shelves, I managed to find stories, ‘Tarka the Otter’, Norse myths and legends, border ballads and tales and plenty of others. I love stories.  My life has been bookended and bookmarked by hearing them, reading them and telling them, but from those early days in Kirkcaldy, the stories that have carved out the deepest impression in my memory and my heart have one common feature, ‘The Wind in the Willows’, ‘Treasure Island’, the Chalet School series, ‘I Robot’, what they share is a sense of place.  In my mind's eye, I can see where each of these stories unfolds. ~ Interview continues ~ Ben Holden: Brilliant.  Thank you so much.  And so this was your second home, as you call it, and did the building and all the imagined worlds inside it, did that allow you escapism throughout your youth?  Did that continue for the following years there? Val McDermid: Yeah, I mean, that was my window in the world.  It was, I suppose, a door that opened into other possible lives.  Kirckaldy is in Fife, and Fife geographically is quite a distinct and isolated part of Scotland in a funny kind of way that's right in the middle of the central belt.  Until we got the road bridges in the 1960s, it was quite difficult to come to Fife, you had to make a very specific decision to come here.  You didn't get here by accident.  And we had, I think, a very distinct view of ourselves as being different and distinct.  It was politically quite radical. We were the first to send a communist MP to Westminster, for example.  But the flip side of that was it could be quite inward looking.  So almost all of the people who taught me at school, for example, came from Fife.  They'd gone off to university and come back to Fife, and that was the expected pattern of your life. The school I went to had the view that if you were bright, you went to Edinburgh or St. Andrews, and if you weren’t quite so bright, you went to Stirling or Dundee.  But, either way, you came back to Fife.  And if you were really, really sort of a bold person, you might work in Edinburgh and commute.  There's a very strong sense of belonging.  And I knew instinctively from a very early age that I wanted more than that, I wanted something different that I didn't fit with that confined life.  At the time, I thought it was because I wanted to be a writer, and that somehow set me apart.  It took me a long time to understand that a large part of it also was my sexuality, because there were no visible lesbians in Fife when I was growing up.  I mean, there was no visible lesbians most places, but very particularly here, I mean you’d have been more likely to find a unicorn than an out lesbian wandering about Fife! And so I didn't have a name to put on who I was, because if you can't see it, you can't be it.  You have to be able to imagine something, you can't imagine it without some sort of template to start that imagination off.  And so, yeah, for me, the library was the first step on a journey of escape because it showed me worlds beyond my window and the library was directly responsible for me going to Oxford, in a perhaps not expected way. Ben Holden: I know you got in at 16? Val McDermid: Yeah, but I read the Chalet School books when I was growing up.  The Chalet School books were one of my favourite series of books, girls school stories, set first in Austria, then in Switzerland.  I learned a lot of things from the Chalet School books.  They were actually a proper series, in the sense that the books followed on from each other, and things had consequences.  If you read The Famous Five, they all seem to take place in the same summer, and nobody ever has any self consciousness about anything.  Nobody ever says, “We can't go into the dark caves, because the last time we went into the dark cave, something terrible happened”.  Nobody notices, you know, it's like, it doesn't matter what order you read them in, but with the Chalet School books, if you broke your leg in one book, you were still limping three books later.  So there was that sense of progression and therefore of engagement and commitment to the characters. And there's also the sense of mystery and puzzle, because it was the library, so you never read them in sequence.  You just took whatever one was on the shelf.  So you'd go book 27, book 43, book six, and gradually, you form the picture.  And you’d have these moments of revelation - “That's why she behaves like that!”.  And so I love that aspect of it. But for me, one of the key things or two things really, that were key to my future, one was that one of the characters grows up to become a writer of girls school stories in a way that we’d now see as very meta-fictional, but back then was just what she did.  And then one of the books, she gets a letter from a publisher, and in this letter, there's a cheque.  I thought, “Oh my god, you get paid money for this.  You write books, you get paid.  It's a job.  I could do that!”  And the other thing was that everybody who went onto further education from the Chalet School, either went to the Sorbonne, and I knew my French wasn't good enough for that, or they went to Oxford, or they went to the Kensington School of needlework.  So for me, it was obvious if I was going to spread my wings and extend my horizons, I had to go to Oxford. Ben Holden: So you hadn't been to Oxford at this point? Val McDermid: Before I went to Oxford, we'd had one holiday in England.  We'd been to England for a week in Blackpool, which obviously prepared me for Oxford [laughs]. Ben Holden: I know that you've also said a library card is a powerful weapon to change lives and where we can learn about other places, other ways of seeing the world, other lives.  There you go:  “We learn how to value what we have, to mourn what we've lost, to dream of what we might become”.  So that's very much in keeping with this.  So what sort of age was that when you were reading those books? Val McDermid: I think I was about eight or nine when I discovered that if you wanted to be a writer, you got to make money out of writing, that was when I decided that was what I wanted.  I think I'm very lucky.  I think most people take a while to discover their passion, to find out what they want to do with their lives.  I knew from the age of about nine that that was what I was going to do. Ben Holden: But you must have also, your parents must have given you that security of that can-do spirit of the, as you said, you didn't necessarily have the role models around in terms of your sexuality, but also presumably in terms of the writers as well.  But you got that in your head that that’s what I'm going to do. Val McDermid: Everybody laughed at me.  I mean, everybody just went, “Don’t be ridiculous.  People like us don't do that”.  But I was determined and I was very lucky.  Also my father was a great Burns man, Robert Burns man, and he really did believe, a man's a man for all that, and you shouldn’t let anyone call you master, you know, but the only thing standing between me and my dreams was me, so I was always encouraged to go for it, have a goal and to be determined. Ben Holden: And were there any books in that library?  Obviously, you've talked about the series and the impact that had, and you can see the impression of that in terms of your own series, but were there mysteries or in terms of the genre novels, the crime novels, were there things there that sort of sowed any seeds in your head in terms of the types of things you wanted to write?  I know you’ve written all sorts of things, but notably the crime novels.  Were there any seminals, I know you read Buchan and you read Robert Louis Stevenson, and that you were omnivorous, but were there any sort of seminal works? Val McDermid: Well, I read the Nancy Drew books and the Hardy Boys, you know, I rather envied Nancy Drew’s little red roadster.  But what really turned me on to the genre of fiction was a kind of accident really, my grandparents were not readers, the only book they had in the house apart from the Bible, and that in itself was a mystery, it was Agatha Christie's ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’.  And that was a book I started reading when I was probably about nine or 10.  Because I’d turn up at my grandparents for the weekend or for a week in the school holidays with my library books, and I'd run out of library books and so I’d fall back on Agatha Christie.  Linguistic scientists tell us that you can read Christie if you have a reading age of nine, because her grammatical constructions are so limpid, and her language is so clear, and simple, that it's possible to understand the text pretty readily.  So I read ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’, and I thought this was great.  I loved it.  I just was entranced by it.  And I read it and I re-read it again and again. I look at it now, and I think it's probably lucky that my first proper crime novel was Christie at the peak of her powers.   It’s a beautiful construction, you've got this sort of overarching main story, and then you've got lots of subplots that kind of interlock, so that when you have a sort of hiatus in the main story, there's something terribly exciting going on with the subplot.  And every one of those subplots has got, you know, set up, development, pay-off, and it's just, they all interlock.  I mean, if you drew it out, it would be this lovely, sort of geometrical thing.  But I mean, I wasn't thinking of it in those terms when I was reading it back then, I mean, I understand now what the charm of it was.  I got hooked on this.  I have to read more of these. Ben Holden: And you were re-reading at that point?  At that age, though, that's going to really sort of get emblazoned into you or imprinted somewhere. Val McDermid: It definitely imprinted that idea of how to use structure - I couldn't have told you that at the time.  And I was determined to read more of these books once I discovered that Agatha Christie had written more than one book.  And the problem was that they were in the adult library and there was no way to get, it's not like now when everything's on open shelves.  It was totally off limits.  So I did a bad thing, I stole my mum's library tickets.  I went to the library and I did my most pitiful face and said to the librarian, “I have to get a book for my mum.  She's not well”, and god bless those librarians!  It worked for five years until I was old enough to get my adult library tickets. But as I read my way around the excellently stocked crime section of Kirkcaldy library over the course of those years, but because you know, you never get away scot free, your past always catches you out; and a few years ago, I went back to Kirkcaldy library to do a gig, and I took my mum with me, because she’s still living across the road from the library, and to my astonishment, a couple of women who'd been librarians when I was a kid were there.  As I introduced them to my mum, one of them said to my mum, she looked quite shocked, she said, “Mrs McDermid, I thought you must be dead!”.  My mother said, “Dead? Why would I be dead”?  The librarian goes “With you being a bed-ridden invalid all of those years!” Ben Holden: So the funny thing is, though, of course that you were reading the queen of crime, and now that mantle is often yours.  You've sort of become the queen of crime. Val McDermid: Yes, I find that quite strange, because particularly as a Republican, a journalist once dubbed me the “gobby shop steward of crime”, and I think that's probably the more accurate description of my mindset. Ben Holden: I know P.D. James, who was also sort of had that mantle didn't like it much. Val McDermid: No, I think it's, it's just one of these things.  There's a label that you get attached to you, usually for reasons of marketing, I think more than anything.  It's kind of invidious, really, because there's no such thing really, as a writer that speaks to everybody. Ben Holden: And there aren't kings of crime, are there? Val McDermid: Lee Child once referred to himself as my consort. Ben Holden: But that said, you know, crime as a genre is often talked about in terms of, and we're in a bit of a golden age of crime, a lot of female authors; you've talked a bit about the female point of view in terms of writing, about the the sort of experience or the threat of violence, rather than a man's point of view.  And of course, there's a lot of controversy around certain shows and depictions of violence against women.  So there is also some gender interesting sort of discussions to be had within the genre, perhaps? Val McDermid: Yeah, but I think what's important is that there's no doubt that women are often, more often than men, the victims of sexual violence.  And you know, I'm not going to stop writing about these things.  I think what's important though, is that you write about these things with a degree of awareness that there is a line you need to not cross, you need to rein in, you need to say enough to be honest about what violence is and what it does, and the impact it has on the way it contaminates the lives it touches without revelling in it, without it becoming a kind of pornography of violence.  But what my books do and what a lot of other women writers now, what our books do, is we have characters, female characters, with agency.  So the victims are not the only women you see in the books.  You see women who take responsibility, you see women who have an important role to play in the unravelling of these crimes and the resolution of these crimes.  So it's not like the olden days, if you like, of sort of like Raymond Chandler, where the only women in the books were the victims, the vamps and the vixens, you know, now we take responsibility, and we are the agents of vengeance, I suppose. Ben Holden: I know you've sold 16 million copies and in 40 languages, it's astonishing.  And Lee Child has also said that your books have a rare and self sufficient integrity, which is a very succinct and nice way of putting it, and in other words, you've mastered murder as a fine art.  I only mentioned that because in your ‘Mermaid Singing’ novel, you reference De Quincey's treaties on murder. Val McDermid: Yeah, it's a very satirical essay on murder considered as one of the fine arts.  I took quotes from that as the epigraph for the chapters. Ben Holden: Yeah, they're beautiful.  I have one here. I'll read it if you don't mind: “People begin to see that something more goes into the composition of a fine murder, than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife, a purse and a dark lane.  Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed to be indispensable to attempts of this nature”. Which is great stuff, although gentleman is, again, a little limiting, but the components there seem to be in line with what you were describing, what you were learning from Agatha Christie, and also in terms of your own novels. Val McDermid: I'd like to think so.  I think the contemporary crime novel, at its best, is about almost everything except the act of murder.  I mean, we write about all kinds of things.  And the crime, if you like, is the lure to draw the reader in, while we spin our tales that cover all sorts of aspects of modern life.  Everything from politics to romance, find their way into our books. We write about all kinds of things, but the string that pulls the reader through is the crime and its resolution.  And that gives us, I suppose, gives us free rein to write whatever we want to write. I'm very lucky to be writing crime fiction at a time when the genre has become so expansive.  You know, when I started out in British crime fiction, really, you had village mysteries and police procedurals, and that was about it.  You had Ruth Rendell kind of out there on the fringes writing her sort of dark psychological novels, but mostly, what people were writing were these kind of home counties novels about small towns and villages, or about the Metropolitan Police solving everything.  I started writing at a time when, I suppose, independent of each other, a group of writers writing regional crime novels, you know, John Harvey writing in Nottingham, Rachel writing in mid Yorkshire, Ian Rankin writing in Edinburgh, and we were taking murder out of that cosy home counties environment and setting it down in places where it was a part of a different fabric. Ben Holden: And it seems, yeah, listening to you talk about the old days, they sound quite backward, not just in the scope, but in terms of, it's amazing to think that... Val McDermid: But they were quite conservative socially as well.  I mean, there was a very strong conservatism running through the genre, I mean there are always outliers, but the the mainstream of crime fiction up to, I suppose, the early 80s was quite conservative. Ben Holden: And looking at ‘The Mermaid Singing’, I was quite struck in terms of Tony, the profiler, who of course has had huge longevity as a character, in terms of his process, and all your novels are full of beautiful process, which is for a reader incredibly satisfying, and all the research is threaded in there, but it's really rich; but his process, not to get too meta, but sort of began to make me wonder if it was similar in terms of how you are yourself going about conceiving of the characters, their motivations, and sort of being.  You’re always one or two or three steps ahead of us as the reader, but then, in terms of getting inside Tony's head, he was sort of always inside everyone's heads, it struck me in a slightly sort of similar fashion. Val McDermid: I think there's a lot of truth in that.  I mean, if you can't get inside the heads of your characters, you're never going to be able to write a character who spends his time getting inside the heads of other people.  People sometimes ask me, is it harder to write the murderer, or is it harder to write the villains?  How do you manage to get inside their heads?  I say it's just the same as writing any other character.  You have to figure out why they do the things they do, what motivates them, what's in it for them?  What drives them to do these things?  And it doesn't matter if you're writing about the detective, or you're writing about a minor character, or you're writing about the murderer, you've still got to understand why they do the things they do, and it's got to make sense in terms of their world.  People don't do things for no reason, even the most apparently random choice that a criminal makes will have its roots somewhere in their history or their world view.  So you have to figure all that out.  So yeah, I suppose in that sense, writing a character like Tony Hill is about externalising the process that you go through as a writer. Ben Holden: And also the conjuring of imagination in terms of his placing himself into the scenes and into the characters, the minds of these people that he's trying to... Val McDermid: And I'm always looking backwards, when I'm starting out, I kind of know what the crimes are going to be, so I have to reason backwards, I know what the outcome is so I can reason backwards.  And so I can put everything in place to make sense.  Whereas when somebody's doing this for real, somebody who is actually a profiler, they have to reason forwards.  They've got a limited amount of information and they've got to try and figure out from that limited amount of information where the end game is going to be,  whereas I have the advantage of knowing what the end game is from the start.  It’s so funny, I've actually had a couple of occasions, where there’s been sort of serial offences going on, I've had newspapers ring me up and say, will you profile the killer? And I go, “No, of course I won’t!  I can’t just make stuff up!” Ben Holden: But there's loads of, again ‘Mermaid Singing,’ I’d love to, if you don't mind, I’ll read one other thing: “That's how I do the job.  Gradually, the evidence makes me eliminate some of my initial thoughts.  Eventually, some sort of pattern begins to form.  This time, he was going to be as close to a clue as he's ever been.  For a man who lived his life behind the shield of learned behaviours, penetrating a killer’s face was the only game in town”. Which is fantastic stuff, but also, again, just made me think of, without overdoing this, your own process.  Did you feel that you were onto something with that novel in particular, because it was a big success, of course, and you were doing some interesting things in terms of the genders of the victims and the UK profiler was a new sort of thing as well.  But did you feel like you were onto something, of course, it turned into, as well as the series of novels, ‘The Wire in in the Blood’ TV series, the novel also won the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger Award for novel of the year etc.; I know you've won more awards than I probably have time to list, but that one, that was a bit of a game changer for you? Val McDermid: What I've discovered is most of psychological profiling seems to be a really exciting thing to write about.  And at the time that I wrote ‘The Mermaid Singing’, nobody in the UK was writing about this at all.  I mean, it was the first sort of profiling novel in the UK at that time.  I'd read Thomas Harris, and on the basis of that, I went away and read all the non-fiction I could find about it.  There's a marvellous publication called ‘The FBI Book of Sexual Homicide’ - that was my bedtime reading for quite a while.  And I was just, I was completely fascinated by this.  It seemed to me to be a really exciting and different way of approaching the idea of writing about crime.  And I discovered very quickly that we do things differently in the UK from the way they do it in America, and in America, the FBI trains up their agents in what they call behavioural science, effectively psychology, and then they go out into the field. But in the UK, we don't have the number of these kinds of serial offences for it to be practicable to have some sort of specialist unit within the police.  So they summon people who are clinical psychologists, for real, they do this, this is their day job.  They spend their days working with serial offenders or one sort of another.  So I thought this was really interesting, because it creates all sorts of tensions right away, you know, the cops never like being told what to do, what to think.  So I thought, this is fascinating.  I've never seen anything quite like this before.  How exciting is this to work with?  And I thought if I make Tony Hill’s liaison person a woman, that also creates a different dynamic, because you get another set of tensions there, because at the time, it's hard to think about it now, but back in the early, mid 1990s, there were not many women in senior jobs in CID.  So women were not very highly regarded often by their colleagues, so I thought that gave me another whole set of tensions to go on. And I thought this is creating all these different possibilities for narrative and possibilities for relationships.  It was very exciting when I started thinking about the book and working on it.  And I suppose I wasn't thinking about it in terms of it being a game changer when I was writing it, I was just thinking I've got this great story to tell.  And that's all it really is, I suppose, when I sit down with a book, I'm not thinking about it in any terms other than I'm really excited about telling the story, because I think if you start looking at how it's going to be received or what readers are going to think about it, and will readers like it if I do it this way rather than that way, that way madness lies and that way bad books lie. Ben Holden: But the excitement and the enthusiasm which sort of infused the writing process in what became the novel, you felt especially a sort of, “I'm onto something”, or you really enjoyed… Val McDermid: It’s because it was fresh.  I mean, I had felt in my different ways just as excited about when I started writing Lindsay Gordon books or the Kate Brannigan books, they excited me, the idea of what I could do with those books was exciting to me.  I was lucky that with ‘The Mermaid Singing’ it hit the right nerve at the right time. Ben Holden: ‘The Wire in the Blood’ quote is an Eliot quote from ‘Four Quartets’, but it's quite elusive or at least to me what the meaning is, “The thrilling wire in the blood sings below inveterate scars, appeasing long forgotten wars.” Val McDermid: Who knows?  It’s poetry.  It means what you want it to mean.  I don't think things have to be that explicit.  Yeah, I think it's quite nice to have a title that the reader picks up and goes, ‘Oh what’s that about”? Ben Holden: And your newest novel, ‘How the Dead Speak’ is the latest instalment in the Tony Hill series. So they've been through an awful lot, that series, as you described in the library, now you've created several of these series.  Tony's, actually the prison library features, I was pleased to read, there's also… Val McDermid: I had to find something to do with him.  The nature of the story, I had to find a story for him inside the jail, and didn’t just want it to be the sort of standard fare of, you know, so the people getting a shiv in the shower sort of thing, I wanted to make it a little more nuanced than that. Ben Holden: Yeah, and it is a legal requirement for prisons to have libraries.  And yet it's not a legal requirement for schools to have libraries. Val McDermid: But it's also not funded by the prison services, it’s funded by the local authority, prison libraries. Ben Holden: What do you look for now that you've done several of these successful series, when you're sitting down, what are the starting points for the characters, as opposed to a standalone, is it a very different sort of process? Val McDermid: When I start to feel the shape of a story, when I start to have an idea of what I want to write about, and how the story is going to play out, what kind of story it is, it becomes very clear to me very quickly if it fits into one of the series that I write, or if it's going to have to find another set of characters to make the story work.  There’s certain kinds of stories that Tony and Carol can tell, there’s certain kinds of stories that Karen Pirie can tell.  And then there’s stories that don't work for either of them.  And I think, I've always, from the start of my career, written different kinds of books which, for me, has given me the freedom always to be writing a book I’m excited about.  I think it must be awful for people who only write one series character, because they must throw away so many stories that just don't work.  You know, if you've got a private eye as your central character, there's only a certain kind of story you can tell in the first person; if you’ve got a cop as your central character, then you can only tell cop stories, whereas I've always kind of taken the view of I want to have the freedom to tell the story that excites me.  So whenever I sit down to write a book, I'm excited because this story has gripped me by the throat and needs to be told. In fact, sometimes Tony and Carol started as a standalone.  I didn't intend that to be the start of a series, but as I came towards the end of ‘Mermaid Singing’, I thought these characters are really interesting, both in terms of their professional lives, and their personal relationship, the chemistry between them, I can take this further.  And I thought I might get three or four books out of it.  Well, you know, ‘How the Dead Speak’ is number 11.  The same with Karen Pirie, she started off as a minor character in a standalone, and a few years after that, I had an idea for a novel about a cold case set in Fife.  I thought, well, I've already got this cold case cop in Fife, nobody will remember I've used her before, and then Karen suddenly took on a life of her own - so like, you know, five of them next year, there'll be six. Ben Holden: And they span 25 odd years as well.  And as you said, in terms of the genre, you've, along the way, kind of chronicled various changes in society.  And in the new book, it's not the De Quincey, Tony gets the epigraphs himself which is cool.  And he says in one of them, “One of the less obvious effects of austerity has been the increase in the numbers of the visibly vulnerable.  For predators, it's been a gift wrapped opportunity to expand their choice of victims”. Val McDermid: There are more people out there that nobody misses.  There are certainly people who will take advantage of that.  As a sort of sidebar to that, back in the 1980s, late 80s, early 90s, a group of chief constables got together in England, about half of England's forces, they met for a weekend in a country house, and brought along their unsolved murders.  And at the end of that weekend, their conclusion was that there were probably at least three previously unsuspected serial killers working in England, preying on sex workers.  And that was that, I mean, I never heard anything came of that, nothing more was written, there's no result, these guys were not put away or found or anything.  But there was a clear belief that methodology and the nature of these crimes indicated that there were individuals perpetrating several of these crimes.  And for one reason or another, they were never tracked down.  So it's not a big leap to say, you know, you have people who are ready, they are predators, and it's quite clear that there are more vulnerable people out there for them.  So the logical conclusion is, you know. Ben Holden: It's a sobering thought.  And on austerity, we might as well get into, you know, the library closures, which is a touchstone of this podcast.  Sadly, in Scotland, 69 libraries closed between 2011 and 2018, but there were 30 in 2017.  I don't know what the numbers will be for this year, and Fife got hit especially hard, and I know that you were campaigning and doing your bit to try and stop that scourge. Val McDermid: It’s low hanging fruit isn’t it, the library?  It's hard to prevent happening, even though we have a first minister who champions reading and who reads herself. Ben Holden: She's incredible actually, though.  She’s a voracious reader. Val McDermid: Yes, she is.  In fact, the year I was Booker Prize judge, she used to take the mickey out of me.  She reads on Saturday nights, and she quite often tweets about what she's reading.  And when you're a Booker judge, you're not even allowed to say what you're reading, because that would indicate what had been submitted, and she would tease me on Saturday night saying, “I'm just reading such and such a book, what do you think of it Val McDermid”?  But even with that, it wasn't enough to prevent library closures. I think it's incredibly short sighted.  It's not just writers who were made by libraries, it’s doctors, it’s nurses, it’s architects, it’s builders.  It's anyone who wants to open their eyes and have a wider horizon.  And I think closing libraries is burning your seed corn.  I think part of the difficulty is that politicians never go into libraries.  They are the middle classes.  They can buy a book if they want a book.  They don't see what happens in libraries.  Now libraries are not just a hushed place where people sit quietly looking at reference books, now, libraries are a hub for the community in all sorts of ways.  All sorts of clubs and societies meet there, all sorts of groups.  For a lot of people, it’s their only access to the internet, because not everybody has WiFi, not everybody has a computer.  So the library becomes a resource for the community.  It's not just a place to borrow a book.  And the failure to understand that seems to me to be symptomatic of the line, this wall between political classes and the people that they are supposed to be looking after. Ben Holden: Yeah, and it's awful, obviously, in a personal sense to think of young Val, you know, your second home, the Kirkcaldy library, which we went past on the train earlier.  I looked out the window, and it was right there as well. Val McDermid: It's a very good library.  There was a beautiful refurb of it as well, a few years ago, a two million pound refurb, and they put a new cafe in.  And there are new libraries being built, and there are some quite interesting partnerships being made between supermarkets and local authorities, this deal of you can put your supermarket in this new shopping mall in the centre of the city, but you've got to put a library above it.  So things like that are happening which is positive.   But I think that, you know, the overall picture is still pretty grim.  You know, they talk about, “Oh well, you can have volunteer run libraries”, but the volunteers, of course, do a great job, but they're limited.  They're not librarians.  They're not trained librarians.  And there are no funds for restocking these libraries, it’s gloom and doom, I'm sorry, it makes me very cross. Ben Holden: Well this is the raison d'etre of the podcasts, so please be cross. Val McDermid: Particularly in the time of austerity, when people are again in a position where they can't afford books. Ben Holden: And what about independent bookshops, then?  This one seems to be flourishing, but then it's a beautiful, beautiful place, as we said, but how would you paint the landscape there, what's, very different sort of, you know, apples and oranges, but what's your take on why these shops have worked and the landscape generally? Michael Grieve: I think the question of independent bookshops is quite largely a question of where you are.  Edinburgh, particularly, I think, at the moment, is spoiled for lovely independent bookshops, in a way that places like Glasgow and Fife outside of St. Andrews often isn't.  And as Val was sort of intimating, I think it is a class thing, I think it's often to do with income and availability of books as a thing to be owned, rather than as a thing to be borrowed.  Well, this is the tragic thing about library closures, as well, it’s the communities that need them the most are usually the communities where the libraries are closing down as well, which is  really, really awful. Val McDermid: It’s not the libraries in the middle class areas that have closed down, because the middle classes are articulate, and they know how to complain, it’s the libraries on a council estate where the local people don't have at their disposal the easy mechanism for complaining, for protesting, for making it stop, because it's not part of the culture that they have grown up with.  I remember back in Newcastle working with Ann Cleeves, we were campaigning to save a library in a pretty rundown council estate and this library had been built in a little shopping mall in the 1980s, and the only other things that were open in the shopping mall was the betting shop and the payday loan place.  I mean, it was quite clear that the library was the hub here.  Where are you going to go to find out about your benefits?  You’re not going to go into the betting shops and say, “Excuse me, can I borrow your computer for a minute?”It’s devastating to them.  But independent bookshops are surviving…. Michael Grieve: ...because they become the community hub often as well.  And so here, there's always a tea and coffee on the go.  And many of the good independent bookshops in Scotland are places where, I know Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh are helping people who are homeless register to vote in the upcoming general election, and they were offering that as a service, and in the absence of those services being provided by libraries, often independent bookshops can become the place where people can come and ask for advice on how to find information, come for a place to relax and have a coffee and read a book, and it's not necessarily as driven on sales, obviously, fundamentally it is, but the atmosphere of being an open and warm space. Val McDermid: But you also have in indie bookshops, it's incumbent upon you in a way to cultivate your readers, you have to remember what people like, you have to remember what that this, you have to figure out what the next thing is that they might be interested in.  That's a way of helping people to explore and to make new discoveries. Michael Grieve: When you have people who come in and you see them buy something and you ask them about it next time, you go, “Oh well, you tried this”, so then they recommend a book to you and you read it.  The community of readership, I suppose, is the shared link between the…. Ben Holden: The ongoing conversation down the ages as well that these sorts of institutions allow us to have.  And this is a podcast, as we know, about libraries in bookshops, I always like to ask Val, you've already touched on your library at home.  How, without being too nosy, how fastidious are you with your books?  Are you an alphabetical sort of person?  Are you a regimented kind of reader or? Val McDermid: The fiction is arranged alphabetically, because, otherwise, how do you find what you need to go back and look at again, whether it's to reread it or to refer to it. Ben Holden: You’re preaching to the choir, but I know people who don't always abide by that. Val McDermid: I often go back for a very specific reason to a book, you know, because I'm thinking about, I might be writing an article or something, and I want to think about that particular book.  Or I'm just, I just get sort of, “Oh, I need to re-read so and so”, I need to know where they are.  But I'm slightly less organised in other areas of my reading life, I mean, in my office, there’s a chunk of non-fiction, and it's not arranged according to anything other than it looks like it should sit next to that book. Ben Holden: And Michael?  I know that, here, all the time you are immersed in it, but at home, does it come with you in terms of how you organise yourself at home? Michael Grieve: All the books that fit on a shelf are alphabetized, all the books that do not fit on the shelf are stacked in rough total collocations with one another, which often relies on hauling books, if you're looking for something in particular. Val McDermid: What do you do with your unread books?  How do you organise them, do you organise them? Michael Grieve: They tend to be sat next to my arm chair until I get down to them. Val McDermid: I’ve got a random wall of unread books. Michael Grieve: They’re a sort of stratigraphic thing, you have to sort of work down to them, and if they end up right in the bottom, you know, you probably should pull them back up again. Ben Holden: The time will come, they each have their moment, don’t they?  They are biding their time waiting for you. Val McDermid: And I think even with the number of shelves that I've got, I mean there’s a shortage of space, and every now and again, you think I have moved this particular book through three houses, I'm really not going to read it.  I should really give it to the charity shop, so that it may find the person who will read it and love it, because it has sat there unloved on my shelf for 15 years, and I'm not going to read it now. Michael Grieve: But isn't that the beauty of having a book is that everything else you buy runs out or you grow out of it, or it goes off, a book is very patient, it will sit and wait until you're ready for it. Val McDermid: It's true.  And then there are the books that you've picked up five times over the years and given up on, and finally you pick it up for that last time and it speaks to you. Ben Holden: Speaking of which, it would be lovely if, Val, you wouldn’t mind browsing these gorgeous shelves and choosing a new book with Michael.  You've spoken in the past about the power of browsing, and this last sort of button on the podcast is designed to celebrate the serendipity of these places.  And I know that you've spoken about the algorithms of buying online where you don't get challenged, you don't go thinking out of your reading box, as it were. ~ Val McDermid is invited to select a book from the shelves of Toppings & Company ~ Val McDermid: I know exactly where it is because it leapt out at me.  Here we go - ‘Sensible footwear.  A Girl’s Guide’. It's a memoir-cum-history of LGBT activism over the last 50 years. Michael Grieve:  Where does the title come from? Val McDermid:  I think that’s because lesbians have sensible shoes!  So I’ll take that one. [END] Thank you for listening to this Ex Libris podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe wherever it is you get your brainfood. That way, not only will you keep up with the podcasts, but you’ll also help us champion libraries and independent bookshops.  To find out more about the authors and venues, as well as libraries and independent bookshops, please visit our website: www.exlibris.com [http://www.exlibris.com]You can also get updates on twitter and instagram.  Find me @thatbenholden. Follow those accounts also for a chance of winning signed copies of Val’s gripping new novel, ‘How the Dead Speak’ in hardback, as well as her fascinating work of non-fiction, ‘Forensics:  The Anatomy of Crime’. Ex Libris is produced by Chris Sharp and Ben Holden. Ex Libris is brought to you in association with The Lightbulb Trust [http://lightbulbtrust.org/] - which illuminates lives via literacy and learning, providing opportunities to shine.