That Dark Remembered Day

I am delighted to welcome Tom Vowler back to the blog today, to talk about his brand new novel - his third book - That Dark Remembered Day. Tom was here last year talking about his first novel, What Lies Within, and two years before that to chat about his short story collection, The Method. He's not been sitting still much! Below, we play Word Association, with Tom answering in the voice of his main character. But first...


 Alison Moore, author of The Lighthouse, called That Dark Remembered Day "a compelling story about damage done, a touching exploration of the possibility of forgiveness and recovery" and Anthony McGowan, author of Mortal Coil, said: "Almost every page has the sort of perfect sentence or paragraph that makes you want to elbow the stranger next to you on the train, point with a stubby finger, and say: ‘Read that. Just read it.'"

Here's a quick synopsis: 

A son returns to where he grew up, where his mother still lives and where a terrible event in his childhood changed the lives of every person living there. As the story unfolds through the eyes of the son, the mother and finally the father, the reader experiences the taut build up to one day's tragic unravelling, and the shock waves that echoed through a once happy family and close-knit community. Will they ever be able to exorcise the damage of that day or do some wounds run too deep?

Tom is giving away a copy to one lucky blog reader - just leave a comment below! Here's a little bit about Tom: " Tom Vowler is a novelist and short story writer living in south west England. His debut collection, The Method, won the Scott Prize in 2010, and his novel What Lies Within received critical acclaim. He is co-editor of the literary journal Short Fiction and an associate lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, where he’s completing a PhD looking at the role of the editor in fiction. That Dark Remembered Day is his second novel. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk"

To whet your appetite further, here are me and Tom playing Word Association, with Tom answering as Stephen from That Dark Remembered Day:

HOME

Sanctuary by the sea.

FRIEND

Betrayed in childhood. Forgiveness sought.

BIOLOGY

Work, the sea, escape.

MOTHER

Eccentric, avoided.

VICTIM

Thirteen.

WAR

Father remained there.

FAMILY

Broken forever. New one found.

MEMORY

Buried. Unwelcome.

STORY

Cover. Truth hidden.

DEATH

Seen.

LOVE

Daughter. Wife. Hope.

Intrigued? You should be! To find about more about Tom's amazing novel, visit his website. Don't forget - to be in with a chance of winning a copy, leave a comment below. Thanks for playing, Tom!

 

Bookish Gift Ideas...

So, I've been immensely honoured over the past few years to be asked to contribute an endorsement to a range of wonderful books. I take the task of blurbing very seriously, it takes me a long time, for me a blurb is almost a story in itself, and as I've seen from the amazing  blurbs I was lucky enough to get, they can really give a great impression of what is in the book. So, if you're looking for presents to buy this festive season, here are all the books - in no particular order - that I've blurbed, with my blurbs - I highly recommend them all!

Dot Dash by Jon Pinnock

In these wonderful short, very short and very very short stories, Jonathan Pinnock takes aim at all the foibles and vanities we think we succeed in hiding. Not content to just pull back the curtain, Pinnock sets fire to it and chuckles as it blazes. Yet he also executes something of a conjuring trick, making us laugh, but also making us feel, think. Like Nana, whose granddaughter recreates Cairo in her bedroom for her before she dies, we fabricate our own reality: we see and hear what we want and ignore what we don't. Dot Dash is sending us a message, and yes, it may be through yellow plastic ducks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't listen. 

Beneath the Liquid Skin by Berit Ellingsen

Berit Ellingsen is no ordinary wordsmith but a weaver of silken tapestories, lush and burning with both ancient ache and postmodern playfulness. Mixing myth and astronomy, desire and other appetites, and dancing on the thread that slips between poetry and prose, Ellingsen stitches every word in perfect service to her utterly beautiful and dreamlike stories.

The Baghdad Fixer by Ilene Prusher

A journalist's fixer is a go-between in so many senses: linguistic, cultural. The fixer straddles borders and boundaries, helping each try to communicate with the Other. Ilene Prusher conjurs this so beautifully in her stunning, thrilling debut, as Nabil, an Iraqi English teacher with a poetic soul, is drawn into the unfamiliar, learning as much about his own country and people as about the world in which Samarra, the American journalist who has hired him, moves so easily. A unique novel, The Baghdad Fixer's compelling plot is combined with poignant and difficult insights into the life and tragedies of ordinary Iraqis during the war. This is not just a wonderful read, it is an important book for helping us, too, to begin to understand the Other.

Fakakt: Melissa Morris and The Meaning of Sex by Jasmine Schwartz

I love Melissa Morris. The most unlikely heroine of a murder mystery, she's insecure, worried about her failing love life, her job prospects and her fashion sense. Yet when, on a trip to Rome in pursuit of errant boyfriend Colin, she is wrongfully arrested for murder, does she sit in a cell, weeping? She does not. She promptly escapes to track down the real murderer and clear her name. In a city she's not familiar with and a language she doesn't speak. That's more than plucky, and it makes for the unputdownable story of an amateur detective who could be any one of us, stumbling around atmospheric Italian streets trying to piece the plot together. I dare you not to fall in love with Jasmine Schwartz's Melissa Morris too. She may believe she's "fakakt" but I think she's fabulous!

Enough by Valerie O'Riordan

Valerie O'Riordan puts to shame the puffed-up and the oversized with her beautiful, brief and brutal fictions. Each word is worth a hundredweight, each story a full world. O'Riordan is a true original, fierce and fearless, she will travel anywhere for a great story. I can't wait for more!

Storm Warning by Vanessa Gebbie

Both haunted and haunting, Vanessa Gebbie's protagonists in these unsettling stories move through the present but remain always tethered to the past. No war stories these, but explorations of what it means to “survive” the conflicts and horrors created by humans across centuries and continents. Like Pat Barker, Gebbie gives voice to those who cannot forget, even decades later, who was taken and and what was lost in the blood and mud. Gebbie's strength lies in her poetic and poignant combination of reality and dream, the weaving together of outer experience and inner turbulence, and the small sparks of hope even in the darkest corners.

Hot Kitchen Snow by Susannah Rickards

The stories in this quietly powerful collection are populated by characters you care about from the opening sentence, children and adults whose lives you slip into in the midst of action. For Rickards, action is something as ordinary as a mother wondering whether to leave her children alone for five minutes or a dog-food salesman looking for meaning in his life; as magical as the father who kidnaps the moon for his daughter; or as quirky as the overweight dance administrator persuaded to put on a sari and take an Indian dance class. Whatever the context, Rickards’ stories grip and flow onwards, tiny twists and revelations exposing the undersides of life, both glowing and dark. This book will entertain, provoke, shock and surprise you in all the ways a great short story collection should.

In the Spirit of Phineas McLata by Lauri Kubuitsile

Lauri Kubuitsile's stories are sweet, salty, colourful, hot, and unforgettable. Botswana-flavoured and pregnant with atmosphere, Kubuitsile's writing slips easily between the real and the magical, between death and life, love and sex, humour and darkness, friendship and family. Just as McPhineas Lata wove his seductive spell on the village women, so too will these stories bewitch and enchant.

Housewife With A Half Life by Alison Wells

AB Wells is not only a supremely talented writer but also something of an alchemist. Housewife With a Half Life is wondrously original and imaginative, combining the travails of domesticity with glorious scientific allusions and illusions in a fast-paced and sparkling tale of a wife and mother who discovers she is losing herself, and the stranger from another dimension who turns up as she's cleaning the bathroom to make sure it doesn't happen. A wild ride, this nuclear fusion of a novel is, underneath it all, the story of relationships, of family, of what it means to be a mother, a wife, a woman, and, ultimately, a human being. Move over H.G., A B Wells has written the time-travelling tale for the 21st century!

Veronica Britton by Niall Boyce

I could say that Niall Boyce's fiction is X meets Y meets Z, but that would be doing it a severe injustice because it is a fabulously imaginative and unique combination of elements. Here we have historical fiction meets science fiction meets fantasy with a dash of philosophy and a sprinkling of feminism. I was captivated by chronic detective Veronica Britton and her sidekick, superheroines in every sense of the word, saving the world time and again, in and out of time. I was only sorry when I turned the last page and had to leave their exploits. Am eagerly awaiting the next one!

All the Bananas I've Never Eaten by Tony Williams

Tony Williams has a special talent for assembling the magical out of the mundane - whether that be pub carpets, satnavs, mattresses or bananas. These short short stories often deal in pain, in death, in loss and loneliness, in absence, in anger and in shame, but Williams always makes sure that fragments of hope emerge, like the music of an oboe, that short burst of happiness that lights up the dark.

I hope I haven't forgotten anyone! Right, that's your lot, something there for everyone, I think!

Excitement for Girl Author!

So you know how it is when you go and hear an author read, and then afterwards you go and queue, you buy their new book and take it to them to sign? Well tonight, I had the immense pleasure of not only receiving something from Famous Author, but also handing over a copy of The White Road to her!

Famous Author is Rebecca Goldstein, a wonderful American writer of science- and philosophy-inspired short stories and novels such as The Mind-Body Problem, who in 2006 awarded me 2nd prize in the Entelechy Journal's Biofiction contest for my story, My Name is Henry.  So, when it came to that wondrous and fairly stressful time for me to find endorsements (aka blurbs) for my own book, I thought, Well, she liked one story, maybe she'll like the rest?


Thankfully, she did, or anyway was incredibly generous enough to shower me with lovely words to put on the book:

"Tania Hershman's very short stories manage to pack the punch of fiction many times longer. Her strategy is highly original, consistently interesting, and astonishingly moving. Joining the impersonal facts of scientific research with our human fragility, complexity and tragedy, Hershman extracts poignancy out of the laws of nature."

I remember being very moved when she sent me that endorsement. So when I heard she was coming to Bristol, with her husband Steven Pinker, the rather Famous Scientist and Science Writer who I am also a great fan of, to talk about her new book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (a novel), my first thought was that I would be able to present her with a copy of my book to thank her in person.

The talk was very interesting, Steven was interviewing her, and oddly he wasn't actually introduced by the Bristol Festival of Ideas person, which was strange. But it was a very highbrow discussion about God, morality, religion, atheism, etc... And Rebecca read from the beginning of the book, her usual gorgeous mix of lyrical prose with extremely thought-provoking philosophical ideas. One of the characters in the book is apparently a maths prodigy, which, of course, thrills me even more! (I will be blogging on the Jewish Book Week blog shortly about Sunday's talk by celebrity mathematician Marcus do Sautoy - which made me go all wobbly with delight.)

I got a little nervous in the queue. How would I present myself? Rebecca had sent out a mass email to people announcing her new book - I'd been thrilled to be on that list - and so I had taken that chance to "warn" her that I'd be accosting her in Bristol. But still.... I clutched my slim little volume, and purchased her large, hardbacked one. James struck up a conversation with the woman from the publishers who was making sure no-one got too close... just to make sure I wouldn't be hustled away!

She was, of course, charming! Made out like she knew exactly who I was, was delighted to have the book, even said something about having something new to read... even though she's read the stories before. And then we walked home, me feeling all warm and fuzzy.

So thank you Rebecca Goldstein, for being so generous to a fledgling writer, taking the time to make me feel that I could do it too. And for writing wonderful books that keep on inspiring, the kind of books that, along with great stories, challenge readers and make us think, even make us look up words, rather than allowing our brains to atrophy. If you haven't read anything by her, you should rectify that at once. This Girl Author is going to bed happy.

Writers supporting writers

To return to the subject of the dreaded blurb hunt, I just wanted to say thank you to Toby Litt. Toby was one of my tutors on an Arvon course a few years ago, and when I got my book deal, I asked him if he might provide a quote for the back of the book. After much confusion involving the Post Office and lost printouts of the proofs, he finally settled for a PDF, which is never the same as holding the book in your hands, and today he emailed me this beautifully succinct quote:

'These stories are acute, meticulous, memorable. Tania Hershman is definitely a writer worth watching.'

I greatly appreciate someone like Toby, who is busy promoting his own books, taking the time to read my stories and to encourage a beginning author who is just stepping onto the path. I only hope that if I am in a similar position, I will be able to be as generous with my time and my words.

The hunt for blurbs

This from The hunt for blurbs | Salon Books

I managed to beat the odds by finding an agent and a publisher for my own first novel. All seemed to be going well until, about six months before publication, my editor called to discuss the issue of blurbs. For the paperback version of my book, I'll have plenty of reviews with which to lard the back cover but, pre-publication, the first-time novelist needs quotes like "Genius!" or "Masterpiece!" or "Johnson writes like an angel!" from other, more established, writers in order to lure potential readers. Thus commenced the dreaded search for blurbs.

A very amusing, bittersweet article in Salon about the dreaded "blurb" hunt, which I am familiar with. It's not enough to have attained the book deal, now you have to deal with the naked spaces on the back of the book jacket and try and persuade people to glow and praise your writing.

I am lucky, I found three wonderful writers who did just that, and I am very grateful to them. But there's something vaguely humiliating about even asking - it's like saying "Say something nice about me, please!" Then they do, and you're thrilled, but somewhat disbelieving that this describes your writing. A very odd aspect to publishing. I presume originally the quotes were from reviews of the hardcover which they then added to the paperback, but now books often go straight to paperback, hence this strange, artificial process. I don't quite believe it will boost my readership at all... we will see. Anyone else have tales of the dreaded search for blurbs?

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