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Books of the Year 2023

December 30, 2023 /

2023 has been, more than any other I can remember, a year of two halves: the first productive, forward-looking, full of excitement over new projects; the second blackly surreal with Chris’s cancer diagnosis and the gradually encroaching impacts of the disease.

I want to say first that Chris’s resilience, fighting spirit and wickedly subversive sense of humour have been in evidence throughout. He is a rare individual, a deep thinker, a very brave man.

I want to say also that books have proved if anything even more important to us this year than they have always been: reading them, writing them, talking and thinking about them. One of the hardest things to bear has been Chris’s increasing inability to find refuge in books, not through lack of desire but through simple tiredness.

Hearing him read aloud the opening pages of The War of the Worlds for a French documentary film segment back in November is a memory that will remain with me for a long time to come.

The ten books I read in 2023 that have meant the most to me are:

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. One from the first half of the year, and mind-bendingly good. So well made the joins are flawless. For anyone interested in true crime, whether as reader or as writer, this remains the gold standard.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. I’ve followed MacInnes’s work from the beginning and for me he is one of the most interesting and important younger British writers working today. In Ascension – humane, provocative and radiantly beautiful – is a book everyone should read.

The Last Supper: a summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk. As a woman writing, Cusk has always been fearless in putting her intellect on the page and for this alone she is a hero to me. This book is about everything – art, time, mortality, belonging – and the kind you could reread every year and gain something new. Her forthcoming novel Parade is one of my most anticipated publications of 2024.

Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison. The writer’s anti-Bible. There is nothing about this unique exploration of memory, autobiography, place and the fantastic that I do not love.

The Lost Child by Julie Myerson. This is the first book in a long time that I have just sat down and read, cover to cover, when I’ve not been on a train. Like Cusk, Myerson is a writer who has often found herself reaping the whirlwind simply for being a woman who examines her own experience with an unflinching eye. Her pursuit of the forgotten watercolourist Mary Yelloly is every bit as compelling as her account of her son Jake’s cannabis addiction, which is precisely what makes The Lost Child a masterclass in autofiction.

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. Even though the overblown dramatics of its final section annoy me, I still count this book among my most enjoyed of 2023 as it combines those two rare qualities: propulsive readability with effortlessly beautiful sentences. Can I call this a crime romp? Yes I can.

Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates. The opposite of a crime romp – Babysitter is too dark and tense for that – this is nonetheless another Oates classic, garnering way too little attention at the time of publication. Dreamlike, nightmarish, a fascinatingly original treatment of true crime themes.

Possession by A. S. Byatt. I am so glad I decided to finally catch up with this one. A beautifully wrought novel, everything a Booker winner should be and worthy of its literary godfather Umberto Eco. The poems alone are a significant achievement. So typical of the industry that the editor initially implored Byatt to cut them out.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman. I thank God for this book. It reminds me of who I am and what I want to do.

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler. Forget all the other conspiracy theory books – if you want to get under the skin of cognitive dissonance, go and read this one. Superbly researched and articulated, this exploration of author identity and why – in defiance of Barthes – it does actually matter is as entertaining as it is important.

Wishing everyone a fruitful and spiritually prosperous 2024. May it be a more peaceful space to inhabit than 2023.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors

December 16, 2023 /

From what I can remember of that time, I think I saw him as some kind of integral role model. Incautious, unfettered, improper, untethered. But also… getting the work done.

At this blackened, stub end of the year, it is hard to express what a comfort this book has been for me during the greyish hours between four and six when I have not been sleeping. Because of what it says. About art, about German culture, about death. About the missing link, as Penman puts it, between one era and another.

Because of what it says and because of its sentences. Because of the sense this book gives me, that if I could write something even halfway comparable then I would have succeeded in expressing something of the kind of writer I aspire to be.

Did I ever wonder: why are so many of the things I love either French or German? Did I ever think: how European is it? Or why does the UK feel so parochial and un-European? Why are we so time-stranded and small-c conservative? Such a hidebound culture at the time; plenty of newspapers and small magazines and arts programmes but all of them so Oxbridgey and middlebrow. Absent a whole education in European culture, ancient and modern. I don’t recall ever feeling particularly English or British or Anglo-Saxon or Celtic or whatever; this may partly have been the punkish, puckish spirit of the time, and partly a result of my own, wildly dispersed, non-settled, non-linear childhood, which had nothing like a home town or immediate circle or anything like a secure sense of nationality.

You don’t have to know Fassbinder to love this book. I have seen only a couple of his films: Effi Briest (which I remember as a claustrophobic vision of Bismarck-era Prussian propriety as if viewed through the lens of an unsuccessful film maker from the thirties, thinking about going over to the Nazi party), Die Ehe der Maria Braun, bits of Berlin Alexanderplatz. (Of course I want to see more now. I want to binge-watch.) You don’t need to know Fassbinder to love this book, because this is really a book about how to write biography – your own, someone else’s – and I have been thinking about that a lot recently.

For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases. (Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye)

The book’s epigraph, from the novella by Nabokov that only VN completists ever read, a postscript to Dostoevsky’s The Double, a precursor to VN’s own Despair, the most Dostoevskian of his novels, this from a writer who was forever insisting how he hated Dostoevsky, how cheap his sentiments, how gaudily lit his scenes. VN, estranged from Dostoevsky as from his own twin brother. A kind of self-hatred, the classic Fassbinder material, the rain across the opening credits neither the ecstatic catharsis of the rain that enshrines Solaris nor the terrifying downpour that powers Suspiria. The grey pouring-out of winter, somewhere in-between.

Watched two episodes on Netflix of the Spanish crime series Bitter Daisies, including now almost obligatory scenes of the detectives’ wall of clues and photos, linked together by differently coloured bits of wool or string. Later that night I dream that eventually I am going to have to assemble this book the exact same way. But what is the underlying mystery or transgression here, crying out to be solved?

A biography of the film-maker, an excavation of self. Writing as if it matters, which it does.

If you loved this book

Or this book

Then you will love this book too.

The North Shore

November 30, 2023 /

Over the past ten years, we have seen a seismic upsurge of interest and enthusiasm for what has come to be known as folk horror, a peculiarly British brand of weird fiction characterised by subtle intimations of the supernatural, an understated delivery and most crucially an interest in landscape and sense of place. The folk horror revival has produced some excellent work, texts that have already earned their place in the canon and will endure as classics. It has also produced its own share of duds, derivative works that rely too much on familiar tropes and showing little inclination to break new ground. All literary movements tend to run to a law of diminishing returns, and such disappointments are inevitable. Which makes it all the more marvellous when out of nowhere something brilliant arrives to surprise you.

Ben Tufnell’s novel The North Shore is that rare beast, a work of folk horror that holds its own with the classics whilst exhibiting genuine points of difference, a radical literary sensibility combined with an old-fashioned appetite for the strange that will, I am sure, see me returning to this novel repeatedly for new inspiration.

The unnamed narrator – we learn only their initials – grows up somewhere on the north Norfolk coast (I am guessing Salthouse, or Stiffkey), a landscape of treacherous marshland and sudden storms. Alone on the shore during one such storm, the narrator unwittingly becomes a part of something extraordinary, an event that will mark their life while never fully revealing the true extent of its mystery.

Ben Tufnell is a museum curator and writer on art, so while it is not entirely surprising to find him bringing aspects of art criticism into his narrative it is entirely to be welcomed. His writing on the transformative power of Dürer and Bosch came as a real joy for me, and the landscape writing – a vividly sensuous evocation of liminal spaces – is truly exceptional.

To mix folk horror with film criticism and botanical illustration – yes, please! The narrator’s own uncertainty over what they have experienced, the ways in which the potentially treacherous landscape reflects their personal isolation – this is a timeless book, one that will outlast any fashion and repay close attention. The author’s refusal to provide any easy conclusion or explanation enhances the whole.

This elegant, thought-filled book has been an unexpected delight during a difficult week and I am already looking forward to Ben Tufnell’s next novel.

The 10 Best Books from the past 10 years

October 26, 2023 /

As I watched a recent Booktube video in which Eric Karl Anderson aka Lonesome Reader celebrates a decade of book blogging by naming his ten favourite books from the past ten years, I found I couldn’t resist the temptation of following in his footsteps . Of course, it is inevitable that the choices I make right now will be governed by what I am drawn to right now, rather than what might have seemed more important to me back then. But that makes things, if anything, even more interesting. It has been a little over a decade since I first started keeping detailed records of the books I read – and what I think of them. Every year at around this time I open a new Word document where I can make a note of upcoming releases as and when I hear about them, a document that will eventually become my tally of books considered and discussed and read in the year to come. These lists act as a reminder not only of those books I do actually end up reading, but also of those that catch my interest, however fleetingly, books that I might return to in subsequent years. Each of these documents as I look at them now powerfully brings back the literary flavour and texture of the year in question. As a record of the changing literary landscape, of how my interests as a reader and writer have evolved in new directions, I find them fascinating.

2013 – the year Eleanor Catton won the Booker for her superbly achieved megatext The Luminaries. But my pick of the year – then and now – is Richard House’s The Kills, which made the Booker longlist but should have gone further. It remains as strong in my mind in 2023 as during the month I spent reading it a decade ago.

2014 – a weirdly awful reading year, in which much of what I read seems in retrospect to be of zero consequence. Among the few titles from 2014 that still resonate, Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed is the one I still think about with love and awe.

2015 – another depressingly inconsequential reading year in which I was clearly struggling to find direction. Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, with its piercingly beautiful landscape writing and impassioned defence of personal freedom remains a favourite. The fact that I can still remember where I was when I was reading it – on the train to and from Cornwall sometime in late summer- stands testament to that fact.

2016 – a fascinating reading year, in which my current interests are clearly beginning to solidify. A toss-up between Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser and Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground.

2017 – the year of the Sharke, and many fond recollections. Memories too of reading Paul McAuley’s Fairyland while on the Paris Metro. No contest though for book of the year, which is Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, a touchstone work and one I am planning to reread very soon. Kitamura’s expert manipulation of the mystery template continues to be inspirational.

2018 – reading through this year’s list brings back powerful memories of what was clearly a breakthrough year for me in terms of thinking about my own writing. With a dozen titles at least in contention, I am going to plump for This House of Grief by Helen Garner, if only because I very recently read her novel The Spare Room, which reminded me so powerfully of how much I love and admire her, and how much territory she has conquered for women who write.

2019 – on trains a lot, doing stuff for The Dollmaker. Also the Dublin Worldcon, reading all of Ben Lerner and discovering the genius of Mary Gaitskill. Top pick though goes to The Porpoise by Mark Haddon, which is a glorious and wonderful feat of experimental storytelling and didn’t get anywhere near enough attention.

2020 – as with 2018 I find it almost impossible to single out one book as emblematic of what was a stellar reading year, with so much achieved in terms of thinking and writing. It would be wrong of me not to mention my beloved Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson, Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn and Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride, which closed out the year on a wave of pure joy and inspiration. But if I have to make a choice I’m going to declare the book of 2020 to be a dead heat between Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry and The Spire by William Golding. Both are, of course, masterpieces.

2021 – to be remembered for a journey from Liverpool to Glasgow that kept me trapped on the train – several trains, in fact – for long enough to read the entire second half of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, mostly while crammed into a luggage rack between York and Edinburgh. But the top spot would still have to go to Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams, a peerless reconstruction of the social, political and cultural landscape of the Moors Murders that should be cited in every true crime aficionado’s top twenty.

2022 – bit of a weird reading year – bit of a weird year full stop, illuminated by points of particular brightness, including Heather Clark’s magnificent landmark biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, and especially Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza, which rescued me at a moment of particular darkness.

I have today opened and named my document ‘Books 2024’.

Prix Medicis et Prix Femina

October 18, 2023 /

I am thrilled and a little overwhelmed to announce that the French edition of Conquest (translation, as ever, by the incomparable Bernard Sigaud) is a finalist for the 2023 Prix Medicis. It has also made the second selection for the 2023 Prix Femina for best translated work. You only have to look at my fellow shortlistees to see what an honour this is.

The growing visibility and success of my work in France is in no small part down to the dedication and commitment of my French publishers, Sylvie Martigny and Jean-Hubert Gailliot of Editions Tristram. These are very special people, who live and breathe literature. Their generosity and sensitivity, their belief in what I have done and what I can do is indeed a beacon in dark times.

Bravo, mes amis, bravo. C’est tout pour vous.

Lamb

October 12, 2023 /

Today sees the appearance of Matt Hill’s long-awaited fifth novel. Lamb is published by the Liverpool-based independent press Dead Ink, the home of Naomi Booth’s Exit Management, Gary Budden’s London Incognita and Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad, provocative, unsettling works that challenge every aspect of the status quo. Given the nature of Hill’s literary identity – northern, speculative, discomfiting yet humane – it seems inevitable that this writer and this publisher would come together eventually.

Hill made his presence felt from the moment he arrived on the scene in 2013 with The Folded Man, which was a runner-up for the Dundee International Book Prize. Set in a disturbingly near-future Manchester and ‘starring’ the superbly dislikeable Brian, The Folded Man presents a fertile clash between gritty Gibsonian futurism and a distinctly home-grown eco-noir, an ambience that persists throughout his tangentially related 2016 follow-up Graft, which was a finalist for the Philp K. Dick Award.

The two novels that followed are equally distinctive. Climate change and the post-work environment become major themes in Zero Bomb (2019) in which grieving father Remi becomes drawn into a murky world of government surveillance and anarchist plots. The Breach (2020), published on the eve of lockdown and thus denied much of the attention it deserved, is a potent mix of evocative landscape writing and post-Brexit paranoia.

Indeed, what Hill’s books have in common is an obsession with the enforced inequalities and social divides – north and south, worker and manager, government and citizen – that have come to define our disunited kingdom in the present century. Hill is too young to have fully formed memories of Thatcher in government, but his political and literary consciousness have clearly been shaped by and within the long and continuing fallout from the 1980s.

This new novel Lamb, the latest chapter in Hill’s evolving oeuvre, is as brilliant as anything he has yet written, keeping faith with his core themes of future-shock, environmental degradation and the structural imbalances tearing at the fabric of our post-truth society. Following a family tragedy, teenager Boyd and his mother Maureen flee north from Watford to the village of Sile, an eerily closeted community where Boyd feels not just out of place but actively threatened. He knows there is something amiss here, whilst amongst certain elements of the townsfolk, the suspicion begins to surface that what is wrong in Sile is Boyd himself, or more specifically his mother Maureen.

With Lamb so newly published, it would be wrong of me to reveal much more about the exact nature of Boyd’s catastrophe, except to say that the journey he embarks on is one of radical transformation. The truth of who Boyd is – WHAT Boyd is – has far wider implications than the fate of one family, and as always with Hill, the vision presented to us within the pages of this story has more to say about our unreliable present than any possible future.

One of the most arresting aspects of Hill’s fiction is its boldness in incorporating dramatic speculative ideas into deeply human stories. From The Folded Man onwards, Hill has seemed compelled to place his characters in extreme situations, to test their resilience, and thinking about this today, the book that keeps coming to mind is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like Shelley, Hill writes about responsibility, about cause and effect and the price of human arrogance. About technology run out of control, about the costly repercussions of moral failure.

Lamb is a unique blend of the personal and the political, the kind of work that reminds us how radical science fiction can be, how well it retains the power to shock and to surprise. A road trip like no other, Lamb will leave you thrilled, changed, unsettled, and still asking questions.

Tying the knot

October 4, 2023 /
Eaglesham House, Rothesay, 30th September 2023 (photo by Garry Charnock)

Chris and I were married on Saturday, surrounded by friends and members of both our families. It was a joyful day, marking the end of what has been a summer of difficult news and major life adjustments.

In July, Chris was diagnosed with cancer. He spent six weeks in hospital in all, mainly on account of a broken leg, an injury that came about as a direct result of the disease, though of course we did not know that when it happened.

He is now home, and concentrating his energies on his current writing project. His spirits remain high, his resilience remarkable, his sense of humour undiminished. We are relieved to have regained a passable version of what we think of as normality, and aim to keep things that way for as long as possible. We are doing the work we love, being together, and focusing on the positive.

Just sayin’

August 10, 2023 /

When I reread Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home a month or so ago I found it astonishing to remember that the book was published in 2012, more than a decade old already and yet still, in my head at least, so enmeshed in and essential to our literary present.

The same could be said of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published the same year and which I have finally, belatedly caught up with. I remember reading the press at the time, intrigued by the outrage the book seemed to be causing, though not enough to dive in immediately. I felt instinctively on the side of the writer, who seemed to have committed no other sin than have the temerity to say what she thought.

That writers say what they think seems to cause outrage rather too often, especially if the writer is a woman.

I feel amazed, disappointed, tired as I reread the reviews of Aftermath from the week of publication. Frances Stonor Saunders and Julie Burchill damning with faint praise, their responses inadvertently, embarrassingly sexist and profoundly un-literary. Burchill finds the final chapter of Aftermath ‘baffling’; Saunders thinks it ‘bizarre’ and feels it ‘should [have been] dumped altogether’. Most of the discussion seems to revolve not around Cusk’s astringent analysis, her mastery of language and form, but – as with Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child – whether or not she ‘should’ have written the book at all.

Aftermath is one of the most powerfully interrogative, furiously honest and boldly imaginative texts I have read. The final chapter is what makes the book a masterpiece. Always, but especially now, I feel grateful, inspired, humbled to have such talent to look up to, to show me what can, with sufficient courage, be achieved.

Mid-year thoughts

July 30, 2023 /

This year started very normally but has become deeply strange. Chris has not been well. Plans have had to change suddenly. I have been caught mid-thought, at that peculiar moment of transition between one book and the next. This has happened to me before but never, I don’t think, which such violently immediate effect.

Something good has always come out of such derangement in the past, so I am keeping faith with that knowledge. In the meantime, books.

The best, the most impactful, the most personally significant book I have read so far this year has been Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. If I could hold up one book and say this is the kind of thing I want to write, the level of achievement I intend to keep before me as my perfect example, it would be this one. I think about it most days. The quality of the writing. The vision. The timelessness, which is the stuff legends are made of. A book that both transcends and suitably honours its source material.

Second comes a reread: Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy, which I read when it first came out and found slight, and vaguely annoying. This time round I got it, and it’s a masterpiece. Again, I think about it most days. Please read this wonderful article, if you haven’t already.

Third would have been The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, a great bollocking romper stomper of a book that helped keep me going through the earlier part of this month, the most perfectly addictive long novel I’ve read since first discovering the Stephen King doorstoppers – Salem’s Lot especially – that The Shards is at least in part a homage to. Then, like King, Ellis blows it in the final quarter. I am convinced he rolled with this thing right into the last hundred pages without properly understanding how he wanted it to end. So he stuck in a stupid knife fight. Heavy disappointment. But it’ll stick with me, I guess, and the guy can write, so.

Honourable mentions go to Julie Myerson’s brilliant The Lost Child, Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper, Gordon Burn’s inimitable Alma Cogan, Benjamin Myers’s Cuddy and of course M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, which is more than an honourable mention, it’s in its own category. So far as weird precursors go, it is the epitome.

Looking forward to the Booker longlist, as I always do. Hoping to post here more often as the year progresses.

Shining a light

June 26, 2023 /

Earlier this summer, I reread Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This was the first time I’d revisited the book since seeing Bennett Miller’s film Capote when it was released in 2005. Capote is a favourite film of mine, one I rewatch frequently and with undiminished admiration. Of course, Philip Seymour Hoffmann is out of this world in it. But it’s not just him. From the opening frame, there’s something about the texture of this film, the evocation of sense of place most of all, that keeps me coming back to it, wishing that there were more true crime dramas that accorded their subject matter this level of attention and restraint.

Over time and with repeated viewings of the movie it was perhaps inevitable that book and film had become inextricably enmeshed in my imagination. This was a good part of the reason I chose to revisit the novel. I have read a significant amount of true crime literature in the almost twenty years since first encountering Truman Capote’s magnum opus. How would it have fared in the onrush of time and memory?

If anything, it was better than I remembered. Not just a masterpiece of true crime literature but a masterpiece full stop. The attention to detail, the restraint, the beautifully jointed, watertight sentences. In Cold Blood is rightly called a novel, not simply because it goes beyond the reporter’s brief in imagining scenes, dialogue, alternative scenarios but because it is a novelist’s feel for structure and for narrative form that Capote brings to his material. The thing that surprised me most – the thing I’d forgotten – is how little Capote inserts himself into the text. There is just that one line near the end, in which he refers to ‘the journalist’, a person that can only be him, but who is neither named nor referred to again.

I have read criticism of In Cold Blood that suggests Capote’s obsession with the two perpetrators and his uncomfortably close relationship with Perry Smith in particular makes the book unforgivably unbalanced, that he ‘did not do right by the Clutter family’. Though one has to take account of and respect the views of those who knew the Clutters as neighbours, I would have to disagree with this assessment. Whatever his private turmoil, Capote does not in any way ‘favour’ the murderers. His summoning of an entire community and way of life, very much including the personalities and daily lives of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy and Kenyon Clutter is a act of imagining – I almost want to say resurrection – that favours nothing but the truth insofar as he was able to discover it, an inextricable tangle of opposing truths, contrary points of view, accidents of fate that are as horrifying today as they were in 1959.

More than sixty years ago and still, this story. There is nothing that can forgive or make right the evil act that ended the lives of a blameless family. But in literature as in life, the line between ‘evil acts’ and ‘evil men’ is a notoriously tricky one to navigate or to describe. That Capote attempts to do so is his job as a writer and he succeeds brilliantly. The only certain thing is that the death penalty helps no one, and solves nothing.

There is similarly much to contemplate in two more recent works of true crime, both published this year. Francisco Garcia’s We All Go into the Dark revisits the Bible John murders that took place in Glasgow in the 1960s – less than a decade after the Clutters were murdered – while Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer recounts the murder of Garza’s twenty-year-old sister Liliana in Mexico City in 1990. In the case of Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock, no one was ever charged with their murders and the identity of Bible John remains a mystery. In the case of Liliana Rivera Garza, the identity of her murderer is all too clear – but he, similarly, has never been charged.

Francisco Garcia admits up front that he has little to add to the Bible John narrative as it is already known. His intention in writing the book is to examine the effect the crimes had on Glasgow at the time, their treatment by the media and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of detectives to shine a light on the identity of the killer for decades afterwards. While I might have liked a little more commentary on the harshly constrained lives of Glasgow working class women in particular, Garcia’s work is honest, thorough and captivating and I like his book a lot. His unsensationalist, self-questioning approach to writing true crime should be noted and applauded. I hope his next book will push this envelope still further.

I know Cristina Rivera Garza’s work from her strange, elliptical 2012 novella The Taiga Syndrome. It would be impossible for her not to insert herself into the text of Liliana’s Invincible Summer – whole tracts of this heartbreaking narrative are inevitably her story, too – but the miracle she performs in allowing her sister not only to be properly seen for who she is but in some sense to be the narrator of this remarkable book is no less an act of literary resurrection than Capote’s. As an examination of coercive control, intimate partner violence and the only recently named and acknowledged crime of femicide, Liliana’s Invincible Summer is an essential addition to the library of true crime literature. As an elegy for a lost beloved it is equally indispensable.

Reading this excellent interview with Eliza Clark over the weekend – Clark is the author of the smartly original novel Boy Parts and has recently been named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists – I was particularly struck by what she says about what it is that attracts her to true crime narratives:

“I’m just interested in people’s lives and the histories of places… True crime, done well, feels like one of the only times you get to read nonfiction about day-to-day lives.”

This chimes so exactly with my own reasons for being interested in true crime literature, why I think it’s important. It’s good to see new voices entering this arena, even better to see the inventiveness, seriousness and respect with which they approach this difficult and sensitive material. I cannot wait to read Clark’s new novel, Penance. And while I’m waiting, I have my own research to be getting on with…

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