Morag Joss Blog - Morag Joss

Getting it Covered

Tue, 8 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

If you - as I do - think of yourself as a reader of novels rather than as a consumer of book products, if you dislike the notion of your tastes being analysed, targeted and generally “marketed to” in any commercial sphere, then you may find the following little story intriguing, or puzzling, or even a little annoying.

All my books have been published both in Britain and America. Way back when things were simple, the first three, the Sara Selkirk mysteries, were sold in both territories under the same titles and with substantially the same jackets. That was over a decade ago.

The next three were published with the same titles, and although the jackets were different, in each case the differences weren’t so great that a comparison between the USA and UK editions would have led you to wonder if there were two completely different kinds of novel between the covers.

Now we come to the interesting situation where the seventh novel, soon to be published in America and Britain, and just a few months apart, is to appear with different titles, and with jackets not just different, but radically different. For advance reviews of the book, from some wonderful American writers, click above on News.

Here’s the USA jacket first - simply because it’s out first, on 21 June 2011.

I think it’s arresting and disturbing – also dynamic, modern, a great piece of design. To me it suggests something of an urban thriller, which the novel isn’t, though I hope it’s thrilling, of course, in the sense that it will grab you and not let you go until the final page. And it’s true that many of the events that unfold in the story are very dramatic. But if I’ve pulled this one off, the narrative will engage you not just in plot terms but because the characters develop unpredictably but compellingly, and their predicament will touch you on a few other, non-thrillerish, levels. That’s what I was after, anyway.

And here is the UK jacket, with the British title, which will be out in September 2011.

I think Alma’s jacket design is beautiful. It's also rather romantic, which the novel isn't, although love comes into it. And, as intended, this jacket suggests “literary”, and that’s a fair reflection of my endeavour, if “literary” means aspiring to write, quite simply, very good prose. I’m not sure it can or should mean any more than that. Absolutely the last thing I would wish the word “literary” to convey is the idea that anything in this novel - the writing, or the subject, plot, characters or setting - is any less accessible, or requires a reader to have some higher calling to “Literature” before it can be enjoyed.

It’s the contrast between the two jackets that interests me – both the visuals and the different titles. Without the author’s name, would you ever imagine, seeing these books side by side, that Among the Missing and Across the Bridge were the same novel?

Do let me know your thoughts on this, or on book jackets in general. What works for you? What doesn't? What draws you to one book from among all the hundreds in a bookshop?

Crossing Bridges

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Titles matter.

It’s hard to imagine Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men under the title Something That Happened, but that’s what Steinbeck first intended to call it. I’d say it was his lucky day when he came across Robert Burns’ poem Tae A Moose*, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough, November 1785, and found the lines:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft agley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain

For promised joy.

James Joyce wrote and abandoned a novel called Stephen Hero, and finally re-wrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Could Catch-18, Heller’s original title, ever have become the universal phrase that Catch-22 now is? Would the sight of Daniel Craig striding out of the sea be slightly less memorable if the film Casino Royale had the same title as the Fleming novel on which it’s based, which is You Asked For It? (That’s a difficult one.)

My seventh novel is coming out in America in June this year under the title Among The Missing, which both I and everyone at Random House are very pleased with as it refers to both the plot and the novel’s bigger themes of loss of identity and reinvention. Like many good titles it’s been used before, as I discovered when, after thinking it up in the isolation of my study, I ran a check on Google. But we concluded that the previous Among the Missings were far enough back in the past, and sufficiently different kinds of book, to make the danger of confusion for readers and buyers insignificant.

The novel is also, to my delight, being published in the UK in September 2011, by Alma Books, but under the title Across The Bridge. Elisabetta Minervini and Alex Gallenzi, Alma’s inspirational founders and owners, think Among The Missing not quite distinctive enough for the British market, and I’m happy to bow to their judgment. We finally decided on Across The Bridge just yesterday and it grows and grows on us all. It’s the right title, every bit as right as Among The Missing which I had thought, wrongly as it turns out, was the one and only title.

In just three words, Across The Bridge has an intriguing, forward momentum, and also reflects the novel beautifully. It was editor Alex who came up with it, and in doing so he’s focused on an important aspect of the novel’s setting which features, of course, a bridge. In this case, the bridge spans a river in the Highlands of Scotland. I won’t go into detail about the story here, except to say that the bridge is central to the action in straightforward plot terms. But I’ve also exploited, I hope unobtrusively, the underlying symbolic power of the bridge. In the mythologies of many cultures, the crossing of a bridge is always a transformative act; those who endeavour to cross a bridge undergo a rite of passage, or some test or other, and thereby pass, or fail to pass, from one state of being to another: from life to death or vice versa, from childhood to adulthood, from earth to paradise, or to the underworld.

I’ve just realised this brings us back to Robert Burns. In his wonderful narrative poem Tam o’ Shanter, Tam escapes a hellish coven of witches by galloping across another Scottish bridge, the Auld Brig over the River Doon at Alloway. The witches cannot cross running water and thereby fail the test, but one grabs the tail of Tam’s mare, Meg, and pulls it off.

I was brought up less than twenty miles from Burns’ birthplace and consequently was forcefed his poetry from the age of five. I loathed it then, but admire it now. I’m a late convert. You can take the girl out of Ayrshire…

The Auld Brig

*Moose in Scots dialect means not the huge deer also known as the elk, but mouse, the small rodent with no antlers.

Highlights from the Low Countries

Wed, 8 Dec 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Think of a city a little bigger than Sheffield.

Now think of a complex of concert halls not unlike London’s Southbank Centre (www.dedoelen.nl) but made of marble and glass rather than concrete, arguably easier to love and indisputably more pleasant to be in.

Put them together in mainland Europe, add a major art gallery (currently showing a stunningly comprehensive exhibition of Munch), waterways crossed by bascule bridges, vast docks, a tiny extant 17^th century quarter and a lot - a lot - of landmark, post-war architecture, and you’re in Rotterdam.

Or rather I was, to visit my brother Neil Wallace who is Programme Director of the aforementioned de Doelen, which is why I, with Neil and his partner the composer Vanessa Lann (www.vanessalann.com) went to half each of two concerts happening on the same evening, the second being a recital by the brilliant German pianist Ragna Schirmer (www.ragnaschirmer.de). Ragna is a leading interpreter of Bach, Handel and Chopin, as well as a world authority on the life and work of Clara Schumann, some of whose music she’d played in the first half of her recital. We heard her play the Chopin Études Opus 10, and there’s no need for me to describe her vibrant interpretation of this work because you can hear it for yourself here: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wb15qltw9E). Brilliant, isn’t it?

At dinner together afterwards, the conversation was funny, serious, gossipy, at times all three together, and ranged over many things: Clara and Robert Schumann, the quirks of famous pianos and pianists, where to get the best chips in Rotterdam, and it was wonderful to discover that Ragna has an encyclopaedic recall of Monty Python sketches that outclasses even Neil’s, and by some way. Brava!

Permitted Fruit

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Overhanging the lane near the place where I live there’s a scruffy-looking tree. I usually notice it in the spring when it’s covered in thin white blossom but after that I don’t, really. For the rest of the year it doesn’t stand out from the hedgerow the way other things do, the briar roses and honeysuckle when they’re in flower, and in winter it’s just as twiggy and bedraggled as everything else around it.

So I was surprised to see, driving in the gate one day in mid-July, that this boring old tree was laden with what looked like big, fabulous cherries. The fruits must have set weeks ago and I hadn’t noticed, so this amazing harvest has just snuck up on me. I think – think – this is the first year since I’ve been here that the tree has borne a crop. I couldn’t have just failed for the past three summers to notice thousands of luscious red fruits clinging the length of every branch, could I?

When I went to look, I discovered they’re not cherries but wild cherry plums (Prunus cerasifera). The flesh is juicy and sweet and slightly fibrous, the skin is tart. I picked nearly two pounds in about three minutes. The colour of the ripe fruit is lovely, ranging from pinky-red, to crimson, to a rich, purplish, er, plum.

I made some jam, entered it in the village flower show at the end of July, and won First Prize in ‘Class H: Jam, other fruit’. Result! High fives all round the marquee. And as if that weren’t enough excitement, I also have a recipe for plum schnapps.

I could go on, only slightly ironically, about Nature’s bounty and all that, but the fact is that this plum-laden tree was a small pleasure for which I was glad and grateful in a month when, for reasons too tedious to relate, I had been feeling rather beset.

It so happens that the new novel I am writing (working title: Our Picnics in the Sun) has in it, guess what, a woman who is rather beset. I don’t think I’m going to let her make jam, but I think that giving her a small pleasure – a secret solace – might be a way of revealing her (to me, at this stage, rather than to the reader) and illuminating how she will go about confronting the big things that beset her. So, Art mirrors Life, or Life, Art - and turns out to be in this instance a bowl of not cherries but plums, or a jar of jam, or something.

Pride and Joy

Sat, 3 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

This is personal; I can’t stop myself from posting here some wonderful news. My daughter Hannah has just learned she’s got a place on the Directors Course at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London (President: Dame Judi Dench). It’s a one-year postgraduate course (she’s just graduated with an excellent first degree in Drama from University of Kent) so from September she’ll be following a path trodden by people who have gone on to work at the RSC, the Royal National Theatre, the Almeida, Old Vic, Young Vic, Donmar, English National Opera … just about everywhere, in fact, that a young theatre director could be excited about.

A year from now, if all goes well, she will be embarking on the really hard part, trying to make a career in an intensely demanding and precarious profession. There will be trepidation, highs and lows, and much uncertainty ahead, but for now she is feeling only the pride of her achievement at getting in to Mountview, and I am feeling pure joy. And there is no joy quite like seeing one’s child under sail, entirely on her own merits, towards the thing she has been single-mindedly determined about since the age of eight.

Here is Hannah around the age of eight. I’m glad that in this picture she looks just happy rather than single-mindedly determined. I remember she was very agitated about the size of her feet which were, though I insisted at the time they weren’t, enormous. I don’t think they grew more than half a size from that point on, and of course the rest of her has long since caught up.

And on the right is an early self-portrait, done when she was two and a half. Is it just a dotty mother’s delusion to see something both happy and determined in the shout, the punching of the air?

Probably. Don’t care. It’s a good day.

A Night at the Opera

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

I went to the opera last week.

I didn’t have to go far, because Grange Park, a glorious half-ruined neo-classical house hidden in the countryside less than half an hour’s drive from here, happens to be where the determined and visionary Wasfi Kani has built a stunning opera house.

Wasfi is a relentless parter-from-spare-cash of every opera-loving and potentially philanthropic person she meets, from the moderately prosperous to the fabulously wealthy, and she has to be. Every year she raises over £1.4 million, and if she didn’t, her daring, dazzling Grange Park Opera (www.grangeparkopera.co.uk) would not survive. She’s a bit of a genius at giving her fundraising a twist, so last Saturday she appeared onstage before curtain-up, accompanied by Grange Park's Chairman Lord Ashburton and Ellie his imperturbable black Labrador, to announce that she is selling next season’s singers’ body parts. If you hurry, you may be in time to sponsor Isolde’s head. I don’t recall which parts of Tristan are still available (or I’m keeping it to myself).

Now in its twelfth season, Grange Park, whether you judge it by its productions, setting or general élan, comes close to making Glyndebourne look (whisper it) almost clunky. Grange Park has similar chic and high values – and a similar black tie and pashmina count - but it’s younger, wittier, and still full of surprises. Among the bosky summer fields of Hampshire, it somehow has edge.

With minimal consultation and eery efficiency, my date and I had each brought half of a perfect picnic: Champagne, a salad of crab and prawns with a saffron mayonnaise, French bread, tomatoes with basil, and asparagus and strawberries grown in fields I can see from my house. We both remembered napkins and glasses. He forgot cream, I forgot sugar, but neither of us wanted either. The wirework table and chairs we managed to nab under the portico made it easier than it might have been to picnic in silk chiffon harem pants and high heels (me, not him).

We saw David Fielding’s production (he both designed and directed it) of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, and I can’t descibe it better than Richard Fairman did in his Financial Times review as “frenetic, colourful, magical”. The story is a fairy tale, and although it follows the age-old logic of the quest, the rescue, the impostor revealed, the triumph of love and truth, it's pretty silly. But the production is so full of dramatic and visual wit, the wonderful coups de théâtre come so slick and fast, that the story doesn’t matter.

Did I really say that? It was deliciously liberating to think such a heretical thought, driving home that night under a midsummer sky that didn’t really get completely dark (and didn't fall in). Sometimes the story doesn’t matter.

Talking to the Wall

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

A while back, in my very first Notebook entry, I threatened I might write about the colour I painted the spare bedroom. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The spare bedroom is now painted (more in a minute), and furnished, curtained and - I think this is the appropriate landladyish term - well appointed. That is to say, I have slept two nights in my spare bedroom in order to learn exactly where a person could use a lamp, a hook to hang a robe, a makeup mirror, and where in the guest bathroom next door they need somewhere to set down toothbrush, towel and specs, and a place to sit to dry between the toes. I enjoy the entire undertaking of anticipating what might be needed, from slippers to aspirin to the latest New Yorker to spare razors to every soap and unguent that Kiehl’s has devised. In another lifetime I must have run a great Bed & Breakfast.

The paint, though. It’s a fine, pale string colour, perfect with the natural light in a south-facing room, and cool and soft against the mahogany of a slim little Regency dressing table and the two small, dark-framed 18^th century paintings on one wall. The room is a mixture of antique and contemporary, true to the spirit of an old-but-modern house in the country, but is strictly not countrified: the bed coverings are checks and dots (not florals), the fabrics are natural linen, muslin and faded silk (definitely ruffle-free) and the other colours are stone, white, and a washed-out, dull pink.

But the room seems not quite finished. It’s a strange shape; sitting at the gable end of the building it has the perfect cottage bedroom proportions on one side but, like most of the rooms in this converted stable, it is double height at the other side, with dark, criss-crossing beams just under the ceiling. It verges on the dramatic, so I began to wonder if the drama needed a bit more attention. What might be very good, I thought, would be to cover the two highest walls in a Zoffany Toile de Jouy wallpaper called The Boatmen.

A sample dropped through the letterbox two days later. Here it is. Like all Toile de Jouy designs, it’s made up of separate little pictures (in this case, etched in charcoal grey on a parchment background) – properly called tableaux, although why do we need to put it in French? – which are repeated over and over, each group of figures fixed in its pastoral idyll, each character arrested mid-gesture, mid-sentence, mid-moment. And as soon as I looked carefully at them, The Boatmen got me thinking about more than just pasting them on the wall. I couldn’t tear myself away.

It brought back something from years and years ago I had completely forgotten about. I suddenly remembered the urgent, heart-thudding envy I felt when, at about the age of eight, I visited my friend Sara Whitby’s house and saw that her bedroom had been redecorated. Now she had horse wallpaper! The walls were teeming with mares grazing with their foals, colts drinking in a stream, galloping stallions caught at the moment of lift-off over hedges. Whiling away that afternoon and later afternoons with Sara, playing, talking, reading comics - I don’t remember what - I gazed and gazed at the pictures on the wall. I swear I heard the whinnying, the hooves splashing in the water, I smelled the hay.

I also moved every horse on to the next point in the narrative. I dreamed up the invisible girl who looked after them, and began to imagine tales of jeopardy, rescue and reunion which featured either a horse or the girl and usually both getting lost or having accidents or falling sick. Naturally, some joint human and equine act of heroism, some mystic union between girl and horse, would save the day. (None of these escapades, come to think of it, had a villain.) Looking back, I see I was incapable of not making stories out of it all.

I burned with desire for the same in my room. I cannot overstate this. Life is very intense when you’re eight, even if you've never heard of Freud. I begged my parents for horse wallpaper. Request denied, first on the grounds that I would “get tired of it”. Inconceivable! Eventually I was told – the words “bad taste” unspoken but clearly understood - that horse wallpaper was not The Kind Of Thing we had in Our House.

So I haven’t decided about The Boatmen. It might drive guests mad, especially if they’re writers, trying to get to sleep and being plagued by boatmen and their companions clamouring to have their stories told. My friend Debby Holt, for example (www.debbyholt.co.uk) would at once single out two to be romantically inclined towards each other, but thwarted; she’d have their desires, doubts, idiosyncrasies mapped, the obstacles to their happiness lined up and waiting to be overcome in funny and touching ways. David Mitchell would have the boatmen, the boatmen’s wives and the boatmen’s dogs encountering vivid, astonishing versions of themselves across millennia and continents, all in the space it would take me to get them to walk around a tree. Frank Delaney (www.frankdelaney.com) would see the epic passions and cruelties of a nation’s history looming over the horizon and about to play havoc with the intricate passions and cruelties of a handful of boatmen, among them a pair of lovers who would struggle to keep alive a perfect love in an imperfect world. Thomas Hardy would have had one of the boatmen ready to sell any of the others for the price of a drink, a boatman’s girl wronged and ruined, a drowning of innocents while the Gods laughed, and terrible weather.

Not that any of the above-named has actually stayed in the spare bedroom, but I couldn’t risk even the idea of their, or anyone else's recriminations over breakfast. What if people chronicled their mental descent from the time they stayed here, dating it not from when they started talking to the wall, but when the wall started talking to them? I don’t want the responsibility. Maybe, at least for now, boatmen wallpaper is not The Kind Of Thing I should have in My House.

Contact

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

I have been really enjoying the emails you've been sending - thank you! Please keep writing - it's great to hear from readers, and I do reply! When I can, that is; I haven't been able to respond to Pauletta's because of some problem with the address - my reply bounced back. Sorry, Pauletta, I wanted to thank you for your very kind message. Do try again!

How many ways do I have to say it?

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

A slight heart-sink moment this morning... I discover that this website appears on Google as the official website (no problem with that) of crime writer Morag Joss. And the piece I filmed a few weeks ago, going out on tomorrow’s Sky Arts Book Show, is flagged up as being by crime novelist Morag Joss.

I have nothing against crime writers - I number three or four among my good friends. I have nothing against crime fiction, per se – I’ve written some and I’ve read some, albeit not much. It’s just that, as the result of a happy accident, it happened that crime fiction was what I wrote first, and it seems I’m never going to be allowed to forget it. After the three Sara Selkirk novels, I felt I didn’t want to write crime again, or at least for a very long time. And I haven’t, but the four novels I have written since the Selkirks, in only one of which a murder takes place, have all been labelled crime fiction. It’s annoying, and also confusing (since it would be churlish to complain that two of the four have been up with the best, in the running for major crime fiction prizes).

So I find myself claiming that I hope the novels I write – certainly the novels I love to read – are saying something different about the damage done to lives through wrongdoing, accidents, human fallibility, and about responsibility, guilt and reparation, than Who Done It. Aha! the crime buffs then tell me, but that just shows that crime fiction is a marvellously wide genre that can encompass all sorts of treatments of the subject. Well, I’m not sure. In the pursuit of inclusiveneness, a definition can be broadened to the point where it doesn’t define a thing.

And I don't know why the definition, however broad, should stick to some novels (and writers) and not others. I don’t see anything in The Night Following that should destine it for the crime shelves more than, for example, Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin or Hart’s Damage or Wilkie Collins’ The Woman In White.

But why the heart-sink, why am I saying yet again that I’d rather be known just as a writer? Does it matter? It matters to me, because for one thing I would hate to disappoint a reader who bought one of my books wanting a whodunnit, because that’s not what my stories deliver and I’d hate any reader to consider his money wasted.

There’s another reason, too. I have grown increasingly squeamish about murder as entertainment. I think of the thousands of people affected by real murders – ugly, meaningless, catastrophic, real ones – and I wonder what they must think about the event that has blighted their own lives being the stuff of fiction, often glamorised and trivialised. I worry about the blurring of the line that occurs when gore gets the ultimate trivialisation, the comedy treatment. I recall an advert for literary and historic London that referred to “the city of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper”. Does the passage of time make it all right to treat Jack the Ripper’s crimes as pantomimic and “spine-tingling” and forget that his victims were real people who suffered hideously before they died?

I’d love to know what you think.

Big Things and Small Things

Mon, 5 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

When I was in New Zealand I stayed most of the time in a timber house on a cliff overlooking Tasman Bay, and I also hired a big tinny Nissan and travelled around the South Island for a while, just gawping at the place. And I have to let the clichés roll a little now, because they’re all true. Cliché one, the landscape is stunning: even places less than Lord-of-the-Ringsishly dramatic are pretty dramatic in comparison with Europe. Cliché two: a lot of it is like Scotland – pine forests, mountains, rivers - but with bigger, pointier mountains and greener, wider valleys. Cliché three, a lot of it isn’t like Scotland at all – I drove through acres of orchards and vineyards, past gum trees and tropical tree ferns growing next to Douglas firs, alongside miles of ocean breakers crashing on the surfers’ beaches. I picked lemons, limes and peaches from the garden. Oh, and New Zealanders actually eat large amounts of the fabulous fish that’s caught in their waters, unlike the Scots who export most of theirs.

I flew in a helicopter over the Franz Joseph glacier where the subtropical forest grows right to the edges of the ice, I walked on the snowfields, peered into frozen crevasses and over massive shelves of ice and felt in general like a very small speck on a great big and surprising planet. The next day, in a town with a main street of single storey shops, I came across, stuck in the window of one which still displayed spangly dresses for the Christmas party season, the following:

Have Gone to try and win some money on the horses. Will be open in the Morning. Sorry to inconvience [sic] Anybody. Have A Nice WeeKend. Viv

What a gift. A small thing, but a great gift to a writer of fiction. Sometimes you don’t need to “get your ideas from” anywhere at all, they throw themselves at you. To begin with, who is Viv? Why has she shut up shop, is business bad? Why are Christmas dresses in the window in March? Does she need the money badly? How often does she do this kind of thing? Is it even true, or is going to the races a cover for something else she’s doing, that half the town knows about anyway? What did she leave behind at home when she went to the races? And what happened that day, if indeed she got there? It’s irresistible.

Viv, if by any chance you’re reading this, I hope it was a good day, long may you prosper, and thank you for a world of possibilities.

Today I’m heading to Inverness to teach a course at Moniack Mhor (click on News & Events at the top of the page for details). I’m taking a photograph of Viv’s sign with me, and I hope the students will find it as rich a feast as I do.

Please leave comments here if you'd like to, or send me an email.

What not to write in a Notebook

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

When I started the Notebook I swore I would not fall into that unintentionally hilarious "lady novelist in the shires" mode that I have sometimes come across. I would not go into clouds of whimsy about the writing life, I would not invite an image of myself wild-eyed and wild-haired in enraptured creativity at a pre-war Remington with a crocheted shawl over my knees and my herbal tea cooling in my favourite lucky mug atop a teetering pile of papers. I would never, ever mention a) cats b) eating too many biscuits when I’m working (I eat about three a year, in fact) or c) how "inspiring" are my surroundings in this beautiful part of Hampshire.

So I am not going to witter on about the sunsets this winter, how day after day on my late afternoon walks around the fields they are so ravishing I now always take my camera with me. I am not going to say how pretty a herd of fallow deer looks grazing on a hillside with the low sun slanting over their backs. I certainly am not going to post a photograph here of any such thing. I am not a good enough photographer.

Instead I shall urge you to see if you possibly can Alan Bennett’s new play The Habit of Art at the National Theatre in London. I managed to get a ticket very early in its run and saw it for the second time the week before last. It’s about a conjectural meeting between W H Auden and Benjamin Britten in Oxford in the early 1970s, when they were both feeling washed-up, defensive and doubtful; actually both were ill, and both died not very long after. Bennett’s brilliance is that the play is very, very funny, but also serious about the nature of the artist and his function, both the personal and the private. As Auden said, “Real artists are not nice people. All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue.”

And tomorrow I travel to New Zealand, and in the middle of March from there to Australia. I wonder what the sunsets are like there? I’m taking my camera, and I may have to let you know.

First notebook entry on new website

Tue, 2 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

So - first notebook entry on new website. I’m looking forward to keeping notes here on what I’m reading or thinking, maybe even writing (although work in progress is always a closet affair). I’ll include places I go and people I meet, as and when they’re interesting. It won’t be high-brow; I’m just as likely to include a bit of gossip, a note on what I’m cooking, or wearing, or the colour I’m painting the spare room. I plan to update every couple of months or so. Of course, that statement brings the words Hell, road to and paved with rushing all at once into the same sentence, but that’s the plan...

I’ve recently finished my latest novel, Among The Missing, and last week I sent the edited and copyedit-checked manuscript back to Random House in New York. That’s always a good moment – the next time I see it, the pages will be typeset and beginning to look like a book. And the design for the jacket will be coming along fairly soon, and I’ve liked all the jackets that Random House have done so far. It’s been rather more hit and miss with British publishers, although I did like Hodder’s jacket for Puccini’s Ghosts, and the misty, ambiguous night-or-day design that Duckworth produced for The Night Following.

Anyway, while I’m waiting for the galleys to arrive, I am at work on a treatment for a screenplay, and I’m also beginning to sketch out the next novel.

And I must make some marmalade.

Reading delights ahead: I’m just about to start Tim Pears’ new novel Landed, published 2 March, of which I have an advance copy. We’re tutoring an Arvon course together in Scotland in April and I couldn’t be more pleased about that (especially since meeting him last week), having been a fan of his writing since I read his first novel In The Place of Fallen Leaves.

Also, just arrived from the publisher is a proof copy of David Mitchell’s new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, due out in May, and as this is his first book since Black Swan Green in 2006, I am truly excited. We had a conversation about it maybe three years ago, just as he was embarking on it, and I remember his expeditionary mood: his sense of adventure and clarity about what he was setting out to do, his exuberant courage.

Where do you get your ideas from?

Whenever I’m asked this I tend to wish I had a more interesting reply, but the fact is that by the time an initial thought has grown into a novel, its origins are usually lost in so many subsequent layers of thought I don’t remember where it all started. There is an exception to this, and someone asked me about it recently, so I thought I’d put the story here, too.

Puccini’s Ghosts began with this picture. It was painted, in oils, by my Great-uncle George some time in the 1930s, and depicts a touring production of Turandot that was performed at (I think – my research was inconclusive) the Caird Hall, Dundee. Uncle George died long before I was born and this picture hung on the landing in the house where I grew up. There’s nothing great about it and it certainly isn’t valuable, but I’ve always liked the eerie, stage-lit look of the figures, the attention to detail on the set (Uncle George was by profession an architect’s draughtsman) and its Art Deco palette of greens and yellows. All through my childhood I had no idea what the picture showed; I thought it was just some fancily dressed people standing about with nothing to do.

In 1993, the picture was one of the very few things not destroyed in a dreadful fire in my mother’s house - a fire in which she died – and some months after it was rescued, I took it, blackened, out of its frame, and over several days cleaned the canvas with warm water and a toothbrush. I did the same with the frame, scraping off several coats of paint and deciding to leave it in the half-restored, “distressed” state it is in still. I remounted the canvas with a new linen slip, and it has hung in all the houses I’ve lived in since.

It was a labour of love, I suppose, a way of reclaiming something from the past. The back of the picture told me it was the opening scene of Act III of Turandot, an opera I knew by then, and over those sad but productive days of gentle scrubbing, and emptying of basin after basin of blackened water that smelled of the horrific, burned-out house, I began to think of the story (which is entirely fictitious, by the way). Back then, I no more thought I could write a novel than I could ski-jump for Britain, so the idea stayed where it was, in my head. But another ten years (and four novels) later, those thoughts became Puccini’s Ghosts.