Episode Two: Hester Musson

This episode we hear the five books on the hypothetical shelf of the bestselling author, Hester Musson. Hester's debut novel, The Beholders, was a Times bestseller, a Sunday Times historical book of the month and shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown in 2024. Her second novel, The Night Hag, was published in February 2026.

Transcript

unknown 0:02

Feet few.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Hello! And welcome to the Hypothetical Bookshelf, a kind of desert island discs for books. Inspired by Talo Calvino's essay, Whom Do We Write For or The Hypothetical Bookshelf, this is a podcast that asks writers what other works their writing is in conversation with. Looking for the ways new work can make connections between different books on a writer's and reader's hypothetical shelf. I'll be interviewing a different author each time and asking them to name five books of fiction or non-fiction that can be put beside their own on that imaginary bookshelf. Calvino also writes about how this juxtaposition and conversation between different works can question the established scale of values and code of meanings generally accepted by the wider culture. And I'm keen to test that theory, asking authors about different approaches to storytelling techniques and traditions to inspire listeners with new reading lists and new creative practices. Today I'm very happy to be talking with Hester Musson, author of The Beholders, which was a Times best-selling novel and shortlisted for the HWA debut crown in 2024, and The Night Hag, which came out earlier this year, both of them published by Fourth Estate. Welcome Hester. Thank you very much. Hello, nice to be here. Yeah. Thanks so much for being here. So this is exciting. Five different books I'm keen to talk to you about. And I think let's let's start the conversation with uh with number one, which is A Walk in Wolf Wood by Mary Stewart. Do you want to tell us a little bit about this book?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Yeah, so it's a children's story. Um set uh I think it was written in 1980. Um, and it's a brilliant sort of fantasy trap time travel um book about two children, a brother and sister, who are on holiday with their parents in the Black Forest, um, and they suddenly find that they've been transported back to the 14th century. Um, and there's a werewolf and there's a curse, and they have to help a man who's been cursed deal with the sorcerer who's cursed him and is trying to take over his best friend, the Duke's life, basically. Um so it's just a really brilliant, captivating, wonderful story, which is just um, yeah, when you said think of five books, it was the first one that came to mind, really. Even though I don't think I've really thought about it in years consciously, I think that's the same for all of them, actually. It was just that bob to the surface. Um, yeah, it's just it's just a really great story, and it's got all the things that I love in it, the kind of the gothic and the historical and the curses and the wolves and the dark forests.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

So was it like one of the earliest books that you remember really kind of enjoying reading and being gripped by?

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Um, I don't think so, because I think it was uh I'm not quite sure what age group it's for, but I would have been a bit older and done a lot of reading before then. But I I think it's just one that answered to something in me, if you if you see what I mean. Um because I was I was an avid reader, I was really lucky to grow up in a sort of house of books and a mum who read to us a lot. Um so I I think I think this one, and I read I was just, you know, it was really, I mean it's embarrassing, really. I was just obsessed with books about ponies for like when I first started reading. I remember teacher telling me, no, Hester, you have to choose a book that doesn't involve a horse. Uh so maybe this was the book where I sort of graduated out of that and grew up a bit and actually started getting into the things that were gonna be with me for the for the probably the rest of my life.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

I love that. I love that. I'm obsessed with with books about horses. There's hope for us all that we can move into different areas of reading. Um yeah, so you um well, let's have a little excerpt and then I've got a question uh to follow that up.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

John and Margaret Begby were sitting on a rug beside a track through the Black Forest in Germany when a man walked past them, weeping bitterly. The children and their parents had been having a picnic. They had left the car in a parking area beside the road, and carrying the rug and the picnic things, walked back to where a wide track led steeply downwards from the road into the shade of the trees at the forest's edge. Between track and roadway was a wedge shaped stretch of mossy grass, where an old battered wooden signpost stood, and near it the moss stump of an enormous tree. They spread the rug beside this full in the sun. To their left, the track led on steeply downhill, to vanish into the darkness of the forest. Ahead of them the trees grew more thinly, giving sunlit glimpses of the wooded valley below. A river ran there, and there, on its rocky hill, stood the ruined castle that the Begby family had visited that morning. They could see tiny in the distance the narrow wooden bridge that spanned the dry moat, and the hut where they had bought tickets and postcards. Beyond the castle was the glint of the water where the river ran. Beyond that again, and wherever the eye could travel, were trees, trees and more trees.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Yeah, so as you said, there's kind of like there's lots of exciting things in there that feel like they brim behind some of the writing you've done since uh all that time ago. Uh and I'm just thinking about uh, as you said, kind of the gothic, that castle rears straight up. Um but also they end up going back in time, don't they, in this novel?

unknown 5:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Um and I and I know you didn't begin with historical fiction, so just do you think there was a part of you maybe that might have I don't know, that's always kind of been interested in that, even though that wasn't necessarily where your writing first began. Can you tell us a bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Yeah, definitely. And it really um surprised me that I did become a historical novelist and seemed to be there for the time being as well. Um and actually when I when I picked these five books, it wasn't until I said, Oh yes, those are the five that I looked at them and thought, oh, well, actually, the uh that one set in the 14th century, and the rest are all either partly set in the 19th century or written in the 19th century. So I was like, oh well, that's a clue. Um yes, it was, I think it has. This has been such an interesting exercise because I think it must have always been there. And I just had never thought of it in terms of my own writing until I was kind of forced into it with the beholders, because that um that had this historical subplot, which wasn't going to be a massive part of the story. But when I started writing it, it just it just ate the rest of the book and became the main thing. So it was almost like it was waiting for its chink, its moment to get its foot in the door and then just forced its way in. Um, which yeah, I kind of find really fascinating, uh, because it's not it's not what I set out to do with writing at all. But I do think looking back at most of my reading, it it was uh it wasn't just 19th century or early 20th century for a very long time. So perhaps it's not surprising that that's been in my subconscious for the longest period and fermenting and um composting, and just is kind of inevitable that that's what was going to come out.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

And kind of amazing that in this book they are in the present and then they get transported back, right? Yeah, so it's it's almost like you're the but the beholders kind of did that as well and then you know became something different. But I I wonder whether there's something about the way historical fiction forces us to see the world we live in now differently. You know, it's impossible to go back without making comparisons, even if what you present to the reader is then. We're still reading it through our eyes now, aren't we?

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Yeah, definitely. And I think it it I think for me it kind of creates a safe space for me to explore um the ugly and and the really unpalatable. And I I think I think it might also be because it's um because I, you know, my life compared to like my characters and and just generally is is you know, it's a very privileged one and safe and um really comparatively. And I I think there's something about that's that's more it feels like an easier way in for me to write about uh you know really terrible things or upsetting things um that happen to other people now, but setting it in the past where I can sort of approach it from that point of view and and do that research. I think there's there's a way that makes it kind of easier to get into it in a way, um, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Do you think that's to do with politics? Is that really what you're talking about? The kind of the complex politics of the now that by Yeah, I think at least at least in part.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

I think on one hand, it is just historical fiction is so brilliant because it it it because it is at a remove, it does create that kind of distance where you can really look at things you know that still apply now, but um might have been even greater than or you know slightly different, but you're still making the parallels. But it's just um yeah, it's a kind of playground, I think, in a way. Uh yeah, I don't know if I can really put my finger on what it is exactly I'm trying to say. But I think there is also on the other side of it, politically, um, yeah, certainly. It I don't know if it kind of gives you a little bit more license um because you're looking at lives that have passed, where though those particular set of circumstances have passed. So still obviously you've got the responsibility for the voices you're doing and people you're representing. Um, but there is just that slight remove, which I think just does make it slightly more comfortable and easier to approach, I think.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Yeah, that's really interesting. And this particular book, the A Walk in Wolf Wood uh by Mary Stewart, which we just heard from, there's a werewolf in there, isn't there? And I mean so it kind of takes the it takes the fantasy of not only going back in time but also kind of this magical dramatic mythic. I mean, those are things which also have found their way into your work. Interesting, isn't it? That they're that that sits there behind it all.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

Um yeah, because it's not as um much or as uh blatant in in what I write, at least for now. I've not, you know, I've not wanted to write fantasy, but there's definitely that sense of the yeah, the supernatural in some way kind of hovering around. I mean that's what I love about the Gothic and especially supernatural gothic, is that again, it's a bit like the historical thing. It's you get this heightened world um where you can really explore what feels very heightened in the real world, um, but it's very difficult to express and explore because it's so awful. Um so it um so the gothic kind of is a way of being able to express that. And because things do feel overwhelming and and can kind of feel um supernatural in a way, uh, some of the things that challenge us, just the power of it and the helplessness um in the face of it, um that's a that's a really I think it lends itself in fiction as as ways to propose it.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

I mean, I'm just thinking about uh thinking going back to the beholders. Your main character, Harriet, is in this big house. Um, and I think one of the scenes that really stands out to me in memory. So for listeners, the Beholders is well, maybe you should describe it better. Give us a little insight into the beholders.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Um so, well, it begins with the trial of a woman um who's been she's the wife of Lempe and she's been accused of murdering their baby son. But the story begins a few months then before that and is told completely through the diaries of Harriet, who is a housemaid who goes to work for this couple in their country estate. Um and she, her character, she's very dissatisfied with life, she doesn't really want to be a housemaid, she doesn't want to do the things that are expected of her, like marry her childhood sweetheart, even though that's what she really should do, it's a sensible thing to do. Um, she thinks, you know, she's captivated by Clara, her mistress, and thinks that you know, this could be her purpose in life, is sort of serve this amazing woman. And um, obviously it doesn't all quite work out like that. And there's also the uh the the MP, Ralph Gethlin, is he's away for a lot of the beginning of the book and becomes this sort of almost mythical figure in her mind because you know he's he's this famous man who's supposed to be very good um and have a very bright future in politics. Uh, but then she's hearing in the house that he's gonna just hate her, and the moment he sees her, he's gonna throw her out. So he kind of becomes this scary thing who's gonna appear at any moment and possibly ruin her life.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Yeah, and I mean the scene that sticks in my head when we're thinking about the gothic and thinking about the feelings of kind of spine-tinglingness that can arise um through thinking about difficult things in the past that still are in our present, is when she's tidying some of she's cleaning some of his things and she finds these quite terrifying objects. And you really do bring that feeling of anxiety. They feel they feel like objects which kind of have a kind of power, um, but really they're they're industry objects, you know, so they're quite sort of solid, boring things in some ways, but they have a kind of horrible, horrible, horrifying power. Um, and I think you bring that across really well. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

So yeah, I love I love objects. Um, that's something I've noticed that I do a lot without really consciously meaning to, is that objects sort of pop up that are very powerful or have some kind of meaning, which actually happens in a walk in Wolfwood. There's um these amulets are incredibly important and are the key to sort of saving the day. Um but yeah, so that was great in the beholders. It really kind of had full reign because, yeah, so some of these objects are industry objects, but they might have a really repellent history behind them, which she can't know about until she does know about. Um but meanwhile, it's almost like they've carried something of that. They're sort of fascinating and intriguing, and then she understands what they're actually what either happened around them or what their actual use is for. Um and there's also in the beholders, there's lots of there's objects in the wrong places. There's, you know, there's a gargle on the inside and things in unexpected places. Um, and it also looks at kind of art, what people choose to put in their houses, and um these depictions of which are very beautiful but of really quite horrific things, like scenes from mythology or Mount Vesuvius or something, you know, where there's basically death and destruction. Um but that that's put up as decoration. And uh yeah, so how yeah, just the things that are around us, whether they're placed there on purpose or otherwise, um yeah, how they can be how they can wrong foot wrong foot and what yeah, what lies behind them.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

And I think just to kind of think about pulling us into the next book, uh, let's see if I can segue. Um I'm thinking about how there's there's those kinds of objects and the kinds of sort of sensations that we're discussing where you know you the object brings with it emotions, like it kind of carries a weight, not just of what it did, but of who's touched it, of how it's been used, you know, all those sorts of things and of what it implies about the owner. And I think there is a kind of factual history of an object, but there's also all of that extra stuff, that kind of fantastical, fictional, um imaginary that goes alongside them. And in um Possession, a romance, which is your next choice by A. S. Byts, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1990, yes, I thought what's so interesting about that is that it begins. I I think the key is that a romance that comes after possession, which we kind of always forget. But then I remembered the first epigraph, which is all about it's from it's from Nathaniel Hawthorne, his preface to the House of Seven Gables. And it says, When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a novel. And I mean it goes on, but I just think how interesting that is that she's kind of claiming, and obviously the book itself is about two academics who meet um and end up falling in love because they are discover that the people that they're investigating through their research actually had an affair. I think that's a good roughish summary of what happens in the book, but you can say more. Uh and um and yes, she invents this old poet that one of her characters is is researching. Um so this kind of slippage between how poets might have behaved in the past, um you know, basing some things on real poets, but then inventing a fake one. I don't know, there's some wonderful kind of different layers. And yeah, I I wonder how you feel about this idea of like romance and novel. There's so much other there's so much other work in this book. You know, it's almost like um it's like a kind of intertextual thing in and of itself, isn't it? But you know, yeah, I do you think that there's a difference between a romance and a novel for you?

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Um yeah, I I'd forgotten about that epigraph. And yeah, I think it's something that I've ever thought about. Um because I I don't think in terms of if I'm writing a romance, I just it sort of wouldn't occur to me to write a romance, I think. Although I did, um I think I um read an interview with A. S. Viatt where she was kind of quite grumpy because the possession did so well. It was critically um commercially very successful before she even won the Booker. Um, and she was like, you know, how extraordinary it's basically a book about librarians. Um uh but also she was like, uh but also was kind of like, uh, is she you've got to write a romance. That's you know, that's obviously what you want to do if you're just gonna write a romance. Like, you know, as if it's just sort of reducing it to that's just a love story, that's what people will buy. Um, yeah, I should definitely perhaps ask about putting a romance on the front of my next book.

SPEAKER_00 19:23

But that's the thing, isn't it? Because she's redefining or she's saying a romance isn't necessarily a love story, a romance is a way of approaching um the writing of a longer work, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the whole history of uh of romance, which yeah, I think I don't really know enough about, but I think it's really interesting. I'm sure she was you know very aware of it. The whole book is just a really gleeful kind of um pistake in a way of a lot of different kinds of scholarly approaches and ways of writing, and um, in some ways, it's not all obviously, um, but it is yeah, it's it's kind of fun. I think she pokes fun at a lot of stuff. Um, so yeah, certainly I'm sure that as a romance that'd be part of that.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

It's so funny because I it's been many years since I've read it, but I do have a real sense of affection for the book in my memory. Um, and then I as you as you pointed out, like she said it's a book about librarians, it literally starts in in uh the London Library. You know, it's like well, and also with the with the with a quotation from the fake poet. Um Yeah, it's just extraordinary.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

She wrote thousands, hundreds, anyway, of lines of this of this made-up titan of Victorian literature, who I don't know, uh, I mean, sort of Robert Browning, I think, was possibly the main kind of idea, not directly, but she must have had him in mind, I'm sure. Um yeah, it's uh it's extraordinary. She created this whole Victorian kind of literary world with the actual work and the letters and the poetry within it, which she did all herself. It's I mean, it's just extraordinary, just on, you know, as a feat uh of literary work for that in itself, I think.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Yeah. Shall we shall we have the beginning? Shall I read this one? Um I'm not going to read the lovely poem. Um, so you you people can go and can check it out for themselves. Uh so here we go. The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking. It had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or rather protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape tied in a neat bow. The librarian handed it to Roland Michelle, who was sitting waiting for it in the reading room of the London Library. It had been exhumed. From locked safe number five, where it usually stood between pranks of Priapus and the Grecian way of love. It was ten in the morning, one day in September 1986. Rowland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St. James's Square. And thus it begins at a desk. With a book. So tell us why why this one?

SPEAKER_01 22:37

I discovered AS by accident in a charity shop. I think it was still life, which was out of order in her series of four books. Four books, I think. And her writing just completely galvanized me. So I had to go and read everything else. And then I just, yeah, absolutely loved possession. And I found I kept because I was just so impressed with it, I think. What I love about her writing is how much she puts into it. Her books are just absolutely teeming with ideas. And you can sort of feel her own interest. You can kind of feel her brain buzzing as you're reading. And I yeah, I just I absolutely love that about her. That she can just put so much, so many. And they're also, you know, you could take apart her books and just write 50 novels worth of ideas in there, I think. But she always shoves it into one. And yeah, just the intelligence behind it and there's wit in there. Um and and just always felt that she's just really trying to get to the crux of you know, of the truth, not to sound too grand. But do you know what I mean? She's like she's so interested in life, nothing else will do. She's just really, really, really doing her best to get to the bottom of something, um, which I find really exciting to read. And possession, um, I found myself, I just sort of repeatedly come back to it. Um, I went back to it when I started writing the polders, when it was still a parallel narrative with the modern um supposedly think the most of it and this background. So I re-red it, read it then, sort of to see how she'd done the um the two different strands. Um, and I find myself, if I often going back to her, and especially this book, because I'll think, oh, she did that. You know, if there's some, if there's an image I'm grappling with, or there's a scene, and I think, oh, I think she wrote one of those. How did she do it? So I will go back as a kind of um guide and inspiration and sort of almost like a reference book for my own writing. Um, or how she did, because in the night hag, I have um a lot of it is written is letters, there's a story told through letters, and uh she uses letters in possession a lot as well. So I I went back then as well to have a look at what she was doing and how she was doing it. Um so she just yeah, she just became a kind of lodestar.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

It's I I love this idea. So obviously I'm excited by the idea of how each book that we write, each book that we read is in conversation with all of the other books we've ever read and thought about. And and it feels to me like you really are in conversation with with this book in your work. Do you I mean would you agree that that's the case?

SPEAKER_01 25:25

I think so. Not I mean not in a not in a conscious way, but because it's always um it's just always my automatic go-to if I'm struggling with something. Um she's the first writer I think of to see if I can get some help from there, or if I'm just completely stuck and just feel like I'm writing uh sludge, then to try and sharpen my brain up. I will quite often go back to A. S. Wyatt and read her prose and try and sort of re-get my reboot my brain um by doing that. So, and I don't know if I'd say it's you know the actual things that she wrote about, um if I'm directly in conversation with that, certainly not consciously. Um, but I I think in terms especially of uh, because she wrote other books in the 19th century as well, of how she interpreted that age, I think that is certainly at least in the back of my mind when I'm writing, there's almost a kind of would she approve of this feeling about it?

SPEAKER_00 26:31

Um it's interesting hearing you talk about how you kind of go back to that book as a kind of way of getting you kind of training your writing hand, if you like, or brain. And I wonder, because you studied English literature at Bristol, and do you think that the way you read as a writer is different to the way that you read as a kind of student of literature?

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Yeah, I really wish that there was a compulsory part of literature degrees where you have to write, you have to do creative writing yourself. Uh, because I think not in order to become a writer necessarily, but just to understand something about the process of writing. I think that would have been incredibly useful as a reader, as a student of literature, because I wasn't writing at that time. I mean, I'd written as a sort of child, an early teenager, but then it all sort of went away. And it was something that it became something that I I thought I would like to do, but I completely lost confidence in myself that I could do it, and that I it was a real, I don't really know why I had such a block, but I just felt like I couldn't really, that you know, that I was I would be writing if I was a writer. Um, and I'm not writing, so I'm not a writer. Kind of as ridiculous. I timed myself into. And then I and then I think reading, you know, the things you read at university when you're studying literature, sort of timeless classics, it's um that can be very intimidating as well and make you feel like, well, what's the point of me putting pen to page? Um, so I I definitely read differently, and I think it would have been really helpful if I had still been writing or if there was some sort of component of those courses to um to just just just try it and understand how the brain works when you're writing. I think that would have been really helpful in actually um approaching texts of all kinds. Um and I and I think and even now I think you know I will I will still read sometimes just purely as a reader. I think do I? Or am I always looking? Maybe I'm not, maybe I am always looking now, maybe I do always have at least half a writer's hat on when I'm reading.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

And by that do you mean that you're kind of aware of how it will have been constructed?

SPEAKER_01 28:51

Yes, yeah. And yeah, aware of the choices being made and um and and an appreciation for it, which is just different when you've been doing it yourself. And especially when you uh are reading writers who write in a very different way from yourself. Um I don't know if you find that which is so exciting when you write something that you couldn't possibly have written in a million years. Um I find that really exciting. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

Yeah, no, that uh yeah, I like that idea. I I think you know, I I feel like I always go to books part of me hoping to find an expression of something that I feel or have experienced that I haven't been able to well express myself. And when you find that sometimes in a book, the feeling of connection is so exciting, uh inspiring, but also reassuring. You know, you're like, oh then I'm not alone in seeing the world quite like this.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Yeah, it's a relief, it's a it's a lovely, warm, cozy feeling, I think.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

And I think it's beautiful, isn't it? You can communicate like that with someone who maybe you know isn't even alive anymore with some of the things.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

Yeah, exactly. I love that about um novels, that it is this it is this massive conversation where you know they don't even have to be alive anymore, or of any concept of your life. Um yeah, and I and I love it as well when you you see, I mean, I suppose you're still seeing yourself in it because that's what the writer's done to you, but you know, um a character or situation which you which isn't familiar, which you're not um which isn't part of your experience, um opening your eyes to it, uh that's that's uh amazing as well.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

Yeah, and I mean, great segue into the next book in the sense that thankfully um you have not had to live through the life that gets explored in Beloved by Tony Morrison. Yes. Um but but also I think uh maybe we'll come back to this, but there's also this idea around you also study drama, and it seems to me that that might be very helpful for thinking about inhabiting characters. Um but anyway, let's let's talk about Beloved, uh, first published in 1987. I mean, the absolutely seminal, very well-known novel of this Nobel Prize-winning author. Um, tell us a bit more about the book and and why you chose this.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

Um so the book is set, I think 1870s again in Ohio, and it's um Setha um is the main character really, who was born into slavery, uh managed to escape. Um, and it's many years later. She's living with her 18-year-old daughter, and also, and but the house is haunted um by a kind of sort of Portuguese thing. And the I don't know how much to say in terms of I mean, I think it's it's sort of so well known, I don't think it matters. You can cut it out if if you don't want to include it. Um but what becomes apparent is that this boss in the house is her baby, it's her eldest daughter, um, who once she had escaped uh from slavery, people came looking for them. And when the men arrived to, or she who she thought was going to come and take back to the plantation, um, she tries to kill her children because to protect them from that. And it's actually based on a real um case of a woman who did that. Um so it's this absolutely, it's it's just such a it's one of those things that's why I thought we need the gossip, because how do you even approach that horror that the horror of slavery is such that a mother would choose to kill her own children to protect them, to keep them safe from this abhorrent existence is just something I think it's just um yeah, very difficult to get your head around. And so the way that Tony Morrison does it in this incredible book is through this idea of being haunted, um, and they're living this very isolated existence because the you know, local people know what she did is one of the reasons, so keep their distance. Um, but then another uh friend who was part of the same plantation comes by and he kind of uh releases them in a way, gets them out of the house. Uh, but when they come um and tries to sort of exercise this ghost, but when they come back, there's this young woman uh called Beloved uh sitting there who is this kind of you never quite, you never know exactly what what she's supposed to be. It's probably the daughter, um, but she's never really explained. She sort of she just turns up, she's real, but is she real, you know, um, but everybody can see her and interact with her, and she just kind of gradually takes over the household um and and flips the relationship with Setha, who sort of takes care of her, but then it kind of um the relationship changes. But it's just it's just it's such an incredible idea of a way to approach that story and of what you know the aftermath would be like and how it never goes. And yeah, it's it's just such um I just read it if you haven't. It's so it's so amazing.

unknown 34:22

Sorry.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

And it's is that is that why you is that why you picked it, do you think? Because it just feels so overwhelmingly.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

I think it was a massively powerful book when I because I read it as part of my A-level um English, and I think it was really well taught. Um, and it just had such a powerful effect on me then. Because you know, that yeah, it was it was it was introducing me to the full horror of slavery and all of that kind of thing. And um, I think as a class we just we really got into it. It was a really good experience of being taught English literature. And it's quite funny because when I went to university then, um uh one of the tutors was asking about books that we loved, and I said this, and her reaction, she was she sort of snorted in derision and was absolutely dismissive. And I can't remember even what she said when she gave a reason for it, but it was like oh, just dismissed it out of hand, which just absolutely knocked me flat. Um yeah, which is I wish uh yeah, I wish I could know what it was about it that she just had no time for. It was really interesting. But yeah, I think it came up because, and especially as then I because you know it wasn't just that I wasn't didn't think I was a historical writer, I didn't really think I was um into Gothic until my agent pointed out that the beholders was quite gothic and maybe lean into it a bit. And I think, yeah, probably the um beloved is uh part of that tradition of Gothic. And I think the fact that that did have such a strong effect on me, it might be also why I have learnt that way myself and sort of seen that as a sort of absorbed that as a way of storytelling that you can you can explore things through these weird, not not entirely explained methods of you know of suit of the supernatural or at least something that isn't quite natural.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

I mean, obviously we're we're moving into the night hag territory. Uh so tet uh but maybe we should maybe we should just have a little extract from the beginning of uh Beloved, and then it would be great to talk about um how how that might have come through a bit in in your novel The Night Hag. Okay, so this is the opening. 124 was spiteful, full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it, and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way. But by 1873, Setha and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, the baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buggler, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old, as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it. That was the signal for Buggler. As soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake, that was it for Howard. Neither boy waited to see more, another kettle full of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor, soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods, the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once, the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be born or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother baby Suggs, Setha, their mother, and their little sister Denver all by themselves in the grey and white house on Bluestone Road. Even the beginning is really powerful, isn't it? Yeah, it is. So talking about kind of the spiritual world, that comes into the night hag. So tell us a little bit about the night hag and that sort of aspect of the novel.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

So night hag is set again, late 19th century, um, 1886, and that's it's set partly in the Victorian spiritualist movement in London and partly on the archaeological dig of a Bronze Age burial mound in Fife in Scotland. Um and what links the two is Lil, who is raised by a medium to be a medium, um, but in a very unhappy, oppressive household. Um as she grows up, she begins to doubt her mother's uh gifts, uh, never mind her own, and she wants to run away and she manages to escape, um, sort of embraces 19th century science, this sort of burgeoning new, you know, empirical-based rational inquiry, and eventually manages to become an assistant to archaeologists, which is how she ends up in Scotland on this dig, but she cannot escape. Um, because for one, the dig that they're working on, the burial mound, is supposed to be cursed. Um, but also she is haunted by night at night by a figure that comes to her, um, which and she can't, even though she's desperately trying to find a non-supernatural explanation for it, she can't quite shake um the beliefs that her mother has instilled in her. So it's a lot to do with belief and how you're not always in control of what you believe. Um and yeah, so that's where the so it was kind of interested in the collision of this spiritual world in the 19th century. Because on the one hand, you had the spiritualist movement, which was a sort of distinct thing in itself and new, um, and but then you also had the old folklore beliefs, which were still very potent and powerful. Um, same thing, um, for people and very important in their lives. And then on the other hand, you had this uh, you know, a complete revolution in science, uh, where that had you know detached itself from the church finally and was independent and secular and you know, moving towards this much more rational view of the world, which changed everybody's view of the world as well, um, radically. Uh, so I was interested in the kind of collision between those two and and especially how it kind of can collide in one person. Um, and it's not really a spoiler to say that her visions at night are what we would now understand to be sleep paralysis. Um, when the mind wakes up before the body does, it's a very common condition. Um, so you're paralyzed, but you're awake, but it induces hallucinations. So people really see and really feel themselves being attacked, and it's often a dark figure uh that's kneeling on them and and often trying to strangle them. So it's absolutely terrifying and feels very, very, very real. And there's still, although we know what's happening um physiologically now, you know, there's still debate about you know what why exactly do people see what they see, why do they see it in certain places? And there's all sorts of anecdotal stuff around it anyway, which is still a bit um, yeah, we don't just don't fully understand it. But in the 19th century, it was um the the medical profession kind of understood that it was the something going wrong with the physical body that was affecting the mind, but they didn't they didn't really know what it was. Um they thought about stagnation of the blood and that kind of thing. Um so that yeah, so there was this, it's just the perfect kind of meeting point of the hallucinations or the visions, which were, you know, all were put down to demons and all sorts of folkloric figures, um, explained it. Um and then and then yeah, you had this kind of puzzle for science to try and figure it out as well, that there's something you know going on that's explainable. So it was kind of this push-pull between science and folklore and superstition, um, which I which just it just seemed like the perfect realm to explore all that stuff to me.

SPEAKER_00 42:22

Yeah, I mean, obviously that kind of demonic spiritual theme connects to to your choice of beloved, but I'm also wondering we've there must have been a lot of factual books that you kind of read to give yourself um knowledge around uh the time and and how people understood all of this then. Um do you find yourself when coming up with or in the development of new ideas, making kind of reading lists? Uh or is it less structured than that?

SPEAKER_01 42:59

Oh no, I feel like I have to have read everything possible, and I'm always terrified that I'm gonna have missed some seminal text or you know something that would make, you know, everyone else knows about, which I haven't been able to for some reason find. No, it it all comes out of the reading, really. Um the idea actually came out of an AC Benson short story, a ghost story, uh, where he does characters talking about these half-lit skies, as in they're having a discussion about spiritualism. He was writing sort of end of the 19th century mostly. Um, and they were saying, why, you know, it's so mean of people who've died not to come back if they can and comfort us. And so one of them says, you know, why would they come back to these half lit skies if they're in heaven, essentially, or some version of heaven? Um, which got me thinking about, yeah, how this we're in this sort of shadowy world where we know some things and but can't explain everything. Um, so that's where it started. But then, yeah, and then I just did um did so much reading um about the spiritualists. Um, and also by the spiritualists, some of them wrote about their experiences, which is fascinating. Um, and also that, you know, there was because it was something that was fascinating at the time. So there are some novels set around it. Um, so yeah, I did all the, I read Houdini's book on you know, him really against them. He was horrified by it and said he could recreate every trick that they did. Uh so just yeah, just read everything I could lay my hands on really for that, and then a lot about um sort of the folklore, and because there's a lot of hags in it, um, so exploring the folklores behind sleep paralysis uh and you know, cursed burial mounds. So did all did as much reading as possible, always feeling like I wasn't doing quite enough.

SPEAKER_00 44:43

Well, and the and the horrifying, somehow horrifying figure of the evil woman. What is it about the hag that's so appealing, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 44:52

It is really interesting because it's hard to uh you can't really sum up hags in one go because there's some of them are quite neutral, they're just the crones of nature just to explain you know the seasons and birth and death, and there's nothing um there's no sort of agenda behind it, I don't think. Uh uh, but then other other ones are clearly created or have imposed upon them a misogynistic agenda. Um, and I think that, yeah, that that has a lot to do with it. I think it's really interesting that it's always in sleep paralysis this figure that people see in folklore, it's it's almost always a woman, it's a hag. Um, but people I've spoken to, it tends to either be a totally neutral figure or a man. And I think if the idea is that the mind is because it's panicking because it can't move, it sees what it most fears, I think is the kind of one of the theories about why we see what we see. Um and so, yeah, certainly. I mean, I I learnt about it through a flatmate who she said it was almost always a man, um, and she'd have shouting in her ear sometimes, which would be a man, uh, because it would be more normal for a woman to fear a man, just because it would. Uh, but perhaps um in former times the fear of witches was so great that maybe that was what was going happening in people's minds. I don't know, and I don't know whose experiences kind of dictated the folklore, obviously, but you know, that's just a theory, maybe it was something to do with that. But just fear of women, fear of witches, fear of um independent, knowledgeable older women. All these things, maybe that's why they became such a became the the figure of sleep road.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

We're we're a terrifying bunch.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

Well, we are. I mean, yeah, absolutely horrifying.

SPEAKER_00 46:49

I hope people will feel excited by all of that and go and go and read both of your books. Um let's let's have a look at your next choice, which is The Odd Women by Gissing, which was first published in 1893. So this is like this is the oldest one on your list. Um tell us tell us a bit about your your choice of this book.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Um I think I must have discovered Gissing. Uh I can't remember if it was at university or just after, or maybe even just before, anyway, somewhere around formative early adulthood. Um and he I remember just being blown away by how modern he sounded. Um and especially with his books, um, really explored the lives of women in a way that I found really startling for a male author in the 19th century. Um and so the so the odd women, it's it's literally named that because there was this idea that there were a million more women than men. And so, you know, once everyone was married off, what happened to these women? So it was so much more difficult to be independent. Um he sort of goes into it uh and and yeah, has all these different characters and these sort of different versions of these women and what happens. But and I think what also appealed to me at that time was because he is he's such a tortured soul. I mean, I think he genuinely was as a man. Um and he definitely his his characters is they're just I mean, there's almost a bit of hardy about him, that kind of sense of you know, your fate is determined and there's just no way out of the misery that you will it will happen to you, which I think probably appealed to my probably sort of still teenagery angsty self with all of that. Um, but yeah, I just think again, it's a bit like the AS Bayer, just this sense that he's really reaching for something, he's really trying to get to the bottom of something in what he's writing about. And you know, he had this incredible um sense of justice and horror at the injustices of society at the time, but for um certainly for the poor, um, but but also especially for women, he was very alive to how unfair all of that was and how we were all trapped by society's norms, um, which I think is a thread through these books as well. Um, so yeah, so I think I think that's why I really think he helped really bring the 19th century alive as a real time with complicated people who were just like us but just living in a different time, um which I think, yeah, is probably what also drew me back to that time unconsciously to write in myself.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

Yeah. It is kind of mad this idea that there were in England so many more women. Um does anyone do why was that? Do we know why that was? Was it just luck of birth rates or um I don't know actually.

SPEAKER_01 49:51

Uh so 1893, I mean, there'd been so much war. Perhaps it was just war. Um I don't know if there was some sort of class divide with it as well. Um maybe you know it was equal, but you couldn't marry outside of your class, so you might as well have not been any men. Um yeah, I'm not I'm not entirely sure about that actually. Bring on Lady Chatterley's love I'm gonna do. I don't know if they even know if it's true. I don't even know if it's true. Um I don't know how they know that or how they why they decided that.

SPEAKER_00 50:27

Yeah. But obviously it was true for him, that's what he observed. Yes. And and the book is a kind of response to that to some extent.

SPEAKER_01 50:36

Um, so oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:38

No, go on.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Um, just you know, um, because a lot of these women, obviously, they had to fend for themselves, so they were kind of unusual and found um ways of living which were independent and actually they found preferable to marriage, actually, at the end of the day. And so the main storyline is between two, there's a woman who sort of swears off marriage, she runs a school for um young women uh to uh learn sectarial skills, uh to be independent. Um, and then she's wooed by a man who's attracted to her as a kind of you know, something a woman to conquer. Um, but they do fall in love, but then you know, something happens uh again, it's out, it's very much that sort of fate intervenes and and pushes them away from each other again. And then they there's no reason really why they couldn't couldn't overcome that, except for that's why I just always characters are so gen, you know, properly flawed. They're always just sort of disappointing themselves and each other in ways that is so true, you know, but so self-sabotaging. Uh, you know, it and and the pull of um of the of society's expectations, even in these, you know, incredibly strong women, that that kind of is kind of the gothic, I mean it's not a gothic book, but that's kind of that force, that kind of invisible but incredible, incredibly powerful force that will get you in the end, kind of thing, is a sort of figling about it. Um so it's it's really interesting. They're just they were such real people to me, I think, reading them or uh for a book written then by a by a vlog.

SPEAKER_00 52:23

Yeah, I've have to say you've you've made me feel like I I I want to read it. So George. Yeah, but you know, I mean maybe there's a realism there that's uh poignant. Um do you want to read the opening for us?

SPEAKER_01 52:41

Yes, sure. So tomorrow, Alice, said Dr. Madden, as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast downs by Clevedon, I shall take steps for ensuring my life for a thousand pounds. It was the outcome of a long and intimate conversation. Alice Madden, aged nineteen, a plain, shy, gentle mannered girl, short of stature, and in movement something less than graceful, wore a pleased look as she glanced at her father's face, and then turned her eyes across the blue channel to the Welsh Hills. She was flattered by the confidence reposed in her, for Dr. Madden, reticent by nature, had never been known to speak in the domestic circle about his pecuniary affairs. He seemed to be the kind of man who would inspire his children with affection, grave but benign, amiably diffident, with a hint of lurking mirthfulness about his eyes and lips. And today he was in the best of humours. Professional prospects, as he had just explained to Alice, were more encouraging than hitherto. For twenty years he had practiced medicine at Clevedon, but with such trifling emolument that the needs of his large family left him scarce a margin over expenditure. Now, at the age of 49, it was 1872, he looked forward with a larger hope. Might he not reasonably count on ten or fifteen more years of activity? Cleavedon was growing in repute as a seaside resort. New houses were rising. Assuredly, his practice would continue to extend. Brilliant, thank you. Yes, it kind of goes straight in with the it's about money, it's about security, and the w uh yeah, a woman who just has no control over what the men in her life are gonna decide about it.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

And is that one of the reasons that you picked it that in a sense that speaks to the issues that you're interested in writing about?

SPEAKER_01 54:32

I think so. I think definitely. I didn't when when I even when I knew okay, I'm writing a historical 19th century book, I didn't immediately think it's gonna be about women, but because and their you know plight, um, but you just can't, I don't think, I'm not sure it's possible to set a book in the 19th century with female characters without just slamming into absolute, you know, jaw-dropping horror about you know what what the situation was like and really has remained until very recently, and clearly we're not out of the woods by any stretch. Um so I think um, yes, I think and I think reading reading that and being so conscious of it and reading in the historical novels like possession, you know, it's it's always it's always a theme about what you know what life was like for women and how they were curtailed and what could they possibly do. It's interesting because I was thinking, even a walk in Wolfwood, um, one of the lines I really never forgot from it was when his brother and sister, and um she says something like, Oh, Margaret knew uh when she and John uh when John joked about her just being a girl, that he was only joking, but looking at this 14th century society, she realized that women actually had something to complain about. And I remember as a child thinking, wow, when my brother and I fight about that, it's not joking, it's like a real existential battle about who, you know, are boys or girls better. And um, yeah, which isn't, you know, to have a go at pop at my brother, he was just reflecting what you know was fed to us. Yeah, I thought that's kind of interesting that that's a line that even in that you know, lovely little children's book stayed with me um all this time. Um, so yeah, there's a kind of thread that goes through them, I think, about you know, really what it was like for women. And certainly since writing in that period, and yeah, really it's that thing where you know something, you know facts, but then when you really think about them, you sort of understand them in a completely different way. And it's kind of really made me see our own time with much clearer eyes as well, and understanding just how close it was yesterday, what was going on in the 19th century, and the 20th century was also just as you know so shocking and uh you know, with women's rights and things you don't even you know, I I didn't realise until really quite recently that only until two years before I was born a woman couldn't um take out a loan or or sign for a mortgage without um her husband or her father's signature, um which is but jaw-dropping. Um so I think um, and you know that that's just one of so many things uh which explains where we are in this bizarre sort of gender, gender war. Um it really it just it I suppose it's contextualized our own time for me um massively in a way that I kind of knew, but you know, now I kind of oh okay, now I know I'm living it.

SPEAKER_00 57:46

Yes, and I I suppose these it's one of the things fiction can do so well, isn't it? Actually bring a time to life in a way that allows us to understand what it felt like to be there, and also that of course there was no one way to be in any one period, you know, that there were so many different things going on and so many different experiences of a similar time. Um, and that's something which fiction can bring to the fore, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 58:15

Yeah, definitely. And I think that's something that does make the 19th century so interesting because it's so close and yet in some ways so completely different. And I I find it really interesting to write at that time because it's the your kind of sense of perspective zooms in and out, it's quite disorientating. You think you've kind of got a handle on you know what what would be normal, you know, how to write the sentence that would make sense from that period, but then you read something that completely turns it on its head because of course it's just the same as now. It's there's all sorts of different things going on, and you can't reduce an age to um you know to simplistic um ideas of what people did and thought and how they behaved. Um and I so I think reading The Odd Women from someone living then, um, but also a man sort of really actually looking at a at the female point of view. And I'd have to reread it now, it's a very long time since I've had read it. I don't know if I'd have different things to say about it, but um certainly at the time um I felt that, and also with his uh other very famous book, New Grub Street, um I thought the way he wrote the female character in that was and just her how trapped she was. Um it was and just her sense of perspective um was so well written and so relatable, um, even though obviously I'm in a completely different situation. Uh yeah, I think yeah, it absolutely brought that time on the possibilities of that time alive, which must have stayed with me.

SPEAKER_00 59:53

It's fascinating, isn't it? Because in a way, these books that we might not have read in a long time, they have become sort of part of the fabric of your um understanding not only of the past, but but also of how you feel inside, you know, and therefore somehow got into the the meat of how you look at the world. I think that's that's another beauty of books, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:17

Yeah, absolutely. Um yeah, and of reading books written in the past, it can yeah kind of orientate you in way beyond your own lifetime in a really profound way, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:36

It's like it's like the time travel of your first choice, but can happen uh just through picking up a book written at a different time. Yes, exactly. You can go and you're with them and you're invested, and you can't save the day, but you can you can get in your little time travel box, it's called a book, and you open it.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:54

Um I hate it when people write like I think uh you know people rewrite the endings to books to make it the ending or something. It's just so awful, but I kind of maybe that's the version of it. Going back and saving them.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:12

Yeah, well, we won't say what happens at the end of either of your books. People have to read them to find out, so then they can decide whether they need new endings. Um let's let's turn to your final choice, uh, which is The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs. And I think this is the most recent novel. Yes, um, first published by Faber and Faber, uh, and still published by Faber and Faber, actually. Um so yes, tell us a little bit about this novel.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:42

Um I was quite surprised that I chose it actually, um, because I haven't thought about it at least consciously for ages. Uh and I read it once, I don't think I read it again. Um, but it just bobbed to my to the surface. Uh pick me. Um it just seemed an absolutely instinctive, natural choice to make. And I I was thinking, why? And I think again, because oh, when did it come out? About 2005 or something. I read it at at quite a kind of impressionable time, at least in terms of as a writer. Um, and it blew me away with its simplicity, and it's a short book, um, and it's all from one man's perspective, um, Charles. So it's again, it's set in the 1870s, I think, in Cornwall or the West Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:32

Yeah, 1870, I've got in my notes.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:36

And he's uh a blacksmith, but also uh a Methodist lay preacher, um, at a time when you know congregations were dwindling and he would walk, he'd work hard all week and then walk miles and miles and miles at the weekends to go and preach to people who perhaps didn't really want to hear him anyway. And he struggles with his faith. Um, but he has this faith. Uh, but I think it was just it's such a because you're all the time in his interior and it's very simply written. Um, I think it was inspired partly by Peter Hobbes' own great-great-grandfather from his diaries. I think that's I think that's where he said some of the voice came from. Um but nothing happens, it's just one of those precious books which it's very difficult to write and get published these days, where it's all about the interior, really. Um, and not an awful lot happens. It's just about this man's existence and where he is psychologically and emotionally. Um, and he so he has this faith and he feels you know, he's constantly beating himself up about not doing enough for God and you know, for wasting his time. Um, but at the same time, he has this sort of extraordinary appreciation of the land around him and nature. Um, and so the writing's beautiful as well, in this sort of what feels just extremely natural, um, gorgeous way of expressing things of just what he sees and and the pleasure he can take in it. Um, and then there's this but you know, but you can easily he was also it's all him, but it's once again, it's a little bit like the guessing. It's kind of how people can take on board these outside stretches and just really try to live their life by them and miss sort of the point of their own lives in the in the meantime. And there's this beautiful relationship. One of his parishioners is a blind girl who's dying, um, and they're clearly in love. Um, but he can't he can't see it, he can't see it enough to act on it. Um maybe that's giving away too much, really. I don't know because it's such a because it's not a real plot to speak of. It's just this this beautiful mind sort of unraveling. Um and and so yeah, I think I think it yeah, that had such a powerful, it's not how I, I mean, it's one of those books where I'm like, gosh, I'm not sure I could ever, I would love to write a book like this, but I'm not sure I'm capable of it. I think I would, it would just, I would overcomplicate and there'd be explosions and things. Um but um I just it's just so beautiful and so perfect in what it does. And even though in a way it's quite gloomy, again, which I think is probably uh uh another strand throughout all of these choices, and perhaps in in my own books as well. Um it's not it's not without beauty or without hope, actually, I think, at the end. Um yeah, it's just a stunning book which hit me between the eyes.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:41

That that makes it very appealing. Um I definitely it's not one that I was even aware of, um, and I I definitely feel like I would I would like to read it. And I think it's interesting what you say about the idea that an interior world is one that's hard to publish, because in a strange Strange way, it's one of the things that novels do so well. You know, the novel has been so kind of endlessly affected by other media that have grown up around us, you know, you know, film, TV, series, you know, we've got all this stuff happening all the time in which we're being delivered forms of storytelling that kind of infect, invade, challenge, alter what a novel might be. And I think one of the things that a novel can do, which so many of those other things can't do so well. I mean, even drama, I think, even in a monologue, you know, it's not the same thing as kind of just sitting in someone else's head, which of course a novel can do so well. So I'm kind of delighted that you fit one of these. I uh and and also I think it's in a way, isn't it, one of the things that we're all so intrigued by? Like, how do other people think?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:55

Yes, yeah, I think you're so right, it is. The novel has been yeah, bent about by by other media. Um, and I think because you know, it's it's he's a he's a Methodist lay preacher, but you don't have to have any um interest or experience in religion um to enjoy this book. I mean, that's not that wouldn't be alienating, I don't think. Um it I think it's again, it's this what what's the strand in the other ones, this sense of um how you live your life, the life that's been you've been born into, which has all these pressures on it. Um and actually, I mean it's he starts by asking, pretty much, have I ever been free? Um, and it kind of ends with a similar question, but talking about, you know, surely, surely that's what will save us if we have room for our own choices. Um gets to at the end. And it's very, you could sort of read it the the ending, yes, kind of ambiguous. I think you could interpret it as being quite bleak or quite hopeful. Um, but I I think that's I think that's something that underpins all of us, really. Kind of our what are our choices? Did we ever have a real choice? Have we just been knocked about by circumstances and birth and you know what how how much choice do we actually have? And I think it's something, yeah, which I wrote into my books. I was being I've been very aware of it at the ending of the books, actually, thinking, you know, how do I end them? And do these characters actually have a choice about how what they do? Could I have given them a different ending? Um, and it feels like no, no, there wasn't another ending that this could that they could have could have had. Um that's true, but it's sort of what it feels like. So it's kind of, yeah, I kind of think it's uh it's sort of coming away totally away from your question, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:51

No, it's it's it's fascinating. I there's often this piece of advice that you can be given when you're writing novels, which is, you know, oh, when you write the book, you know, make sure you've got that kind of sense that a character always could do the other thing, you know. So that kind of sense of an inevitable ending is never quite there because there's always the possibility that you know supposedly are meant to keep this alive in your reader's mind that they might do X instead of Y. Um, and I think in some ways, you know, one can feel the desire of that kind of tension is appealing in terms of kind of intrigue, but at the same time, you know, uh there's also a pain in the fact that characters and many of us, although we do obviously occasionally do unexpected things, you know, we are kind of like you say, there's an exploration of what choice, what choices do we really have when it comes down to the circumstances in which we're in and have been made, you know, in terms of our beliefs, our understanding of of kind of loyalties, and you know, how do you move outside of that? And I think it is the rare person and the rare character that can step aside from a lot of those expectations and behave differently. But I guess in many ways, yeah, there's a part of us as readers often that is yearning for characters to do to do something different to kind of you know uh not end up taking doing the thing that we think they're probably gonna do and if it's gonna lead them to some pain. But I mean, um, you know, as you say, that is sometimes just what we kind of find.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:34

I feel like it's about the fun of reading, because I, you know, yeah, I mean, certainly in my books, they could have there were other options that they could have taken. Um, but it but it yeah, but it felt like for that character in that situation, I feel like if I'd made them do if I'd written them doing something else, it would have felt off. I'd have had to have rewritten something else, you know, and gone sort of back and corrected in retrospect. Um and so and I and I think part of the obviously you're reading it hopefully uh empathetic with a character, but at the same time, there's always always that sense of, but what would I do? Um, which I think makes it fun, makes it fun and makes that tension at an end when you know characters could have done something else. Um and maybe that's what the reader would have done, or yeah, is it that's where it's kind of interesting and and part of the fun of reading.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:31

Yeah. Yeah. Well, will you give us uh a little bit of the opening of the short day dying by Peter Hobbes?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:39

Sure. I'm not gonna attempt to do a Cornish 19th century lay preacher's accent. So you just sort of imagine. And also the other thing about this is there's not that much punctuation. Um it doesn't get in the way in the way that it sometimes can. It's actually just it actually just adds more to the feeling of of yeah, the sort of authenticity of this in it. Another Sabbath is gone into eternity, born from as swiftly as though the angels gathered it in their arms, flung wide to harvest the days. Our time is stolen from us, and we are blind to its loss, neither will we see it again. Mine hours have been wasted. The days flicker with light and are quickly past. In the short hours today I made my labours, though they left me tired, and I have worked tomorrow. I have been to school and to class I have given my tithe. I am gone down to Tideford to change the tracks. And then the time was spent, it feels as though I have not seen the reward that our land is bare of promised fruit. It seems a long while since I saw anything but desolation in this place. We have failing minds and failing communities too. There are wide spaces opening up among the congregations. I've been to the empty houses of the Lord, I have seen his home made barren, and held to ridicule the jewels that man may find in there, gone to gather dust, and the book unopened, though it contains such wisdom. I have known the word of the Lord speak through me, though it echoes in the emptiness, with none to hear it, none to listen. Time is pressing. Twenty seven years are gone from me, at least twenty I must surely be able to remember that has passed around me. It has been so short. Yet half my life is lost, and my youth is already distant. I forget what it were to be a child, and the forgetting is as painful as grief. What have the days amounted to?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:29

That's yeah, perfect. Stop there. I I think I mean I'm so interested in uh uh religion and belief, and I think uh in many ways all of the books that you've chosen, even though belief isn't necessarily even though religion isn't necessarily the driving force, there is this idea around structures of social structures, I guess. Um and and the religious is part of that, isn't it? As as is the spiritual, this idea of of what holds our imagination of what we could possibly do with our life. You know, we are we're born into thinking that there are certain kinds of there's a framework, and religion is part of that framework, isn't it? And I guess even today, if you are not religious, there is still a kind of the family that you grow up in usually has a sense of expectation around what life is supposed to be, and I think that's why I'm drawn to these kinds of religious books, because one can intellectualize oneself out of a lot of things, but the kind of emotional framework of our early lives is often quite inbuilt into our kind of like nervous system. Um and I find that that tug between those two things to be very intriguing. It feels like there's a lot of that going on in this book.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:05

Yes, yeah, I think so. Um and certainly the reader can see it, even if he can't, um, which is what makes it such a sort of compelling read, even though and it, you know, it's not all that beginning sounds quite bleak, but you know, the it's so compelling, and him as a character is so compelling. Um, you're kind of willing to go with him through.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:24

Beautiful, it's beautiful though. I mean that first line, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:27

So lovely. It is, it's gorgeous. Um, and yeah, I agree that sense of we're all really struggling with uh how we were raised and figuring out what belongs to us, what we choose to keep and what we need to reject. And if yeah, do you ever really get completely objectively away from it and then and then remake your decision about how you live your life? Um, I don't suppose we can really. But you can go a long way. Um yeah, and I think novels can play a part in that actually. That by witnessing it in a fictional character, um, that struggle and that you can yeah, it is one way of sort of reflecting back our own sense of really trying to figure out our own identity and who we are and what we stand for.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:23

Yeah. Well, I mean, thank you so much for sharing your hypothetical bookshelf.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:29

Thank you very much for asking me. It's a really fascinating um and illuminating exercise.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:34

Uh if you had to pick one, uh if you like, if we imagine that, you know, I mean, I don't really think that we're creating a desert island here, but if we were, and you had to take one with you, which is the one that you think has been in a way most influential, I guess, on where you are now as a as a writer?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:54

Uh it would be possession, I think, by A. S. Byat. Just because I think her it's so full, it's something I still will literally go to the shelf and and open up if I'm feeling like I was saying, if I'm feeling stuck in some way or need some kind of help. Uh, it's still very much one that, you know, I don't think I've picked up the others in a long time. But I I will still take that off the shelf and and use it in some way and in lots of different ways. And I feel like I could read that again very happily. Well, I could read all of these again, actually, very happily, but um just just for pleasure as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:30

Well, I think you've made me feel like I should go back to it. I think I haven't read it since the 90s, so let it go. Um, thank you so much, Hester, and um thanks to everyone for tuning in. And you can find a list of all of the books we've described and talked about um in the description for this episode and on my website, and there'll be a bookshop.org page where anything that is in print you can go and have a look at and buy if you're excited by what you hear, and obviously you can buy Hester's book. Um so thanks very much, Hester. Um have been listening to the hypothetical bookshelf with me, Rebecca Lapinburg. Please do look out for future episodes published every two weeks with more fantastic guests wherever you get your podcasts.