Speaker 1: What makes a successful writer? Is it reviews, awards, sales,
Speaker 1: simple longevity. Back in the early two thousands, the Australian
Speaker 1: Council for the Arts put out a report on how
Speaker 1: many people in Australia make a living from the proceeds
Speaker 1: of the books they've written. Do you want to guess
Speaker 1: how many it was? I bet you can't. According to
Speaker 1: their best calculations, excluding people who supplemented their income with
Speaker 1: teaching or journalism, or public speaking or unrelated day jobs,
Speaker 1: the number was eight eight people who could make a
Speaker 1: living as writers in this country, and let's be honest,
Speaker 1: seven of them were probably Andi Griffiths. In the two
Speaker 1: decades or so since that picture might have changed a bit,
Speaker 1: but not much. It's perilously hard to make it as
Speaker 1: a writer in this country. And even if you do
Speaker 1: make it, what of it? All of which brings us
Speaker 1: to today's guest. A towering success story by any measure,
Speaker 1: he spent well over half a century publishing daring, exciting work.
Speaker 1: He's a seven time nominee and two time winner of
Speaker 1: the Miles Franklin Award. He's acclaimed around the world. He's
Speaker 1: had fourteen novels published, eleven collections of poems. The Washington
Speaker 1: Post said he's reminiscent of both James Joyce and Gabrielle Garcia, Marquz,
Speaker 1: David Mitchel, Zevan so Salmon Rushdie. But at eighty eight,
Speaker 1: almost none of Rodney Hall's books remain in print, and
Speaker 1: there's a reasonable chance that you've not heard of his name.
Speaker 1: When I sat down to talk with him, I expected
Speaker 1: he might be a bit disillusioned by the Australian publishing scene,
Speaker 1: reasonably a little bit frustrated by a kind of collective
Speaker 1: littery neglect. But for Rodney Hall, the idea that one's career,
Speaker 1: let alone one's life would follow some kind of clear
Speaker 1: narrative with a neat beginning, middle and end, is nothing
Speaker 1: more than a made up story.
Speaker 2: I've always had a suspicion of stories. I think the
Speaker 2: problem with stories is enchanting things that strip away all
Speaker 2: the natty realities and presume that our lives in any
Speaker 2: way are sensible successions of cause and effect. My life's
Speaker 2: being chaotic. If I try to find a story and
Speaker 2: it it always rings false.
Speaker 1: I'm Michael Williams, and this is read. This a show
Speaker 1: about the books we love and the suspicious stories behind them.
Speaker 1: If you can find a copy, I implore you to
Speaker 1: read Rodney Hall's memoir Papa I Never told you. It's gorgeous,
Speaker 1: beautifully written, but also quite a life. Rodney Hall arrived
Speaker 1: in Brisbane from England as a child following World War
Speaker 1: Two and was raised by his widowed mother. His childhood
Speaker 1: was marked by poverty, but for his eighth birthday he
Speaker 1: received a formative gift, a printing set from his great
Speaker 1: uncle Mont, who said, what I look for in a
Speaker 1: boy is ink stains, because writing is the most important
Speaker 1: thing of all. What a wonderful gift, and one that
Speaker 1: kicked off an obsession that would shape and define an
Speaker 1: entire life.
Speaker 2: Where to begin? When I was twenty two, I set
Speaker 2: out to walk in Europe. I left school in Brisbane
Speaker 2: at the age of sixteen. On my sixteenth birthday, I
Speaker 2: did my last exam for the junior public in Queensland.
Speaker 2: My mother couldn't afford for me not to be in work,
Speaker 2: so I was sixteen when I went out into the workforce,
Speaker 2: and it was with an incomplete education and no family
Speaker 2: money and no connections. Brisbane was a pretty rough and
Speaker 2: raw proposition, very fruitful in my view in the long term,
Speaker 2: but tough to live in and I wanted to get out.
Speaker 2: And I worked at these various low grade jobs. When
Speaker 2: I saved enough for the ship fare, and it was
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty four pounds anyway, I stayed in
Speaker 2: work till I got another one hundred and twenty four,
Speaker 2: stuck it in my sock, as it were, metaphorically, and
Speaker 2: set off on a ship to go to Europe to
Speaker 2: land in Genoa. For the next three years, I walked
Speaker 2: and did work where I could find it, and starved
Speaker 2: when I couldn't. And it was a life changing experience
Speaker 2: because I was there to find some sense in the
Speaker 2: muddle of my life and the fact that I seemed
Speaker 2: to have no openings to do anything, and the only
Speaker 2: things I wanted to do were all the arts of
Speaker 2: one sort or another. But on that journey, I was
Speaker 2: in Barcelona and I saw a billboard for a overnight
Speaker 2: boat to New Yorker, and I thought, Robert Graves lives
Speaker 2: in New York, and he's a great hero of mind,
Speaker 2: me now almost forgotten, author of I Claudius and Claudius
Speaker 2: to God and the Wonderful White Goddess, An amazing book.
Speaker 2: And it was like the equivalent of tenpence in English money,
Speaker 2: because we traveled with English money if you sat up
Speaker 2: on deck. So I thought that would be fun. So
Speaker 2: I was twenty two, so I did the overnight, got
Speaker 2: to Palma Mi Yorko. Found a little library called the
Speaker 2: English American Library. So I knocked on the door, as
Speaker 2: it were, and went in and explained to the lady
Speaker 2: behind the desk, and I wanted to visit Robert Graves
Speaker 2: and did she know how I go about doing that?
Speaker 2: And she said, I think he's a member, and she
Speaker 2: went through her card index owed the privacy business is business,
Speaker 2: just shot to pieces. She said, yes, here he is,
Speaker 2: and she got out of his address and wrote it
Speaker 2: out for him and gave it to me these innocent days.
Speaker 2: And to my surprise, it was on the margins of Palmer,
Speaker 2: there's little city. I expected he lived somewhere grander than that,
Speaker 2: and in fact that's what happened. I was somebody. One
Speaker 2: of the tenants at the address I was given guided
Speaker 2: me where to go to Deja, to the village, and
Speaker 2: I walked there and that was twenty five kilometers The
Speaker 2: following day and I got there around about four in
Speaker 2: the afternoon, and someone pointed out this beautiful bungalow on
Speaker 2: the top of the cliff overlooking the It's just magical place.
Speaker 2: So that yeah, this is Graves territory. So I rolled
Speaker 2: up to the door, knocked on the door, and his
Speaker 2: second or third wife, whichever it was, came to the door,
Speaker 2: and I said, I wonder if I could speak to
Speaker 2: mister Graves, and she said certainly not. And I said, well,
Speaker 2: could I at least have a glass of water? And
Speaker 2: she said, well, stay here, and she shut the door,
Speaker 2: came back a moment later and thrust the glass of
Speaker 2: water at me, and she said, you better hurry up
Speaker 2: if you want to catch the bus. I said, oh,
Speaker 2: is there a bus? And she then opened the door
Speaker 2: to see if I had a car, I suppose. She said,
Speaker 2: how did you get here? I said, I walked? Said
Speaker 2: you walked from Palmer and I nearly, because humor is
Speaker 2: never far away, I nearly said, no, I've walked from Genoa.
Speaker 1: I walked from Brisbane.
Speaker 2: From Brisbane, yes, I said, would be even better anyway,
Speaker 2: she said, well, at least I'll tell him you're here. Anyway.
Speaker 2: The upshot was he sat with me for two hours.
Speaker 2: It was the most fabulous conversation I'd ever had. And
Speaker 2: in the course of it he asked to see what
Speaker 2: poems I was writing. I'd written a lot by then,
Speaker 2: but I had had nothing published and very little encouragement. Anyway,
Speaker 2: when he got me to read them, because they're in
Speaker 2: my handwriting, and when he'd heard three or four, he said, oh, well,
Speaker 2: well that answers that the poems stand. You don't have
Speaker 2: to worry about that. He said, By the way, if
Speaker 2: you ever decided to write novels and you choose a
Speaker 2: historical setting, remember the two golden rules. Rule number one,
Speaker 2: write first, rule number two, research afterwards, because if you
Speaker 2: don't write first, you don't know what you need to know.
Speaker 2: If you don't research afterwards, nobody will believe you.
Speaker 1: That's magnificence, isn't a.
Speaker 2: One who what a great thing? And so I always
Speaker 2: write first?
Speaker 1: Can I ask, before you had that validation from a
Speaker 1: writer who you revered, do you remember what fueled you
Speaker 1: to keep writing poems, you know, without any kind of audience,
Speaker 1: without any response, or what was it inside you that
Speaker 1: made you know that that was just the thing that
Speaker 1: you were going to keep doing.
Speaker 2: I think a sense of a loss or a repudiation
Speaker 2: of who I was. I wanted to be a great
Speaker 2: deal taller and a lot better looking and given to
Speaker 2: simple enthusiasms that I could pitue with that without guilt.
Speaker 2: All the arts are always I always felt open to them.
Speaker 2: I mean, I do discover that I have a pretty
Speaker 2: good memory, and I've got I did a little book
Speaker 2: of memoirs tracing my adventures from the age of five
Speaker 2: to nine. Were all the things I could remember on
Speaker 2: the basis that if I could remember them, however trivial,
Speaker 2: they were important. And that's what happened with this, is
Speaker 2: that what I'm really doing in Vortex is recreating the
Speaker 2: Brisbane of my most anxious days because I went to
Speaker 2: a pretty rough, brutal school. It was my mother spent
Speaker 2: the money she got from selling her furniture in England
Speaker 2: in order to bring my sister and brother and I
Speaker 2: here and with her soul surviving relative in Australia, she
Speaker 2: paid for a year at a private school, and it
Speaker 2: was if you were a palm, it was brutal. All
Speaker 2: of it worked out for the best in a way,
Speaker 2: because the very fact that it was as awful as
Speaker 2: it was meant. I was determined to get away, which
Speaker 2: I did. Which I getting away in Europe shaped me.
Speaker 2: If you say, could I have made it as a stonemase,
Speaker 2: I reckon I could. But it was a much easier
Speaker 2: path to be writing novels.
Speaker 1: Rodney's latest book, Vortex, is a wild read. It's experimental, fragmentary,
Speaker 1: boldly itself. At eighty eight, he's clearly not done with
Speaker 1: redefining the form in ways that interest him. It's the
Speaker 1: story of a year nineteen fifty four, but not quite
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifty four of history. Fifty four was the
Speaker 1: year Queen Elizabeth first toward the Commonwealth, and the book
Speaker 1: follows the story of a fatherless boy in postwar Queensland
Speaker 1: as he sets out to become a man. In many ways,
Speaker 1: it's a love letter to the city of Brisbane, but
Speaker 1: it's not just one story. It's not just about one city.
Speaker 1: All of that just undersells this expansive, generous novel. It
Speaker 1: brings together scores of characters and historical events swirling together
Speaker 1: in a way that gives the book its name Vortex.
Speaker 1: His publisher calls it the most comprehensive achievement of a
Speaker 1: long neglected giant of contemporary literature and suspects that it
Speaker 1: may be his final work. And as someone who's enjoyed
Speaker 1: so much of what Rodney Hall has written, it's fascinating
Speaker 1: to say how all these earlier novels have led to
Speaker 1: this moment. Many of the chapters, many of the ideas
Speaker 1: and fragments of this book have been just stating for
Speaker 1: some time. They've popped up in other works and popped
Speaker 1: up in journals and things. And I'm curious about when
Speaker 1: you knew that there was a single story that you
Speaker 1: wanted to tell.
Speaker 2: Well, that's very interesting because I never planned works. I
Speaker 2: take what comes to me and see how long I
Speaker 2: can work with it. And it means that there are
Speaker 2: probably twenty five or thirty novels that have got anything
Speaker 2: between twenty pages and two hundred pages done before I
Speaker 2: realize there's nothing in it. And this book has. It's
Speaker 2: a curious circumstance. I wrote a book in nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: one called The Colony Club, which was set in Brisbane,
Speaker 2: where I had my teenage the only time I've ever
Speaker 2: written a book which I based characters on real people,
Speaker 2: and it got to me afterwards, I thought I can't
Speaker 2: do this. It's just it's not my right to do it. Anyway,
Speaker 2: fast forward something like thirty years and I get a
Speaker 2: phone call from an old acquaintance and he said, I've
Speaker 2: just been downsizing, moving into a flat, and I've come
Speaker 2: across an envelope of some papers of yours. And this
Speaker 2: is subsequent to me having my whole house of all
Speaker 2: my work go up in flames and I lost absolutely everything,
Speaker 2: including this failed book. Anyway, he said, I've cleaned out
Speaker 2: my library and I've found an envelope of some type
Speaker 2: pages of yours, and I wondered if you would like
Speaker 2: them back, send me a postal address. So I did,
Speaker 2: and that came the envelope and there were these four sketches,
Speaker 2: and there were five characters in four sketches from that
Speaker 2: early book. And I looked at them and I thought,
Speaker 2: at long last, I know what it is that I
Speaker 2: didn't find when I wrote this. I can work with this.
Speaker 2: This is the beginning of a new book. In the end,
Speaker 2: I cut one of the ninety seventy one passages out,
Speaker 2: but we knew what the date was from the postmark
Speaker 2: on the envelope, and so there are three passages in
Speaker 2: Vortex that are substantially, not exactly unchanged, but substantially the
Speaker 2: way I wrote back in the seventies.
Speaker 1: Part of what's so beautiful about vortex is that the
Speaker 1: voices of the past and the press and they imagine past,
Speaker 1: all intersect in ways that render the exercise of picking
Speaker 1: out an individual bit almost redundant. The point is that
Speaker 1: they talk to each other.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Michael's exactly what I hoped, and i've I
Speaker 2: was working with an idea in the abstract, as it were,
Speaker 2: that the spider's web is a better image for how
Speaker 2: life drops us into a multiplicity of conflicting forces, that
Speaker 2: we're not subject to a single strategic storyline, dynamic. And
Speaker 2: as I got these little fragments back in the mail,
Speaker 2: I thought, as long as I don't attempt to connect them,
Speaker 2: as long as I don't attempt to tinker with them,
Speaker 2: I can absorb them. They've sparked my interest in so
Speaker 2: I initial working title was the web.
Speaker 1: A vortex is more anxiety.
Speaker 2: Yes, thank you.
Speaker 1: I'm deeply moved by the singular tragedy that was the
Speaker 1: burning of your house, Given what that meant for your papers,
Speaker 1: what that meant for a life, gathered and carefully considered
Speaker 1: and thought about. It just seems to me to be
Speaker 1: a devastating loss. And I'm thrilled to hear the story
Speaker 1: of being sent the fragments that helped trigger this book.
Speaker 1: I'm just as an inflection point in a life. That
Speaker 1: fire must have been a terrible one to endure.
Speaker 2: Well it was, but you know, don't forget, as I
Speaker 2: have made public in my memoir, Papa never told you
Speaker 2: just about my earliest memory. I was five. We know
Speaker 2: exactly what it was in Gloucestershire in England, when the
Speaker 2: bombers came over Second World War to bomb the port
Speaker 2: in Bristol and Swansea where the British fleet was anchored.
Speaker 2: And when the waves of bombers had dropped their bomb,
Speaker 2: they'd turn round to return home. And at that stage
Speaker 2: they were vulnerable to the British Air Force fighters, which
Speaker 2: had speed but not altitude, so the bombers could fly
Speaker 2: higher than the fighters, so they dropped all the remaining
Speaker 2: bombs that they hadn't expended on targets to lose weight
Speaker 2: to gain height to escape back to Germany. And one
Speaker 2: of those bombs hit the house a friend of mine,
Speaker 2: right across the street from where I lived in a
Speaker 2: little country town, and getting up in the morning after
Speaker 2: the air raid the night before, which was beyond terror,
Speaker 2: and seeing that house gone. I think I've always expected
Speaker 2: that the house would be bombed, as it were. I'm
Speaker 2: more worried about my three daughters and what the world
Speaker 2: has turned into, in many cases, a very ugly place,
Speaker 2: and a place where tyrannical individuals wielding colossal amounts of
Speaker 2: centralized power, and the rich behavior appallingly and anti socially
Speaker 2: and destructively, and the twenty six or twenty seven wars
Speaker 2: that we of the West have fought to prevent Eastern
Speaker 2: countries making up their own minds about what system they
Speaker 2: want to live under. I mean, all this is terrifying stuff,
Speaker 2: and I can let go of it, but I do
Speaker 2: trouble it does trouble me with the next generation.
Speaker 1: After the break, Rodney reveals the eighteenth century philosopher that
Speaker 1: has shaped his writing career. We'll be right back. I
Speaker 1: want to come back again to your resistance to the
Speaker 1: consolations of story, and why the novel felt like the
Speaker 1: right art form for you, given that.
Speaker 2: How it came about. This developed idea is if I'm
Speaker 2: writing a novel. Who is reading the novel? Why are
Speaker 2: they reading? What are they reading for? And I came
Speaker 2: across an essay by C. S. Lewis called an Experiment
Speaker 2: in criticism, and the experiment of the title was he said,
Speaker 2: if the experience of a work of fiction that exists
Speaker 2: in the head of the reader as the reader is
Speaker 2: silently reading, we call that the book. The book is
Speaker 2: as it exists for one person, one person only at
Speaker 2: a time. The closer to fifty percent of that that
Speaker 2: is brought by the reader, the greater the book. And
Speaker 2: it struck me that I had to address the reader
Speaker 2: as a collaborator, that really I'm not giving them as
Speaker 2: something complete. They're collaborating in the process of finding something
Speaker 2: that will do for the moment. And the one philosopher
Speaker 2: that was speaking to me he was an eighteenth century
Speaker 2: Italian called gim Battista Vico. I only discovered later that
Speaker 2: Vico was much loved by James Joyce and a few
Speaker 2: other choice readers. But Vico spoke to me, and I
Speaker 2: most of my books, most of my novels, have taken
Speaker 2: an idea from this philosopher and used that as the
Speaker 2: basic structure of the book, and one of his ideas
Speaker 2: was against the way history was taught in seventeen twenty eight,
Speaker 2: when he was writing his great book The New Science,
Speaker 2: that he says, it's truer to our experience of living
Speaker 2: history if we think of time forms like you do
Speaker 2: with a slice of sausage. You get all of the
Speaker 2: ingredients in the sise, but you're only dealing with the
Speaker 2: sis as under a microscope and vortex. Is that it
Speaker 2: says most of the public events that are in the
Speaker 2: book did happen in nineteen fifty four, but they're all
Speaker 2: upside down and jumbled about in order to show what
Speaker 2: they mean, and puts it to the reader read freely.
Speaker 2: In fact, when I first completed the project, I said
Speaker 2: to Jordie Williamson, my wonderful publisher, I want to explore
Speaker 2: that idea and time form, and I might write a
Speaker 2: book called one hundred and one chapters to be read
Speaker 2: in any order. And he very politely said, oh, that's interesting,
Speaker 2: And I got a message in a subsequent conversation. Do
Speaker 2: you think that's asking too much? He said, I do.
Speaker 2: I think it'll put readers off. So I've taken the
Speaker 2: year ninety fifty four, as if all the events of
Speaker 2: ninety fifty four have happened simultaneously, as it were, And
Speaker 2: that involved devising a structure in which there are always
Speaker 2: threads that you're picking up from what you've just read.
Speaker 2: So the idea of threading and becoming is really what
Speaker 2: I was hoping to use in order to attract the
Speaker 2: reader to what we were doing together.
Speaker 1: It's such an exhilarating level of play when you're reading it.
Speaker 1: When you play in fiction like this, do you feel
Speaker 1: a responsibility to the events of nineteen fifty four, the
Speaker 1: people in nineteen fifty four, or do you feel liberated
Speaker 1: from that because you're writing fiction that you're outside.
Speaker 2: Oh no, I feel totally responsible to it. And it's
Speaker 2: the guiding principle behind the idea of decentralizing everything and
Speaker 2: tearing it with freight edges loose from each other, so
Speaker 2: that we've got fragments, because I think that's all we
Speaker 2: live anyway. We tend to bind the fragments together and
Speaker 2: cobble them together as best we can, but they are fragments,
Speaker 2: and the holder you get, they pass more swiftly and
Speaker 2: more tantaloe, more terrifyingly than they ever did. But again,
Speaker 2: you know, our armament against all that is is our
Speaker 2: collaborations with each other. You know, I am a socialist.
Speaker 2: I think we are a collective, and we do things
Speaker 2: as a collective, and we're going to see the best
Speaker 2: and deepest part of ourselves when we operate as a collective.
Speaker 2: I want to see that in the way we are.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm writing nominally in nineteen fifty four, but
Speaker 2: I'm also of course writing in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you mentioned your excellent publisher, Jordie Williamson,
Speaker 1: and in the advance reading copy of the book, he
Speaker 1: has a lovely letter introducing the book to readers. But
Speaker 1: in that he refers to you as a long neglected
Speaker 1: giant of contemporary literature. And I have to say that
Speaker 1: that phrase did correspond with my own impression. You know,
Speaker 1: you have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin seven times,
Speaker 1: and one or twice you were chair of the Literature
Speaker 1: Board of the Australian Council. You are one of the
Speaker 1: most consequential novelists, and yet you are sometimes I think
Speaker 1: underestimated or overlooked. Your books aren't all in print at
Speaker 1: the moment, for example.
Speaker 2: Now almost nothing in print.
Speaker 1: That seems like a very sad state of affairs and
Speaker 1: an indictment of Australian publishing to me. And I'm curious
Speaker 1: about whether that's something that wounds you or disappoints.
Speaker 2: You or no. No, no, no, the public if in
Speaker 2: this hypothetical sense, the public knows what it wants. I
Speaker 2: haven't at any stage in my working life've been what
Speaker 2: the public wants. People don't want it. They want personal confessions,
Speaker 2: personal stories. I'm not interested in it. I'm interested in
Speaker 2: them as an imagination. I'm interested in the reader coming
Speaker 2: along for I hope is an exhilarating ride. No, I
Speaker 2: mean I winced at the idea have a sort of
Speaker 2: comic vision of me as some kind of lumbering giant
Speaker 2: fifi fo from.
Speaker 1: You said you wanted to be taller.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I did say that. Anyway, it's I've always accepted
Speaker 2: that I didn't fit. I wanted to fit around her.
Speaker 2: At the time that I did the three year walk
Speaker 2: in Europe, I thought I'd never come back to Australia.
Speaker 2: And then the first time the opportunity arose when my
Speaker 2: camera was the only valuable thing I had, was stolen,
Speaker 2: and I claimed the insurance. The insurance just paid me
Speaker 2: to come back, and I came like a shot. And
Speaker 2: I've never regretted it, but I haven't felt that I
Speaker 2: have earned a place in a way. So I don't mind.
Speaker 2: I would only mind if the books weren't published, and
Speaker 2: then I would mind very greatly.
Speaker 1: In the event that a young writer walks the twenty
Speaker 1: five kilometers out of my yorka and finds a cabin
Speaker 1: on a hill and knocks on the door, and the
Speaker 1: door opens, and Rodney Hall answers the door, and you know,
Speaker 1: Rodney Hall in his late eighties, lets in that young
Speaker 1: writer and sits down and listens to their palms and
Speaker 1: talks to them for a couple of hours. What bit
Speaker 1: of advice do you give that young writer?
Speaker 2: Read what speaks to you. I mean, some of the
Speaker 2: best and and or ugly things in ourselves are things
Speaker 2: we deny and thy pass and we tend to as
Speaker 2: it will make a virtue of reading to the end
Speaker 2: of every book we pick up when what we really
Speaker 2: are gettest signal we're really getting is put it down.
Speaker 2: You know that wonderful piece of advice. Franz Kafka gives
Speaker 2: us that every new novel should be an axe for
Speaker 2: smashing the ice around our hearts. I think, goodness me
Speaker 2: if I've ever provided any readers with an axe to
Speaker 2: crack the ice around their heart, and I've done my job.
Speaker 1: Rodney Hall, You've done your job. Thank you, Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Michael.
Speaker 1: Rodney Hall's latest book, Vortex, is out now. Look for
Speaker 1: all his other books in your local library or second
Speaker 1: hand bookshop. And before we go, I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know what I mean reading this week. I love
Speaker 1: the British author Kate Atkinson. Her novel Life After Life
Speaker 1: a few years ago was an absolute sensation. But I
Speaker 1: am a particular fan of her unusual crime series starring
Speaker 1: private investigator Jackson Brodie. That most of them set in
Speaker 1: or around Yorkshire, and the series started with case histories.
Speaker 1: A couple of weeks ago, the sixth mystery landed and
Speaker 1: it's called Death at the Sign of the Rook and
Speaker 1: it's a whole lot of fun. A country house of
Speaker 1: vicar A Horpes, all the elements of a classic murder mystery,
Speaker 1: delivered as only Kate Atkinson can do it. You can
Speaker 1: find it and all the other books we mentioned at
Speaker 1: your favorite independent bookshop. That's it for this week's show.
Speaker 1: If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends rate and
Speaker 1: review next week. I read This I sit down with
Speaker 1: Irish writer Kielin Hughes to discuss her latest book, The
Speaker 1: Alternatives and Kill, and shares the near death experience she
Speaker 1: had during its creation.
Speaker 3: Well, it definitely passed the is this the book you
Speaker 3: should be writing if we were you to be hit
Speaker 3: by a boss? You know test, which is genuinely the
Speaker 3: thing I always ask myself when I'm writing a book,
Speaker 3: Is this the book that were you to be hit by?
Speaker 3: I usually say a boss, insert a truck, that you
Speaker 3: would need to be writing, that you'd be glad to
Speaker 3: have been writing. And it turns out that you simultaneously glad,
Speaker 3: but also in the moment of being hit and just
Speaker 3: before being hit, are absolutely tortured by it because it's like,
Speaker 3: finally I am writing the book that I must write,
Speaker 3: and I am not going to get to finish this.
Speaker 3: That was my thought.
Speaker 1: Read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames. The
Speaker 1: show is mixed by Travis Evans and has original compositions
Speaker 1: by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week,