Tag Archives: Beside Myself

A book club with a difference

December 5, 2017 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

A few weeks ago, I had an exciting invitation. Audible, the UK’s largest providers of digital audiobooks, were launching a Listening Club. Once a month they would select one title to invite readers to discuss. They had decided to launch the club with the audio version of my debut novel Beside Myself, narrated by the wonderful Lisa Coleman. Would I be available to come to their London studio to take part in a recorded discussion with a small group of listeners to help get the conversation started?

The studios were in one of a number of glamorously converted warehouses near the Barbican. Brightly decorated, with bird-print wallpaper on the kitchen ceiling and large breakout spaces containing foosball and table-tennis tables, they were a world away from the tiny cluster of little black booths where I recorded the audiobook of  The World Between Two Covers in 2015.

They also contained the most beautiful piece of book-related art I have ever seen: Storylines, a huge reworking of the London Underground map, with book titles replacing station names. I was amused to find that the novels populating the area of north London in which I grew up seemed particularly dark, and included The Exorcist and Psycho.

The experience of talking about your work with readers can be mixed. Although it’s always nice to hear that people have engaged with your work, you often find yourself answering the same questions over and over again. When it comes to Beside Myself, a psychological drama about twins who get trapped in the wrong lives, I rarely get through a conversation without having to explain that I’m not a twin and that I have never been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, unlike the main character of the novel.

This discussion was entirely different. Attended by three listeners, among them my friend, writer Rosie Fiore, who had received an invitation entirely by chance, and chaired by Audible editorial assistant Holly Newson, it explored many of the novel’s themes in great depth: nature versus nurture, the role of education and whether personality consists of what we are or of what others project onto us.

I particularly enjoyed talking about what the audio form can add to a novel, as my experience has been that narrator Lisa Coleman brought a huge amount of interpretative richness to the text. Indeed, as I explained in the discussion, it was her idea to make some of the voices in the central character’s head those of people in the novel – an extra layer that had not occurred to me.

The first Listening Club question went up on the Audible UK Facebook page yesterday and the recording of the discussion will be released soon. Watch this space!

Being translated

September 3, 2017 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 16 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

Having spent the past five years thinking a lot about translation and how important it is, I’ve been delighted to have a chance to observe the process from a different angle over the past twelve months. My novel Beside Myself has received book deals in around nine language territories, which means that I have had the privilege of seeing my writing translated into other tongues.

This has been a strange experience. As I don’t speak Thai, Polish, Chinese or Italian (some of the languages in which my work now exists), I have no way of knowing how the respective translators have rendered my story. I have had to trust them and my publishers to produce a fair representation of my original work, one that I hope will convey the kernel and spirit of the narrative to readers in their respective language markets.

From my own research and experience with reading translations, I am aware that this might involve a degree of alteration or the inclusion of extra bits of explanation in order to convey concepts that may not be familiar to people in other parts of the world.

As such, the process has brought home to me once more the generosity and fragility of translation – that it is essentially an exercise that relies on strangers reading your work with sympathetic and discerning eyes.

However, although I can’t read the foreign-language versions of my novel (apart from the French – of which more soon!), I have been able to consider the different book jackets and titles that publishers have chosen to give my work. This has been an education in the way that different book markets operate and so I am sharing a selection below. Above, from left to right, are the UK hardback, UK paperback, US hardback and US paperback covers for comparison.

(For those who don’t know, the novel centres around a pair of identical twins who swap places in a game and then get trapped in the wrong lives when one of them refuses to change back.)

 

Vida robada

This is the cover of the Spanish edition. I like the sepia feel of the picture, which harks back to my central characters’ childhoods in the 1980s.

The literal translation of the title is ‘Stolen life’. This is interesting as it makes a more definitive statement about who is to blame for what happens in the novel than the original title. Spanish readers will have the sense that someone has done something wrong before they even begin the first page.

 

 

Moja siostra …czy ja?

The Polish cover is intriguing. We’re in thriller territory here. The mirror gets across the idea of twinship and doubleness. However there is a much darker feel to everything, as though the beautiful woman in the reflection is about to come to serious harm.

The title (‘My sister… or me?’) is much more direct than the English or Spanish versions. In Poland, readers know that this is a story about choosing between sisters as soon as they glimpse the spine of the book.

 

 

Beside Myself

The Taiwanese edition seems like a halfway house between the two previous versions. We have the slightly retro-feeling little girls, but the fragmenting of the picture lends a dark feel as though everything is about to fall apart.

The Taiwanese publisher has kept the English title on the cover (apparently this is common practice in this part of the world), but I’m not sure whether the Chinese characters are a literal translation of it or a different title – can anyone help me out?

 

 

The Person Who Stole My Name 

The Chinese cover is the most unusual of the ones I have seen. In fact, when I was first sent it, I was so intrigued that I asked my agent to find out what the thinking behind it was (in case you were wondering, there aren’t any flamingos in the novel).

The answer came back that the separation of the species – the little girl and the birds – was intended to indicate loneliness. This is a central theme in the novel, so that makes sense to me.

As with the Spanish title, Chinese readers of ‘The person who stole my name’ will have the sense that a wrong has been done to someone before they turn to the first page.

 

À sa place

The French cover also prompted a question, as to my British eyes it seemed to have slightly erotic overtones (again, not a strong feature of the book). My French editor, however, assures me that this is not the case in the French market.

I really like the ambiguity of the title (‘In her place’), which leaves open the question of which twin’s identity is under threat.

As I can read French (very slowly and with a big dictionary), I will be able to see how the story has been carried over into this new language. I’m planning to get stuck in as soon as I finish editing my next novel.

I’ll let you know how I get on…

Twin audiobook giveaway results

February 16, 2016 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

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Many thanks to those who took the time to tell me about their favourite twin novels. As always happens when I ask readers for advice, there were some thought-provoking suggestions.

Familiar English-language titles, such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, featured alongside several other world classics. I was particularly grateful to Barbara for recommending Erich Kästner’s Das doppelte Lottchen. I watched the 1961 The Parent Trap recently, but hadn’t appreciated that it was an adaptation of this German novel.

I was also pleased to see that Dutch novelist Tessa de Loo’s The Twins appeared among the tips. I came across it some years ago and can agree with Betsy that it is a very worthwhile read.

Several of the titles you suggested were unfamiliar to me. I was particularly intrigued by Hungarian author Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook, which Sabina brought to my attention. From what I’ve read about it online, it sounds like a fabulous book – even if, as Gremrien warned, it is rather dark.

In the end, though, I could only pick two winners to receive an audiobook of my own twin novel, Beside Myself. After much deliberation, I plumped for two commenters who had not only suggested tempting titles that were new to me, but had also described them in intriguing ways that have already sent me scampering off to track them down. They are Lizsmithtrailingspouse, for her suggestion of Italian classic The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and Gremrien, who suggested Anatoly Pristavkin’s The Inseparable Twins.

Congratulations to them and very many thanks to everyone else. Winners, I’ll be in touch.

What’s your favourite NYC bookstore?

December 5, 2015 By in Events, Post-world, The World Between Two Covers (book) Tags: , , , , , , , 23 Comments

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I’ll be back in one of my favourite places in late January: New York. The trip is partly for a holiday, but I’ll also be celebrating the US publication of my debut novel, Beside Myself.

I already have a reading lined up at wonderful WORD in Brooklyn, where I did an event in May when The World Between Two Covers came out (you can see me outside the store in the picture above). But I’m keen to visit some other bookstores around the city too – whether for readings and events or simply to browse.

Over the many trips I’ve made to New York since I was 18 (when I first visited and fell in love with the city), I’ve got to know quite a few of its bookstores. I have a fond memory of taking over the world literature section in McNally Jackson one afternoon back in January 2012, at the start of my year of reading the world. Under the eyes of the bewildered sales assistants, I pulled heaps of titles off the shelves in an effort to identify works that might be suitable for my quest.

It was really quite funny, looking back. While most people were out sales shopping and trying to bag the hottest ticket in town, there I was, panic-buying books!

The trip proved worthwhile. Several of the titles I found that day ended up being my choices for the project, including Germano Almeida’s witty The Last Will and Testament of Senhor Da Silva Araújo for Cape Verde, and Nuruddin Farah’s engrossing Secrets for Somalia.

No doubt I’ll pay another, less disruptive, visit to MJ while I’m in town (I can still remember the thrill of popping in last spring and seeing The World Between Two Covers displayed on one of its tables).

But one thing I love about New York is the way new things are happening all the time and there’s always more to discover. So I thought I’d asked your advice about what stores and initiatives should be on my radar.

New start-ups or old faithfuls would be equally intriguing. As ever, I’m particularly interested in places that have a good selection of translated works. But I’m keen to hear about anywhere you think is great. And if there are other book-related places (cafes, libraries, community projects, festivals – you name it) that you’d like me to know about or that you think might be interested in hosting an eccentric British wordsmith for an hour or two, tell me about them below.

Ooh, this is going to be fun!

Picture by Steve Lennon

My next book

March 16, 2015 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 99 Comments

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As those of you who have followed this project for a while know, I was a writer long before I was a blogger. For the last seven years I have paid my bills by writing and subediting on a freelance basis for a variety of publications and organisations. In fact, for the first seven months or so of my Year of Reading the World, I was working five days a week at the Guardian newspaper in London and juggling shifts and commissions for several other clients. It made fitting in roughly six to eight hours of reading, blogging and researching a day quite a challenge!

What you may not know is that I was also a writer long before anyone paid me to do it. I made my first attempt at a novel when I was seven (a fantasy story set in an old castle with a bookcase that revealed a hidden world – it owed a lot to The Chronicles of Narnia) and throughout my childhood and teenage years I filled notebooks with scraps of stories and splinters of poems and half-formed things.

When I graduated from my creative writing master’s course and had to face the reality of earning my keep, I made a deal with myself: wherever I was working and whatever I was doing, I would always get up early and spend an hour or so on my own writing before I left to go and work for someone else.

For the next few years, through a series of varied and sometimes rather strange jobs (administrator, campaigns officer for a charity, invigilator for school exams, assessor of doctors’ surgeries, freelance choral singer, professional mourner – don’t ask), I stuck to my bargain. Give or take the odd duvet day, I got up at around 6am, sat at my desk and wrote.

I produced a lot of nonsense. Still, when I became a professional writer, I carried on with my regime. Before commuting into London to edit articles on planning applications for Building Design or write about the latest opportunities for international students for the British Council, I would spend an hour or so on my own (usually not very promising) projects.

Then, about four or five years ago, a glimmer of an idea came to me. I found myself gripped by the thought of a pair of identical twins swapping places in a childhood game and then one of them refusing to swap back.

It was the merest flicker of a concept, but it wouldn’t let me go. Over the months and years that followed, my mind returned to it again and again, full of questions. What would cause one child to refuse to swap back? What might it do to someone to grow up with the wrong life? What kind of family wouldn’t notice the change?

A few times, I was on the point of sitting down to start writing the story, but something always held me back. Somehow, it wasn’t ready for me (or perhaps I wasn’t ready for it).

Then A Year of Reading the World came along and for the first time in my adult life, I gave my precious early-morning writing slots over to something else, and filled them with reading and blogging.

What with everything that happened with the project and the book deal, it wasn’t until March 2013 that I got back into the swing of the old writing pattern. Having submitted my first draft of Reading the World to Harvill Secker, I found I had brainspace to focus on other things.

That was when the twins came and tugged at my sleeve once more. And this time I felt ready to take them on.

Over the 18 months that followed, in between long stints re-writing and editing Reading the World, I wrote my twins manuscript. Perhaps it was because I was in the rhythm of writing from the blogging and non-fiction book, but I found the story came to me easily and I wrote with excitement to find out what would happen next.

In autumn 2014, after several drafts, I gave the manuscript to my other half, Steve, and to my novelist friend, Emily Bullock, to read. I worked their feedback into my draft and shared it with a few more people. And then, when my lovely agent Caroline returned from maternity leave towards the end of the year, I sent it to her.

I envisaged that there would be a long process of re-writing and polishing, but when Caroline had finished reading the manuscript she told me she was very excited and that – with a little bit of tweaking – she thought it was ready to sell.

I spent about a week working on Caroline’s edits. Then, on the day that Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer was published in the UK, Caroline sent my novel, Beside Myself, out to editors.

We soon heard that several publishers were interested. I met with them and, after a few weeks of negotiation, I’m delighted to announce that Beside Myself  has been bought by Bloomsbury and will be published worldwide in English by them next year. It means my book will be produced by the same team looking after the works of writers such as Margaret Atwood, Khaled Hosseini, Donna Tartt, William Boyd and JK Rowling.

My seven-year-old self wouldn’t have known about Harry Potter when she was scribbling my first novel back in the late 1980s, but I think she would have approved.