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For my readers abroad, I’m happy to share this update of plans by my wonderful publishers for translations of Once Upon a River.  In alphabetical order, my new book is currently scheduled for publication in the following languages:

Catalan
Rosa del Vents
mid-Feb 2019


Chinese
Shanghai 99
2020


Czech
Albatros
Between Nov 2019 and March 2020


Dutch
Orlando
unknown


French
Les Escales
2019


German
Blessing
unknown


Italian
Mondadori
Nov 2019


Norwegian
Gyldendal
2019


Russian
Atticus
unknown


Romanian
Humanitas
2019


Spanish
Lumen
mid-Feb 2019

 

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Readers of my Facebook page will already know that there is a TV series of Once Upon a River in the pipeline.  Made by Kudos, the brilliant team that created Broadchurch, Spooks and Grantchester, it can’t help but be wonderful!  I know how keen you all are to know who is going to star in it, and when you’ll be able to watch it, but it’s far too soon!  You’ll have time to read Once Upon a River several times before the televised version comes to your screen…  but given the talent of the people working on it, I know it’ll be worth the wait.

If you’re feeling impatient, there’s always the DVD of The Thirteenth Tale (Heyday Productions, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Olivia Colman and Sophie Turner) to while away the wait.   Check the format though – if you’re outside the UK it may not work with your player.

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Book Giveaway For Once Upon a River

Find out more and enter the giveaway via this url http://bit.ly/2ABSFSY

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Book Giveaway For Once Upon a River

Find out more and enter the giveaway via this url http://bit.ly/2tNwKSY

The post For US readers: Book giveaway offer! appeared first on Diane Setterfield.

Diane Setterfield’s new mystery, Once Upon a River, will be available in the US on 1st January 2019 and in the UK on 24th January 2019.

At the time of writing the book is also set to be published in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Norway, Romania (all 2019) and China (Spring 2020).  Further details will be posted as they come!

—

A dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the Thames.

The regulars are entertaining themselves by telling stories when the door bursts open on an injured stranger.

In his arms is the drowned corpse of a little child.

Hours later the dead girl stirs.

Is it a miracle?

Is it magic?

Or can it be explained by science?

Replete with folklore, suspense and romance, as well as with the urgent scientific curiosity of the Darwinian age, Once Upon a River is as richly atmospheric as Setterfield’s bestseller The Thirteenth Tale.

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I���ve been rereading Lion Woman, a marvellous novel by my favourite Norwegian novelist Erik Fosnes Hansen.�� It���s not available in English as yet so I read it in French, but if you can read any Scandinavian or European languages you have an excellent chance of getting hold of it, and if not you���ll have to do with one of EFH���s novels that are translated into English: Psalm at Journey���s End and Tales of Protection ��� both are brilliant.�� Anyway, while my French copy was hanging around my flat, in a moment of idle curiosity I did a thing I rarely do: I took the jacket off to see what was underneath.

Here is the book dressed:

and undressed:

French literary publishers have a long tradition of presenting their books to the public in what to British and American readers seem to be rather boring covers.�� The uniform and unillustrated jacket style came about for a reason: historically publishers could assume that readers were an educated lot who read the literary press, kept up to date with what was going on in the world of letters, and were therefore so knowledgeable about authors and books that they didn���t need the cover to inform or persuade them. They already knew what they wanted. ��That���s how the thinking went.

For some readers I suspect the sobriety of the jackets worked as a form of flattery: the unadorned covers were testament to their seriousness and intelligence.�� (There is a form of intellectual snobbery that looks down on colour and image.)

But time went on.�� We entered a more visual age.�� Reading had to compete with new forms of entertainment.�� Markets became more competitive.�� The traditional publishers were loath to abandon the sober style that had become a recognisable part of their identity among their long-term loyal readers, but knew they had to reach into a new market too.�� Hence the new style: an illustrated and often very colourful outer jacket (sometimes just a band) and underneath it the ���old style��� plain and lettered cover.

When I was a student and then an academic I used to shelve my French books separately from my English ones.�� My French shelves with their serried ranks of black, charcoal and cream spines looked smart, formal and verged on the stiff. ��They would have looked very fine in the home of a chic minimalist.�� My English shelves on the other hand were full of colour, all jumbled together.

In the interior design magazines that are the guilty secret of my reading life, I often notice photos which feature graceful ivory tomes left lying on side tables beside vases of flowers.�� I squint and peer until I can figure out the ��� usually French ��� title.�� This, in the homes of people who are most unlikely to be French readers!�� The books are not there to be read, but are stylists��� props, used for their elegant, ���goes with everything��� aesthetic.�� Old rectories and parsonages with their Country House look go the other way: English books, all in different colours that don���t necessarily go, but that en masse produce an effect of relaxed warmth that is an essential part of the charm.

I love both styles.�� The colourful images on books produced for the English speaking market have a more immediate attraction but I am very drawn to the elegant sobriety of the old fashioned French literary volumes.�� The typography is endlessly fascinating in itself: when illustration is absent and colour is kept to a minimum, the delicacy of a serif, the weight of a ball terminal are seen to have a grace that is truly beautiful.�� I have a geeky side that means I can gaze at a lovey ampersand for sixty minutes on end and not get bored.

Here���s a true classic (Penguin, 1949) where monochrome and lettering come decoratively together:

I started to wonder: do we in the English speaking world do truly plain books?�� My first thought was of the Everyman hardbacks.�� In recent years you can see a parallel development there to what has happened in the French market.�� Here is an older Everyman Dickens:

and here is a new one:

Undressed, they both look the same:

And then there is the brilliant, delightful and utterly-fantastic-in-every-way Persephone Press.�� Look at this pared down and oh-so-French-looking tome:

Inside, by contrast, it has these totally bonkers and very English endpapers:

Every book also comes with its matching bookmark ��� how about that for genius?

(By the way, in case you don���t know them, Persephone books are as glorious to read as they are to look at.�� You can find out all about them here: www.persephonebooks.co.uk)

The final thing I found on my bookshelf that I would call plain English, are the twin Penguin hardbacks that I couldn���t resist last year when I was supposed to be on a book buying go-slow:

Sans serif typeface, black and grey cloth cover ��� oh, what could be finer?

We live in a competitive world where books have to fight for our attention in the bookshop windows, and every author wants their book to be the one that stands out on the shop floor – but my bookloving heart says: long live the plain cover!

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This ordinary looking building is a library.  It is also a treasure trove.

Theale Library, in the village where I did much of my growing up, is set to close due to austerity budgeting.  This will be a great loss to the village.  Not only does the library provide reading, it is also a place to meet, to talk, to connect.  It is an invaluable resource and the village and its readers and other residents will be the poorer without it.

On Wednesday 23rd March (tomorrow, as I write this), supporters of the library will gather to protest against the closure.  The event is from 4.30 to 6.30.  I will be there, and if you live nearby, please try to come by.  It will be greatly appreciated.

The sad news about Theale Library got me thinking about all the library books I have read over the years and I remembered this piece I once wrote for another purpose.  Its original purpose was to illustrate the workings of memory and the cross-pollination that takes place between books, but it works equally, I think, as an instance of the value of libraries for childhood reading and the way such reading can bear fruit many years later.

Writing The Thirteenth Tale, there was one particular scene that I wrote and rewrote many times.  In it my two main characters – Margaret Lea and Miss Vida Winter – meet for the first time, and the reason it was tricky was because there had to be a very fine balance between the giving and the withholding of information.  After a lot of hard work it was almost there but it still needed something else.  It needed a little bit of magic.

For months that bit of magic eluded me.  There was something specific that would make the scene work, and I knew that in some far-flung realm of my mind the answer already existed.  In bed, on the border of sleep, my brain sent out search signals and I could sense something answering feebly, but it wasn’t enough to give me a compass bearing.  I had no map.  No X marking the spot.

The answer took time to come to me, and when it did it was perfect: the magic of 3!  All those folktales and fairytales with three questions, three wishes…   I had got it!  I went back to my pages and inserted a few words here, a few words there.  The scene opened up to make space just where I wanted it to and absorbed my additions quite if it had been expecting them:

Some time after The Thirteenth Tale was published I found myself reminiscing with a friend about childhood reading.

‘There was a book I used to borrow from the library.  How I adored it!’ I told her.  ‘It was about a lonely girl by the sea who found a magical sort of friend.  I wish I could reread it.’

Soon afterwards my friend gave me this:

When Marnie Was There, by Joan G Robinson had been reissued by Collins in their Modern Classics series.  (Thank you Collins!)

I settled down to read with that rare sense of doubleness that comes when you reread a book after many years and still find it enthralling.  My adult hand turned the pages, my adult mind reacquainted itself with a world it had all but forgotten, and all the while I felt the presence of a ten-year old self, reading over my shoulder, across the decades – and she knew the story better than I did.

I had got to the part where lonely Anna has met the mysterious Marnie.  There is something unexplained about Marnie.  The two girls need to get to know each other, but not too well, not yet.  Certain things must remain unknown.  I turned a page to Chapter 11.  It was entitled Three Questions Each and the moment I set eyes on those words a thrill ran down my spine.  What was it?  I did not know, but my shadow reader was anticipating something.  I hurried on, and then there it was:

Two characters, newly met, must tell each other something about themselves.  It must be the right amount of information, neither too much, nor too little.  It is a ghost story, so there must be magic in it.  Joan G Robinson wrote it first.  I read it, forgot about it and twenty-two years later wrote it again (from what Miss Winter would call the compost of memory).

In my work I am constantly delighted by the incessant whispering that goes on between what I am writing and what I have read.  The years fall away, an old story brushes against a new one and leaves a trace of itself.  It is magic: of reading, of writing, of memory.

It is also the magic of libraries.  When Marnie Was There was a library book and I must have borrowed it countless times.  Almost all my childhood reading came from the library.  Amongst the children using Theale Library and so many others that are under threat or have already disappeared, there must be a number who have it in them to become the storytellers of the future.  Their reading imaginations need to be fed.  Libraries are there to do it.  What will happen to story telling when the libraries disappear?

If you cannot come to Theale Library at 4.30 tomorrow, Wednesday 23rd March – or even if you can! – please help protect local libraries everywhere in the UK by signing this petition:

http://www.cilip.org.uk/advocacy-campaigns-awards/advocacy-campaigns/my-library-right

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Readers have been asking me about a Facebook page for years, and I’m sorry to have been so slow about it.  I kept putting it off because I was reading.  Then one day recently I got to the end of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (all 1700 pages of it) and when I woke up the next morning the most extraordinary thing happened: I just didn’t feel like reading.  So at long last, I made a Facebook page.  It turns out to be a nice way of sharing my thoughts about reading and writing with people who like books as much as I do.

The best bit of putting the page together was selecting the cover photo, and this is it:

It’s a shelf in my bookcase. My favourite shelf. What is it that makes me love this collection of books so much?

The whole collection fits the shelf to perfection: no empty spaces and no volumes left over.  I am fond of neatness.
The glory of the colours!  If I didn’t have a novel to write I could while away hours reorganising them in different combinations…
For any lover of typefaces and fonts, the books look brilliant from the front too:
And look!  The edges are coloured too!
They were a gift from my Canadian publisher so they remind me of happy times in Toronto with Lynn, Martha and Ruta and the whole team at Penguin Random House.

These are beautiful books to look at and to hold.  But that would mean little if what is inside didn’t match up.  This collection came about when the booklovers at Random House Canada decided to bring out new editions of their favourite novels and story collections in brand new jackets.  As soon as I saw the list of titles I knew it would be special.  About a third were books I had already read – and loved.  (Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is there; it’s the regal purple volume, far left.)  Another third were on my radar and I was planning to get round to them one day.  (David Mitchell, Black Swan Green and Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey; peacock green and saffron yellow respectively.)  Alongside these familiar names and titles were a number of new names, new voices.  Over the months and years that I have been exploring them, I have come to realise that there is not a single disappointing book in the collection.  So finally, this is my favourite shelf because:

Every book on it is a good one.

That’s why I photographed it for my Facebook page.  You are cordially invited to come and visit me there.  You’ll find it at:  https://www.facebook.com/dianesetterfieldauthor/

But if you are too busy reading, I quite understand.

 

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I now have an author page at www.facebook.com/dianesetterfieldauthor

All readers welcome!

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