Books
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‘I’M INTERESTED IN WHAT WE NEVER KNOW ABOUT ANOTHER PERSON’ Hitlist THE BEST BOOKS, COMICS & EVENTS*
✽✽ Jackie Kay and Aidan Moffat The Carry a Poem campaign continues apace with this event featuring author and poet Jackie Kay and Aidan Moffat (pictured), the ex-Arab Strap leader sometimes known as Lucky Pierre. Sparks could well fly. Central Library, Edinburgh, Thu 25 Feb. ✽✽ Alistair Findlay The world of social workers and poverty is tackled in Dancing with Big Eunice, Findlay’s latest poetry collection. The Canons’ Gait, Edinburgh, Fri 26 Feb. ✽✽ Kind of Larkin More Carry a Poem gear with excerpts from Philip Larkin’s jazz poetry, accompanied by some appropriately jazzy live music. Central Library, Edinburgh, Fri 26 Feb. ✽✽ Carol Ann Duffy Our very own Poet Laureate talks and reads from a bunch of her own lyrical works. Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Mon 1 Mar. ✽✽ The Book That Changed My Life In this Scottish Book Trust event, scribes AL Kennedy and Sara Sheridan chat about the tomes that had a big impact on them. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Thu 4 Mar. ✽✽ Amy Sackville See preview, left. Portobello. ✽✽ Delphine de Vigan The moving tale in No and Me of a young French girl befriending a homeless woman while dealing with her own personal demons has done big business in central Europe and deserves to do the same here. See review, page 35. Bloomsbury. ✽✽ New British Comics 2 This second volume features strong Scottish voices while there’s even works from some Poles and South Africans. See review, page 35. www.polygobooks.com.
Turning point
Writing as though she was around in regency England, Amy Sackville tells Claire Sawers about her adventurous Boy’s Own debut novel
Amarried couple is asleep in bed. Back to back, knees bending, and feet touching, ‘they form the uneven outline of an urn’. Bizarrely, they are both dreaming of the same freezing cold place, but it means two very different things to them. To Simon, the Arctic is a frustrating place. Largely unmapped and unknown, it raises more questions than it answers, which is hard for his detail-loving, precision-craving head to get around. Next to him, Julia also dreams of the Arctic, but finds the idea of an edgeless, limitless space very calming. Vast, silent expanses let her lose herself in a sea of blues, whites, indigos and greys. There at the North Pole, she could enjoy the ‘still point’ at the top of the world, while the globe spins under her.
It was this idea that formed the basis, and opening pages, of Amy Sackville’s debut novel, The Still Point, an Arctic love story which has already drawn comparisons with Virginia Woolf. When Sackville started researching the area by trawling through explorers’ diaries from over 100 years ago, her original short story grew into an historical novel, and took on what she calls a ‘Boy’s Own spirit of adventure.’ Set in modern-day England, Julia is the great-grand-niece of the Arctic explorer Edward Mackley. When the pace of London life becomes too much, Julia and Simon move to her family’s country home, where she begins sifting through Edward’s belongings. The story of her relative and the newlywed bride he left behind fascinates her. Bored with her new stay-at-home routine Julia is hooked in by Edward’s brave journey into the unknown, and his
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wife’s loyalty as she waits for decades on his doomed expedition to return. But what is ultimately more romantic, Sackville seems to be asking: a hero fixated on reaching an undefined point in the North while his wife pines at home? Or a safe, humdrum husband, who synchronises all clocks in the house, and labels butterflies for fun, but who stays by his wife’s side? ‘My writing tends to focus on couples and family relationships,’ says Sackville, who graduated from Goldsmiths’ Creative and Life Writing course just over a year ago. ‘I’m interested in what we don’t and will never know about another person; the different sides of people and what draws them together.’ So while a perfect love affair plays out in Julia’s head – full of long distance longing and chaste devotion – the reality of her own marriage seems disappointing, until some home truths emerge about Edward.
Flicking her narration between the vivid landscapes of the frozen north and a languid, sticky-hot English summer, 28-year-old Sackville creates some soaring elegant prose. Although she writes as though dressed in an empire line dress in regency England, Sackville admits it was written mostly at home, sitting in a vest, sweltering through a London summer. ‘I did quite enjoy writing these faintly Austen-esque social scenes,’ she laughs. ‘There’s something about that rarefied world that I enjoy. I suppose, there’s a bit of me in Julia; I’m happy to escape into the past, and retreat into these imagined worlds.’
The Still Point is published by Portobello on Thu 18 Feb.