Festival Books
Telephone Booking Fringe 0131 226 0000 International Festival 0131 473 2000 Book Festival 0845 373 5888 Art Festival 07500 461 332 MAREK KOHN Tackling climate change denial head-on
Think of Marek Kohn as the mouthpiece of the moderates in the climate change conversation. His new book, Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles will Change as the World Heats Up, strips the sensationalism from the story and projects a thoroughly researched vision of what we in Britain might be in for, should we continue as we’re going. ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ says Kohn, reassuringly. ‘It’s not Big Ben sinking below a rising River Thames. The climate change genre so far has been about awful apocalyptic warnings: if you say the world is ending, at least you’re giving a firm point of view. But if I’d been looking for disasters, I wouldn’t have enjoyed writing it nearly as much.’ He may not be prophesying
unleavened doom and disaster, but like most of the mainstream scientific community, Kohn doesn’t dispute that climate change is taking place: a position likely to draw disdain, if not outright ire, from the denialist lobby. ‘I’m not saying there’s no point reading this book unless you believe mainstream scientific theory,’ he says. ‘But if you’re the least bit open- minded, you should be playing with it in your mind. I have been taken slightly aback by some of the responses when I tell people I’m writing a climate change book: like, “Oh, do you believe in that?” I find there’s a slight correlation between the degree of scepticism and the size of car the person’s driving.’ (Matt Boothman) ■ 22 Aug (with Fred Pearce), 6.45pm, £10 (£8).
EMILY MACKIE Delving into some dark places
One of the most talked-about British debuts of 2010 was Emily Mackie’s And This is True. It featured a 15-year- old boy Nevis and his author dad Marshall who carried on their passive existence living in and out of a white Ford Transit van. Since his mother left the family home when he was four, it’s all Nevis has known. He appears 24 THE LIST 19–26 Aug 2010
AMY SACKVILLE Retreating into imagined worlds of the past
Amy Sackville’s debut novel, The Still Point, is an Arctic love story which has already drawn comparisons with Virginia Woolf. Set in modern England, Julia is the great-grand-niece of an explorer whose story fascinates her and she often dreams about the Arctic. To her, the idea of an edgeless, limitless space is very calming. There at the North Pole, she could enjoy the Still Point at the top of the world, while the globe spins under her. To Julia’s husband Simon, though, the Arctic is a frustrating, unmapped and unknown place, which is hard for his detail-loving, precision-craving head to get around.
Switching between dazzling landscapes of the frozen north, and a languid, sticky-hot English summer, 28-year-old Sackville creates some soaring
prose, full of elegance and confidence. Sackville researched by trawling through Arctic explorers’ diaries, but also added in details from her own ski trips. ‘I go to the French Alps every year and like seeing how snow and light work together. Watching the shadows move in a complete white-out landscape; you start noticing reflections and shades of colour in the white.’
Although she writes as though dressed in an empire line dress in regency England, Sackville – who graduated from Goldsmith’s Creative Writing MA last year – admits the novel was written mostly sitting in a vest, sweltering through a London summer. ‘I did quite enjoy writing these faintly Jane Austen-esque social scenes,’ she laughs. ‘I suppose there’s a bit of me in Julia; I’m happy to escape into the past and retreat into these imagined worlds.’ (Claire Sawers) ■ 23 Aug (with Kirsten McKenzie), 6pm, £7 (£5).
withdrawn and curious, but when he starts planting kisses on his sleeping father’s mouth and observing his dad
pleasuring himself, their relationship is never the same again. ‘I’ve got an older brother but there’s none of him in Nevis. There’s a little bit more of me in there, in the way that he thinks, not the bits about his attraction to the father but his observations are a little bit like mine at that age.’
For a debut, it’s a bold area to be delving into, but Mackie has the confidence of having written stories from the moment she was able to put a concentrated pen to paper. Her first play was written at the age of nine and not long after that she was churning out short stories and dabbling in novels. The darkness she explores in And This is True is reflected in the
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books she adores. ‘Wuthering Heights is my favourite book; I loved the dark demonic love. And I love The Tin Drum, with its crossover between fantasy and realism.’ (Brian Donaldson) ■ 21 Aug (with Robert Williams), 4.30pm, £7 (£5).
ZAIBA MALIK Attempting to dispel a few myths about Islam Zaiba Malik’s experience of her Muslim faith has been one of humility, humour, exploration, and horror. It has taken her from the comedy and anxieties of a childhood in Bradford to imprisonment in Bangladesh for ‘anti- state activities’, while filming a documentary. Having grown up with a father who, though he was ‘a very devout man, never taught his wife or daughters that they had to hide their