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DAVID ALMOND Skellig author crosses the tricky divide from successful children’s books to an exciting kind of adult fiction
Since penning his first children’s novel, 1998’s Whitbread Award and Carnegie Medal-winning Skellig, David Almond has been lauded as one of the UK’s greatest authors for younger readers. In 2010, the Skellig prequel, My Name is Mina, had critics falling over themselves in praise, lauding Almond as much more than simply a ‘children’s novelist’. And this year, the author is finally crossing the literary age divide with his first novel for adults, The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean, which he’ll be discussing in Edinburgh. The book focuses on Billy, a boy who has grown up in
seclusion but is eventually forced to confront a post- apocalyptic society when his father disappears. ‘It’s written in a kind of misspelled English,’ Almond explains. ‘Billy can’t write. He’s been kept in isolation so in the process of writing his story, he’s also
discovering himself and the world through the act of writing.’ Almond’s audience might be changing but his approach
to writing isn’t. ‘Like most writers, I write the kind of books that I want to read. Obviously you have to think about your audience, but I am my first reader and I have to make sure that it satisfies me. But I’m also aware of wanting to experiment more, which is one of the things that led to Billy Dean. As a writer, you’ve only got a certain number of books you can write, so you’ve got to make sure that you’re really challenged by each one.’ And he’s eagerly awaiting his Edinburgh appearance
too: ‘I love Edinburgh, it’s my favourite book festival. There’s a real excitement that’s generated by so many events going on in the same place. But you get the sense that the festival itself is generally interested in the world beyond Charlotte Square Gardens too.’ (Yasmin Sulaiman) ■ 29 Aug, 7pm, £7 (£5).
JANE HARRIS Making Glasgow an evocative character
‘The secret was what I began with,’ says Jane Harris about her most recent work, Gillespie and I. And what a mystery we unravel, as narrator Harriet Baxter reflects on her time in 1880s Glasgow and the consequences of a chance meeting with ‘soulmate’ painter Ned Gillespie. ‘It was always in my mind that things would dawn on people as they read on,’ the author says from her East London home, ‘and that would be part of the pleasure for them; they would become the detective.’
Harris may be an ex-Weegie now, but she still has a soft spot for the city, and her second novel (after an acclaimed 2006 debut, The Observations) reads like a love letter to the place she lived and studied in. This Glasgow setting is a theme for the author’s forthcoming event but, as she explains, she found embarking on it rather daunting. ‘So many great novels have been set there, but it was exciting writing about it because I love it so much. I have lived on those streets in the West End where this story is set. I see the city as a character in the novel, because I put a lot of love into my rendering of it.’ (Camilla Pia) ■ 25 Aug (with Ross Raisin), 10.15am, £10 (£8).
Previews {BOOKS} Top 5
IT’S A LONG STORY
With Adam Levin hauling his doorstopping debut novel to the Book Festival, Brian Donaldson gets double vision from five fictions over the 1000-page mark
The Instructions The story of a megalomaniac 10-year-old boy who may or may not be the messiah takes place over the course of four frenetic days, but Levin’s massive book also takes in Israel’s battle for existence and an entire religion’s search for peace. Against the Day When Thomas Pynchon wrote Crying of Lot 49, its near-300 pages felt like five times more. In his 2007 work, he goes the whole hog with a multi- narrative split between its own group of characters, situations, time zone geography and philosophical problems and situations.
Infinite Jest The late David Foster Wallace certainly can’t be accused of leaving behind a slim literary legacy. This one focussed on a dangerously entertaining movie – Infinite Jest – and how it affects everyone from a Boston halfway house for recovering drug addicts and a nearby tennis academy. War and Peace Tolstoy himself said of his epic work that it was ‘not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle’. Whatever his sprawling tale actually is, it hasn’t put off adaptive types who have turned it into movies, TV dramas, radio plays, stageworks and an opera.
It This may well be the easiest read of the lot given that it’s from the commercial mindbrain of the page-turning horror master Stephen King. It (literally) features a group of adults who try and defeat the protean being/scary clown that is threatening their childhood hometown. ■ Adam Levin, 27 Aug, 8.30pm, £7 (£5).
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