We are delighted to see that this month’s US GQ Magazine has named The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman as the Best Debut Novel of the Summer. To celebrate we are giving you the chance to read the opening pages of the book Teddy Wayne (author of The Love Song of Johnny Valentine) described as ‘one of the most nuanced and precise portraits of the muddled male mind since Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity‘. 

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. tells the story of Natheniel Piven, a rising star on the Brooklyn literary scene. After several lean, striving years and an early life as a class-A nerd, he now (to his surprise) has a lucrative book deal, his pick of plum magazine assignments, and the attentions of many desirable women: Juliet, the hotshot business journalist; Elisa, Nate’s gorgeous ex-girlfriend, now friend; Hannah, lively and fun and ‘almost universally regarded as nice and smart, or smart and nice’.

In this twenty-first-century literary enclave, wit and conversation are not at all dead. But is romance?

Click here to read the opening pages of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is published this August by William Heinemann.

Premiere of Noye’s Fludd, performed in the Aldeburgh Festival at St Bartholomew’s Church, Orford, 1958. Taken from Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music. Credit: Britten Pears Archive.

Earlier this year Hutchinson published Neil Powell’s biography of one the greatest British composers of the twentieth century. Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music is a moving portrait of a complex and brilliant man, published to mark the centenary of his birth.

To celebrate the numerous Benjamin Britten concerts and operas currently being staged in the UK, Neil Powell has selected his favourite Britten pieces for Windmill. Accompanying Neil’s words is a Spotify playlist, which can be found here*.

1. Frank Bridge, The Sea. English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britten. BBC/IMG CD BBCB 8007-2

This is the piece by his future mentor which ‘bowled over’ the young Britten when he heard at the Norwich Festival in 1924. It’s hard to imagine a more formative piece for a composer who was to write three great ‘sea operas’ – Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice. The recording too has particular significance: Britten is the conductor, in Blythburgh Church, Suffolk, during the 1971 Aldeburgh Festival.

2. ‘Interlude II (Act 1, Scene 2)’ from Peter Grimes. Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Benjamin Britten. Decca CD 414 577-2

And this, in a sense, is Britten’s transformation of The Sea. Few things in English, or any other, music are as evocative of an exact coastal location as this and, as so often, the composer’s own recording is unsurpassed.

3. ‘Midnight on the Great Western’ and ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’ from Winter Words. Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten. Decca CD 425 996-2

Britten responded at a deep intuitive level to Hardy’s poems: this two, about a pair journeying boys (one with a violin, although in Britten’s own case it was a viola), seem to resonate uncannily with the composer’s own childhood train journeys. This is the first recording, made by Pears and Britten in 1954.

4. ‘Third movement, Requiem aeternam’ from Sinfonia da Requiem. New Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britten. Decca CD 425 100-2

There are too few symphonic works by Britten, a master of orchestral colour: the Sinfonia da Requiem, written in wartime America, has much in common with the later and larger Cello Symphony, and its final movement develops characteristically from questing introspection to a hard-won, precariously achieved resolution.

5. ‘Pastoral’ from Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Ian Bostridge with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Simon Rattle. EMI CD 5 58049 2

Britten’s most triumphantly English song cycle for voice and orchestra was written for Peter Pears and Dennis Brain: the definitive recording was made by them in 1944. Some people find Bostridge a bit mannered, but his literariness is perfect here (as it is for Captain Vere in his recording of Billy Budd) and he has the benefits of a modern recording and the luxurious textures of the Berlin Phil behind him.

6. ‘Lachrymae: Reflections on a song of Dowland for viola and orchestra’. Lawrence Power with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov. Hyperion CD CDA 67801

This is a very late (1976) orchestration of a much earlier work, which combines Britten’s admiration for his English predecessor John Dowland with the autumnal colours of his own (and his own favourite) instrument, the viola.

7. ‘Fugue’ from The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Columbia 78 DXS 1309 (side 5 of five-side set, DX 1307-08 and DXS 1309)

The other great English predecessor whom Britten revered, once naming him as the composer who had influenced him most, was Henry Purcell; and the return of the Purcell theme in the ‘Fugue’ which ends The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is among the most glorious and touching moments in all music. Generations of children have begun their real musical education with this work; and so, although the composer’s own recording is the benchmark, the older Sargent version – a parental gift in childhood as an antidote to that nasty rock ’n’ roll – has a very special value for me.

*Please note that whilst we have tried to replicate Neil’s chosen pieces in our playlist, we were not able to find the exact performances online. However Neil has helpfully provided catalogue numbers.

If you want to explore Benjamin Britten’s life and music further, please visit the Britten 100 website.

Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music is out now, published by Hutchinson.

Our first Windmill Guest Blog comes from Jonathan O’Brien. Best known in the book world for his work as the voice of Waterstones Oxford Street, Jonathan is also Head Astrologer for the wonderful Horrorscopes. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter here, but not before you’ve read what he has to say about bookshelf hierarchy.

I’ve spent most of my life arguing with people that ‘the floor’ is a valid storage space. Especially when it comes to books and, now that I live in a small London flat, people are finally conceding my point. It’s strange to me that some people have enough space in their homes for more than one small bookcase. One of my biggest problem is deciding which books get to go on the actual shelves.

At the moment, only books I’ve actually read get the reward that is shelf space and, even then, they’ve got to be the best to reach such heights. I don’t want books I didn’t like unfairly lording it over the room like Joffrey Baratheon. I want them cast to the ground and slapped in the face like Joffrey Baratheon.

There are perks of being on the bookshelf. Alphabetical and genre order being the main one. Is there any other way to arrange your shelves? I’ve heard about people who arrange their books by colour. These people are clearly ill and need help. No, my books sit there, enthralled to the alphabet, easily found and noticed. Fiction first, Then short story collections, biographies, sport and more crossword books than I’d care to admit. Not like those on the floor, scattered and unread, the escalator Metros of my room.

Next to the bed, the ‘to read’ pile. Fifty books strong and regularly growing in number. I’m concerned that one day I’ll awake and find them covering my bed waking me with cries of, ‘read us. You promised to read us.’ There’s no order, a mix of non-fiction and fiction. An orgy of styles and ideas all vying for my attention. I go to sleep hoping that somehow they’ll whisper to me in my sleep. That I’ll wake up as well-read as I like to pretend I am.

By the computer desk, on the floor, the ‘have read’ pile. The books that simply weren’t good enough to make it onto the bookshelf. Cast aside, ignored. They spend their days wondering what they did to deserve such abandonment. ‘You were good books,’ I say. ‘But you are no Borges.’ At least, I think, they aren’t in the wardrobe.

The poor wardrobe books. Schroedinger’s books. Revealed only to ‘show off’ the extent of my collection whenever I think it may impress a woman who knows that John Waters quote. But I don’t let them get too close in case they realise that, ‘really, is that the time? I’ve got to be up early tomorrow. I think I’ll catch the last bus.’ Like going home with someone and finding out they’ve got an extensive collection of Enya records.

There’s an honesty needed with a good book collection. The ability to arrange your books for yourself rather than for the eyes of an ideal stranger. I used to arrange my books in case the Billy Liar version of Julie Christie came round. We could have been so happy together. Her with her looks and sense of adventure and me showing off that I’d read some books by Franz Kafka. One day…

But nowadays I don’t bother organising for people I’ve made up or thought about too much as a teenager. A bookshelf is a personal thing and it must reflect the mind and tastes of the person it belongs to. Especially because, if they arrange them by colour, you’ll know to get out. Get out fast before it’s too late

If you’ve approached Bains Stores recently, you’d be forgiven for hesitating on doing so. A prominent window advert for a discontinued chocolate bar suggests the shop may have closed in 1994. The security shutters are stuck a quarter-open, adding to the general air of dilapidation. A push or kick of the door triggers something which is more grating car alarm than charming shop bell.

Sathnam Sanghera’s first novel Marriage Material is an epic tale of family, love, and politics spanning the twentieth century. Taking inspiration from Arnold Bennett’s classic novel The Old Wives’ Tale, Marriage Material tells the story of three generations of a family through the prism of a Wolverhampton corner shop – itself a microcosm of the South Asian experience in the country: a symbol of independence and integration, but also of darker realities.

In this film Sathnam introduces his novel, which will be published by William Heinemann on 26th September 2013. For more from Sathnam follow him on Twitter or visit him online.

Marriage Material is published in September by William Heinemann.

All artists have places that matter to them. Be it where they work, the setting of their latest piece, or where they go to think. Our Sense of Place feature invites you to the places that matter to our authors.

To celebrate the paperback publication of Joy, here again is Jonathan Lee’s tour of his home in Brooklyn. 

I live and write in an apartment in Brooklyn. The building, like many of those in my Italian-American neighbourhood, is a brownstone. Down the road there’s an amazing bakery which sells a whole universe of tremendous baked goods. The best is something called Lard Bread. Lardons of bacon and hunks of cheese are baked into the loaf. If you eat a whole one the palpitations kick in instantly.

I tend to write early. Monday to Friday I’ll generally be awake by 6.45, have my coffee in the mug by 6.55, and make sure the laptop is open by 7am. Once the laptop is open, I’m technically on the clock, and all manner of procrastination is possible. I like the fact the desk is blank and white, the laptop is small and easily tidied away, and the bookcase I face while I write is stacked with the books I’m interested in at that time. Working in a tidy-ish environment allows me to feel vaguely sane in the face of the unruly many-paged beast I’m often trying to wrestle into publishable shape.

(The Christmas tree isn’t always there – I don’t live all year round in some weird Miss Havisham time warp – it just happened to be Christmas when I took the photo.)

Come afternoon my imagination is usually burnt out, so I’ll read, answer emails and maybe go to the gym. The books are usually a mix of things I’m looking at for research and those I’ve picked for pleasure. I like to read while sitting on a futon, a futon which is so incredibly uncomfortable that it stops me sleeping on the job.

In the evenings I do whatever I want, and the next day I start the process all over again, but my spine is usually so sore from the miserable futon that I need to use this ridiculous pillow for the base of my back. He’s called Louie.

Joy by Jonathan Lee is out now, published by Windmill. Look out for more features from Jonathan over the coming months.

This week our featured author is Sarah Ridgard.

Sarah’s debut Seldom Seen is a beautiful, evocative novel set in Suffolk in the 1980s. The story of a young girl’s awakening to the cruelty of the world, Seldom Seen was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award.

In this interview Sarah talks to Windmill about reading, writing and her favourite bookshop.

What are you reading now?

I’ve just started Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis.

What is your favourite bookshop?

The Book Hive in Norwich is a wonderful bookshop and has books which I’ve often not come across anywhere else. I’ve also been to some great readings and books launches as organised by the owner, Henry Layte, and met lots of other local writers over a few glasses of wine. Norwich is full of them!

Hunter S Thompson used to type out The Great Gatsby to know what it felt like to write it. What would be your choice?

I recently finished reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Ford, and funnily enough I had to grab a pen to copy out several passages which were so well written and insightful, I really wanted to reproduce his words on the page to see how he did it. I’ve not done that for a while, though I often set down the plot of a book if it’s been a compulsive read to see how it fits together and why it works so well.

What were you doing before you became a writer?

I did several jobs in the voluntary sector after leaving university, mainly administrative work with Amnesty International and Oxfam.  I worked in Spain and Japan for a while as a TEFL teacher, but really I was just circling around writing all that time. It was only after I’d done a publishing course at Oxford Brookes and worked as an assistant editor at OUP for a while, that I realised all I wanted was to be at the other end of the process. A couple of years later I was on the MA in Creative Writing at UEA and had started the first draft of Seldom Seen.

If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be?

On St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly, having a Cornish pasty and a pint outside the Turks Head after a long morning on the beach and a walk at low tide over the sandbar to Gugh.

Who are your literary idols?

There are lots of writers I return to including Angela Carter, Annie Proulx, Vladimir Nabokov, DH Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Attwood, Alice Munro, Richard Mabey…

And what about your non literary idols?

DCI Jane Tennison, in the television series, Prime Suspect.

Your favourite book?

The one I read most recently,  Richard Ford’s Revolutionary Road (see above).  And then there was a time I could not put down The New Pregnancy and Childbirth by Sheila Kitzinger.

Favourite film?

Play It Again, Sam by Woody Allen in a tie-break with the Billy Wilder film, Some Like It Hot.

Why do you write?

I really enjoy it. Nothing else I’ve worked at over the years has felt so intensely rewarding, fleeting as those moments may be.

What do you do to relax?

It would have to be a swim at the UEA pool or a wander into the garden at dusk with my two children to pick snails off the clematis and slugs off everything else while the swifts come in low overhead. Wine is also rather good.

 Seldom Seen is out now, published by Windmill.

Welcome again to the Windmill Festival Guide. We hope you enjoyed the first edition, taking you event-by-event through the spring season with information on what, where and who. Now as we approach the British summer let’s all keep our fingers crossed for sunshine as we talk you through the busy festival months of June, July and August. As ever, we want to hear from you if you’ve been to a festival, or are planning on going. Get in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook or email with your thoughts and photos.

(All past events are italicised).

*

June

Not entirely June, but it’s one of the main events on the literary festival calendar so deserving of a mention. Hay Festival runs from 23rd May to 2nd June. After which a busy summer begins in earnest and we’re delighted to see our authors across the country, beginning with John Niven in conversation with Irvine Welsh at the wonderful Stoke Newington Literary Festival on the 3rd.

Later in the month Granta Best Young British Novelist Jenni Fagan is speaking at the York Festival of Ideas on the 15th.

Hugh Thomson will be at the Travel Festival on the 23rd.

And John Harvey is at the Lowdham Book Festival on the 24th with Mark Billingham.

One of the busiest festival months also sees events in Ashbourne, Middlesbrough, Cornwall and Melrose with the Borders Book Festival.

July

July is another jam-packed month with some wonderful festivals, including a few where literature combines with music, theatre, performance and art. Speaking of which, we will be at Latitude for Kevin Dutton and Elaine Fox‘s Salon London event on the 20th.

Other big July festivals include the London Literature Festival, Buxton Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Ways With Words and the Penzance Literary Festival.

However the main event this month will see crime and thriller fans head to Harrogate for the annual Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival, where Hutchinson author Ruth Rendell will be interviewed by Jeanette Winterson, alongside Val McDermid, Kate Atkinson, Lee Child, Charlaine Harris and Susan Hill on the 19th.

August

There are only two August literary festivals to note and both of them in Scotland.

The Inverness Book Festival runs from the 7th to 10th, after which comes one of the biggest events of the season.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival is the largest literary festival in the world and will take up residence on Charlotte Square on the 10th of August, finishing over two weeks later on the 26th. The full programme for Edinburgh will be launched on the 2oth June. So check back then for all the details. In the meantime, enjoy your festival summer and remember to keep in touch.

Cult horror director Stanislas Cordova hasn’t been seen in public since 1977.

To his fans he is an enigma.

To journalist Scott McGrath he is the enemy.

To Ashley he was a father.

In this new film Marisha Pessl gives a short reading from her forthcoming novel Night Film and introduces the book. For more on Night Film follow @WindmillBooks on Twitter and the hashtags #NightFilm and #whoiscordova.

Night Film will be published on 29th August by Hutchinson.

On 15th April Jenni Fagan was named as one of Granta Magazine’s Best Young British Novelists 2013. Since then, she has been across the UK talking about her debut novel The Panopticon and what it is like to be a Best Young British Novelist.

In her second film with Windmill Jenni tells us how she reacted when she was first told about her inclusion on the Granta list.

‘Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon is a terrific book in all the senses of the word terrific, and I am still reeling from reading it…A shining, vigorous work…I love it.’

Ali Smith

‘The term “stunning debut novel” doesn’t even begin to cover The Panopticon. Each page sparkles with the ebullient and sinister magic of great storytelling, culminating in the same impact as the first books of Kelman, Gray and Warner. An utterly magnificent achievement. The best debut novel I’ve read this year.’

Irvine Welsh

‘An astonishing debut, I have a feeling that Fagan is a name we will hear more of.’

Jackie Kay

Join the conversation about The Panopticon on Twitter, using the hashtag #BestYoung. For more from Jenni Fagan, visit Granta to listen to their recent podcast. You can watch Jenni’s first Windmill film here.

All artists have places that matter to them. Be it where they work, the setting of their latest piece, or where they go to think. Our Sense of Place feature invites you to the places that matter to our authors.

Today Kim Barnes takes us on a tour of the places that matter to her, from her writing desk and bookshelves, to the beautiful scenery that surrounds her home in Idaho.

Kim’s most recent book is In the Kingdom of Men, which is the Waterstones Book Club Book of the Week.

Perhaps it is because of my childhood spent in the isolated logging camps of the Pacific Northwest that I so dearly love living in the mountains. My husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, and I have chosen to remain in the American West, where we feel connected to the landscape and are able to write in solitude.

Our house sits on the south-facing flank of Moscow Mountain. My office, which was our youngest son’s room until he moved out on his own (since I had been using his older sister’s empty room up until that point, I often joke that I write in abandoned places), looks out over the rolling hills of the Palouse Prairie, which has some of the deepest topsoil in the world. Early in the summer, when the wind blows across the fields of wheat, peas, and lentils, it looks like the undulating surface of the sea. This is the view out of my office window as I write on this blustery spring day.

When I’m struggling with a scene or section of dialogue, I sometimes move from my desk to sit at the window, gaze out, and clear my mind. There’s something about all that open landscape that allows my imagination to expand.

The painting in the upper left is by my closest friend, the author Claire Davis. You can see the bird riding the Magic 8-Ball, used for fortune-telling and advice, but you have to look closer to make out the barely discernible lettering that scripts the blue sky: Write your heart out and In your dreams and Yes No Maybe. I love looking up at it from my desk when I need to remember to take chances in my writing.

My desk was given to me by my younger brother, Greg, an electrical engineer, when it no longer fit his needs (and so it is that I write on abandoned desks!).

In the upper left is a bullfighting poster that (after the date had passed) we peeled off of a telephone pole in San Miguel, Mexico, where my husband was teaching a workshop. Next to it, on the right, is the Governor of Idaho’s Proclamation of my being named as the state’s writer-in-residence. Below is the US cover of In the Kingdom of Men, which my mother framed with various family trinkets and Arabian memorabilia that my aunt, who spent several years in Saudi Arabia, provided.

As is the case with most writers, my walls are lined with bookshelves. This one contains a few of the historical texts, novels, and memoirs that I read while undertaking the years of research that went into writing In the Kingdom of Men.

The small camel-hide purse on the lower shelf was given to me by my aunt as a gift when she returned from Saudi Arabia. The insulated Thermos on the top shelf – an Arabian-American Oil Company Safety Award – was an eBay find. At the bottom right is a small bottle of sand from the Empty Quarter (Rub’ al Khali) – a treasure from a lovely woman who worked for Aramco in the 1960s and shared her wonderfully vivid memories with me.

On another wall is my shrine to Hemingway and my other passion: fly-fishing.

The placard is at least half-a-century old and was used by schools to teach basic reading skills. I found a stack of the cards at a second-hand shop and have them scattered throughout my office. Like Hemingway’s writing, they remind me of the simple beauty of clear expression.

And, of course, every office must have a mascot.

This is Opal, our Australian Shepherd, who watches me with great patience and curiosity and herds me on when I need direction.

The fields outside my window are green now, but in the fall and winter, the late light takes on a whole other palette of colour, and the hills turn apricot and tangerine.

The shorter days of the colder seasons make for good writing time, and I often watch the sun set and the moon rise from my desk chair.

When, after teaching and writing through three seasons, summer finally arrives, my husband and I take to the high mountain rivers. We pitch our tent beside the water, and, when not fishing, we read, dine al fresco, and toast our good fortune with wild huckleberries dropped into glasses of champagne.

This is where we let the wells of our imaginations refill, where new ideas for stories and poems come to us. We each carry notebooks in our fishing vests, and you can often spot us, standing in the middle of the river, jotting down lines and sentences and bits of dialogue that will make their way into our stories and poems once the fishing is done.

In the Kingdom of Men is out now, published by Windmill.