Heather Brooke appeared on Start the Week to talk about The Silent State and the way Britain’s culture of state secrecy goes by almost unquestioned by most British people. Listen at the link below, from 25 minutes in.

Heather Brooke on Start the Week

The Silent State is published in April.

Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas and Red Dog, Red Dog by Patrick Lane have both been selected by Waterstone’s for their New Voices promotion.

From the website: ‘For the first time in [New Voices'] three-year history, all twelve of the chosen books are debuts, and this year’s selection includes some incredible, innovative writing’.

All books in the promotion are 40% off rrp. Visit the Waterstone’s site here.

Heather Brooke, author of The Silent State, has won the Judges’ Award at the British Press Awards, for her pioneering work in exposing MP’s expenses the Guardian reports.

Heather has had her story dramatised for the BBC in ‘On Expenses’. For more information on her, you can visit her website, and follow her on Facebook.

The Silent State is published next month.

Film critic Mark Kermode will be talking about his book It’s Only a Movie at the Duke of York Picture House in Brighton on the 29th March 2010. From the website:

In this talk, Mark will revisit some real-life scenes that he remembers with cinematic clarity: getting shot at while interviewing Werner Herzog in Hollywood, being handbagged by Helen Mirren at the BAFTAs, being thrown out of the Cannes Film Festival for heckling in very bad French.

Outspoken, opinionated and never lost for words, Mark gives a hilarious account of a life obsessed with film, which will appeal to anyone who’s ever wondered: “Who would play me in the film of my life?”

For more details, please visit the website.

Dan Cruikshank, author of The Secret History of Georgian London will give a talk on researching and writing the book at the Oxford Literary Festival on the 26th March 2010.

From the website:

Drawing extensively on contemporary memoirs, court cases and the evidence of art and architecture, architectural historian and television presenter Dan Cruickshank explains how Georgian London was shaped by the sex industry.

His approach is ambitiously wide-ranging, and examines both the smart new streets that sprang up in Marylebone and the squalid alleys around Charing Cross.

He also discusses the impact of prostitution on artists such as William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, as he argues that prostitution shaped 18th-century London and helped determine its future development.

TICKETS FOR THIS EVENT HAVE SOLD OUT

Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World, will be on the panel discussing ‘How to Write a Bestseller’ at the Oxford Literary Festival on the 24th March 2010.

From the website:

What truly makes a bestseller? What do agents and publishers look for when they sign a new author? What are the differences between a fiction and a non-fiction bestseller?

Chaired by Barry Turner, editor of The Writer’s Handbook, the definitive guide to getting your book published, these questions and more will be discussed in a lively debate between Clive Bloom, author of Bestsellers, novelist Nick Harkaway, sci-fi fiction author George Mann, Peggy Vance, Publisher at Dorling Kindersley and Michael Alcock, Literary agent at Johnson & Alcock.

Tickets cost £10. Click here to buy

Tim Pears has been interviewed by the Guardian today about his early writing life, and his latest book Landed, out now, and also reads an extract from the book.

Listen to the extract

Read the interview

Visit the author’s site

Introduction

I wish I mapped a novel out on index cards like some people do, a neat deck with a rubber band snapped round it. Instead, it seems I have to write every fragment of the people’s lives and then cut like crazy, a succession of pruning edits done with a chainsaw, a cleaver, the pinking shears, a scalpel and a fine-tooth lice comb. Whole sections fall away during this process, landing on the cutting-room floor with a soft whump, and sometimes I miss them. It’s good to have a venue for one of those out-takes: this scene was cut during a chain-saw moment, but it’s at the root of Good to a Fault’s beginnings.

When my husband took me out to the Alberta wilderness on his first posting with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, I scrambled to find work. Not a lot of theatre in the bush. One of the jobs I lucked into was interviewing an old woman and writing up her life. The oil company that owned the land she’d lived on for fifty years wanted her off-the deal they’d struck involved moving her to a very posh old folks’ home, and publishing a few copies of her biography. I spent many hours interviewing Myrtle before it dawned on me that she was making things up to fill in the gaps.

In the patchwork way that we create characters, that old woman, Myrtle Mattson, came back to me years later when I was thinking about Mrs Pell (who is also what I think I’ll be like, when I’m very old), and the impossibility in old age of being known by anyone any more. Whatever life once was, it’s now a set of stories that you tell yourself, or tell whoever will listen. This is a story Myrtle Mattson told about herself, pretty well straight from the horse’s mouth.

- Marina Endicott

Snake

The sun was warm enough, this late October day. Already snowed once, but it didn’t stick. Day like out by Hanna, Mrs. Pell thought. Porridge oats breakfast, warm by lunch time. She thought of a sliced bologna sandwich, made with thick white homemade bread, Kraft dressing and pale green lettuce picked from her momma’s yard. That was a good sandwich. Might be some bologna at least. Mrs. Pell wandered into the house, the back screen door snapping behind her. She shuffled out of her shoes and stepped up the three steps to the kitchen in bare feet, purplish skin stretched tight over their swelling. Each step was a pang, and then the weight moving onto that foot was another. She made it around the corner to the fridge and peeled it open quietly, in case that Clary was lying in wait.

Some  commotion behind her-Dolly, home from school. Allowed to walk home alone, the minx.

“Where’s Clary?” Dolly asked, in that too-sharp voice.

“How should I know.” Mrs. Pell rustled in the meat-keeper, looking for bologna. None. A jar of rollmops in the back, she knew that would still be there. Good to have outside, on a warm day like this. And a dill. There.

“Where’s Trevor?”

Mrs. Pell shrugged, digging tight-packed dills out of the jar.

“I had to stay after. I had to help the teacher do the marking.”

“I’ll bet.” She knew when Dolly was putting on.

“She needed me to call out numbers for her.”

“I used to help the teacher,” Mrs. Pell said. She motioned Dolly to take the plate, and went down the stairs first, creaking from side to side.

Dolly slid around to get the back door open, and held it for her while she struggled down the last little half-step to the back patio. Pearce’s wagon was sitting beside the chair. Just the right place to put the plate. Mrs Pell worked her way into the wooden rocker, grunted, and sat still.

Dolly itched to go find Trevor, but if she ran by street or by alley she was bound to miss him, so she sat down on the grass.

“The teacher liked me best,” Mrs. Pell said. “I was the pet.”

“We don’t have teacher’s pets any more, they’re not allowed. It was at assembly not to call people that.”

“She used to get me to carry her work home to her place for her. If she had a big load. Better me than one of the big boys, who might get rough with her. She got bit by a snake once. Out there in her yard by the teacherage.”

Impossible not to listen to a snake-bite story. Dolly leaned over to where she could see around the side of the house. She’d catch Trevor coming.

“Now I didn’t see that happen, she told us later. She’d tell us anything, to fill up the time. So she was out in the garden, and a snake bites her twice on the leg. She didn’t even realize what it was-there was so many wasps that year, she never thought of a snake. She got herself back up to her house, to her bed, and she lay there paralyzed for three days, she told us. Stiff as a plank. Then Jim Balder comes along to bring her groceries and sees that the goat hadn’t been milked, and he thought to look inside the house, and there she was. In a pitiful state, and begging him to help her. I guess he hauled her out to the outhouse. She said she was too stiff to sit on the toilet.”

“She told about sitting on the toilet?”

“Right in class. My dad would of tarred her hide if he knew. That Jim Balder kept going over to her place, they ended up getting married. They had to. Sarey Dahl saw him having breakfast there one morning. ‘I know all about this!’ she yells at the teacher. I’ll bet she did, considering her own mother.”

Mrs. Pell put a rollmop in her mouth and crunched it down, moving her yellow teeth carefully. The smell carried to Dolly even in the fresh afternoon air.

“She knew who done it, it was her German neighbours had put the snake there. They hated her because she was so true to the flag.”

Dolly was drowsing off on the warm grass. The flag, the floating flag, the flag that brought tears to your eyes in the middle of the national anthem.

“Years later I met her on the street in Winnipeg, we went for a cup of tea by the Greyhound station. She wouldn’t of been more than five years older than me. She told me she seen that snake again. Down in Spokane, in a zoo.”

Mrs. Pell stopped and pointed her first two fingers. “Same snake. She swore black and blue. She had some story, how they’d told her the snake had disappeared from the zoo for a while, and then’d been mailed back to them, some story about that. Don’t know what she was doing down in Spokane. She was nuts.”

All her stories end that way, Dolly thought. Someone or other was nuts. Or crazy. Or went to jail or died. Like the only possible ending to a story.

“I should cook some supper for you kids.”

But she didn’t move. She bit into her pickle.

Clary would be home soon, she would cook a real supper, Dolly knew. Not just butter and sugar on bread.

Around the side of the house came Trevor, crying. He’d lost his blue baseball cap that Fern had given him, the one that said Davina Ag Society. Dolly walked back to school with him and they cast around the playground for fifteen minutes before she found it for him, blown underneath the bleachers in the rubble of last year’s chip bags. He settled it tighter down on his head so it wouldn’t blow off, and they ran home for Clary, for supper.

Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault is out now. Buy it from Amazon, Waterstones.com, Play, or from your local bookshop.

Read Marina’s interview on Writer’s Pet.

It’s the weekend and spring is in the air, so here’s our selection of bookish and not-so-bookish marvels from our ranges across the internets this week.

The people at Ikea have made the world’s longest outdoor bookcase on Bondi Beach, Sydney. If you can bring yourself to see how tanned everyone is, check it out.

In this fascinating article, an archeological dig in Turkey is turning upside-down our ideas of how civilisation first came into being.

OK Go are making a habit out of having very cool music videos: their treadmill one a while back was the first. This one however, with a Rube Goldberg machine falling apart beautifully around them, is even better.

And if you haven’t listened already, our very own Kevin Dutton reveals the art of extreme persuasion through undercover SAS operatives, Monty Python, and Howard Marks. His very persuasive book Flipnosis is out in May.

Tim Pears’ new novel Landed is out now, and to mark the release we’re offering you the chance to win one of three copies of this already critically acclaimed book. We’ll even chuck in one of our lovely Windmill Books notepads and a set of bookish postcards. All you have to do is read the extract and answer the question below.

Q: What animal does Owen’s grandfather use the Tia Maria on?

a) Sheep

b) Pheasant

c) Fox

Send your answers by email to windmill@randomhouse.co.uk. Winners will be picked on Friday 5th March - good luck!

‘Reading Landed was a huge pleasure, since this novel really sang to me. I can think of nobody who writes with quite such searing beauty, honesty, authenticity and commitment about the British countryside and its small farmers. We are back to the Tim Pears who gave us the memorable In a Time of Fallen Leaves, only this time round we have a book more artfully sculpted, more layered, more powerfully elegiac. This is a really beautiful novel’ - Barbara Trapido

‘Landed is a bleak and brave novel … Like moments of sunshine on a Welsh hillside, shafts of brightness irradiate the gloom, passages of descriptive writing of such clarity that the scents and sounds of lost childhood assail the reader with deep, moving pungency. Pears is a remarkable prose stylist … Landed offers rich pickings’ - The Times

‘The story is powerful: it shows the grief that overwhelms a parent at the death of a child and … the darkness that lies beneath the surface of a superficially happy family; it is also a rhapsodic account of the pull of the land … There is no denying Pears’ achievement in the character of Owen, a raw, desperate man even before he is filled with grief, and his deeply poetic descriptions of an old-fashioned life on the land‘ - Daily Telegraph

‘Beautifully and evocatively written … the utterly different passages fit together … because the author has from the start a unity of vision, which he successfully conveys to the reader … Emotionally, the book rings true. Owen’s deepening isolation, and inability to understand why this should have happened to him, why a wretched accident (though it may have been his fault) should lead to the disintegration of what had been a happy marriage, and the loss of his children - these states of mind are rendered sympathetically and cogently … There is - can be - no happy ending to his story; yet Pears’s skill is to make us wish that there might be’ - Scotsman