I tweeted yesterday that I didn’t want to get drawn on the #dearpublisher discussion that had erupted on Twitter. This was for two reasons: one was that the first tweet I read said that publishers homogenised culture, only publishing ’safe’ books, and are slaves to celebrity. It’s an accusation as common as it is unfounded, as a cursory glance in any bookshop or our book list will tell you.

So that annoyed me, and I didn’t want to use Twitter to vent my annoyance. My lovely followers wouldn’t have liked to see that, and I have an allergy to internet bitching, which is how I would have sounded. I’m just not that guy.

The second reason was that some of the questions and comments, the majority of which were good, relevant, and interesting, couldn’t be sensibly answered in 144 characters, and deserved more space. Well, look-ee here, I’ve got a blog and I’m darn well going to use it. I’ve taken some of the recent, popular #dearpublisher questions and, along with my colleague and co-conspirator @drummondmoir, we have attempted to answer them as best we can. Please note these answers apply only to how we in Windmill Books work. Other publishers do things differently: that’s their bag; this is ours.

Any other questions? Stick them in the comments below, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

@tea_mouse: What sort of stats are you looking for from wordpress bloggers, since we don’t have ‘followers’ #dearpublisher

I don’t look for stats: I look for a well presented, frequently updated blog that shows passion and interest in books. If your blog has five readers, and each of them buys a book because of the review you wrote, then that’s good enough for me.

@Irisheyz77: #dearpublisher please encourage yours authors to comment/email bloggers when they like a review. It gives us the warm fuzzies.

This is a great idea, and I’ll do this, though I’d still want to check with the blog owner first. What gives some people the warm fuzzies gives others the heeby-jeebies!

@glindaharrison Please ensure an author’s backlist titles are out as ebooks. Can’t believe CS Lewis & Wm Golding’s backlist not available. #dearpublisher

We’re currently working on ‘digitising’ both our frontlist (upcoming titles) and our backlist. But given that as a company we have an enormous backlist - stretching back literally decades and decades and comprising many thousands of titles - it’s unfortunately not something we can do instantly. There are other issues involved in terms of quality control, as frontlist titles can be easier and more reliable to convert to the required formats, but backlist titles are a different kettle of fish. Rest assured we’re going as fast as we can, but we don’t want to cut corners as backlist titles are important!

@MJRose #dearpublisher find a way to support every book you publish - no one can buy a book they never heard of, never see, don’t know about.

We agree 100%, and finding a book’s audience - including how many there are of them, the ways that they find out about books, how they communicate, and where they are - is a key part of our jobs. In a lot of cases, our time spent doing this is the most valuable investment that we can put into a book.

@katrinalantznov: #dearpublisher Combine ebooks with hardcovers, but please don’t stop printing books ever. The book is not dead. It just had babies.

There are no plans to stop printing books - they still make up the vast majority of our market and our bookshelves. Indeed at time of writing Ebooks sales make up just 1% of the UK book market. The rise in ebooks heralds an exciting time for publishing, but we haven’t lost sight of what got us where we are in the first place.

@bookladysblog: #dearpublisher I love it when you get to know me & recommend the right books for my blog. Also: catalogs are appreciated.

We always read up on a few blog posts to see what kind of thing a blogger is interested in, as we don’t want to waste anyone’s time with irrelevant books. That doesn’t mean we know for sure that the books we’re sending will definitely get a good review, and in fact I’ve been surprised in the past with reviews where I’ve thought it was definitely going to be positive, and it’s been more mixed.

Currently we don’t produce catalogues, but if you’re a blogger and would appreciate receiving one every 3 months say, drop me a line at windmill@randomhouse.co.uk

@thestorysiren: do you like us to send review links even the not so positive ones? #dearpublisher

Absolutely do send links through. For one thing, it helps us gauge what you like so we can fine tune what we’re sending to for review. And also, I’ll often RT a review even if it’s mixed (though not if it’s terrible), as people often disagree, and a healthy discussion about a book is never a bad thing.

@ChatNoirBooks  seen in #dearpublisher - thinking a book’s price is just printing costs is a bit like thinking your marriage is only worth the certificate.

We couldn’t agree more, and in all honesty we do think about more than just the printing costs! If it was just about printing we’d be printers not publishers.

@CassandraYorgey #dearpublisher, not all authors are cut out for “online presences”. Marketing shouldn’t be part of a writer’s job.

I agree with the first half of your statement. We never tell an author to start a blog/Twitter account unless they have both the time and inclination to keep up both - they know from the off that unless they are in it for the long haul (i.e. way past the publication of their book) then there’s no point. In this respect online marketing is very author led: it’s what they are comfortable and confident with.

The second half of your statement I’d disagree with though, and I know a lot of our authors would too. I think it is an author’s job to help promote their work in some way, both to do justice to all the work they put into the writing in the first place, and to further their career for future books that they hope to publish. The way they do this, of course, entirely depends on what their strengths are, which the publisher always wants to play to, both online and off.

Those black markings made by a vehicle’s wheels when it comes to a shrieking stop on the road - what do you call them?

Skid marks. I always called them that - skid marks. When I was a kid riding bikes with my friends, we used to accelerate and then jam on the brakes to see who could make the longest skid marks. Later, when I began driving a car, I saw skid marks that went on over surreally long distances, or that curved over and went right off the side of the road, or that ended in a scatter of broken plastic and glass.

But in my novel, The Reconstructionist - which mentions a number of such marks - you might notice that they’re never called skid marks.

Instead, those black markings on the road are called tire marks (or tyre marks, in proper British English). When I first began working in the field of accident reconstruction I called them skid marks, and I was quickly corrected. It turns out that not every black mark on the roadway leading to a collision is a skid mark. Some are skid marks, but some are yaw marks, and some are a blend of skid and yaw marks. You have to do some analysis to figure out which is which. But tire mark safely covers all the possibilities.

What’s the difference between a skid mark and a yaw mark? A skid mark is generated by a tire that has stopped turning, usually because the driver is braking. But a yaw mark doesn’t require braking; instead it is caused by a vehicle that is turning (i.e., yawing) hard. While the vehicle turns, the wheels might still be spinning, but they’re turning in one direction while the vehicle is traveling in another direction, so the tires are scraped sideways over the road and leave a trail of black rubber behind.

It turns out that there’s a handy way to determine whether a mark was made by skidding or yawing. Car tires today, of course, are textured with patterns intended to improve traction in foul weather. These patterns will create striations in a tire mark, and when a vehicle skids to a stop without yawing, the striations will run in the same direction as the tire mark. But if the tire mark was created by a yawing vehicle, the striations will be perpendicular to the direction of the tire mark. The tire mark will look as if it were made by many small back and forth brush strokes.

You might suppose that you could also tell a skid mark from a yaw mark simply by whether the mark runs straight or curves. But, while it’s true that a yaw mark is more likely to curve while a skid mark is more likely to be straight, a vehicle can skid and yaw at the same time, and even a vehicle in pure yaw may move in a very broad arc if it is going at high velocity. In fact, if you can look at the striations in a tire mark and determine that it was in pure yaw, then you can calculate the vehicle’s speed by measuring the radius of the arc and assuming that the frictional forces between the tire and the road were equal to the centrifugal forces on the car. The broader the arc, the faster the vehicle was going.

My novel is about an accident reconstructionist, a man who has spent years analyzing accidents, trying to figure out how they happened. A reconstructionist’s work is full of examination of tiny detail, studying and analyzing tire marks, headlight bulbs, seatbelts, dents and scratch marks, in the service of recreating a few seconds surrounding an accident - an accident that changed lives forever. It always seemed to me that there was a strange juxtaposition between the reconstructionist’s obsessive recreation of a few seconds around a crash and the long arc of the actual lives affected by that crash - the dead, the injured, their family and friends.

The reconstructionist’s approach is analytic and scientific, but ultimately what the reconstructionist is trying to do is develop a narrative that describes the events immediately preceding a crash. So, a reconstruction is a kind of storytelling. But it is a curiously truncated kind of storytelling, a deformed storytelling, because it ignores the before and the after, and it ignores the stories of the lives involved. It examines a moment of crisis in extreme detail, but it decontextualizes the crisis from the humanity of the crisis.

There’s a danger in this; by ignoring the humanity involved in an accident, the work can eat at the soul. It’s a tension that I found fascinating, and that I struggled with when I worked in the field. And while The Reconstructionist is about a number of different things, I always had this tension in mind as I wrote - the juxtaposition of the analysis of a crash with its actual effect on human lives, and how the stress of that juxtaposition can create fissures and spaces in the lives of people absorbed in the reconstructionist’s work. How else, after all, to work out a problem of deformed storytelling, except by telling a story that explores it?

The Reconstructionist by Nick Arvin is out now. Order it from rbooks, Amazon, Play, Waterstone’s, or your local bookshop.

The weekend is almost upon us, and while the nation gathers in pubs and living rooms to spout ill-informed opinions and awkward jokes about a sport they have only a passing interest in the majority of the time, here’s Windmill’s Friday Feeling, a football-free salve for the soul.

This (sweary!) article made me laugh so hard I spurted milk out of my nose. And I wasn’t even drinking milk!

Engage children in classic literature with a doll that transforms into a dinosaur - I’ll take 10!

Strange scrapbook story art from David Fullerton here: we like, even if we’re not sure we’d ever want to meet him.

Classic photographs made in Lego. The sort of simple genius idea you see and wish you’d thought of first.

Anyone looking for the next big thing in publishing should stop now: Minotaurs are the new Vampires people!

Hearing Don Cheadle’s massacre of the dulcet tones of the humble cockney in Ocean’s Eleven, you’ll wish he had done his research first here: The Speech Accent Archive, a massive project to record as many different accents reading English as possible. Back in the day I used to want to have an upper-class Beijing-English accent. I’m over it now.

And finally, this song has been in my head for days. And now it’s in yours. Ha!

I’ve been raving to my colleagues, friends, and anyone that follows me on Twitter about one book in particular that we’re publishing next month: Tinkers by Paul Harding. It’s beautifully written, touching, true to life and death, and the end…well, I won’t spoil it for you. It’s a great book, an epic of only 192 pages, one of those books that comes around every now and then and reaffirms your love of reading.

One of many interesting things about Tinkers is trying, with my marketing hat on, to sum it up in a few sentences, into a pitch that booksellers will remember out of all the other titles they are presented that month.  I (or, more likely, the person in the sales department doing the presentation) could do what I did in the above paragraph, but then the bookseller would (quite rightly) be able to say ‘Well, you would say it’s brilliant, you’re trying to sell it to me!’ The difficulty is that Tinkers is a book where if you try and sum up the plot in a line it sounds positively mundane: a man lies in his deathbed, and as he is hallucinating, remembers his time with his father when he was a young boy.  That’s about it.*

None of that accounts for how gripping this book is. There are no great clashes between heroes and villains, love affairs, or dramatic deaths (there is death, but it is quiet, sombre), yet it held me, absolutely rapt, right to the last sentence.  That’s no mean feat either.  I’m pretty easily distrac - oo look, a cat playing the keyboard!

Ahem, anyway, back to my point. I like a book with big plots, wham-bam action and sweeping storylines where lots of stuff happens.  The same goes for films and TV for that matter. But watching something like Lord of the Rings (tons of plot, characters with Big Dramatic Speeches, swords held aloft, millions of orcs) is an entirely different emotional experience to watching The Man Who Wasn’t There (very little plot, a main character mumbles most of his lines, a fearsome letter opener, and absolutely no orcs).  The screenwriters have to work hard to gain the trust of the viewer, to get them to relax into a film where nothing much happens, to make them feel that the journey will be worth the work in the end.

When I saw The Man Who Wasn’t There in the cinema, two young guys in front of us got up and walked out after around 30 minutes.  I remember being annoyed at the time, wanting to say to them, ‘Where are you going? You’ll miss the best bit!’  Now I think that the Coen Brothers just hadn’t got the trust of those two people.  Boredom, I think, is not a passive thing: it’s active, fighting against something that’s too slow or predictable.  If a book or film is boring me, I’m impatient to get to the end - I start to skim read, or I’ll get distracted agai - oo look, a funny comic!

Trust is hard won and easily lost with readers.  The success of Tinkers for me boils down to the fact that we know with every sentence that we’re in the presence of someone who can really write.  Harding earns the right to tell a story that, for the most part, is going on in the main character’s head with the precise, lyrical way that he tells it.  He makes you want to sit back, and accept the story for what it is, on its own terms.

What do you think?  How do apparently plot-light books and films hold your attention, and which ones have done it best?

*As it happens with Tinkers our sales pitch was made much easier for the fact we can say that it’s the first debut novel to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in a decade.

It’s been a while, but never fear, I have a super-dulux-bumper-edition of the Friday Feeling to tickle your frontal lobes in time for the weekend.

I’ve been on here before raving about Christopher Potter’s You Are Here, so I won’t mention again how completely brilliant it is and how anyone interested in how the universe works should go and read it immediately.  What I will say however is that you could do worse than start with this very cool animation that shows you your place in the universe, with has extracts of the book next to it.

Does finding out a writer who you admire is in life thoroughly nasty make a difference to how you read them? And can their weaknesses as people be what drives their art? This article discusses the issues through the troubled lives of Naipaul, Larkin and Dickens. And which crazy writer are you? Take this quiz to find out. I got Thomas Pyncheon…hmmm….

Ever wanted to bask in the cocktail-quaffing, long lunch-having ease of a job in the media-journalism-publishing industries? Here’s your perfect opportunity! 

It will shock you to learn that even publishers make the odd mistake sometimes. Some of these mistakes are worth a pretty penny, if you’re eagle eyed enough to spot them: do you have any on your shelves?

Finding out what was happening on your birthday 300-years-ago was probably not what the British Library had in mind when it announced this project, but I’m willing to bet that’s what most people will use it for.

And this has nothing to do with books, but everything to do with AC/DC, for which I make no apology.

I only knew why I’d been driven to write You Are Here some months after I’d actually completed it. At the time, I was too busy worrying if I could write at all.  And if not worrying about that, worrying about how I was ever going to organise the ridiculously free-ranging material I’d collected. Actually, it was the working out of a structure for the book that distracted me from the fear of writing it. Once I knew what I had to say, I just got on with saying it. Seems like an obvious strategy, but it took me by surprise. (In that perennial argument about style versus content I’ve always been a style man. I can’t imagine how a writer who knows how to say something hasn’t also got something to say. Whereas the reverse is certainly not the case. Plenty to say but no style: no thanks.)

I’ve always been interested in science. As an editor at Fourth Estate, I worked with many science writers: Simon Singh, Matt Ridley, Peter Singer, V S Ramachandran, Peter Forbes, Marcus Du Sautoy, Henry Gee, Timothy Taylor, James Gleick, Eric Drexler, and Dava Sobel, among them. Some of these writers are also actual scientists. I am not a scientist of course, and it’s over thirty years since I read mathematics, and then history and philosophy of science at university. I never thought I’d end up writing a science book myself. Not in a million years (or even a billion years now that we know what a really long time looks like). Despite my science-based education, I’ve always felt like an outsider from the world of the arts daring to peek in. I haven’t had a mathematical thought since I left university, and even during those years long gone, I spent most of my time reading novels and going to the opera. (Mathematics is the perfect subject for the lazy student.) I like that thing Auden said about scientists, that whenever he found himself in their company he felt like some shabby curate who had stumbled into a drawing-room full of dukes. There’s something about the way scientists think that can be really intimidating. It’s hard to live in a world in which even one’s most casual remarks are liable to be scrutinised for logical inconsistency.

What really interests me, and interests very few scientists, is what it is that they are doing when they do science, and whether it leaves room for anything else. Scientists are just happy to get on with what it is that they do. And very successful they are at it too. But I’m interested in the philosophy of what that is. On the whole, scientists despise philosophers. As the biologist Steve Jones once remarked: ‘philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex.’ He’s not being complimentary.

Science really got going 401 years ago when Galileo first raised a telescope to the Heavens and described what he saw there. What he saw was a reality made out of things that move. Science tells us what the stuff of reality is made out of, and what we mean by motion. It turns out that it is hard to answer these questions. The material of reality takes us on a voyage down to ‘virtual’ particles that exist (if they can be said to exist) in a so-called vacuum of writhing energy. And what we mean by motion takes us in both directions: out into a possibly infinite universe in which all motion is related to the motion of light in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, and back down to a quantum world in which the motion of even a single atom is unpredictable (and where space and time may exist in 11 dimensions). But for all the subtlety of our current scientific theories, the story of creation can be reduced to a single sentence: The universe is a patch of radiation that expanded. Alternatively, we can say that the universe is a patch of radiation that evolved. The expansion and evolution are equivalent terms. Evolve is merely what radiation does in an expanding universe. Various fields, including the famous Higgs field, explain how radiation becomes matter. As the expanding space cools down, these primeval parts of matter coalesce into atoms, and eventually under the force of gravity into large agglomerations that ignite, and which we call stars. Some of the larger stars explode and spew heavier elements into the universe for the first time. Simple compounds like water and carbon dioxide emerge, and other more complicated molecules like hydrocarbons. And if the conditions are just so on small planets that are not too cold, and not too hot, with just the right sort of gravitational stability, and protected from damaging radiation by a strong enough magnetic field, then just possibly these conditions are fair for life to emerge. These so-called goldilocks conditions have existed at least once in the universe, and perhaps exist prolifically across it. The jury is still out on that one. An opinion either way has to be a matter of belief at this point.

Science is about separating and naming, and looking and describing. Science isolates phenomena and names them before it attempts to describe them. The world is a world ‘out there’ of separateness. This is very different from, say, a Buddhist description of nature, which tells us that the separation is an illusion. Curiously, the different stances aren’t as far apart as it seems. What science does is relate separate phenomena together into descriptions, or theories. Science advances by relating more and more things together into a unified whole. The methodology is one thing, and what comes out of the methodology something else altogether. If you like, the methodology is the illusion, and the wholeness the reality. Such a philosophical understanding of what it is that science does, also helps to explain why science can make us feels so isolated from nature. The separation is the starting point, but not the end point. Ultimately, science has to account for us - we human observers - at the end (as far as we can tell) of a chain of complexity that stretches from the Big Bang to what we call ‘now,’ the present moment. After four hundred years science has only just begun to understand how to address such complexity as we are.

Science has a methodology that it uses to approach the truth. Observation, measurement, theory and technology feed into each other into a positive feedback loop that we call progress. Finer measurement leads to deeper theorising. Theories come and go, each encompassing the one that precedes it, showing where the previous theory holds and why it breaks down. The current theory is always truer than the one that came before because it has greater explanatory power. Science moves from true to truer. It’s great strength is that it never has to use the demon word ‘truth’. There is no such thing in science as ‘the truth’ only theories that are truer than what has gone before.

In his wonderful The God Delusion Dawkins distinguishes between deists, theists and atheists. For atheists there is nothing other than the evolution of stuff. Theists believe that God created and continues to interfere in his creation. And for deists, God created the universe and stepped back from his creation. Dawkins writes of his youthful attraction to deism, before his later adherence to full-blown atheism. In typical Dawkins fashion he is most scornful of those who claim to be agnostic. He tells us that science has no need of a creator only an explanation of the universe’s starting conditions. Well, I don’t see how this gets us very far. The starting conditions merely get more elusive, as indeed does the universe itself, the more we know about those conditions. God simply has got nothing to do with a scientific description of the universe, the only real question is whether one believes, or not, that a scientific description is all that there is.

Well, there’s art. Here’s Peter Campbell writing in the London Review of Books about the current exhibition of Henry Moore at Tate Britain:

‘Yet it is the sense one has when faced with ancient or exotic things that there is something beyond what can be grasped by mere inspection, if only some priest or shaman could give the correct interpretations, that makes the obscure impressive. We don’t necessarily need to know what things mean, but we do like to think they mean something: we want to know what Stonehenge was for.

No modern sculpture is embedded in systems of belief of that sort. With Moore you must look to your own responses for explanations of what you see and feel.’

Agnosticism is the acknowledgement that there things - most things I would say - that are beyond what can be understood, and always will be.  A certain kind of rationalist will put aside the unknown and be happy to wait for a rational, scientific description later. I say, if we wait too long we might forget what the questions are that we don’t know the answers to. I’m happy to stand up for agnostics.

To read an extract of You Are Here, click on the window below:

It’s the long weekend we’ve all been waiting for, and here’s a great Friday Feeling to make Easter even specialer.

I’m a big fan of extremely specific blogs. The newest one I’ve seen doing the round on Twitter is Michael Buble being stalked by a Velociraptor. Or how about Kemp Folds, or the now massive Photoshop Disasters? I was going to make a big ol’ list, but the good people of Urkelesque beat me to it. Good show sirs!

Filmy links: Arnie quotes. ‘You wanna be a farmer? Here’s a coupla achers.’ And this disturbing/hilarious footage of a children’s school play production of Scarface. ‘Shut your face, bacon!’  Classic.

How to tell if your cat is going to kill you. Vital information.

Have a great Easter everyone!

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.

Do we believe in coincidences? I was all set to write a Turbine Blog post for the lovely people at Windmill about a familial coincidence I uncovered whilst researching the true murder case which features in my novel, The Finest Type of English Womanhood, but now, to be frank, I’m confused. (By the way this subject has been politely negotiated between Harvey and myself, as I had an urgent desire to share with the world the dramatic highs and lows of my search for a suitable dress to wear to the Costa Book Awards; Harvey however remained polite, implacable but firm on the subject).

So, I was going to spin out my tale, with its surprising and shocking ending, but I find that I’m sitting here suddenly unconvinced that it’s in anyway astonishing or odd or even unlikely, and the more I think about it, the less outlandish or accidental it becomes. I’ve now (almost) decided that it isn’t a coincidence at all but utterly understandable, in fact, if it isn’t too dramatic to say so, inevitable. Not only because of banal common-place factors such as time, incident and place, but also, I’m realizing, because of my grandfather’s extraordinary Zelig-like character. But I’m racing ahead.

Firstly the ‘coincidence’ under question.

When I was researching the history of the Union Castle steamer line - the ships which travelled between Britain and South Africa - I came across the story of Gay Gibson, a young actress murdered aboard the Durban Castle in 1947. The deck steward James Camb was accused of her murder.  Now, the reason I was doing the original research, the fact that I wanted to write about two girls journeying to Johannesburg in that immediate post-war, pre-apartheid era was not coincidental. My grandparents, and my mother, had emigrated there in 1946. As a child, I had been both entranced and disturbed by my grandparents’ photograph albums; my beautiful grandmother in a large hat and scoop-neck dress, my grandfather in a dapper silk suit at a party, holding a glass of champagne, but then, turning the page, a photograph of my mother sitting in the strange garden of her new house in Johannesburg, one hand up to shade her bewildered face, dark circles under eyes, blinking in the sunshine. You could feel the shock of the sun on her pasty, war-rationed skin.

Gay Gibson - just the idea of her - tied in beautifully with what I was interested to write about too; young women trying to figure out who or how you ought to be and what goes wrong when you don’t know.

I went to the British Newspaper library and read on microfilm the newspaper coverage of the trial. I read Denis Herbstein’s “The Porthole Murder Mystery’ and the published transcript of the murder trial of James Camb.

Here was the coincidence. My grandfather was mentioned in the trial transcript. Weird, huh? I was shocked at the time, his very name there in print, being discussed as a ‘known associate’ of Gay Gibson. One witness said they’d seen them having lunch, and that he had written her a reference for a theatrical agent in London, which she took on to the Durban Castle in her handbag.

Coincidence, right?

Or is it. My grandfather  had been born in London’s east end to Hugarian-Jewish immigrant parents. From this modest start he had made himself up, literally, to the degree that nobody quite seems to know the truth. He said he was picked off the streets by philanthropists and educated, that he ran a socialist underground press, that he joined the army and learnt how to box. All of these could well be true, and probably are.  One thing that is true is that all families have and like to weave their stories and myths about themselves - mine possibly more so than others - and one abiding story in my family is that you could walk into any room or, more accurately, any bar in the world with my grandfather, anywhere, anytime, and someone there would look up, smile and say, ‘Hello Mike! Why are you here?’

The second most relevant thing I can think to tell you about my grandfather is that all around his dining-room hung photographs of him posing with Hollywood stars - John Wayne, Bob Hope, Henry Fonda, Mike Silver and Debbie Reynolds, laughing and clutching one another smiling into the camera. See, Zelig. I said to him once, ‘But why are you with them?’ and he shrugged, smiled and winked at me.

By this I don’t mean to suggest he was a charlatan, he wasn’t - he was, to name a few attributes, brilliantly clever, hard-working, politically energetic, insightful, complex, charming and a surprisingly graceful dancer, friend to thousands but, I suspect, known to very few.

So, when I think that my grandfather, who had just arrived from his army post in Israel to run a commercial radio station in Johannesburg, knew Gay Gibson, I just can’t be surprised by this fact.

And because The Finest Type of English Womanhood is also a story of outsiders wanting to belong, but making it up as they go along and trying - in this case, disastrously - to find their place in the world,  it doesn’t seem unlikely or coincidental that my grandfather might have an off the page walk-on part in this tale, indeed it is characteristic that he should.

Puzzling over writing this blog, I looked up ‘Coincidence’ on Wiki and was struck by this quote from Plutarch, ‘It is no great wonder if in long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur’ . If Plutarch had known my grandfather and, you know, there is this tiny, crazy part of me that wouldn’t be entirely boggle-eyed about that either,  he might have added, ‘Especially if Mike Silver were involved.’

So, do we believe in coincidences or not?

P.S. I wore a black dress, with kick ass shoes.

The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath is out now. Buy it from Amazon, Play, Waterstones.com, or from your local bookshop.