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Vienna 2: Life (and death) beneath the surface

user@domain.com — 2012-01-27T22:32:36+00:00

Vienna is a city of surface; one of the world’s most beautiful. But it has historically had a profound, and influential, fascination with what lies beneath those surfaces. The Third Man, with its subterranean pursuits, might be a metaphor for the city itself. But in one afternoon recently I visited two others...

Vienna in Advent

user@domain.com — 2011-12-29T13:40:31+00:00

I spent a few idyllic -- good to be able to use the word precisely for once -- days in Vienna just before Christmas; now I’m trying to find a reason to set my next Laurence Bartram novel there rather than in Rome, my original plan. Such are the seductions of the writer’s trade... More on Vienna here.

John Emmett is one of WSJ's Top Ten of 2011

user@domain.com — 2011-12-17T13:32:00+00:00

Very exciting to see that the Wall Street Journal has named The Return of Captain John Emmett as one of its Top Ten Mysteries of 2011. See the review here.

"Sunlight on the Garden" and the question of grief.

user@domain.com — 2011-11-17T10:59:23+00:00

in my memoir Sunlight on the Garden, I wrote that we were, despite it all, a family of survivors. Nobody had ever killed themselves. A few weeks ago, that changed. It’s still terribly raw but I have written about it here.

Greece: the abyss gazes back.

user@domain.com — 2011-09-19T11:22:23+01:00

You can see what the Greek finance minister is complaining about this morning. Greece has been a scapegoat for global systeic failures. It’s being reviled, bullied, harrassed and insulted by people who often seem to have no idea at all what the country is like, or its history, or its people. If it were a creditor harrassing and threatening an individual debtor like this, they’d be acting illegally and -- as has happened before -- the debt would be wiped out.

Oddly – actually, not that oddly when you consider its record in general – the British press has been the most shamefully bullying. in my little Greek island cottage now, and I have set out some thoughts here.

John Emmett is Richard & Judy Book Club top pick

user@domain.com — 2011-07-21T12:17:55+01:00

I’m very happy to say that The Return of Captain John Emmett is now Richard & Judy Book Club featured book. Some very nice comments from Richard and from Judy, and a video interview with me which you can see below or on their site .

American reviews of John Emmett

user@domain.com — 2011-07-16T10:29:47+01:00

Excited to see the first reviews of The Return of Captain John Emmett in the USA... Carole E. Barrowman, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel calls it “quiet, moving . . . elegant” while Tom Nolan of the Wall Street Journal, in the sort of review any author would sell her soul for, describes it as “elegant . . . restrained and marvelous.” (I do like “elegant”. It’s how I secretly saw myself all along...)

5 July: The Return of Captain John Emmett published in USA

user@domain.com — 2011-07-05T17:30:48+01:00

...which says it all, really. Very exciting — and slightly nerve-wracking to see how what is, after all, a very English story will play in America.

The future of book promotion?

user@domain.com — 2011-06-08T10:43:47+01:00

My American publishers’ new... well, I suppose you’d have to call it “trailer” for the US edition of The Return of Captain John Emmett really took my breath away. So simple yet eloquent, and brilliantly designed and executed. Hard to believe that it’s really just a version of Mick Wiggins’s superb and evocative book cover... and even stranger, I’d swear that the words were actually spoken aloud. To Circle of Seven, who produced it: thank you.

Sunny weekend in Fowey

user@domain.com — 2011-05-19T20:31:24+01:00

This week is the Du Maurier Festival in Fowey, Cornwall, and I arrived on a warm and sunny day, with the weather forecast promising a beautiful few days.

Friday at 11:45 I joined Stella Duffy and Helen Taylor to discuss the perennial appeal of du Maurier's historical novels. We discussed, with a packed audience, how, in what are fairly hard times for books and publishing in general, there’s recently been a serious revival of the historical novel. It’s a fascinating subject and with two such distinguished fellow-speakers, I imagine I’ll spend more time listening to them than talking myself...

On Saturday, I talked about my new novel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton in the Fowey Hall Hote. It was a beautiful venue and voted one of the top ten seaside hotels in Europe; I was lucky enough to be staying there, and I can see why. But the most exciting thing, for me, was discovering that I was staying in the very building which was the original inspiration for Toad Hall, in Kenneth Grahame’s the Wind in the Willows. Now there’s a literary connection to boast about!

Fowey Manor Hotel -- the inspiration for Toad Hall

John Emmett "one of the best reads I can remember" — Richard Madeley

user@domain.com — 2011-05-12T23:07:09+01:00

Praise is always hard to believe, even from such consummate professionals as Richard & Judy. Have they really read it? Is there a secret Autocue that only they can see? Is someone going to arrive and shepherd me gently off the set, murmuring “Awfully sorry; bit of a mix-up”?

So all the more comforting — and flattering — to hear Richard Madeley interviewed on the BBC this afternoon talking about The Return of Captain John Emmett. — “An absolute corker”.

You can hear the full interview here (it starts around 0:53 in) or listen to the excerpt.

Richard & Judy Book Club choose John Emmett as Summer Read

user@domain.com — 2011-05-11T10:36:00+01:00

A brilliant start to the day -- the Richard & Judy Book Club have chosen The Return of Captain John Emmett as one of their Summer Reads.

This is a tremendously successful partnership with W H Smith (and Galaxy chocolate, the readers’ companion). So far, they’ve sold more than two million books. But, more importantly, it confirms what every writer hopes: that she’s struck the right note and there are indeed readers for her story. I’m thrilled. Especially as I’m in such excellent company, such as Jed Rubenfeld’s The Death Instinct and When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman, both of which I recently read and loved.

And now I’m off to Soho for my turn on The Sofa...

Dove Grey Reader on John Emmett

user@domain.com — 2011-05-09T11:22:00+01:00

A lovely and thoughtful review from the remarkable Dove Grey Reader, who describes herself as “a Devonshire based bookaholic, sock-knitting quilter who is a community nurse in her spare time”. (Actually, I think she’s being over-modest, not just because she got precisely what I was trying to achieve with The Return of Captain John Emmett, but because she’s established herself as one of the leading, and most influential, of book-bloggers in the country.)

She recommends John Emmett to people who

...are in search of a really good read, want some smooth-flowing writing and a book that looks as if it will be part of a series...

Publishers Weekly (US) on John Emmett

user@domain.com — 2011-05-09T11:23:00+01:00

With the US publication of The Return of Captain John Emmett rapidly approaching, it’s nice to see that the influential Publishers Weekly describes it as:

compelling . . . an elegant, engrossing read.

The full review is here.

Kitty Easton "Beautifully written and vividly imagined"

user@domain.com — 2011-05-09T11:50:00+01:00

Jessica Mann, in The Literary Review, writes:

Five years after the end of the Great War, Easton Deadall is a village of widows, children and old men . . . haunted by memories and unsolved mysteries. In 1911 five-year-old Kitty Easton, heiress to the estate, disappeared from her home never to be seen again. Her mother insists she is still aliver . . . by the end family mysteries have been solved and ancient mysteries exposed . . . it is a novel about sorrow and secrecy, beautifully written and vividly imagined . . . with the clarity of a photograph for the mind’s eye.

(Read the full review in the May edition.)

FT declares my new book Kitty Easton "Outstanding"

user@domain.com — 2011-05-09T11:49:31+01:00

Very nice review of The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Maria Crawford in the Financial Times.

Architecture and archaeology provide neat metaphors for digging up past events . . . As in Bartram’s previous sleuthing, probing troubled memories invites new mysteries, with further disappearances and discoveries compounding the puzzle . . . Speller’s navigation of trauma – of old soldiers, of a community, of a shaken social class – is outstanding.

Read the full review here.

The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton published

user@domain.com — 2011-05-05T00:01:00+01:00

My second Laurence Bartram novel, The Strange Case of Kitty Easton, is published today. For more on that, see here.

Kathleen Kent: praise for John Emmett

user@domain.com — 2011-03-31T15:55:00+01:00

A very generous quote from Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic’s Daughter and The Traitor’s Wife, for the USA edition of John Emmett. She writes:

"A complex and gripping novel of post World War I England still devastated by violence and loss, Elizabeth Speller's The Return of Captain John Emmett recreates a by-gone era of great innocence and incomprehensible depravity through her richly imagined narrative and characters."

Emmett in America...

user@domain.com — 2011-03-30T14:47:00+01:00

The Return of Captain John Emmett will shortly be published in the USA by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. If you live in the USA, you can order your copy by clicking on Capt. Emmett's splendid and elegant new cover:

John Emmett shortlisted for Waverton Prize

user@domain.com — 2011-03-21T14:01:16+00:00

The Return of Captain John Emmett has been shortlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award 2011. This is a prestigious prize for the best début novel published in the last twelve months, so just to be shortlisted is a great honour.

John Emmett is Orange New Writers Book of the Month

user@domain.com — 2011-04-01T13:57:00+01:00

I’m delighted to learn that the paperback of my novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, has been chosen as Orange New Writers Book of the Month for April, in association with Waterstone’s. It’s very exciting to see my firstborn having such good fortune out in the world; the paperback could hardly have a better start in life. Buy online or find a branch of Waterstones near you.