Guildford Book Festival - bestselling Surrey authors share their top reads

Guildford Book Festival 2011

Originally published in Surrey Life magazine October 2011

Autumn’s arrival signals a time for leaves to fall and pages to turn in Surrey, as Guildford Book Festival brings the literary inclined to the fore in our county town. Here, we speak to a few of this year’s authors, all of whom are appearing over the course of the festival, to find out what books have caught their attention lately

Nev Fountain
My favourite recent read is a collection of sublime and ridiculous stories from Surrey’s very own Brigadoon. Louis De Bernière’s Notwithstanding is about a fictional village that’s a hop and a skip from Godalming. Living a hop and a skip from Godalming myself (and suspecting that the village I dwell in is at least semi-fictional), this was a natural book for me to seek out. Louis has spun Notwithstanding out of a beautiful skein of sepia-tinted childhood memories; catching fish, walks to church, pet rocks, mad nuns... The stories are so light and whimsical they seem to float straight into your head without the inconvenience of reading the words. My favourite tale is Mrs Mac, which is like the film The Sixth Sense as if written by Beatrix Potter. Wonderful stuff.

LA Larkin
I have just finished reading The Wreckage by Michael Robotham, which is a departure from his psychological thriller series. This is a government and banking conspiracy story that had me on the edge of my seat. Told through intriguing characters, Michael brings to life the horror of Iraq and the menace of an assassin known as The Courier, which he skillfully combines with a touch of humour. Recently, I appeared at a book festival with Michael. He revealed the idea for The Wreckage came from a discovery that four of the biggest bank robberies in history had taken place in Iraq. That got me hooked!”

Keith Jeffery
The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming is predicated on the notion that there was a ‘sixth man’ beyond the famous ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring of which Kim Philby was the most famous. This is an intriguing notion and Cumming plausibly moves the action on from Cold War rivalry to more enduring antagonisms between the British and a Russian intelligence service prepared to undertake lethal operations in the West. The gripping narrative concerns a naive English academic, who ‘wanted to think the best of people … and to trust that human decency would win through’, but gets caught up in a predictably nasty and hazardous web of deceit. With echoes of Le Carré, it portrays an MI6 populated by amoral apparatchiks who believe that spying is not at all about ideological conviction, duty or loyalty to one’s country, but ‘weaknesses – the lust for money, for status, for sex’.

Chris Grace
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel deserves every accolade already awarded. I began with health warnings from others running in my ears: “It is difficult to get into; it is never clear who ‘He’ is; it is too heavy…’’ But, fortunately, I persisted. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, Wolf Hall is essentially the life and times, up to 1535, of Thomas Cromwell and the narrative is continuously from his perspective. It recreates the Tudor world unlike any other I have read. It has imaginative insights and descriptive prose that take your breath away. I have read it four times and learnt something new each time. As a reviewer put it, ‘Wolf Hall is a feast’. Read it!

Felix Francis
I read The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars by Patrick Hennessey as part of my research for my novel Crossfire, but it was far from being a chore. With my own son, William, serving at the time with the Grenadier Guards in Afghanistan, it was my way of finding out a little more about his life on the front line. Hennessey’s description of the boredom of war broken only by brief episodes of high-adrenalin excitement and bowel-moving fear makes the reader believe that he, too, is there face-to-face with the Taliban. Yet it is also a reflective piece. It is not a history of strategic decisions and ‘why’, it is the personal views and raw experiences of a young man sent far from home to ‘do and die’.

Hallie Rubenhold
I loved How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran, and the fresh perspective it offered on being a female in the 21st century. For a start, Moran not only embraces the term ‘feminist’, but completely reinvents it. Being a feminist comes down to simply wanting to maintain control over your own body, not hating men or plotting to take over the world. It’s about treating people with respect – and men can be feminists too. It was fascinating to read this so soon after writing Mistress of My Fate, which is about a young woman in the 18th century attempting to assume some control over her body and her life. In spite of the difficulties women face today, it’s quite uplifting to think how far we’ve come!

Francine Stock
I caught up this summer with Edmund de Waal’s affecting history of his family’s effects, The Hare With Amber Eyes. It is as beguiling as the very objects that inspired it, the exquisitely made Japanese netsuke. And although it’s hard to find a copy outside a library, I’d also recommend Iris Barry’s 1926 Let’s Go To The Pictures, a sparkling, perceptive account of what now seems to us the adolescence of cinema-going. She’s sharp on the film-makers, touching and vivid about the audiences and remarkably prophetic. If we don’t speak up, she warns, they’ll serve us rubbish.

Isabel Ashdown
A book I recently loved was Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, which is the tale of a young family growing up against the beautiful but harsh landscape of rural Northern Ontario. With my own writing, it is always the characters and their relationships that fascinate me most. In Crow Lake, Lawson’s characters develop with rare subtlety, to gradually reveal the story of a family falling apart at the seams.  From the beautiful descriptions of magnificent rural Ontario to the evocative storytelling across the generations, this is a story that lingers – compelling, lyrical and wise.

Martin Bell
I have just finished Cables from Kabul, written by Sherard Cowper-Coles, our former ambassador to Afghanistan. It is a vivid account of missed opportunities, both military and diplomatic. In my view, it is a ‘must-read’ for anyone who wishes to understand how so many of our foreign adventures end in disappointment – and at what a cost!

Ceri Radford
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. A close family friend gave me a copy for my sixteenth birthday and I’ve still got it: a little battered, a little yellow, but still there on my bedside table. It may sound trite, but there is something so basically comforting about knowing that there’s a happy ending ahead. And Austen’s writing is anything but trivial: I find something new to admire in her elegant but waspish prose every time I read it. Her comic characters – the pompous Mr Collins, the breathless Mrs Bennet – are superb, while Lizzie is my favourite literary heroine: clever, funny, feisty and flawed.

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Guildford Book Festival 2010

Originally published in Surrey Life magazine October 2010

Autumn's arrival signals a time for leaves to fall and pages to turn in Surrey, as Guildford Book Festival brings the literary inclined to the fore in our county town

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Based in Guildford, well-known author ADELE PARKS has written nine bestsellers, including Love Lies and Tell Me Something, and sold over a million copies of her books in the UK alone. Her latest novel, Men I’ve Loved Before, was published in July.

What I’m reading…
“This year, I am a judge for the Costa Novel Award, which has involved reading close to 60 books in a period of 14 weeks and I’m still in the middle of that,” says Adele. “The task is at once exhausting and exhilarating. I’ve been challenged to read widely, outside the genres I traditionally pick, which has been good for me as a reader and a writer. I took nine Costa Novel Award contenders on holiday with me but still managed to run out of reading matter. The local English bookshop did a line in classics, so I bought The Great Gatsby, which I haven’t read for 20 years. A taut, insightful and beautiful novel.”

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Writer of the best-selling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, about Stone Age boy Torak and his beloved wolf, Wimbledon resident MICHELLE PAVER is one of the area’s leading authors.

What I’m reading…
“As I’ve had a noisy summer plagued by roadworks, I’ve been rereading Tove Jansson’s A Winter Book,” says Michelle. “It’s a collection of short stories, many of which vividly evoke the wild Finnish coast that Jansson knew so well. Her writing is clear, cool and unsentimental. Here are two of my favourites: an old woman on a remote little island encounters a squirrel, which comes to dominate her life; and a small girl meets her first iceberg. Both stories are beautiful, and true to icebergs and squirrels as well as to people, and make me long for the Arctic.”

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Festival patron ELIZABETH BUCHAN may not be a resident of our fair county, but born in Guildford she can still always be relied upon to support her hometown festival. Her latest novel is entitled Separate Beds.

What I’m reading…
“I’m half way through The Junior Officers’ Reading Club and, so far, the reading club has not had an airing (I think that will come later),” says Elizabeth. “It is the portrait of a rookie soldier and the process by which he is forged into an officer ready for the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is hard to convey the high-octane drive to the book – taut, brutal, outrageously funny and shocking. As a despatch from the heartlands of modern warfare, it is revelatory. As a savagely honest examination of man as soldier, it is a classic.”

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Best known as Peggy Archer and the only original member of the cast still in The Archers, BBC Radio 4’s longest running soap opera, East Horsley resident JUNE SPENCER released her autobiography, The Road to Ambridge, in October

What I’m reading…
“Usually, I like to read books that are out of the ordinary and perhaps a bit challenging,” says June. “But now and then, I choose something to make me laugh. At present, I am reading The Prostrate Years by Sue Townsend. Her humour is so succinct and her wonderfully awful characters are brought to life so roundly by her sharp wit. A joyful read.”

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Born in Kashmir and brought up in Derbyshire, Guildford resident ALEXA GOODWIN is one of three sisters who have devised a spice box (as used by the Hairy Bikers) and released the appropriately named The Three Sisters Indian Cookbook.

What I’m reading…
“At the moment, I’m reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which is a heartbreaking, yet funny novel,” says Alexa. “It has been some time since I have read a book that I found so hard to put down. It perfectly captures life in the 1960s, the racial tensions and the women who, though they worked for white families and raised their children, were never fully accepted. I really felt the friendship these three women formed, Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny, was something very special. This truly is a remarkable novel and a story that has stayed with me long after it was finished.”

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Writing historical crime books under the pseudonym of SJ Parris, STEPHANIE MERRITT is a features writer for The Guardian and The Observer and author of the Heresy series. She lives in Guildford.

What I’m reading…
“I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance proof copy of Freedom, the new novel by Jonathan Franzen, which came out in September,” says Stephanie. “I loved The Corrections and his collections of essays and I’m quite obsessed with him as a stylist – he’s probably one of the smartest and most perceptive chroniclers of modern life. Again, it’s a study of one family against a backdrop of social and political change, and it’s also darkly funny, which is essential for me in any serious novel.”

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Members Comments

• Comment by: MatthewWilliams 09 November 2010 - 06:02

  Favourite book of all time: probably The Count of Monte Cristo because I love the spectrum of emotion it covers. It would probably be something else if I commented tomorrow.
  
  Currently reading: Sir Michael Caine's biography. Haven't got far because of deadline though.

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