I’ve published a new paperback edition of my second novel Scenes from the Island. It’s a book I’m still proud of, even though writing it was a hugely difficult experience for me. An odd mix of genre and literary fiction, the novel found itself lost in the grid. I still find that a bit unfair– as much for the potential of this kind of book as for myself as a writer– and tracing how I came to write a novel like that was probably one of the prime reasons for starting this blog. It’s nice to give it another chance. An excerpt from the opening follows below. You can buy Scenes from the Island here.
‘You reach Emperor Court along a new road, a dreamy petrol-blue expanse, cutting perfectly across a delta of wild marshland. You turn off the main coastal route and keep the remains of a village behind you: the closed up service station, the vacant play park and roadside café, the row of yellow terraced cottages, subsided, threatened. The road is strewn with traffic barricades; feathered grass arcs to an unheard breeze. The car engine sounds troubled, and it has been like that ever since you left the city. But everything is fine. You are nearly there. Your final destination. The turns of the road offer glimpses of the building’s white stucco depth, but face on, the wide, high frontage is mostly glass. Sheer, obscure, aquatic. A turquoise enhancement of the sky.’
Absence Club 