Andy Miller

We should say what we're... I mean, we've probably already kind of given you a bit of a clue that the book we're here to discuss, or books, because it's more than one, really...

But the main book is The Springs of Affection, a collection of stories by the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, which was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1997, although all but one of the stories in that collection appeared originally in The New Yorker, where Maeve Brennan was a staff writer for 27 years.

So an adopted New Yorker, Brennan died there in 1993.

and was by that time so thoroughly forgotten in her native land that she received no obituaries in any Irish papers.

The publication of this collection was to change all that.

Anyway, we'll get on to that in a moment.

First, I've got to ask the old familiar question, Andy.

What have you been reading this week?

I have been reading a book that will...

almost certainly sounds stranger in some ways than it is.

It's a verse novel by P.J.

Harvey, the singer-songwriter, musician, Polly Jean Harvey, called Orlam.

It's basically a coming of age.

The main character is a nine-year-old

girl who lives in a village in a kind of version of Dorset.

The book is written in verse and each verse is produced in Dorset dialect and also there's a translation on the facing page into more conventional English.

One of the

fun tricks is the more difficult the dialect the lighter the type of the English translation so there's a kind of a coding system that goes through the poems also come with with footnotes a lot of the poetry is based on traditional Dorset folk rhymes the story is very basically narrated by a lamb's eyeball or lamb is the eyeball of a an all-seeing lamb's eyeball it's about Ira Abel

As I say, coming of age, she suffers an assault in a terrible place called the Red Shed and restores herself by going to Gore Woods, which is the woods next to her house in this strange village.

It's like a kind of dark almanac.