Aoife Clifford

LAUGHTER

But we do know that music.

I mean, it would be interesting.

I was thinking the exact same thing about if I give this book to one of my children, what would they make of it when they don't know that music at all?

Whereas at least in the 60s, I mean, we do know the Beatles music.

I mean, I think there's so much there about the making of music and the experiencing of going to live music and what does that feel like?

that that is still, it's that experience.

So it doesn't actually matter that you don't know the Hoodoo Guru single, but that you know that feeling of what it's like to experience in live, particularly live rock music or punk music or whatever, that will ring true to you no matter what, I think.

Yes, like I thought of the Visit from the Goon Squad too, not because of the music side of it, but because of the way some of the chapters are presented.

So you might not be up to this part, but there is quite a moving PowerPoint presentation chapter in Visit to the Goon Squad, which you would have thought was impossible.

Absolutely not.

Whereas here there are chapters where the words are in the shape of an LP.

So there is a lot of experimenting in the presentation of the material that reminded me, because I think probably Jennifer Egan is probably one of the best examples of that.

It can be so effective and really make you think about the way words work.

Well, I would recommend, if you walked into my bookshop now and I was still working in it, I would recommend Lucy Treloar's Wolf Island, which I was trying to think of a central character that I loved as much as I loved Jean and the animals in that country.

Yeah.

Lucy's character, Kitty Hawk, is similarly a wonderful kind of person to journey with through equally kind of strange and difficult lands, and it's stunningly written.

I mean, I think the only good thing I can think of about 2020 so far is that there have been amazing books published, so many really fantastic new books.

This was a book actually from last year, late last year, and I read it over the summer holidays and it's a book that I'm still thinking about even though I have read like Killing Mantell and Maggie O'Farrell and I'm about to pick up David Mitchell.

So there's some such stunning books out at the moment.