Francis Spufford

But it's not.

It turns out that she has been

brewing up something else, something artfully different and very narratively sly and full of completely different pleasures from that sort of beautiful flowing Regency thing that she came up with for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

It certainly is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, we're just going to go, yeah, together for a while over that one, aren't we?

Two things very recently, like in the last month.

One of them must be out in Australia.

I don't know if the other one is yet.

The one that's definitely out is an article called The Heavens by Sandra Newman, which is a strange kind of dark, beautiful, crystalline thing, which starts in a world happier than ours and is the most sweet natured and beautifully observed love story between two people who

meet in the year 2000 at a party in Manhattan.

Only one of them, when she sleeps, dreams her way into Elizabethan England.

And every time she does something in Elizabethan England, when she wakes up, the world is a little bit worse back in Manhattan.

And it gets very unpleasant indeed.

But it's still a love story.

I've never read anything like it.

And I am at this point

going to be 57 soon so quite a lot of the books i read i have now read something like it but i have never read anything like that and the other thing which may be not out in australia yet is a beautifully observed short novel called little scratch by rebecca watson it's a london book it's a piece of it's stream of consciousness really with typographical experiments but rendering a

one very very close-up day within the mind of a a woman who has been sexually assaulted recently and has not told anyone about it so it's a it's a mind with an injury in it which is doing everyday things and it is i suppose in the tradition of virginia wolf it's it's a wolfian take on a painful and extraordinarily well-observed contemporary situation um