Francis Spufford

But it is a brilliant and continuously, quietly funny novel of character.

And the trick of being observantly funny and even bitchy while doing universal sympathy for all of your cast is absolutely extraordinary.

And I've got no idea quite how she does it.

It's also within the bounds of the Victorian novel genre.

kind of quite sexy it's very good on on desire and the way it works and it's very good on on what happens in marriages and it's it's very good not in a vengeful way but in a kind of sorrowful clinical way about the awful things that happen to men who who think what they what they need is a sweetly submissive partner and kind of end up getting a kind of blonde vampire who they need disguised as a sweet submissive partner

oh, it's a great work.

And I expect that when I read it again, when I'm 70, it'll be different again and I'll learn something else new from it.

It will turn out to have some other dimension, which is presently invisible to me.

Okay, we are missing science fiction and fantasy too, because I am

I am the kind of reader who doesn't think that the world is a harsh and difficult place, which can only be described in a very few words chosen with difficulty by Samuel Beckett.

I think the world is an amazingly, copiously, various, plural, wonderful place, and awful place, but wonderful too.

And that there are as many different ways of representing it and getting pleasure out of representing it as there are human imaginations.

and that what genre fiction has to offer can be just as serious and just as powerful.

So I wouldn't be the writer I am, and I wouldn't be the reader I am, had I not been, on the one hand, reading the excellent science fiction of, for example, Kim Stanley Robinson, a great Californian writer who

who wrote, it sounds like Saint Prey, the greatest novels about Mars ever written, but compared to what?

But they are up there with Tolstoy.

Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars are also masterclasses in how to handle an imagined place, how to handle a large cast.

He's really, really good.

And I like the way that science fiction in general works.

It helps with the problem of representing work because there are important things that aren't just personal.