Max Porter

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, his writing is so crisp, is so matter of fact.

Not to get too, you know, invisible beret about this.

And I love her books.

I think they're brilliant.

My parents read that book to me so many times.

It's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I'm delighted and flattered, obviously, but also surprised because it's a book that is incredibly dense on the surface and has quite an unusual ambition.

As far as novels go, it sets out to do something which in our time is perhaps quite unfashionable in as much it aims to discomfort and unnerve and discombobulate and cloud, you know, deepen and obfuscate rather than unravel and show itself and have a plot and all those things.

So I'm delighted because I hope that it would

cause people to ask questions not just of it, of the death of Francis Baker, but also of themselves as how they read books, how they read novels, what they expect a novel to be, what they expect prose or poetry to be, but also what they think about fiction, about the life of real people.

So is it in any way biographic?

What is its relationship to biography?

What is its relationship to art history?

What is its relationship to actual paintings?

So all these questions, I love the idea that people might be asking them.

Because it's a lonely old business writing a book and it's nice to have friends in the kind of post-mortem.

I hope so.

I hope that's something that I do across all my books.