Michaela Kolowski

There's a beautiful feedback loop between creativity and action that David Mitchell describes really powerfully.

Nicola Shakespeare is an English writer with a strong connection to Australia.

He's written about Tasmania and has a biography of Bruce Chatman, which is wonderful.

The sandpit of the title is actually at the side of a school in Oxford where most of the story takes place.

It's a school called the Phoenix School, a prep school, as the English call it, a private co-ed school where they learn Latin and play rugby and might go on to rule the world.

You're getting the picture.

He's kind of a bit of a sort of a faded human, really.

He's a journalist who

survived in his trade by working out that you couldn't trust anyone and you get the impression that he really wants to trust people he spent a lot of his life living in brazil he's an only child and he's a bit sort of family-less and he it turns out john dyer this character had actually appeared in the earlier novel the dancer upstairs john dyer's marriage has ended his wife sort of fell out of love with him and left him for someone else and who has had children with someone else and he has custody of his only son who he really loves who's about 12 whose name is leandro

And all throughout this book, The Sandpit, John Dyer is working on a very interesting historical project about Brazil and doing a lot of research on that.

And he's also damaged by a few undisclosed things in his past that become a little clearer as the story evolves.

so who's he what's going on there before i talk about marva i should say that the characters in this novel are just so well drawn they feel um like you've seen them speak before or you've seen them in a television program before they just completely come to life and so many of them are so unlikable but they're wonderful and really carefully drawn by um nicholas shakespeare i really loved a lot of them i enjoyed reading them but marva is a wonderful character he's a bit shambolic

He's a youngish man.

He was a student from Tehran.

He's a nuclear physicist.

And all we know about him is that he has a wife and child still in Iran who can't leave.

And he's in Oxford with his son, Samir, who's about the same age as Leandro, as John Dyer's son.

And really, Mavar and John Dyer are brought together because both of their sons are being bullied by the same Russian kid.

And what we see evolve in the course of The Sandpit is an unusual friendship between Marva and John Dyer that springs up very quickly.

There's a lot of intuitive kind of liking and trust that is shared between them.