Tanya Dalziel

I've also been reading or rereading actually William Faulkner's Light in August, which was published in 1932, but feels kind of raw and bruising read in the current context of Black Lives Matter.

So this is a book that is set in an imaginary US South and

It's a kind of modernist text, has indebtedness to the Gothic, and interleaves the story of several major characters, including a young white woman who's pregnant and in search for the father of her baby, but also a man who kind of identifies as both white and black and neither, and ends up being subject to really horrific racialized violence.

So it's a really difficult book, I think, to read at this point in time.

The other things I've been looking at are Nora Krug's Heimat, which is recently published, 2018.

That's a graphic novel.

And the last book that's been lying around my house is Mark Lanigan's Sing Backwards and Weep, which Mark Lanigan, as many of your listeners will know, was a member of the Screaming Trees, the band, the front man of that band.

He also was Queen of the Stone Age and also has done some

work with Isabel Campbell, among other musical artists.

And it's a classic rock and roll memoir of drugs, sex, rock and roll, and kind of speaks really interestingly, I think, to another book that's also interesting in that era, which is Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth.

So those two books together give a really interesting account of the 90s music scene.

I'm looking forward to hearing what you've got to say.

Well, I guess the conceit of the book is an historian's dream.

The idea that there's this kind of cachet of unknown private papers belonging to Elizabeth MacArthur, which just has been suddenly discovered, is something that I guess historians and fiction writers long for.

And the idea that Kate Grenfell actually sets herself up in the text and

as a character of sorts as well, I thought was a really interesting device.

So we're introduced to her as a kind of curator of these papers.

And so it sets up the author as an agent within the story being told, which I think is something that is asking us to think about that idea of the trafficking between fact and fiction at the very beginning of the text.

Yeah, I think the novel is very aware of that context and that inheritance.

There's reference to Jane Austen throughout the novel.