It struck me that simply delivering slabs of the new book probably wasn’t a great idea – lack of context and all that. Better instead to offer up a few choice bits which give a flavor of what is to come. To that end, here’s another excerpt from early on in the book. The narrator’s grandparents have just arrived in …
152,531…
… is a big number. It’s the number of words, as of right this instant, that are in my book. If memory serves, this is more than double the number of words in my first novel, Working It Out. (Of course, whether that is a good or a bad thing is open to debate.) Anyway, I am inching slowly towards …
Paradise, Part 2
The voice that had halted Jette’s afternoon walk belonged to my grandfather, Frederick Meisenheimer, and in fact Jette’s intuition had been exactly right: he was singing directly to her. Frederick had watched her make her way around the path, following the same route she always followed. When she passed in front of the bush he was hiding behind, he crossed …
Opening Bit (technical term) to my new novel, "Paradise" – You Read it Here First
Always, there was music. It was music – Puccini, to be precise – that first drew my grandparents into each other’s orbit, more than a hundred years ago. It was an unusually warm afternoon in early spring, in the grandest municipal garden in Hanover, the Segerpark. My grandmother, Henriette Furst, was taking her usual Sunday stroll among the regimented flowerbeds …
Death Becomes Me
For all those of you who are contemplating writing a multi-generation saga for your next novel (come on, admit it), a word of warning for you. All of my previous books have taken place over a relatively short time period. One of the things I wanted to do with my new novel was to expand that rather tired palette (to …
Eureka!
Today was kind of a big day for me and my little ole book. I’ve spent more than three years on this baby, painfully cranking out the 130,000-odd words that constitute my fifth novel, whose working title is Paradise. (5 second pitch: “Absolom Absolom meets The Sound of Music.”) And all this time, I’ve been wondering: how on earth am …
What's It All About, Alfie?
So, yeah, anyway. This blog. I wanted to have a go at trying to give some sort of mission statement – more for my benefit than yours, really, just to keep me on the straight and narrow. Here’s what I do not want: within a couple hours of mentioning on facebook that I was contemplating starting a blog, I got …