BOOKS!

Including the new one

There’s virtually nothing I love more than writing books, but one thing I love almost as much is holding those books in my hands for the first time. I got to do it again a few days ago and it was just as exciting as it was the first time, way back in 2002. What I relish significantly less is asking people to purchase my books. Ideally what would happen is I’d just write a book, try to make it as good as possible, never speak of it again, then move on to another book and do everything in my power to make that one a little better. But I am subject to a human frailty: I am keen for people to read my books - the relatively small tribe of people who might potentially enjoy them, anyway - and, much as I’d like to think that the act of working unfeasibly hard on a book would be enough, unaided, for the book to have the best life possible, that’s not quite how it works, or at least not at the beginning of a book’s life cycle. So I wanted to let you know that my second novel, 1983, is being published in the UK three weeks today (on August 8th) and that you can pre-order it here, from Blackwells, with free international delivery.

As you probably know, pre-orders massively help, in terms of getting a book more visibility in bookshops and offering it the best chance possible to flourish and not be bullied by other, bigger, more corporate books from more privileged backgrounds.

I chose to link to Blackwells, mainly because of the free delivery thing and because I know that most of my subscribers here on Substack live outside the UK. They’re also a nice shop and have been known to send out free teabags with orders. But you can also get 1983 from Bookshop.Org. Amazon or directly from my publishers. Or, if you’re in the UK, you can use your purchase to support your local independent bookshop.

Yesterday I went to my publishers’ warehouse and signed almost 900 copies of 1983 for the people who kindly helped fund it into existence (photo above taken about halfway through, before my hand started aching). I’m told that authors with short names make cover designs more tricky but I was glad of being one of them, in this instance.

Later on in the day someone on Substack Notes asked me what the book is about, and I quickly came up with the following list: childhood, coal mining, the “big light” of the 1980s coming on, robots, the importance of freedom and individuality in education, bullying, comic books, the tension between the rural and the urban, the UK’s industrial Nearly North that isn’t The Actual North but sort of isn’t quite The Midlands any more, aliens, 20th Century ideas of the future, alpacas, the power of old photos, art, the difficulty of finding information and choice in a pre-internet era, Italy, gardening, friendship. I probably missed a few things out, but that’s the general gist. Here’s the synopsis from the inside of the jacket:

It’s a little early for reviews right now but the Madrid Review called 1983 “playful and subversive” and said “boundaries are well and truly pushed and the reader is challenged to face their own preconceptions of what they thought they were reading.” My partner said it was her favourite book by me so far (which makes me feel like I’ve done the job I ultimately set out to). Meanwhile my dad said he felt “BEREFT” when he finished it, and that “IT WAS FUNNIER THAN YOUR LAST ONE”. But these are just opinions, of course. I’m sure some people will hate it. Some people always do.

Quite a few people have asked where they should start, in terms of reading my books, so I thought now might be an apt time to also provide a short guide to some of the others:

21st-Century Yokel, which was published in 2017, is what I normally suggest as a beginning point for people new to my work. It’s the first book I crowdfunded with my current publishers Unbound, probably the closest I get to a memoir and has lots of my LOUD DAD in it. It was born out of my frustration with what the traditional publishers I’d worked with before didn’t seem to want me to write about - which I felt I really needed to write about - and with the more worthy and humourless nature writing I’d read. I wanted to write a funny book about nature. But, in the end, I don’t think 21st-Century Yokel is centrally a nature book. It’s just as much social history, family, folklore, walking… life.

Ring The Hill is slightly less riotous than 21st-Century Yokel but is, I think, my best non-fiction book. It works as a companion piece, but concentrates a little more on landscape and the nomadic nature of my recent life. A self-styled “book marketing expert” on the internet told me that I made a mistake by giving it the name I did (Ring The Hill is an old English term for hare) and not getting a dog and calling it Going On Walks Up Hills With My Dog. She also said that Clare Melinsky’s cover design makes it look “like a chick lit romance”. I believe neither of these things are true. I think it is not a book aimed at people who buy books called things like Going On Walks Up Hills With My Dog. I also think Clare Melinsky is a shit hot artist who totally gets it.

Notebook - which is a collection of around a decade of excerpts from my notebooks, fashioned into an abstract narrative of sorts and inspired by the fever dream non-fiction storytelling of Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights - is also a good place to start, especially if you want a short book that’s easy to dip into. I’ve been sending out signed hardbacks of this for the price of postage. I can still do this if you email me via my website. Or you can get the paperback from Blackwells with free delivery.

Help The Witch was my first published attempt at short fiction. It’s not a summer book at all, and much of it was written in minus degree temperatures while snowed in at a house at the top of an enormous hill in northern England. I had fun experimenting with quite a few new kinds of storytelling in it. It won a Shirley Jackson horror writing award but it’s not a horror book; it’s just very eerie. It’s undoubtedly marinated in the spookiest parts of the English landscape but it arguably owes more to Grace Paley and Annie Proulx than it does to MR James.

Villager is still, at the time of writing, my best published book. It was my attempt to come up with a psychedelic narrative that had the feel of some of my favourite records from the late 60s. It’s set in and around a fictional moorland village called Underhill, has many many narrators, dots around in time over the course of almost two centuries, and is full of haunted water. You might like it if you like ghosts, rivers, folklore, social and oral history, lost music, teenage warrior queens or opinionated hills. I will send you a free signed copy of it (and Notebook) if you take out of a full year’s subscription to this page, wherever you are in the world.

Before the half dozen books mentioned above, which are all published by Unbound, I had published eight other books, via more traditional publishers, which I think of as part of a learning process and - to varying extents - less fully me. Of these, my favourites are The Good, The Bad And The Furry, Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind (both of which were great fun to write and feel like a bridge to 21st-Century Yokel) and Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia.

I’ll be honest: I don’t like writing posts like this, because, well, they’re not writing. They make me feel like I’m ripping off my subscribers and being an annoying self-promotional foghorn. So I’m glad I’m on the final paragraph and I can soon get back to working on things more like this, this and this. But I’m also over the moon that so many of you are now reading my books and excited that some of you might be reading the new one very soon. Thank you so much for the support you’ve give me recently, and for spreading the word.

My books definitely aren’t for everyone. But on Substack I really feel like I’ve found my people.

All the bees,

Tom