Granny Kettlebridge
An early excerpt from a freshly completed novel
Today - May 23rd, 2024, three days after my 49th birthday - I delivered the manuscript of my third novel to my publishers. I am instructing myself not to get too carried away and self-congratulatory about this. The world is arguably already too full of books and not full enough of the kind of people who still read them. I am fully aware of the small, niche place of mine in the grand scheme of things. Also, who knows? Maybe this one isn’t as good as I think it is. On the other hand, I might just permit myself to tentatively pat my own back this evening, maybe even drink a glass of mid-budget wine. Everything Will Swallow You - which comes out next March - is the longest, most emotional, most ambitious book I’ve ever written - five and a bit thousand words longer than Villager and, I believe, a little more epic in what it attempts to do - and I’ve written it to the tightest deadline I’ve ever been given, in a cyclone of inspiration and insomnia, while dealing with all sorts of health crises involving the people closest to me. Whatever happens from here on in, it feels, right now, like the biggest creative achievement of my life. I also think I’m ready for a little break from achievements, since - especially when executed with this kind of intensity - they have their downsides, such as being extremely tiring and preventing you from doing a lot of the more relaxing things that motivated you try to achieve stuff in the first place.
No doubt, however, I’ll be writing something else extremely soon. If I don’t write for too long, I get unhappy. That’s just the way it works with me. I have a new free piece planned for publication here next week but in the meantime, to celebrate EWSY’s completion, and as a thank you to my paid subscribers, I wanted to post an extract from what I’ve been so utterly enveloped by, so deliriously lost in, so… dare I say it… swallowed by. If you’re one of them, you’ll be able to read the extract below, in full. If you’re not, please note that I’m currently offering free signed hardbacks of my earlier books Villager and Notebook to anyone who currently takes the full paid annual subscription option (I’ll post these to you wherever you happen to be on the planet, regardless of the fact that to get them to, for example, the US and Canada, is costs over £27). It will also mean you get to read stuff like this.
Thanks for reading!
Tom
P.S. My second novel, 1983, is also out soon. August 8th in the UK, to be specific. And October 1st in the US and Canada.
“Any gossip, m’dear?” Granny Kettlebridge asks me. What she means by this is “Have you bonked anyone new and interesting lately?” There is a crow at the window and we are in her kitchen, the kitchen that has been her kitchen for 79.8 years and was her own granny’s kitchen before that, and which back then probably smelled of the exact same odour of vinegar and tea and chair dust and potatoes and turned salty earth blowing through the always-open window as it does today. You can’t see the sea out there like Granny Kettlebridge used to be able to because the trees and vines and ferns out there have grown back up since her childhood when the land last lost its grip and devoured itself and because winter’s rot has not quite yet set in, but I know the sea is there, growling behind the drapery. There is never a moment when you don’t know it’s there. Granny Kettlebridge said that when she was a girl there were more people living around here: pig herds, cottagers, dairy farmers. But one night late in 1926 people heard tree roots snapping and saw plaster falling off the walls of their houses and panicked and feared it might be like December 1839 - which a few of them still remembered firsthand - when as a special Christmas present the undercliff gave most of itself to the sea, so the people panicked and gradually they moved away or died and their empty former homes slowly crumbled and now it is just Granny Kettlebridge and her house, hanging on to the last sheer edge of everything. “They would have burned me at the stake in any other century,” Granny Kettlebridge has told me lots of times, and I have to admit that her house is just the kind that you can imagine a witch living in, with its resident crow, and Granny Kettlebridge has the fingernails you might expect a witch to have - long thin pointy ones, fingernails almost half as long as the fingers they defend, fingernails that play their part in her immense skill at hanging onto the sheer edge of everything - and their length and pointiness used to scare me when I was small, but doesn’t any more, and I don’t think Granny Kettlebridge is a witch, or at least not one of the cartoonishly evil ones that the film industry likes to ferment in the minds of children. Granny Kettlebridge is the one who knows me best, the one person I can tell anything to, and I am the one person Granny Kettlebridge can tell anything to, although I doubt I am the one who knows Granny Kettlebridge best; I come fourth in that regard, after the sea and the wind and the hungry dripping shrubs of the undercliff, and did come fifth, until recently.