Rachel Joyce's Blog
March 10, 2021
Questions for Readers: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
The post Questions for Readers: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry appeared first on Rachel Joyce - Author.
February 23, 2021
The Music Shop – Five Remedies, Music for Healing
There was a time we always invited friends for New Year’s Eve. We asked them to bring nothing but a piece of music they liked.
Come dusk, the house would be packed; first we ate, then we sat round, listening carefully to one another’s tracks, and explaining why that music was important to us. Eventually we’d drift to bed; a few made it through to dawn. We covered a broad mix of ages – from about five to seventy – and the music we chose was eclectic. It’s over ten years since we hosted a New Year’s party, but whenever I hear one of those songs, I still remember the person who chose it, and what they told us. Because that’s how music works. It’s not like literature; musical notes don’t mean something concrete, the way a word like ‘dog’ or ‘house’ does. Music goes beyond the boundaries of time and consciousness, just as it moves beyond the boundaries of nationality and language. It speaks somewhere beneath the skin.
Which brings me to my first choice of healing music:
‘Satin Doll’ by Duke Ellington (instrumental version)This was one of the New Year offerings, and it was brought to the party by my dad. He was extremely ill at the time, but he wanted to be there that night and he wanted to share his music – because I believe he felt it told us something important about him. My dad had been a jazz drummer as a young man and played in bands (he was forever beating out the rhythm of things on our kitchen table), and he chose this piece because it was the best warm-up for a band. Everyone gets a solo, and after that they have to work as a team, supporting one another. They leave space for the others but at the same time they have no inhibitions about claiming a place for themselves. They are both a collective and a set of individuals. I listen to it now, and I think of Duke Ellington turning off the lights on his band, one by one. It’s the happiest -ever goodbye, but it also captures something bigger. It tells us we are not really up to very much when we stand alone, but when we look out for one another and use our skills to help one another, we really are quite something. A utopian whole. We played this music at my dad’s funeral – and every time I listen I feel incredibly happy and incredibly alone, and I know it’s okay to feel such ambiguity. There is room in the music to feel many things.
Sometimes, though, if you feel broken, you DO NOT WISH to cheer up. YOU ARE SAD AND YOU WANT TO BE SAD. If you are going to heal, you need a piece of music that is so spectacularly sad, it is even sadder than you are. I wore out my 45 single of ‘I’m Not In Love’ when I was sixteen. It got so cracked and bumpy the thing was unplayable. But did that stop me? Of course it didn’t. I was sixteen. My boyfriend had dumped me for my best friend, and she (my best friend) was wearing the blue knitted scarf I had previously worn, and I felt alone and betrayed. The only time I was happy was when I was listening to that sad, sad song. The same happened later with Brian Wilson’s ‘Caroline, No’, and Bonnie Raitt singing ‘Too Soon To Tell’, and Sandy Denny’s ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’ and Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’. They are all brilliantly sad songs, big enough to contain the sorrow of a small country.
And then there is a classical piece I found when I was sixteen that I still carry round with me. One of the best healers.
Sonata No. 1 in G Minor by Bach (solo violin)The only way I could afford new music when I was a teenager was to borrow it from the record department of West Norwood library. I took out Bach’s Sonatas because I liked the picture on the cover. (A woman laughing with her violin and also flicking her hair, like someone on an advert for Elnett hairspray.) As you listen, you find there is room to breathe; it gives a feeling of what people call divinity, a state of serenity and tranquillity. You sense that Bach has been very lonely in his time, and very frightened, and has used his music to make peace with those feelings. It is full of poise and therefore hope.
I was writing The Music Shop for a long time, and whenever I travelled, I made sure I found the local record shop. This next choice came from a brilliant store in Reykjavik called 12 Tónar. It’s worth jumping on a plane to Iceland just to visit. (If you do, tell Larus I sent you.)
‘Heyr Himna Smidur’ (Icelandic hymn)Larus told me that everyone in Iceland knows this hymn, so I suppose it must be a bit like ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’. (I have to come clean now and make it very clear I can’t sing. I have not one musical muscle in my body. My husband, who is a musician as well as several other things, says that is nonsense, everyone can sing, but that is because he has never actually heard me. Whenever I have to sing and he is next to me, I pretend I am so busy doing something else – like adjusting my buttons, for example, or being incredibly moved – that I have completely forgotten to come up with any sound.)
So this hymn gets me – it really gets me – because all those male voices come together unaccompanied to sing one message. Help us. It’s the diametrical opposite of an army going to war, or a man on TV telling you life is for winners. Watch a clip on YouTube: men in stiff white shirts and dicky-bird ties, standing so solemn and tall; and yet what they produce, what binds them together, is this exquisite, beautiful plea for mercy. It holds you like a hundred hands.
Researching music for my novel, I came across this next track by accident, and it’s up there now in my medicine cupboard. The only prerequisite is that I have to listen to it a) with headphones and b) in a comfy place – such as bed – and preferably lying down.
‘Avarandado’ by Joao GilbertoThis is like being sung to by something inside you. It’s so intimate and soft-voiced, you can hear him buzzing Zs and slurring Ss. I listen and it’s like being in a trance, or falling asleep as a child in the back of the car, very safe but also not really belonging anywhere except a good, dark place.
Healing is not always a quiet business. My last remedy is French electro pop: ‘Go!’ by M83 (though frankly Shalamar, Chic, Todd Rundgren, Graham Parker & the Rumour’s ‘Hold Back The Night’ would do just as well). Because sometimes you just need to play something wildly happy. And dance.
When I listen to these pieces, I feel the world is in harmony. I hear notes travelling together, all different kinds, and I know there is a place where such a thing is possible. Whether it’s a soprano voice reaching so high that my throat fills with stones, or 10cc singing that I am right to hurt so much because they hurt too, music can give the feeling of having lived through a whole life. It reminds us – broken as we sometimes feel, or lost, or angry, or full of fear – of a place that is nothing to do with words, and nothing to do with differences. A bigger place, that holds us all.
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A Snow Garden – Small Stories
Let me start with a story…
There was once a Roman emperor who got captured in battle. His enemy decided not to kill the emperor, as he generally liked to do with his prisoners, but instead to use him as a footstool. Yes, a footstool. So our Roman emperor spent the rest of his life on his hands and knees, being used as a step to mount a horse, or as the extension to a chair, or whatever else his enemy needed a footstool to do. But not as a Roman emperor. (The end.)
Now if I was a different kind of person I would have painted a better and more exciting picture about the emperor-part of the Roman’s life, but the truth is that bit of the story doesn’t really interest me. I’m not thinking about the might of Rome. The rich historical backdrop. The glories of an empire. But a great man who is reduced to nothing – a man who becomes not even a chair, or a throne, but something as small and ordinary as a footstool – there you have me. I want to know more about that person. I want to know more about the footstool he was forced to become.
This is why I like short stories. They take the small and they blow it up to make it large. They use the ordinary, everyday kind of moments to show what is universal and brave.
And, of course, Christmas – well, for some of us it’s a crazy time of trying to be anything BUT ordinary. We stop work. Stuff our houses with food. Bind anything vaguely static in lights that flash and leap and have at least different zippy settings. We spend money we haven’t got. Travel miles to spend time with family members we may spend the rest of the year trying to avoid..(though the truth is that I also love all this. I still get butterflies about decorating the tree, just as I did when I was small. Note the photograph. How happy I am. Also note the advent calendar, swinging perilously close to my joyful head. And the white lacy dress that I adored which was a hand-me down from Italian Maria up the road, whose mother bought her white lacy dresses with sticky-out skirts. My parents preferred more sensible outfits, which I see now were very trendy but at the time seemed to be a) itchy, b) green and c) straight. )
Yes, we exhaust ourselves with doing Christmas perfectly and then wonder why we are all full of cold in January and desperate to detoxify.
So there is a tension. That is what I am saying. A mad tension – and I have exaggerated here, of course. But this is where stories get interesting. It’s the opposite of the Roman emperor becoming a footstool. Messy, ordinary people trying to be perfect – trying to be something they are not – well, it’s rich pickings.
Shortly after writing this collection, I was asked by a very nice journalist what they were about. I told him I hadn’t a clue. I felt stupid and wretched for saying that – but at the time it was the truth and I was doing my best to be truthful. Whatever I was trying to say was the story: I couldn’t see beyond that. But now time has passed, I see they are about the interconnectedness of small, broken-off things. A man could walk past you on the way to the shops and be a complete stranger. But equally he could stop and ask you something and a connection might be made that could last the rest of your life.
All this in a moment..Like the moment the emperor heard he had to be a footstool.
Do you think he asked for tassels?
CHRISTMAS 1970In order to write these stories, I thought a lot about my own Christmases. I thought about the way we do it now with our children, and how it was for me when I was small. I thought about the ritual or the myth that we recreate every year, and pass on, and why we do that. And one of the Christmases I thought about most was the one it snowed in 1970.
There are things in our house that I would say my family loves to see at Christmas. There is a beautiful slim angel a friend made years ago, whose body is a toilet roll. There are some felt decorations I made when the children were little, along with their Christmas stockings – just as my father did for my sisters and me. There is a sign that says ‘Santa this way’ and endless small pottery figures that my children have made over the years that could be donkeys, perhaps cats and possibly cows (one has three legs.) I pull out a box every year with all these small things wrapped in tissue and we coo over them as if we have never seen them before. My children say, ‘Oh remember this! Look at this!’ I string up lights in corners that are dark, I bring in evergreens. I wrap little gifts in coloured tissue paper and wait up until my children are asleep – past midnight last year – before I fill the stockings they have hung on their doors. My husband prepares exactly the same food that we all ate last Christmas. I make the same biscuits I made the children when they first had teeth. And it is as if we are giving back to our family something they had lost.
There were things about Christmas that sent me inside out with excitement when I was a child – one of them being the shop windows on Oxford Street and Regent Street, along with the lights. We would take the bus ‘up’ to London (we were only coming from West Norwood) on a Sunday when the shops were closed, and we would walk from Selfridges, past John Lewis, then along to Liberty and Hamleys. After that we’d take the bus back to Trafalgar Square to see the column-tall tree that was a gift from Norway, and the crib scene.
I loved Christmas so much that I wrote a play every year and insisted that my sisters began rehearsing it in October. It normally involved songs (written by me), Christmas messages (written by me) and Nativity characters (played not by me.) My sisters and a few friends had to cover between them a cast of about thirty but since my sisters were only one and four, and the friends were often busy, rehearsals fell apart round about November. The Christmas play, when it took place, was a cobbled-together affair.
And why did I love it so much? When I look at family photos, I see that our tree was really quite a scrawny thing – no Norwegian spruce. Our dad had made all the decorations, along with our stockings – out of red and blue felt, which he then decorated with sequins. My mum made mince pies every Christmas Eve and wept into them whilst listening to Carols from Kings on the radio, just as her mother had done when she was a child. She stuffed the turkey with two different mixtures – one at each end – and got up at two in the morning to put the turkey in the oven, and every year it was cooked by about breakfast time. Sometimes we spent it in Devon with friends, and our neighbour did an indoor fireworks display that consisted of lots of tiny lumps of sulphur that gave a tiny pffizzle, and emitted a smell of fart, and then blew out.
But bigger than all of this was Father Christmas. I wrote to him every Christmas Eve and my letters were full of love and gratitude. If the world was big enough to contain this good, kind man who delivered presents to EVERY CHILD in one night, then it stood to reason this was a good, kind world. It was the best story of all, the most precious ritual. No wonder I loved Christmas.
But in 1969 I found out the truth. We were on holiday in Cornwall and I was skipping. Why it occurred to me to question the true identity of Father Christmas as I skipped, I don’t know. Maybe it was because we were on holiday and it was summer and if you are going to start having doubts about Christmas, at least you have time to recover.
I marched into the house where we were staying and said to my parents, ‘Is he real?’
They told me the truth on the spot, on condition that I didn’t go spoiling it for my sisters. I was hoping for a bit more hesitation.
But having asked my parents the big question about FC, I went back and quizzed them about the tooth fairies – about whom I had already had doubts, mostly on account of the fact they frequently forgot to visit and then wrote racked notes of apology that looked like tiny versions of my mum’s shopping lists. And of course, after I found out the truth about the fairies – this was a double blow – I felt compelled to ask about the Loch Ness Monster, the Easter bunnies, and Jesus. My father had never liked the whole Easter bunny thing so he was quick to kill that one off. They exchanged a vacant look on the subject of the Loch Ness Monster, and said that as far as Jesus was concerned, it was entirely up to me.
It was devastating. It wasn’t just about the presents. It was the fact that life was not all good and not all safe. If the world was good and kind, it was only because my parents had made it so and even at seven I was aware that couldn’t last for ever, that I must grow older and see things differently, and the size of their shoulders would not always be big enough to hide me.
That Christmas Eve I wrote my letter to Father Christmas, but it was an altogether more self-conscious effort. I watched my sisters, so excited, and it was a lonely thing, to know the truth. And then that night, the sky went and did the magical thing it never does. It snowed.
So this photograph is me, in 1970, knowing the truth about Father Christmas, and in a bigger sense, the world. It is not a good, magical place after all. There is no kind man who flies through the sky and gives a present to every child, regardless of race or class or religion. There is dissent, there is poverty, there is cruelty, and sometimes, yes, it seems to make no sense. In the photograph, I am wearing my new Christmas hat and scarf. (No woolly tights, I am pleased to see.) But look. I am at the front, whizzing down a hill, my sister behind me, my father at the back. I know now that the story about Christmas is just that – a story, one that we will repeat year after year, because in telling it over and over, we are reminded of the things in life that, like the passing of the seasons, will always return, and we celebrate the sameness of the smallest things.
But look at that photo.
Wooden sledge. Snowy hill. God only knows what at the bottom. Me leading the way; my father and sister laughing at the thrill of it.
How joyful life is.
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November 18, 2020
The Photograph that Inspired a Novel
For a long time, I had a feeling I was being followed.
I’d look up and see someone, out of the corner of my eye. Or I’d walk into a room and feel certain that even though it was empty, someone was actually there. It wasn’t frightening. Once I sensed a large figure in trousers who seemed to be very interested in our drains. Another time it was a much smaller person, sitting in the driver’s seat of my car. And then it began to dawn on me that it wasn’t just one person, but two, and not only that. They were women. One was large, one was small, and I don’t know how but I sensed they had something to tell me.
After my father died, I had a phone call with a clairvoyant. I was deep in grief and I wanted to be given some reason to believe my father was still present, and still loving me. At one point she said, ‘What about the two women?’
I said, ‘What two women?’
She said, ‘I see two women.’
But that wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and instead I asked another miserable question about my father and that was how we went on, me asking about him and her giving answers that seemed not at all what I needed. Truthfully, the whole clairvoyant thing just left me feeling even more bereft. But a few months later, I passed two women sitting on bench. One was whittling a large stick and the other was eating sandwiches. I turned to look again; they weren’t there.
Was the clairvoyant right? Were they real? And if so, could they be something to do with my past? As a child, I had an Aunty Edith who wasn’t technically an aunt, but one of my grandmother’s many single friends. She was a short woman, though not in any ways small, her bosom heavy like a bolster, the folds of her body packed within buttons and hooks. I liked my Aunty Edith. She had a soft voice and she smelt of violets, both of which I found comforting; also, she loved me and because her love was all she had to give, it seemed especially pure. Then there was my mother’s Aunty Gwen, another adopted aunt. She was tiny and annoyed my grandfather – a singularly gentle man – because she never stopped talking and wore red lipstick that bled from the sides of her mouth. Aunty Edith and Aunty Gwen were spinsters who had lived through two world wars. They had lost fathers and uncles in the first one, and brothers and sweethearts in the second. There was definitely something about the two women on my trail that reminded me of my aunts. Something solid; something kind. More importantly, something individual. And yet when I tried to make sense of the two women by turning them into my aunts, I saw I was wrong. Unlike my aunts these two had a life that was independent of mine. They didn’t belong to me in any way. If anything, it seemed to be the other way round.
Twelve years ago, we moved to the house where we live now and I wrote my first novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. I knew almost as soon as we arrived that I was supposed to be here; that’s the best way I can put it. There is an energy. The night before my book was published, every piece of electrical equipment in the house switched itself on. As my husband and I stumbled round in the dark, trying to turn off light-switches and fire alarms, and radios that had sprung to life, we put it down to a power cut. Only afterwards I began to sense that it might be something – someone – else.
Not the two…?
Finally; a breakthrough. I learnt two women had owned our home in the 1920’s. They had been nurses during the First World War and, shaken by what they’d seen, had come here to care for victims of stress and trauma in a more spiritual way. Describing them as ‘maiden ladies’ an elderly neighbour told me Miss Hudson was very tall, elegant and pale, related to the wealthy Hudson Sunlight Soap family, while her companion was altogether smaller, very dark haired and olive skinned. However, he didn’t seem to feel they were the type who would follow people. What he mostly remembered was that they dressed like nuns and had a vacuum cleaner.
It almost fit, and yet deep down the answer still didn’t feel right. One of the women I had seen wore trousers. She was also very interested in our drainage. The other, the smaller, I had caught in the act if not of stealing my car, then at the very least driving it. After that my life got taken over by other things and I began to lose a sense of the two women. It occurred to me they might have found someone else to follow. I began working on a new novel set in 1950 about a miraculous search for a gold beetle on the other side of the world.
The reasons why you choose to tell a certain story are not always clear. I like to compare the first stages of writing to finding a house in the woods that has no windows and no doors. You long to go inside, but you have no idea how, so all you can do is keep circling it, trying to find the tiniest crack. In those early months, or possibly year, nothing about my new book was clear to me – even my protagonist kept changing. One week, it was a man. The next it was a woman. Another day she would be large and broad-shouldered. A week later, she’d gone bleach-blonde and wiry. I feared I was in something that was way too big for me – no matter how many times I circled it, there seemed to be way in – and from there I began to tell myself I wasn’t a proper writer at all. I felt lost and exhausted. Then bang in the middle of all this, a Canadian friend I don’t know terribly well wrote and asked if she might come and visit. Reluctantly I put my writing and research to one side. We talked books, we walked. I took her for a picnic by a pond – until we were politely told by an elderly man in rust trousers that we were sitting in his garden – and finally I drove her to Kelmscott Manor, the once country retreat of Pre-Raphaelite artist William Morris.
It was a cold Spring day. We admired the rooms hung with Morris tapestries; the floors smelling of wax and creaking beneath our feet. We were about to leave when my eyes landed on a small black and white photograph.
The hairs stood on my neck. I felt a kind of rushing of blood and a simultaneous plummeting, as if my feet had missed a step.
It was them. It was the two women. I absolutely knew it. One was older and more frail, gazing off to the side; the other, the more dominant, stood in jodhpurs, tie and jacket, dressed like a man and broad shouldered – a large woman with short curly black hair, staring straight at the camera. She looked exactly like the woman I passed once whittling a stick, and the woman I had seen beside our drains. To be honest she also looked like the kind of woman who would know how to short fuse our electricity.
I grabbed the friend I didn’t know terribly well, and hugged her. We bought a postcard of the photograph in the gift shop and as we drove away, I knew that my book was about two women – not one – and that one of them was the leader, while the other her assistant. What’s more, I knew that their extraordinary and against the odds friendship was the beating heart of my book. The whole story suddenly made sense – the house I had been circling all that time had windows and doors after all, as well as door knobs and tiny handles. Not only that, I understood what those two women who’d been following me wanted.
Only it wasn’t me they wanted. They were asking me to follow them.
So I turned the tables. I found out everything about them. May Morris – the older of the two – was the youngest daughter of William Morris. She had been married briefly, and unhappily, and by the age of 23, she was also the director of the embroidery department at her father’s company. The woman at her side, Mary Lobb, was officially her gardener, unofficially her live-in companion. (So I was wrong. The woman who I’d believed was the one with power, was actually lower in status. We make mistakes all the time.) Mary liked the land, machinery and horses. She also like cider and sticking things in scrap books. They stayed together for 22 years, and they travelled, camping in Wales, Cornwall and Iceland. Mary threatened May’s publisher when he rejected a writing idea of May’s, and May paid for operations for Mary – who was overweight and drank too much and smoked too much – as well as a pair of pink spectacles when her eyesight failed. On her death, May left most of her effects to Mary. Mary died five months later, stating in her will that she should driven not in a hearse but a motor lorry. She bequeathed her entire collection of scrap books to the National Museum of Wales.
Search for Mary Lobb on the internet, and you will find images of her sitting astride a wall, or lounging against a haystack. She is dressed in men’s clothes. She is often controlling some kind of heavy machinery, and if she isn’t, she’s cuddling a small fluffy dog. She is always staring straight at the camera, and her face is strong, open, round. As a young woman she made the headlines of a local newspaper: “CORNISH WOMAN DRIVES STEAM ROLLER. Miss Lobb, of Trenault, a lady of independent means, is to be seen every day driving a steam roller on the main roads near Launceston.”
The more I found out about them, the more I learnt about the two women in my book. It was as if my characters had been empty vessels and now I had so much detail, so much love for them. Margery Benson and Enid Pretty would not be the kind of women who sat around, waiting for life to happen. They would be brave, they would be unafraid, they would be full of life. Together they would travel across the world to New Caledonia, despite the fact they had one passport between them. They would search for a tiny gold beetle that everyone said was not there. They would drive a jeep – no, they would steal a jeep – they would trek up mountains, sleep in hammocks, dress as men if they felt like it, dye their hair, travel by donkey, survive a cyclone as well as heat stroke and insect bites. In short, they would undertake every possible adventure I could throw at them and even though their relationship had started with Margery as leader and Enid as her assistant, the balance of power would constantly shift as they learnt from one another. In overcoming difficulties, and in sidestepping convention, they would realise their best selves. And what was more, they required of me that I wrote about them without stopping to think about whether people would like it, or whether I was a proper writer. The adventure was mine as much as theirs, and they demanded that I kept writing, even when I thought I couldn’t do it, or was too tired, or not up to the job. (Can you imagine Mary Lobb giving up on a job?) I kept the postcard of her and May Morris with me all the time, and I now have it framed above my desk.
I love the way those two women stand together. I look at them and I think, Well aren’t you great? Look, I want to say to my daughters, look what women can do. Look what friendship can do. I love the way that Mary stands square to the camera, her legs apart, one hand in her pocket, wearing her jodhpurs and button-up jacket. I love her big dark curly hair, her unapologetic stance with the camera. I love the way May, thinner and older and looking more frail, gazes off to the side, wearing a thick striped skirt (has she taken up the hem?) and a long rope of beads and a patterned jumper. I love the fact they do not have to look at one another because their love is a given. I love the way that Mary holds her cigarette in a no-nonsense way like a pencil stub, while May holds hers as if it were a champagne glass.
But most of all, I love the way that standing beside Mary allows May to become a little more ethereal, a little more May, and the way that standing beside May makes Mary a little more solid. It is in measuring themselves against one another and acknowledging their differences that these two women discover who they are truly are. And this is what I took to my novel in the end. The truest friendships are those that allow us to step out of the confines of what we were once were, and to realise instead what we might be.
So were Mary Lobb and May Morris the two women I sensed close to me all those years ago? It’s a beautiful thought. And certainly, when I saw their photo, I felt I knew them. Was the clairvoyant right? Were there actually two spirits who had a message for me? Or was the book I finally wrote just a very long time coming?
Ideas happen in many ways, and so do stories. The word inspiration is from the Latin inspire – to draw breath. What I believe happened when I first realised I was being followed was that somewhere inside me I knew I needed to write a book about female friendship; the love between women that extends beyond boundaries. Those women were with me all the time that I was bringing up my four children, reminding me that there would come a time when my children would leave home, and begin their independent lives, and after that it would be time for me to be brave, to look deep into myself for my sense of self-worth, and not demand that from my children. Moreover, they told me that the relationships which would sustain me post-children were those I had forged long ago with other women. A book can require you to write it, without necessarily being so good as to inform you what it actually is.
The other day I got into my car and there were old sweet wrappers everywhere, not to mention dog hairs and cigarette ends. And I swear I could finally see them, full on and three dimensional. I could see them squashed in the back seat of my car, smelling of violets and cigarettes, old wool and a touch of paraffin. Mary Lobb and May Morris, my aunts Gwen and Edith, Miss Kessler and Miss Hudson, Margery Benson and Enid Pretty.
Oh and what a glorious racket we made.
The post The Photograph that Inspired a Novel appeared first on Rachel Joyce - Author.
September 16, 2015
October & November 2015 Book Tour
A Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce
Rachel Joyce will be touring festivals and bookshops in October and November 2015!
Here’s a list of where Rachel will be giving talks and signing copies of her books this winter:
Saturday 3rd October
Marlborough Literary Festival
Big Town Reads
6pm – 7pm
Thursday 8th October
Cheltenham Literary Festival
4pm – 5pm
Sunday 18th October
Isle of Wight Literary Festival
11am – 12pm
Thursday 5th November
The Bookcase, Nottingham
7pm – 8pm
Wednesday 11th November
Bristol Central Library
7pm – 8pm
Thursday 12th November
Caxton Books (Frinton on Sea)
From 5:30pm for a 6pm start
Friday 13th November
Event with Browsers Bookshop, Woodbridge
At Seckford Hall Hotel, Woodbridge
7pm – 8pm
Saturday 14th November
Lavenham Literary Festival
2pm-3pm
Saturday 21st November
Event with Topping Books, Bath
Museum of Bath
11am – 12pm
The post October & November 2015 Book Tour appeared first on The Official Rachel Joyce Website.
August 22, 2014
The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy BOOK TOUR!
Dust off those walking boots and make your merry way over to one of the many wonderful book events for Rachel Joyce’s stunning new novel, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. What better way to spend a winter evening than by listening to Rachel talk about her beautiful new book which tells the story of Queenie, the woman that Harold Fry walked 627 miles to save.
For further details about when and where Rachel will be talking have a look at the events information below.
Wednesday 8th October
Topping and Co, Bath – 7:30pm
Ticket Infomation or call 01225 428111
Thursday 9th October
Village Bookshop, Dulwich – 7:00pm
Ticket Information or call 020 8693 2808
Friday 10th October
Chepstow Bookshop at Chepstow Library – 7:00pm
Ticket Information or call 01291 625011
Wednesday 15th October
Coventry Library – 7:00pm
Ticket Information or call 024 7683 2314
Friday 17th October
Sherborne Literary Festival – 11:30am
Ticket Information
Sunday 19th October
Hungerford Literary Festival – 10:30am
Ticket Information or call 01488 683480
Monday 20th October
Waterstones Newcastle – 6:30pm
Call 0191 261 7757
Tuesday 21st October
Waterstones York – 7:00pm
Call 01904 620784
Wednesday 22nd October
Bookmark Spalding – 7:15pm
Call 01775 769231
Thursday 23rd October
Waterstones Doncaster – 3:00pm
Ticket Information
Off the Shelf Literary Festival, Sheffield – 7:00pm
Ticket Information
Friday 24th October
Topping and Co, Ely – 7:30pm
Ticket Information or call 01353 645005
Friday 7th November
Waterstones Yeovil – 2:30pm
Ticket Information or call 01935 479832
Brendon Books, Taunton – 7:00pm
Ticket Information or call 01823 337742
The post The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy BOOK TOUR! appeared first on The Official Rachel Joyce Website.
May 14, 2014
The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
It is with absolute delight that Rachel’s next novel, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, is due to be published in October this year. Though five months may seem like a long while to wait, it’s sure to fly by in no time at all. Before you know it, you’ll be sitting back in your comfortable reading chair with a copy of the beautiful Queenie book resting in your lap.
If you’re wondering how Queenie’s story will unfold then here’s a little background about the book for you…
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The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
When Queenie Hennessy discovers that Harold Fry is walking the length of England to save her, and all she has to do is wait, she is shocked. Her note to him had explained she was dying from cancer. How can she wait?
A new volunteer at the hospice suggests that Queenie should write again; only this time she must tell Harold the truth. Composing this new message, the volunteer promises, will ensure Queenie hangs on. It will also atone for the secrets of the past. As the volunteer points out, ‘It isn’t Harold who is saving you. It is you, saving Harold Fry.’
This is that letter. A letter that was never sent.
Told in simple, emotionally-honest prose, with a mischievous bite, this is a novel about the journey we all must take to learn who we are; it is about loving and letting go. And most of all it is about finding joy in unexpected places and at times we least expect.
Queenie thought her first letter would be the end of the story. She was wrong. It was just the beginning…
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The post The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy appeared first on The Official Rachel Joyce Website.
March 5, 2014
Rachel Joyce’s 2014 Perfect Book Tour Begins!
Grab your hat and scarf. And don’t forget your gloves. It’s time to embrace the frosty spring weather by making your way to one of Rachel Joyce’s upcoming book events where she’ll be discussing her latest novel, Perfect. Published in paperback on February 27th 2014, Perfect has already found itself sitting happily in the top 10 Sunday Times bestseller list. To celebrate, Rachel will be talking about all things Perfect as well as answering questions about her writing in one of the many author evenings being held in a bookshop near you.
To kick things off, Rachel will be attending the Bath Festival on Wednesday 5th March. From there Rachel will be visiting Cirencester, the Mainstreet Trading Bookshop, Corbridge in Northumberland, Cambridge, Letchworth, Chipping Norton and many more places.
Take a look at Rachel’s full list of events below for more information.
Wednesday 5th March
Bath Festival – 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Ticket Information
Thursday 6th March
Waterstones Cirencester – 7pm
Ticket Information or call: 01285 658998
Tuesday 11th March
The Mainstreet Trading Company in St Boswells, Roxburghshire – 7:30pm
Ticket Information or call: 01835 824087
Wednesday 12th March
Forum Books, Corbridge – 7pm
For Ticket and Venue Information or call: 01434 632931
Thursday 27th March
Urmston Bookshop
For Ticket and Venue Information or call: 0161 747 7442
NOW SOLD OUT
Friday 4th April
Cambridge Wordfest – 1pm to 2pm
Ticket and Venue Information
Thursday 10th April
David’s Bookshop – 7:30pm
Ticket Information or call: 01462 684631
Saturday 26th April
Chipping Norton Literary Festival (Jaffe & Neale Bookshop) – 10am to 11am
Ticket and Venue Information or call: 01608 641033
Thursday 8th May
Swindon Festival of Literature – 12pm noon
Lower Shaw Farm
Ticket Information or call: 01793 771080 or 07940 827624
Tuesday 3rd June
Salisbury Art Festival: Rachel Joyce in Conversation – 11:30am
Salisbury Playhouse Studio
Ticket Information
The post Rachel Joyce’s 2014 Perfect Book Tour Begins! appeared first on The Official Rachel Joyce Website.
Rachel Joyce’s New Website: Welcome
It’s official. You’ve found your way to the brand new Rachel Joyce website, so welcome. Grab yourself a steaming cup of tea or something else that’s just as nice, kick off your shoes, sit back and feel free to browse through the latest Rachel Joyce news about her events, books and more.
Though we’re only 3 months in, 2014 has already been a busy year for Rachel so far. The paperback edition of Perfect was published on February 27th and has since rocketed into the top 10 Sunday Times bestseller list within its first week of publication. Rachel is also currently writing her next novel The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy which is due to be released at the end of this year. Harold Fry fans, make sure to keep your eyes peeled when browsing the shelves of your local bookshop near Christmas time, this book is set to be really quite special.
Before you begin to explore Rachel’s website in more depth, here’s a few words from the lady herself:
“I hope you enjoy the new website. It’s going live to coincide with the publication of Perfect in paperback. I have spent the winter cooped up in my shed (I am writing my new novel. It has been very cold and damp in there.) But I hope to meet some of you soon at one of the events I will be attending this Spring. Rx”
The post Rachel Joyce’s New Website: Welcome appeared first on The Official Rachel Joyce Website.
February 15, 2014
Books to Watch Out For: January
“Perfect” (Random House), by Rachel Joyce, out January 14th. Joyce’s acclaimed début novel, “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” (2012), centered on a sixty-five-year-old retiree’s journey of self-discovery (the book was long-listed for the Booker prize). In her second novel, the journey belongs to an eleven-year-old boy, Byron Hemmings. His story begins in 1972, a leap year, when his friend James informs him that two seconds are being added to the clock to keep recorded time aligned with the movement of the Earth. Though his elegant mother, Diana, is unfazed by the idea of this temporal adjustment, Byron is convinced that it will have terrible consequences. (“Sometimes Byron gazed at the sky above the moor, pulsing so heavily with stars that the darkness seemed alive, and he would ache—ache for the removal of those two extra seconds.”) When an accident occurs on the way to school, his fears appear to have been well founded: his life has been irrevocably transformed. Byron’s coming-of-age story alternates and, ultimately, converges with that of Jim, a middle-aged man struggling with O.C.D. in the present day. —R.A. Read the rest of the article on the New Yorker website
The post Books to Watch Out For: January appeared first on The Official Rachel Joyce Website.
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