Peter Hitchens on 'The Valley of Unknowing'

The distinguished author and journalist, Peter Hitchens, was once a correspondent in Moscow, and is old enough to have some experience of what life was like in the now-vanished Soviet Bloc (it remains to be seen if Mr Putin will succeed in re-inventing it...) Last Sunday, in his regular blog for the Daily Mail's on-line edition, Peter wrote about The Valley of Unknowing, which is set in the former East Germany. Coincidentally he bought his copy from a small shop near Gloucester Road tube station, close to where I lived for many years before moving to the burbs. I have a feeling I know which shop it was too (most likely The Slightly Foxed Bookshop). Anyway, he has some very nice things to say about the novel, and some thoughtful comments on the place and time that inspired it. You can read the piece here.

Two views of The Valley

Hot from the design department at Vintage Books, comes some new concept artwork for The Valley of Unknowing. It makes for quite a contrast from the previous attempt (see below), and I've given it the thumbs up.Something like this will go on the bound proofs, and doubtless there will be more tweaks before the final version appears on the first edition.

I don't think the designers had an easy time with this one. 1980s East Germany was a place of many arresting images, but the fashions were atrocious and the backdrops either soulless or decaying. I like to think The Valley of Unknowing is quite a vibrant story (love, sex, death and plumbing - all play a part), and that's hard to convey in such an apparently gloomy setting. I sent over a disk crammed with 'inspirational' images, but I was never confident they would help. All-in-all, I think this is a good solution: the general feel of the image strikes me as Middle European (or at least European), and there is plenty of blood pumping through the deep red of the title.

As for the shout line, that too is up-for-grabs. In the end, we may not use one, relying instead on a past review or an endorsement. That would be my preference, because it would effectively kill two birds with one stone.

From Dresden to Glasgow

The second half of last week was spent in Saxony, and in particular in the impressive city of Dresden with its recently rebuit Frauenkirche (see above). My eagerness for investigative endeavour was rather blunted by the temperatures, which peaked at 37C on Thursday. Friday brought huge thunderstorms and blinding downpours (quite alarming on the autobahn), and then everything became quiet and balmy again.

I returned to the UK to find a small fist of positive reviews for The Einstein Girl. John O’Connell in The Guardian said some very nice things both about the book and the way it was written; and there was a short but useful piece in The Herald (Glasgow). In the cyber world there were long and very flattering pieces on the EuroCrime and Fantast Book Critic web sites. The interesting thing there, is that these sites both cater for readers with a taste for different types of genre fiction (crime on the one hand and science fiction on the other). It would be good to discover that Einstein has genuine cross-genre appeal , reaching beyond readers of literary and/or historical fiction – which seemed to be the obvious markets for the book when it was being designed and printed. Time will tell if it has. It is still very early days.

The guardian review can be found here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/22/einstein-girl-philip-sington