Mariella and the Stasi

In between yet another plumbing crisis, a mercy dash to St George’s hospital, and the sudden closure of our one-year-old’s day nursery, I managed to slip away to Broadcasting House to record an interview with Mariella Frostrup, the host of Open Book on Radio 4. Also taking part in a discussion about The Valley of Unknowing and the literary impact of the Stasi files, was Anna Funder, author of the prize-winning non-fiction bestseller Stasiland – although hers was a disembodied voice emanating from a studio in New York. Spookily enough, Australian Anna’s most recent book, a novel, is set in Berlin in 1932, just like The Einstein Girl, and is based on the life of an actually existing woman. It came as something of a relief to discover that the woman in question - and indeed the rest of her story - had nothing to do with the great physicist.

As expected, I thought of many brilliant and memorable things to say in response to the Mariella’s questions - but only after the whole thing was over and I was tramping back down a rainy Regent Street towards the Tube station. Oh well...

The interview, suitably edited, will be broadcast on Radio 4 this Sunday 22^nd April at 4pm; and again the following Thursday 26^th at 3.30pm. Details of the whole edition can be found here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gf4lv

A Podcast of the programme will be available for download soon after the first broadcast, here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/openbook

Late that evening, after further urgent plumbing consultations and an untimely instance of projectile vomiting from our youngest, I closed a deal for the North American rights to The Valley of Unknowing. The venerable firm of W.W. Norton will publish the book in November, which is quite soon in the normal run of these things. Norton is reputedly a classy operation, and the editor is something of a New York legend. I would have celebrated on the spot, but it was almost midnight by this time, and I was in danger of collapsing at my desk. I finally collapsed on the floor beside my son's bed ten minutes later.

Life imitates art, kind of

Next week I'll be taking a break from drafting the new book for a trip to Germany. I shall be travelling to the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, following an invitation from the Ex-Berliner magazine. Berlin is, of course, where most of the action in The Einstein Girl unfolds. I'll be doing a reading and answering questions (assuming some get asked…) at the St George’s English language book shop on Wörtherstrasse, which, I am told, is something of an institution among English-speaking ex-pats in the German capital.
This is where things become quite coincidental: for it is on Wörtherstrasse – about a hundred yards from the modern day shop – that the ‘Einstein girl’ herself actually takes a room when she first arrives in Berlin, and where a lot of important events in the novel take place.
I once stayed on the nearby Schönhauser Allee – in what was the old East Berlin Reuters apartment (following in the footsteps of Timothy Garton Ash and various cold war writers). A good few of the buildings roundabout still sported bullet holes in those days, and the years of GDR neglect were still much in evidence. Subsequently, in The Einstein Girl, I had my protagonist (Martin Kirsch) lodge on that street. But it’s been more than a decade since I was there. It will be interesting, and possibly spooky, retracing the steps of these characters - steps that only ever took place in my head, but which feel almost as genuine as actual memories. I suspect that with the vast amount of renovation and refurbishment that’s been going on, much of the area will be hard to recognise. But that's Berlin for you: so much changes, and so much stays the same.
If anyone is in the German capital next Wesnesday 31st and is interested in attending the Ex-Berliner event, here are the details. It starts at 9pm and everyone is extremely welcome:

Saint George’s Bookshop
Wörther Straße 27
10405 BerlinTel: (0)30 81798333

Regreso al Madrid

This past week I spent two delightful days doing press interviews in Madrid. My hosts at Alfaguara (chiefly in the persons of Rosa Junquera and her colleague Alejandro Aliaga) were wonderful, and looked after me like an old friend. It was also delightful to meet María Fernandez Soto, who translated Zoia’s Gold for Alfaguara a few years ago, as well as The Einstein Girl more recently. It turns out she is writing a novel herself, which may account for the beauty of her prose, which I have heard widely praised. As a writer, if you are lucky enough to have a good translator in a foreign tongue, it is a very desirable thing to keep them, not least because you will enjoy continuity of style and voice (which are theirs, after all, and no longer really yours). She told me about some of the particular challenges involved in turning English literary fiction into Spanish literary fiction, which I found quite fascinating. All the decisions about style, voice and tense that a writer makes have subtly different ramifications in different languages, so I am beginning to learn.

The effect on press coverage has been excellent. The interviews given to the press agencies in particular have been syndicated all over Spain and Latin America, and there have been features in the national press - occasionally accompanied by photographs of me looking tired (I was) and jowly. There have also been radio features all over the place, including this one on the national RTVE network. Although the item itself is in Spanish, the entire interview (with the utterly charming Eva Cruz) is also downloadable and is in English. You can hear both broadcast and interview here:

http://www.rtve.es/mediateca/audios/20091126/philip-sington-habla-su-ultima-novela-chica-einstein-asuntos-propios/637668.shtml

The oxygen of publicity

I have just spent most of the working day writing a publicity piece for THE EINSTEIN GIRL, a task which I hate worse than a queue at the post office, but which I've come to see as a necessity. According to Waterstones.com there are still 135 days to go before UK publication, but, if anything, I am a bit slow off the mark. What is a publicity piece? It is an imaginary feature article about your upcoming title, containing as much interesting information, from a press point-of-view, as possible. The purpose of the piece is really just to present ideas (or 'angles' in press parlance) in a stimulating way to the publicity team at the publishers.

In the past, like most writers, I assumed that all I had to do was fill in the author questionaire and the rest would be up to the in-house PR experts. Authors, of course, hate summarizing their work; an activity that inevitably downplays its uniqueness in a desperate quest to be arresting and pithy. And most of them are not very good at it, especially when put on the spot, say, at an industry function. "Describe your book in 50 words or less" is a request that leaves many gesticulating helplessly as they choke on their peanuts and non-vintage Frascati.

In my case, this naïveté was especially unforgivable, because I spent years working as a magazine editor, in which capacity I received hundreds of press releases, 95% of which went straight into the bin. Which is the point. If you want the PR about your particular book to stand out, it is a good idea to lend every possible assistance to the people who are handling it. If that means doing a lot of the thinking for them, then so be it. After all, you know more about the book and about yourself than anyone else does; so it's not unreasonable that you should be asked to help come up with the angles.

There is another, perhaps even more important, side to this issue of the dreaded summary (be it blurb, catalogue entry or PR piece). And it's this: if you can't set out concisely what it is that's interesting and unique about your story, preferably before you spend a year or two writing it, how interesting and unique can it really be? A woolly, rambling idea will - 9 times out of 10 - produce a woolly, rambling book.