Krushchev's footwear

Uta aged 8 (third row, right) in the uniform of the Thälmann Pioneers. (Click to enlarge)

I've just written a piece for the Vintage Books blog on how I came to write The Valley of Unknowing, and why. Needless to say, if I hadn't met and married a former resident (see above), it never would have happened. The piece begins:

I was a child of the Cold War. To be more precise, I was a child of a nasty cold snap during the Cold War. I was born the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when exploding cigars were a serious hazard, and when feisty Russian leaders waved their shoes at the UN General Assembly to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet cobbling. 

Now read on...

http://www.vintage-books.co.uk/blog/from-the-author/PhilipSington/?revision#.T7TGaTVvEyM.twitter

The Financial Times reviews 'The Valley of Unknowing'

This Saturday's Financial Times contains a very nice review of The Valley of Unknowing by David Evans. I'm pretty sure the FT has never reviewed a book of mine before, but it's certainly been worth the wait. It concludes:

"The Valley of Unknowing is simply superb: affecting but never melodramatic, literary but never less than thrilling. Though Krug is self-pitying, he wins our sympathy at the tragic denouement, when we learn how he has also suffered under communism. His story, like the manuscript he grudgingly admires, is “truthfully, tenderly drawn”."

You can find the whole review here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/95d683e8-896f-11e1-85af-00144feab49a.html#axzz1tKACbzGe

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.

The Times reviews 'The Valley of Unknowing'

The official press date for The Valley of Unknowing isn't until the 19th April; so I was quite surprised to find a review in last Saturday's edition of The Times. The reviewer is the distinguished journalist Peter Millar, who, as well as being a successful novelist and historian, reported from all over Eastern Europe for Reuters and for a range of British broadsheets throughout the 1980s. (In East Germany he earned the distinction of being arrested by the secret police and deported). Had I known in advance that such an authority was to pronounce on The Valley, I might not have slept too well. Fortunately, I didn't.

In any case, the review is a generous one by any standards, calling the book 'remarkable', and praising its authenticity (for which my wife Uta, her family and friends can take much of the credit). It concludes like this:

"Having lived in East Germany, I am astonished by Sington's pitch perfect recreation of that society, from the daily shortages to the veil of suspicion that shrouded all dealings with anyone other than close friends, and the hypocrisy of the fraudulent socio-political game almost everyone was forced to play... Build[ing] towards a relentless climax, this is a brilliant, evocative and accurate novel which turns a love story and a chronicle of human weakness and self-deception into a gripping, hard-nosed authentic thriller."

The Einstein Girl moves screenward

Today I went up to Holland Park to meet Emily Hickman of The Agency, who has been ably representing me on various screen-related matters over the past year. In her newly refurbished office I signed an option agreement on the screen rights to The Einstein Girl (aka Das Einstein-Mädchen), the counterparty being the German actor Sebastian Koch, who is in the process of setting up a new film production company in Berlin. 

Right now Sebastian is probably Germany’s most bankable star, and certainly one of its most highly regarded. Until recently he was best known outside his native country for his role as the playwright Georg Dreyman in The Lives of Others (see above), which won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2006. He has since added leads in many English language productions, most recently Unknown (2011) opposite Liam Neeson and Albatross (2011) opposite Jessica Brown Findlay. Over the past few months, as well as popping over to Greece to star in God Loves Caviar with Catherine Deneuve and John Cleese, he has been shooting the lead role in Suspension of Disbelief (see below),a new thriller being directed by the Oscar-winning director Mike Figgis, of Leaving Las Vegas fame. As soon as that's done, he'll be playing the villain opposite Bruce Willis in the latest installment of the Die Hard franchise.

During the course of last year I had the pleasure of meeting with Sebastian twice in Berlin (once at the famous Einstein café in Charlottenburg, which is well worth a visit). They were very enjoyable meetings, and the possibility exists that we will collaborate on the script development for The Einstein Girl. Sebastian is a bit of an Anglophile, and a great lover of Shakespeare, lending his weight to several Shakespearian ventures in Germany. Whether The Einstein Girl ends up heading in an English or German language direction, though, has not yet been determined. I guess, in the end, like so many things, that’s a decision that will be determined by finance.

In any case, I’m really delighted that The Einstein Girl’s filmic destiny has ended up in such talented and charismatic hands, and I’m unusually confident that something special will eventually emerge.

Author in a tight spot

Writers have been known to adopt desperate measures to get a little peace and quiet. But though my house has never been more full of people – small children with snot and temperatures, an au pair, a recuperating parent with a bewildering pharmaceutical regime, and an endless parade of tradesmen – that’s not what I’m up to in these photographs. Things aren’t that bad, not quite.

I’m actually in the process of fitting insulation beneath a section of roof, rendered highly inaccessible by a recently added stud wall within. Why my Albanian builders (and their British overseers) didn’t do this for me, before the stud wall was built, is for them to explain. But, fed up with corner-cutting and delay, I decided to let my friend Heiko, who knows an immense amount about this sort of thing, take on the job instead. The only problem was that Heiko – who was stuck underground for hours during the 7/7 terror attacks, in a packed rush-hour train – suffers from bouts of claustrophobia. So I decided to help. It turned out to be hot, dirty, suffocating work, but strangely satisfying once completed – not that I’m planning a second foray any time soon.

Actually I’ve always liked the idea of writers having a manual trade, or at least being good with their hands. The notion of the novelist as a pure intellectual, spinning tales in the splendid isolation of a rural retreat, is unattractive to me. I like my artists to get their hands dirty, and to interact with the physical world as directly as possible. That’s probably why Bruno Krug, the central character in The Valley of Unknowing – it would be inaccurate to call him a hero – is a man who writes for a living and plumbs on the side (though it was once the other way around).

Actually, I could do with Bruno’s plumbing skills right now, because the Balkan bloke who came to fit up the new bathroom was something of a let-down. I suppose if he wrote good poetry or something, that would make up for his professional deficiencies. But it would have to be very, very good.

Monkey see, monkey do

It's good to see Leo teaching his baby sister something really useful...