The cover art from the 1980 first edition of the novel

It’s the story of Becky Stokes, who moves with her family from London to a small village called Okefield. The first child of her own age she meets there is the eponymous Cora, hiding amid shrubs and creepers at the foot of Becky’s new garden… The girls get along, though Becky’s mother thinks Cora a ‘funny little scrap.’ This, though, is nearly the politest opinion of Cora Ravenwing available around Okefield. Grown-ups and schoolkids alike specialise in dark mutterings about ‘the Ravenwing girl.’ For sure, she has not a friend in the world – except for Becky. And the challenge for Becky – a rite of passage, no less – is whether or not she will accept this status of being ‘Cora’s friend’ in the teeth of such notably hostile and gossipy peer pressure.

Our Finds edition of Cora benefits by a lovely new preface from Gina Wilson, in which she recalls the feelings and incidents that were the inspiration for this novel about how a young girl begins to learn to follow her own instincts and make her own judgements in life.

If you’d like the chance to win a copy of Cora Ravenwing for yourself – and I recommend it highly – you have to do two things.

1. Answer me this correctly:
Perhaps the most famous shadowy subject of small-town gossip in all literature is Boo Radley in Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. What is the nickname of the girl who narrates the story of Lee’s novel?

2. Put your answer in an email to finds@faber.co.uk, with CORA as your subject line. The competition will close at 5pm next Wednesday June 26, whereupon I will pick a winner from a battered schoolbag.

Alan Ross circa 1961, photographed by Joe Waldorf

Among the treasure in our June tranche of Finds titles available as of tomorrow is the concluding volume in our concerted reissue of the writings on cricket and on travel by the poet Alan Ross. The Bandit on the Billiard Table was first published in 1954 (as South to Sardinia) and is an account of a summer journey undertaken by Ross in the early 1950s. He alternates the past and present of this strange island, whose interior, especially, had been only rarely visited at that point. His descriptions of the landscape and local customs and mores are interspersed with tales of a cast of characters who might have come out of Boccaccio, adding up to a memorable evocation.

We’re pleased to see this month’s Conde Nast Traveller has run a laudatory review of the new edition:

‘['The Bandit on the Billiard Table'] is packed with exceptionally vivid descriptions of a journey by train and car through Sardinia in the early 1950s, a time when bandits still operated on the island and billiards was ‘one of the great Sardinian occupations’. If you liked those rural Italian scenes in ‘The Godfather’, then this is the book for you.’

Well, we did all like those scenes, didn’t we? Though I’m not sure if Sicily would be so keen to give Sardinia a share of the glory it derived from the Puzo/Coppola smash hit. Nor that proud Sardinia would care to take it…

But now, competition time: if you’d like a chance to read The Bandit on the Billiard Table for yourself, gratis – and I have to say it’s ideal holiday reading, wherever you may be taking yourself for the duration – then you just have to do two things.

1. Answer me this correctly:
Sardinian literature can proudly boast of the woman who was in 1926 only the second female winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was her name?

2. Put your answer in an email to finds@faber.co.uk, with BANDIT as your subject line. The competition will close at 5pm next Wednesday June 26, whereupon I will pick a winner from an earthenware pot.

Good luck!

Tony Blair addresses the UN General Assembly, Sept. 2005

The Independent on Sunday yesterday ran a generous extract from the new pages, opening with a consideration of the actions of early 2003 that have come to define Blair’s tenure in office. Among many interested responses to that extract was that of James Forsyth, political editor of the Spectator, who took to Twitter to report that he found John’s piece ‘superb on how Blair survived post-Iraq by playing Brown with ‘as fine an understanding of psychology as anything in Jane Austen’’ (and that he was also ‘intrigued by Cherie’s view that [her husband] could take a 51-49 decision and then make the case for it as if it was 70-30.’) Forsyth then offered the crowning verdict that Tony Blair: Prime Minister is ‘one of the best political biographies of recent times.’

Here is the thought-provoking opening to the Independent on Sunday extract:

“Given that Blair’s response to 9/11 led in a straight line to Britain’s taking part in the invasion of Iraq 18 months later, and given that the Iraq war was the main reason Blair did not continue as Prime Minister for longer, solidarity with America – or, rather, solidarity with President Bush and meaning it – was a political error. Certainly, it is possible to see how a more cynical politician might have mitigated the anti-war rage by stepping back from military deployment in March 2003, an option explicitly offered by President Bush and described, but not, he says, advocated, by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, on the eve of conflict. It would have made little difference in Iraq, as the American forces would have gone in anyway, with the British presumably joining them afterwards, when the UN endorsed the international administration of the country in May 2003. But it would have made a difference in British politics…”

To recap, we asked you to identify the three poets of whom Johnson wrote in the following three extracts from the Lives:

1. “[His] delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven…”

The netherwordly/celestial reference will have tipped a wink that it is JOHN MILTON being described thus.

2. “He was contented to be called an Irishman by the Irish; but would occasionally call himself an Englishman. The question may, without much regret, be left in the obscurity in which he delighted to involve it.”

Of course the Irish Sea has more than once made an intriguing bridge/division in the classification of what we try to call ‘English Literature’; but the man referred to here is JONATHAN SWIFT.

3. “… with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard of every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness…”

The tendency of Poets Behaving Badly has been a great blessing to literary biography, but some poets have exceeded others in that line, and few more extravagantly than this man: John Wilmost, the second EARL OF ROCHESTER.

Those were the answers then, and the first correct set drawn from our cat’s basket was from Christa Fleps, who wins the spoils. Congratulations to Christa and, again, thanks to all entrants.

‘They’re GIVING it away!? Why, I was paid but 200 guineas for the whole…’

‘Most literary criticism is ephemeral,’ Colin Burrow opined for the LRB, ‘too good for wrapping up chips but not worth binding, keeping, annotating or editing. Very little English literary criticism has lasted as long or worn as well as Samuel Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets’…’

It was never meant to be the grandest of productions – not in 1777, when Johnson was commissioned by a booksellers’ consortium to write prefaces for a raft of fifty-plus discrete editions of English poets. But in Johnson’s hands the commission acquired weight, he wound up spending four years over the task, and finally a free-standing work emerged – one that remains stalwart and full of pleasures today, 300 or so years from Johnson’s birth.

As John Mullan wrote in the Guardian a while back, ”The Lives of the Poets’, combining mournfully droll biography with brilliant literary criticism, is as enjoyable as anything [Johnson] wrote, yet has long been unavailable outside academic libraries or second-hand bookshops.’

Yet no sooner had Mullan written same in 2009 than Finds was offering George Birkbeck Hill’s three-volume edition. And if you should like to have a chance to win the full set of three for your own shelves you have only to do two things by way of entry:

i. Correctly identify the three poets of whom Johnson is writing in the following three extracts from the LIVES:

1. “[His] delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven…”

2. “He was contented to be called an Irishman by the Irish; but would occasionally call himself an Englishman. The question may, without much regret, be left in the obscurity in which he delighted to involve it.”

3. “… with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard of every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness…”

Update 10.06.2013: This competition has now closed.

H.G. Wells

Call it a rite of spring, call it a fit of magnanimity, call it, if you wish, an urge to clear some space around the desk – but the moment has come for another grand old Finds Giveaway. There are quite a few titles by quite a few authors which we feel moved to offer you the chance to sample gratis. (Your side of the bargain, dear reader, should you be a lucky winner, is just to keep spreading the good word about good books…)

We indicated some weeks (months!?) ago that we wanted to offer some of our striking range of titles by H.G. Wells. That time is nigh, for starters. We have one copy of each of the following to give away:

The Wheels of Chance (1896)
The Food of the Gods (1904)
The Passionate Friends (1913)
Bealby (1915)
Boon (1915)
Men Like Gods (1923)
The World of William Clissold (1926, N.B. in three volumes, the prize being all three)

For a chance to win the title of your choice, you have to do two things.

1. Answer these 2 questions correctly:
(i) Wells had an extramarital affair – and conceived a son – with which English novelist and journalist (herself the subject of a biography by Victoria Glendinning in Finds)?
(ii) Men Like Gods (1923) is believed to have inspired the writing (in riposte) of which famous dystopian novel of 1932?

UPDATE: This competition is now closed.

Anne Sebba

“Faber is to be applauded for re-releasing this superb 1994 history of women reporters through its Faber Finds series… with Sebba’s new preface, highlighting particularly the appalling case of Lara Logan, sexually assaulted by a crowd while covering the uprising in Cairo.

Marie Colvin in Iraq in 2007

Sebba’s history of women reporting abroad is a more positive one, though, tracing the careers of journalistic stars including Martha Gellhorn and Rebecca West, as well as the less well-known but no less heroic Clare Hollingworth (who used her smaller size to good effect to help squeeze through a crowd to a much-needed phone box), and Peggy Hull, the only woman to “approach professional recognition” during the First World War, when female reporters were not allowed accreditation.”

Richard Skinner

RICHARD SKINNER writes:
My grandfather, Captain Alexander Greig, served in North Africa during the Second World War. He fought in the battle of El Alamein with the 8th Army, one of the divisions affectionately known as the ‘Desert Rats’. I have a picture of him in uniform sitting on a camel. My grandfather died when I was a small child and I don’t remember him, but every time we visited my Nana, I would look at his small collection of books that she kept in a locked glass cabinet. These books were mostly about Rommel, and my Nana told me that my grandfather always expressed enormous respect for the German field marshal. Ever since then, the word ‘Alamein’ has had a tremendous significance in my family.

Keith Douglas

So, when I came across a copy of ‘Alamein to Zem Zem’ in a secondhand bookshop more than 20 years ago, I immediately bought it. I knew of and loved Keith Douglas the poet, but had no idea he had written a memoir of his wartime experiences. And what a stunning memoir it is – written immediately after the events it depicts. Douglas’ prose is lucid and direct and sounds so fresh that it feels as though it could have been written yesterday. It is entirely free of that kind of dated English language we now associate with contemporary works such as Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited’ or David Lean’s film of Noel Coward’s ‘Brief Encounter’.

As well as being the finest English poet to emerge from the Second World War, Douglas was also a talented graphic artist and he possessed an artist’s mix of detachment and curiosity, which meant that he could get up, close and personal to the horrors of the war without flinching. His memoir is full of the most incredible drawings and linguistic images: ‘Every man had a white mask of dust in which, if he wore no goggles, his eyes showed like a clown’s eyes.’ Laying down to sleep out in the cold desert night, he describes the lights in the sky as ‘starshells, tracers of orange, green, blue, and a harsh white, and the deeper colour of explosions.’

His account is also very good at capturing the physical sensations of being in battle. A few hours before his first engagement, he describes his feelings as the ‘unstable lightness which is felt physically immediately after putting down a heavy weight.’ The view from his moving tank he says is like ‘a camera obscura or a silent film … which led me to feel that the country into which we were now moving was a strange land, quite unrelated to real life, like the scenes in ‘The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’.’

Keith Douglas was born on 24 January 1920 and was fascinated by all things military as a child, perhaps because his absent father had been an army captain during the First World War. He went to Christ’s Hospital school and later read English & History at Oxford. He was impulsive, precocious and developed a profound disregard for authority, resulting in a near expulsion from Christ’s Hospital over a stolen training rifle. His antipathy towards the establishment continued at Oxford, where he wrote vehemently anti-war poems. And yet, as soon as war broke out, he joined the Sherwood Rangers as a cavalry officer. This contradiction was typical of Douglas’ complex nature.

After an administrative spell with the Sherwood Rangers in Palestine, Douglas was sent back to England for more training. He was desperate for the experience of war and so, against direct orders, he famously made his own way back to North Africa. His unit was now in theatre and he rejoined them in October 1942. No one immediately seemed to notice his absence and Douglas remained in the Middle East with the Sherwood Rangers until 1943, when he returned to England to retrain for the D-Day invasions. On 6 June 1944, Douglas took part in the main assault on the Normandy beaches. Three days later, he was killed by mortar fire near Tilly-sur-Seulles while returning from a patrol. He was just 24 years old.

The war for Douglas was a Nietzschean self-examination of willpower and endurance and he mentions several times that his reasons for joining up were not just ideological, but also highly personal. As a soldier, he was passionate, uncompromising—the kind of person you would want as a leader in wartime. As his batman said to him, ‘I like you sir. You’re shit or bust, you are.’

As in his poems, there is a meditation on the metaphysical that runs throughout the book, almost as though he were a criminal, feeling for his own pulse whilst in the middle of a crime. Death was, for Douglas, a moment of transformation. He describes his experiences in this beautiful memoir as like ‘having walked through the looking-glass which touches a man entering a battle.’ My grandfather would have concurred, I’m sure.

Miles Gibson

Miles’ presence on the web takes many and varied forms. But this is only as befits a writer who has been favourably compared to, inter alia, Ian McEwan (in the FT), Garcia Marquez (in Country Life), Poe (the United Press), Swift (the Sydney Morning Herald), Mervyn Peake (the Literary Review), Martin Amis (the TLS), Dylan Thomas (the Evening Standard), Evelyn Waugh (the Observer) and even David Lynch (Time Out). I can assure you that you will enjoy the chase if, Alice-like, you venture down the electronic rabbit-hole in pursuit of his fugitive shade.

The official Miles Gibson website with extended details of both his writings and artworks is here. His ‘The Author Notes’ blog – which he has described to me as ‘nothing but mischief’, and which I can’t recommend highly enough – is here. And his fabulous Tumblr page of hand-inked collage-postcards is here.

Let us say a little, then, of Gibson’s notorious Sandman – one William Burton by name, who is seen to grow up in a small hotel in a shabby English seaside town, lonely and inclined to practise conjuring tricks. Fully grown he turns to magic of a darker kind, and takes to walking abroad at night, predatory, on the streets of London.

Should you be afraid – very afraid? By no means. The TLS hailed the novel for its ‘comic impact’ as achieved by ‘the deftness of Gibson’s control.’ (Cosmopolitan, too, rated it ‘horribly deft’!) Time Out thought it ‘a splendidly macabre achievement’, the Sydney Morning Herald felt it was ‘written by a virtuoso.’

As Miles reflects in his new preface to the novel in Finds: “I hadn’t intended to shock the reader with a eulogy for a serial killer. I’d created a monster, perhaps, but like any proud parent I’d loved him enough to forgive his crimes and misdemeanours and felt comfortable enough in his company to regard the narrative as a lament for a lost soul, an erotic fantasy, a pitch-black comedy…”

Keep ‘em peeled for a chance to win a copy of The Sandman in our next big prize quiz, coming soon…

Peter Hobbs

I’ve always found it strange how the reputations of so many writers have very little to do with the quality of their work. It can take many decades before there’s a levelling out or reappraisal. In the short and medium terms weak writers may be lauded, and great writers forgotten. RC Hutchinson seems to have been in the latter category – he’s almost unknown amongst writers of my generation or younger. He died in 1975, the same year he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his final novel, Rising. Over most of the years since his books have been out of print and hard to find, and the only way you would even come across his name was through the route by which great, almost-forgotten writers usually endure – word of mouth.

R.C. Hutchinson

My introduction to his work came via a conversation with the novelist Charles Chadwick, who was so insistent I should read it that he later sent me his own old hardback of the 1964 novel, A Child Possessed. It arrived in the post with a letter from Charles saying how fond he was of the copy, and how if possible he’d love to get it back at some stage. I understood that it was one of those books that are simply loved by their owner, and that there was no small amount of pain involved in sending it off in the post. But still he was so passionate about the book and its importance that he was willing to risk entrusting it to me for a while. I’ve been grateful ever since.

A Child Possessed is an extraordinary book. It tells the story of Stepan, a Russian of aristocratic birth, who since becoming estranged from his wife Helene has been working in France as a lorry driver. By chance he discovers that Helene has kept hidden from him the fact that their daughter Eugenie, who was severely mentally and physically disabled and who he has long believed to be dead, is alive, in the secluded care of a Swiss hospital. Stepan visits her, and despite the level of care she clearly requires, he feels instantly that she should not be kept there, away from her family. In an act of love, at once instinctive and certain, he takes her into his own care, bringing her into his life, and taking her with him on his long road journeys.

It is a startlingly brave book to write, quiet and deeply human, a compassionate and fierce love story. It is certainly one of the great British novels of the 20th century, beautifully written, and is perhaps the most moral – though certainly not moralising – book I know. And as Charles Chadwick commented, after I had read (and returned) the book: on learning that Hutchinson himself had a severely disabled child, it seems an even braver, more remarkable work to have produced.

Great writing is often far from where the publishing noise is, and where the headlines are, and sometimes it can get lost for a while. But it tends to find its way, at least to people who care for it.