Number 1
2 June 2008
I'm going to put a link in this home page that will soon be out of date - but what can an author do? You see, Sepulchre is number one this week and I would like visitors to the site to be able to go and see this fact with their own browsers.
But the page will soon be updated because the Guardian website is a brilliant and compendious AND up-to-the-minute thing. Still, for what it's worth, here's where you can go:
I'm especially pleased to be there because the rest of the top ten is made up of big names and brilliant authors - James Patterson, Chris Ryan, Lauren Weisberger, Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, Sheila O'Flanagan, Erica James, Joanne Harris and Jack Higgins.
But I have also been a little out of the loop, because we are so close to the award of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction - click this link to see the shortlisted titles on another superb list - and I've been travelling for foreign publications of both Labyrinth and Sepulchre.
In fact, I'm just back from a literary festival in Bulgaria, a guest of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. We spent four days in the Black Sea resort of Sozopol - once the playground of the Communist Party elite - learning about the Bulgarian publishing industry.
It was such a revealing trip - and so different to consider a country of just a few million people with a language unlikely to be spoken beyond its borders. What a challenge for writers and publishers!
Truly, one of the greatest pleasures of the writer's life is meeting other authors. It is fascinating to chat about this and that - how the imagination finds its way, how vague ideas become substantial ones; as Auden said - how 'relevant thoughts occur' and not 'lip-smacking imps of mawk and hooey'.
I was delighted to meet Danielle Trussoni, author of Falling through the Earth on the beautiful Black Sea coast. I really enjoyed it. It reminded me a little of the beautiful poised style of another writer I know, Jason Goodwin, although in quite another area of writing. Danielle's book is a memoir while Jason's recent work is detective fiction. That said, he has also written extensively in history and travel, so perhaps that's a good training ...
Finally, I've discovered that the French edition has been published not as Sépulture but Sépulcre ...
... so au revoir from the Sépulcre ...
