My Best Books

The final Haycast from the 2009 Guardian Hay festival opens with an interview with one of the festival’s most highly-anticipated authors, Kamila Shamsie. Her novel Burnt Shadows, which opens in Nagasaki on the morning of the atomic bomb and closes in a US gripped by anti-Islamic fervour following the attacks on the twin towers, is shortlisted for this year’s Orange prize. She talks about grand narratives, tackling the tensions between the west and Islam in fiction and why Pakistani literature is having its moment in the sun.

Reza Aslan’s first book, No god but God, was translated into 13 languages and shortlisted for the Guardian first book award. He talks to Xan Brooks about his new book, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror – an academic study of the issues Shamsie grapples with in her novel.

Finally, the poet Ruth Padel, the scientist Steve Jones and Cambridge University’s Gillian Beer discuss what Darwin’s written legacy reveals about him, John Crace offers another take on the festival’s stock characters, and Kate Adie reveals her guilty reading pleasure.

Sarah Waters is unrivalled in her ability to bring the past to life. Even so, writes Tracy Chevalier, her latest novel has a slightly second-hand feel

Sarah Waters has made a name for herself not only by setting her novels in the past, but by following in the footsteps of other writers and reworking established genres. To a list that includes Dickens, Wilkie Collins and gothic Victorian novels (Fingersmith, Affinity), and sober war-time dramas (The Night Watch), we can now add Daphne du Maurier and country house ghost stories.

In Waters’s fifth novel, The Little Stranger, Dr Faraday, a doctor in a small Warwickshire town, is called to Hundreds Hall, the manor house, to tend to a sick maid. He is familiar with the house from a childhood visit to a fete held there. The landed gentry, the Ayres, are now much reduced, consisting of a widow and her two grown children, Roderick and Caroline. Roderick has not long returned from the Second World War and still bears physical and psychological damage. Caroline has the hallmarks of spinsterhood, with thick ankles, wide hips, terrible dress sense and a penchant for long walks with the family labrador.

Faraday begins treating Roderick’s injured muscles with electrical therapy, which brings him regularly to the house and draws him into an awkward friendship with the family and eventually a relationship with Caroline. As was the case for many upper-class families of the time, the Ayres’ fortune is disappearing. Many of the rooms are damaged and worn and the property is overgrown and unkempt. It is a far cry from the splendour Faraday recalls from his youth.

At a disastrous cocktail party the family hosts, an accident involving the labrador and a young girl marks the beginning of an avalanche of mysterious, frightening activity in the house: dark patches and scribbles appear on the walls; knocks and whistles and footsteps are heard; telephones and servants’ bells ring, doors lock, furniture moves. Inevitably and tragically, the brittle family disintegrates, even as Faraday tries to help with doctoring, rationalising and wooing.

Waters writes with a firm, confident hand, deftly building an atmosphere that begins in a still, hot summer and gradually darkens and tightens until we are as gripped by the escalating horror as the Ayres are. She is particularly good at depicting Hundreds, a dilapidated Georgian pile that dazzles with a grand mahogany staircase, pink and liver-coloured chequerboard tiles and an octagonal salon, yet also has long, shadowy corridors marked with dim pools of light from streaked windows. Waters writes of one of its parlours: “…the essential loveliness of the room stood out, like the handsome bones behind a ravaged face.” Hundreds becomes as strong a character as any of the people inhabiting it, just as Manderley does in du Maurier’s Rebecca

Yet, while Waters might have blown the dust off a fusty genre, she can’t escape its limitations. There is an inherent problem with ghost stories: they always boil down to a futile argument between sceptic and believer. Poor Dr Faraday has the thankless task of trying to convince the Ayres that every odd sight and sound and incident has a rational explanation. I eventually grew tired of vacillating between wondering if there was a real ghost and expecting the housemaid to be behind it all; I longed for a credible third way. Waters hints at one, but its supernaturalism disguised with psychology left me dissatisfied.

In previous books, Waters has used lesbian characters as a means of overturning familiar genres and scenarios, allowing us to look at Victorian England or war-time London from a fresh perspective. This time, she uses class and it is here that The Little Stranger really shines. Dr Faraday is from a working-class background; indeed, his mother was briefly a servant at Hundreds, a fact that causes embarrassment on both sides. His ascension up the class ladder makes him at times an uneasy presence at Hundreds. At the cocktail party, other guests are baffled that the doctor is there as a guest.

When he gives Caroline a lift along the country lanes, he thinks of his uncles who once worked in the surrounding fields: “No doubt those men would have been very tickled to think that, 30 years on, a qualified doctor, I would be driving up that same road in my own car with the squire’s daughter at my side. But I felt overcome suddenly with an absurd sense of gaucheness, and falseness - as if, had my plain labourer uncles actually appeared before me now, they would have seen me for the fraud I was, and laughed at me.”

Waters has set the story during the run-up to the implementation of the NHS, a system designed to level the playing field. The Ayres are forced to sell land on which council houses are to be built, literally breaking down the wall of privilege that has surrounded the estate. No wonder that they feel haunted: progress is leaving them vulnerable. Waters’s persistent picking apart of class is fascinating, making the downfall of Hundreds and the Ayres more poignant than any ghosts ever could.

In the end, though, however fresh the prose, confident the plotting and astute the social analysis, The Little Stranger has a slightly secondhand feel to it. Waters is clearly at the top of her game, with few to match her ability to bring the past to life in a fully imagined world. I look forward to the book in which she leaves behind past templates, with their limitations, and breaks away to make her own literary history.

This inspired celebration of Joyce’s great novel succeeds in reclaiming the widely unread classic for the general reader, writes Sean O’Hagan

In August 1924, the long-suffering Stanislaus Joyce sent a letter of complaint to his brother, James, in which he mentioned his difficulties with Ulysses. “The greater part of it I like,” he wrote, before adding with characteristic bluntness: “I have no humour with episodes which are deliberately farcical… and as episodes grow longer and longer and you try to tell every damn thing you know about anybody that appears or anything that crops up, my patience oozes out.”

In his exasperation, Stanislaus anticipated the fate that awaited Ulysses, a novel that, almost 90 years after its publication, seems to have utterly exhausted the patience of the ordinary reader to the point where it is now perhaps the most unread literary masterpiece of all time. Declan Kiberd begins Ulysses and Us, his inspired reclamation of Joyce’s great epic of the everyday, by acknowledging the great irony that “a book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman” has “endured the sad fate of never being read by many of them”.

Kiberd’s previous books include the brilliant Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation and Ulysses: Annotated Students’ Edition. The preoccupations of both books come together in Ulysses and Us. The first - and more interesting - part of the book is a polemic, which tackles what Kiberd sees as the enduring misrepresentation of Joyce’s dauntingly ambitious novel: “How can a book like Ulysses have been so misread and misunderstood?” he asks early on. “How was it taken as a product of a specialist bohemia against which it was in fact in open revolt? Why has it been called unreadable by the ordinary people for which it was intended?” In the second part of Ulysses and Us, Kiberd goes on to give a chapter by chapter breakdown of the novel, best read alongside the original text, to help, it would seem, those “ordinary people” reclaim the book.

If Kiberd tends to downplay the novel’s difficulty, he is a tireless and refreshingly clear-headed champion of its myriad rewards. Even if you do not have the patience to read Ulysses with Kiberd’s chapter-by-chapter guide nearby, you should try and read his two opening chapters, entitled “How Ulysses Didn’t Change the World” and “How it Might Still Do So”. Together, they make up a rigorous, politically combative and heartfelt argument for the continuing relevance of a novel “that has much to teach us about the world - advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do men; how to walk and think at the same time… how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke…”

It is his contention that Ulysses has suffered most at the hands of its so-called champions, the seemingly endless stream of academics that constitutes the Joyce industry in all its self-sustaining, self-defeating specialisation. Their cardinal sin, he insists, is not their wilful obfuscation or often surreal jargon - “parallax, indeterminacy, consciousness-time” - but their determination to wrest the book from its actual - and symbolic - setting.

“Many of them reject the notion of a national culture, assuming that to be cultured nowadays is to be international, even global, in consciousness,” writes Kiberd. “In doing this, they have removed Joyce from the Irish context which gave his work so much of its meaning and value.”

As Kiberd points out, Ulysses is a novel so rooted in a sense of place that, as its author once memorably put it, if Dublin was to “suddenly disappear from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book”. (Joyce was so obsessive in his devotion to detailing the city he had fled that he once wrote to his Aunt Josephine in Dublin asking: “Is it possible for an ordinary person to climb over the railings of No 7 Eccles Street either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within two feet or three off the ground and drop unhurt?”)

Ulysses is a novel that, long before the term was invented, attempted to map out the psychogeography of Joyce’s native city. It is also, though, as Kiberd reminds us, a novel “written to celebrate ordinary people’s daily rounds”. Unlike Flaubert, say, Joyce had no interest in writing fiction with an underlying social message. Instead, he evoked, through the wanderings and musings of his Jewish Everyman, Leopold Bloom, the latent sense of wonder that often underpins the everyday.

It is also a book about the passing on of wisdom from one generation to another, from one remarkably content older Dubliner, Bloom, to the younger, altogether more troubled Stephen Dedalus. Kiberd’s subtitle is “The Art of Everyday Living” and that is what he emphasises throughout.

For all that, though, Ulysses does remain a difficult read and, I suspect, seldom finds its way on to book club reading lists. More worryingly, as Kiberd points out, it has also fallen off the syllabuses of many university degree courses in English literature. Students no longer arrive at college with a thorough grounding in the Latin and Greek classics. “What has been lost,” writes Kiberd, “is a sense of chronology, an understanding of the evolution of English literature on which so much of the meaning of the text depends.”

What has also been lost is the notion of the novel as a medium for self-improvement, a notion Joyce believed in wholeheartedly. He insisted, as Kiberd succinctly puts it, “on the use-value of art” and saw Ulysses as a book that could engage both scholars and ordinary readers alike. This now seems like wishful thinking, but, as Kiberd states: “Ulysses took shape in a world which had known for the first time the possibilities of mass literacy and the emergence of working men’s reading libraries.” That utopian ideal now seems distant .

The last word, though, should not, for once, go to Joyce but to the common reader, in this instance Declan Kiberd’s father, a Dubliner through and through. “My father loved Ulysses as the fullest account ever given of the city in which he lived,” writes Kiberd. “There were parts that baffled or bored him, and these he skipped, much as today we fast-forward over the duller tracks on beloved music albums. But there were entire passages he knew almost by heart.”

That is Ulysses as I know it and love it: a novel that can be read in fragments, dipped into and out of, digested in small, rich, satisfying chunks. A novel, in fact, for our time.

Ulysses, a brief history: The story behind the book

Begun in 1914, when James Joyce was 32 and living in Paris, Ulysses was first serialised in the American journal, The Little Review, while it was still being written. When the review printed a scene of masturbation, it faced a prosecution for obscenity, which it lost.

The finished book was first published in Paris by Shakespeare and Company in 1922. It printed only 1,000 copies and when Random House tried to import some of these to the US, the books were seized by customs.

This first edition was found to have between 2,000 and 5,000 textual errors - although, as the book is made up of 264,834 words (using a vocabulary of 30,030 words), and almost a third of it was written in the margins of the manuscript, none of the 11 editions since 1922 has provided a perfect text either. Most English editions follow the revised edition published by Bodley Head in 1960.

Ulysses is split into 18 chapters, or “episodes”, all of which take place on the same day: 16 June 1904. It was been filmed twice, adapted for the stage and broadcast in dramatised form on the radio.

Despite Ulysses generally being regarded as a difficult read, Dublin and Joyce aficionados elsewhere celebrate it annually with Bloomsday on 16 June, enjoyed by thousands of people, many of whom will never have read it. The book was set on this date because it marked Joyce’s first real date with his future wife, Nora. Bloomsday involves readings, pub crawls, and other festivities; in Spokane, Washington, there is a charity event called the Bloomsday run (in fact held on the first weekend in May).

Whitbread award-winning writer Kate Atkinson confesses her reluctance to publish to a Hay festival audience

Her latest crime novel, When Will There Be Good News, picked up the best book of the year gong at the British book awards last month, but the Whitbread prize-winner Kate Atkinson has admitted that she’d rather not be a published author.

Her reclusive streak was revealed on stage this morning at the Guardian Hay festival, where she confessed her ideal situation would be “to have enough money … [to] write and not be published”. She doesn’t, she told Guardian Review editor Lisa Allardice, like reviews or critics. “It’s a very uncomfortable thing for a writer, we’re very tender,” she said.

Writing is the thing she does best, how she earns her money, but “not being published would be great”, Atkinson continued. “When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I’m totally insane.”

Even though she doesn’t feel a need to be published, she said she “probably need[s] to write”, a distinction which JD Salinger – who hasn’t published a word since 1965, despite rumours of shelves groaning with manuscripts – would surely recognise. But it’s not an “overwhelming burning urge,” she added, suggesting she would “rather potter about in the garden”.

“My work is not my life,” she said. “I started writing quite late, I didn’t have that ‘writing is everything, my art is all’. You have to be able to recognise the difference between the two.”

Usually it takes her two years to write a book, she said, but if she were locked in a room, she could do it in the three months it took her to write her Whitbread-winning novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. “Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book,” she said, and “without the time pressure” she could write faster.

She’s currently in the middle of a fourth novel starring the former police inspector Jackson Brodie, who featured in When Will There Be Good News, which will bring her troubled sleuth back to his old self. “He’s gone through his midlife crisis and is a much more active character,” she said. “I’ve found I’ve changed him a lot, I have added a lot. Me and Jackson tend to do the same things. If I go somewhere he goes there, I’m his twin in a way.”

For fans hoping for romance, Atkinson said they’ll have to wait. “Getting together with Louise – that’s another book in the future.” Whether or not her fans will get to see it, she didn’t say.

The second weekend of the Guardian Hay festival swings into action today, but although the sun is out and the site is awash with strawberries and ice cream, as ever at Hay, serious issues lie just below the surface. Kate Adie talks to Natalie Hanman about a career of bullet-dodging and why she believes human beings are prepared to risk their lives; Rowan Williams discusses matters of faith over breakfast with Madeleine Bunting; and fresh back from a trip across the US during which he tried to avoid giving a cent to the big chains, Dave Gorman explains why he hankers for the days before brands.

Plus, in honour of its 80th birthday, Faber authors Giles Foden, Lavinia Greenlaw and Philip Ardagh talk about what it means to work with the publisher that employed TS Eliot as an editor, poets Daljit Nagra and Alice Oswald read from their Faber collections and customers at Hay’s poetry bookshop explain what the sight of the famous “ff” means to them.

And as if all that weren’t enough, Joan Bakewell reveals her guilty reading pleasure.

The story of the Normandy landings has been told before, but rarely with such panache

In the early hours of 6 June 1944, the allies launched the greatest amphibious assault of the second world war. Assisted by bombers and airborne troops, Operation Neptune, the first phase of Overlord, was the precursor to a campaign intended to drive the Germans out of France and the Low Countries. The attack took place during a brief break in unseasonally bad weather. Antony Beevor begins his account of this now almost mythic narrative five days earlier, by describing the head of the allied weather forecasting team, James Stagg, receiving a broadside from General Harold Bull, assistant chief of staff to the supreme commander, Dwight D Eisenhower. Stagg’s meteorologists could not agree whether the weather for the invasion, originally planned for 5 June and various dates in May, would be suitable:

“For heaven’s sake, Stagg,” Bull exploded. “Get it sorted out by tomorrow morning before you come to the supreme commander’s conference. General Eisenhower is a very worried man.”

One of the many strengths of Beevor’s book is his presentation of the nervous but philosophic personality of Eisenhower in the face of the “appalling responsibility” of deciding at what point he should trust the views of these meteorologists and give the order to go (in the event, a “very great risk” was taken with the weather, as Churchill said later in parliament). But although many other characters are equally well portrayed, from Churchill himself to US generals Bradley - with his specs and “hayseed expression” - and Patton, famous for his profanity, to Montgomery with his terseness and conceit, and De Gaulle with his arrogance and his long arms, it is the personal narratives of ordinary servicemen that drive this book.

This is the same approach Beevor took in his justly acclaimed Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall and other books. Once again a gripping narrative is the result. But with D-Day he was faced with a great problem, in that many more writers have tackled the subject previously. What has he found new that Chester Wilmot, John Keegan (under whom Beevor studied), Max Hastings and Carlo D’Este didn’t?

Though it is hard to match Hastings’s Overlord in particular, the fact is that Beevor has indeed added to the account. Accruing greater detail, he has made use of overlooked and new material from more than 30 archives in half a dozen countries. His skill with German archives (a former Hussars officer, he served in the British Army of the Rhine) is especially evident. He addresses controversies in military history - were the British in Normandy tired out from fighting elsewhere? How badly were the Canadians led? Was Montgomery a hero or a hindrance? - and other questions with balance and judgment. The main reasons for allied success are pinpointed as the speed of advance by US motorised divisions and Hitler’s refusal to allow a flexible defence.

The pleasure of this book lies in the vividness of an episodic narrative, backed up by judicious use of quotation. Moving from the weather drama to surveillance of the assault beaches, to individual accounts of each beach, to the breakout for Paris, the action never lets up. Beevor follows personalities from one location to another. One moment we are with Captain Scott-Bowden swimming ashore from a midget submarine to Omaha Beach to take a soil sample, armed only with a commando knife, a Colt .45 and an auger, the next we are seeing him make his report to an intimidating room full of generals back in Whitehall: “Sir, I hope you don’t mind me saying but this beach is a very formidable proposition indeed and there are bound to be tremendous casualties.” So it would prove, with the ramps of landing craft dropping and German machine guns opening fire so that “men were tumbling just like corn cobs off a conveyor belt”.

Many of the assault troops knew this was to be their fate, not least because their officers kept telling them so. Beevor is very good on how heavily the burden of premonition weighed on men. A large number took their minds off what lay ahead with frenetic betting, first with dubious-looking invasion money (une fausse monnaie as De Gaulle sneeringly called it), then with saved dollars and pound notes. Other eve of battle rituals included shaving heads, with some Americans deciding “to leave a strip of hair down the middle in Mohican style”. This contributed to the German idea that US troops were recruited from Sing-Sing.

The Germans themselves are fairly treated throughout, with a proper view of the difference between those who retained a moral sense and those in whom it had long disappeared. There is a wonderful vignette of an old, one-legged, one-eyed Prussian general called Erich Marcks refusing whipped cream at dinner: “I do not wish to see this again as long as our country is starving.” Equally, there are many depictions of the brutality of retreating SS troops.

A former novelist (it is now often forgotten that before concentrating on his historical work in the 1990s, this author published four works of fiction), Beevor is very good on what might in a novel or film be called the kitbag scene, in which equipment is assembled, in this case in preparation for jumping from the C-47 aircraft that would deliver paratroopers to the assault zone: “Dog tags were taped together to prevent them making a noise. Cigarettes and lighters, together with other essentials, such as a washing and shaving kit, water-purifying tablets, 24 sheets of toilet paper and a French phrase book, went into the musette bag slung around the neck, along with an escape kit consisting of a map printed on silk, hacksaw blade, compass and money.”

This was only a tiny part of the burden that airborne troops carried. Once weapons and other equipment were taken into account, they often needed help to get up the steps of the planes, “almost like knights in armour trying to mount their horses”.

Such a telling phrase is typical, whether it relates to grand strategy (on the eve of invasion “Churchill sent a signal to Stalin with the feeling that the blood debt which the western allies owed the Soviet people was being paid at last”) or to domestic feeling on the home front once the assault was under way: “People in their nightclothes went out into their gardens to stare up at the seemingly endless air armada silhouetted against the scudding clouds. ‘This is it’ was their instinctive thought.”

Landing in thickly hedged country known as bocage, often separated from their units, paratroopers resorted in vain to artificial duck calls or cheap children’s “clickers” (familiar from the film The Longest Day). Many planes were flying too low, and those paratroopers who had landed successfully witnessed the sickening sound of bodies hitting the ground around them, which they compared to “watermelons falling off the back of a truck”.

As well as the grotesque, there were moments of comedy, such as when an allied soldier asked a French farmer “Ou es Alamon?” “He shrugged and pointed north, then south, east and west.” Against these humorous moments must be set strange ones, such as watching heavy shells fired from offshore battleships create a vacuum in their wake, causing the water to “rise up and follow the shells in and then drop back into the sea”. And, of course, there are many pictures of horror, including a description of cleaning human remains from the inside of a tank with a mess tin and spoon.

The last third of the book is concerned mainly with the rush to Paris, which was not in the original plan for the campaign. It is almost impossible for a reader not to get caught up in the excitement. The historian must always make a choice between the work of depiction and the work of analysis. Even though Beevor is well capable of the latter, we should be glad he has chosen the former. By doing so he has overleaped the barrier of hindsight, getting us as near as possible to experiencing what it was like to be there, that fateful summer, 65 years ago.

• Giles Foden’s Turbulence is published next week by Faber. Antony Beevor is at the Hay festival today.

A 15-year-old war orphan is abducted by an elderly woman and her spinster daughter, stripped, beaten and locked in an attic - or so she claims. The plot of the popular 1940s crime novel The Franchise Affair was based on an 18th-century case. Sarah Waters on an intriguing tale of class, fear and sexuality

The ghost story tradition is full of echoes. Haunted houses resemble each other, curses work themselves out along similar lines, and each new Gothic narrative somehow recalls the ones before it. Writing The Little Stranger, I found myself almost unconsciously invoking the touchstones of the genre, giving little nods to Dickens, to Poe, to Shirley Jackson and Henry James. A room in Hundreds Hall, the novel’s setting, had peeling paper on its walls: it seemed only good manners to let the paper be yellow, thereby invoking Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 19th-century masterpiece of mental deterioration, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. And when I needed a cool-headed narrator for the sometimes startling events of the story, an unmarried country doctor felt right - and recalled, to me at least, the scholarly bachelors who so often narrate the classic ghost stories of MR James.

The first dark germ of The Little Stranger, however, came to me from another genre entirely. The book has its origins in my response to a detective novel from 1948: The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, a novel I first read more than a decade ago, and which has fascinated and troubled me, in about equal measures, ever since. And just to add another giddying layer to this story, The Franchise Affair - one of eight crime novels published under the “Tey” pseudonym by the Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh in the 30s and 40s - was itself inspired by an earlier narrative, a notorious abduction case from the 18th century.

The details of that case are worthy of a novel in their own right. They centre on Elizabeth Canning, an 18-year-old London maidservant who, on 1 January 1753, left her aunt and uncle’s house to make the short journey back to her employer’s - and failed to arrive. Despite her family’s and friends’ frantic efforts to find her, Canning was missing for almost a month. When she turned up at last, on 29 January, she was bruised and emaciated and had clearly been through some dreadful ordeal. She claimed that, on the night of her disappearance, she had been assaulted in Moorfields by two men, who had then taken her on a six-hour walk to a bawdy house, where an old woman had tried to persuade her “to go their Way” - that is, to join the girls of the house in prostitution. Canning had resisted; the lace of her stays was cut with a knife, the stays and her cap were taken from her, and she was locked in a hayloft and apparently forgotten. For four weeks she had survived on scraps of bread and water, finally summoning up the courage to force a window, escape, and make her way back into London to her mother.

In the relatively intimate city of the 1750s, her return caused a sensation. The house in which she had been held captive was swiftly identified by neighbours as that of “Mother” Susannah Wells of Enfield, and Wells herself, along with Mary Squires, a “Gipsy Woman”, was promptly charged with Canning’s abduction. The two women denied ever having seen the girl - Squires even seemed to have a good alibi placing her in Dorset on the night of the kidnapping - and odd gaps and confusions in Canning’s own account made the case a puzzling one. Witnesses stepped forward in support of both sides, newspapers and pamphleteers seized on the story, and the affair was furiously and very publicly debated.

Canning’s defenders - who included the novelist Henry Fielding, the magistrate to whom she swore her first affidavit - stressed her honesty and respectability. Her detractors, on the other hand, claimed she had cooked up the whole tale as an alibi for some shady adventure of her own. Even the law equivocated. A first trial found Wells and Squires guilty; the former was sentenced to branding and imprisonment, the latter to execution by hanging. But a retrial saw the convictions dramatically overturned, with Canning herself being convicted of “wilful and corrupt perjury”. She was transported to America, where she became a domestic servant, married, bore children and, in 1773, at the age of 38, died. She had stuck to her story all that time, just as Wells and Squires had held fast to theirs. No satisfactory account of what happened to her during her month-long absence from home has ever been arrived at, and the case remains an enigma.

The details of Canning’s narrative - the abduction in the lonely ground of Moorfields, the bawdy house, the stolen stays - embed it firmly in its historical context, and provide wonderfully lively glimpses of 18th-century London life. But the broader essentials - the assaulted girl, the partisan crowd, the explosive collision of claim and counterclaim - sit more loosely in their setting, and it is easy to see why Tey, a great storyteller with a particular interest in miscarriages of justice, should have been attracted to them. In The Daughter of Time (1951), her most celebrated novel, she re-examined the evidence surrounding the deaths of the princes in the tower to launch a defence of Richard III, rescuing the king from the gross misrepresentations of history. But with The Franchise Affair she took a different line, radically updating her model for a contemporary British audience. So, in her postwar fictional retelling, Elizabeth Canning becomes Betty Kane, a 15-year-old working-class girl who, after a mysterious month-long absence from her Midlands home, turns up bruised, dazed, and telling a fantastic tale of abduction and assault.

Betty’s claim is that, while waiting at a bus stop, she was offered a lift by two local middle-class women - elderly Mrs Sharpe and her spinster daughter, Marion. The women, she alleges, took her back to their house, gave her food that made her drowsy, and tried to talk her into accepting a job as their servant. When she refused, they locked her in an attic, then repeatedly cajoled, bullied, starved and beat her until, by chance, frantic and exhausted, she was able to escape. Since she’s a girl with a reputation for honesty - and since, more crucially, she can back up her story with an apparently intimate knowledge of the layout of the Sharpes’ isolated house, The Franchise - her claims are taken seriously by the police, and the women are charged with her abduction. Baffled and alarmed, they appeal for help to a mild-mannered local solicitor, Robert Blair. The novel is told from his perspective, and follows him in his increasingly beleaguered attempts to clear the women’s names.

For, just like the Canning case, the Kane affair soon becomes a national sensation. The story is picked up by a crusading tabloid newspaper, the Ack-Emma. Public opinion sides unhesitatingly with the injured teenager; the Sharpes - impoverished gentry - are popularly characterised as ruthless toffs. The walls of The Franchise are daubed with graffiti calling the two women “Fascists”, and the windows of the house are broken by a stone-throwing crowd. Robert does all he can to discredit Betty’s story, but the girl’s reputation seems unassailable. Only at the very last moment, just as the case comes to trial, do we finally learn the truth about her absence. Betty, a war orphan, has been made jealous by the fact that her much-loved adopted brother has recently announced his engagement. The abduction and imprisonment are pure fabrications, concocted to disguise that she has “picked up” a travelling salesman in a café and accompanied him, as his wife, on a trip to Copenhagen. It is the salesman’s real wife who has beaten her, after discovering the girl in her husband’s bed. Betty’s spookily precise knowledge of the layout of The Franchise has been gained, mundanely, from the top of a double-decker bus, from which she’s been able to gaze over the high garden walls of the house and in through its windows.

Now, in some ways Tey’s retelling of the Elizabeth Canning story is a quite brilliant one. The Franchise Affair is an ingenious book, a crime novel without a corpse, a detective story in which the victim is justice itself and the main weapons are ignorance, prejudice and careless journalism. The essential mystery is wonderfully established; the claustrophobic building-up of the apparently seamless case against the Sharpes is impeccably done; the Sharpes themselves - along with Robert, their champion - are rounded, interesting characters. All these things have kept the book popular with crime readers, and made it a favourite with crime writers. It regularly appears in detective story hotlists (in 1990, for example, it was ranked 11th in the Crime Writers’ Association top 100 crime novels of all time; first place went to The Daughter of Time), and it has repeatedly been adapted for film, television and radio. In fact, it was through a Saturday-afternoon television screening of the 1951 film version that I first encountered The Franchise Affair, as a child. Years later, when my memory of the story had grown vague, the novel itself was lent to me by a crime-fan friend. It formed part of her collection of vintage green-spined Penguins and quaintly jacketed Pans, and was, she assured me, one of the best detective stories ever written.

I found the novel’s suggestive opening immediately gripping. The reclusive mother and daughter, the smooth-faced girl with her bizarre but convincing account of having been lured to the lonely house, then stripped to her slip, locked in an attic, and finally beaten with a dog-whip - here, I thought, was something quite extraordinary, a story of psychological twists that would surely keep me guessing to the final page.

But something odd starts happening in The Franchise Affair, almost at once. The Sharpes are difficult, “uncomfortable” people, not much liked in the local community. Marion has approached Robert for help because she needs the advice, she says, of “someone of my own sort” - and, indeed, what draws him so swiftly and so surely on to her side are the little signals of decency he identifies in her and her mother: their elegant, if shabby, furniture; the fact that they insist on serving “admirable” sherry despite being forced into other economies. Betty, by contrast, is never given a chance to engage either his or our sympathies. Intriguingly cipher-like at first, she arrives in the novel in her school coat and low-heeled shoes, “an ordinary sort of girl . . . not the sort you would notice in a croc [ie a crocodile line of children]“. But doubts about her character are, within paragraphs, being raised. “Is the girl a virgin?” blunt Mrs Sharpe asks, in the 15-year-old’s presence. And before a few more pages have passed we are disturbed to catch, with Robert, an “unguarded flash of triumph” in the teenager’s expression as one of the details in her story is proved to be correct: “a savage emotion, primitive and cruel . . . very startling on the face of a demure schoolgirl who was the pride of her guardians and preceptors”.

In other words, where the enigma of Tey’s 18th-century model rests firmly on the issue of who in the case was telling the truth - Elizabeth Canning, or her alleged abductors - in The Franchise Affair the question of narrative uncertainty is opened only to be promptly closed down. The mystery is shifted entirely to Betty herself, to the questions of why she is making her false accusations and how she is able to substantiate them. Robert’s efforts to uncover the facts behind her month-long disappearance simply underscore her guilt, by widening its context. He travels to her birthplace, for example, to learn more about her dead parents, and discovers that Mrs Kane was notorious locally as “a bad mother and a bad wife”, a woman who liked to have “a good time” with soldiers and was glad when enforced evacuation took her daughter off her hands. He visits the house in the “warren” of grimy streets in which Betty was staying when she disappeared, to talk to the girl’s tea-swilling aunt. He learns that Betty has spent her summer riding about on buses and making solitary trips to the pictures.

The gadabout mother, the grime, the tea, the buses: the details code Betty as feckless working class, just as surely as the Sharpes’ scuffed Hepplewhite chairs and fine sherry place them as shabby genteel. For a novel of this genre and vintage, that’s perhaps no surprise. There’s a strong vein of conservatism running through classic British crime fiction, and in The Franchise Affair in particular Tey wears her prejudices on her sleeve, invoking a quite breathtaking range of targets: French films, refugees, trade unions, liberal newspapers, Irish Republicanism, careless dog-owners … But what is most startling about the novel is the intensity of the hostility it mobilises towards Betty. Robert’s early unease about her evolves into an almost visceral loathing. It is shared by other sympathetic characters, until the narrative’s treatment of the girl is nothing short of sadistic. Marion dwells with “intense satisfaction” on the thought “that someone beat her black and blue”. Robert’s junior partner, Nevil, wants to “torture” her, or at the very least to make “a very nasty mess [sic]” of her face. Robert himself plans to “undress her in public … to strip her of every rag of pretence, in open court”. Ultimately, of course, he is able to do just that. The novel’s denouement proves the cynical middle-class characters right: once the schoolgirlish front comes off, Betty is exposed as a vicious little nympho, a bad ‘un just like her mother. Narrative-wise, she gets the whipping she deserves - with even the woman who beats her up feeling an instinctive dislike for her: “there was something about this little tramp that turned my stomach”.

All this mystified and appalled me when I first read the novel. It appalled me all over again when I returned to The Franchise Affair a few years ago, as part of my research into the 1940s for my own novel, The Night Watch. But its savagery began to make sense to me - to feel less weird and random - as I set the book alongside other 40s documents. I started to see how very precisely Tey had adapted the Canning story to meet the conservative middle-class concerns of the time, how closely informed the novel is by the specific moral panics - about “problem” children and juvenile delinquency, for example - of postwar life. Few of The Franchise Affair’s early readers must have been familiar with the case of Elizabeth Canning. To them, however, Betty Kane’s story would almost certainly have recalled that of a different Elizabeth: the 18-year-old aspiring striptease artist Elizabeth Jones, who, after taking up with an American army deserter in a tea shop in October 1944, embarked with him on a six-day spree of robbery and violence that ended with the slaying of a taxi driver. The “Cleft Chin Murder”, as the case became known, is the one discussed by George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Decline of the English Murder”: for him, the killing typified a distinctly modern trend in which murder was the product of anomie and squalor, rather than part of the calculated drive for respectability it had been in the palmy days of poisoners such as Crippen and Mrs Maybrick. “Indeed,” he writes, “the whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period” - and, as he also points out, “the brutalising effects of war” may have lent extra vehemence to the expressions of outrage that erupted when Jones was imprisoned rather than, like her male accomplice, executed. (”SHE SHOULD HANG” was apparently chalked on the walls of her home town, Neath, alongside pictures of a gallows and a dangling human figure.)

The war-fuelled violence both of Jones’s crimes and of the public reaction to them find their way, I think, into The Franchise Affair. Like Elizabeth Jones, Betty Kane is an inflammatory figure because she’s such a powerful meeting point for anxieties about gender, sexuality and class - all categories that the war had done a great deal to disturb. The 15-year-old Betty, Tey’s novel suggests, is a dangerously liminal creature, able to pass herself off as a schoolgirl or a tart, depending simply on whether she’s wearing a blazer or lipstick. (Jones herself provoked similar responses: “She has a nice face,” wrote the diarist Vere Hodgson in bafflement, when the girl’s photograph appeared in the papers alongside details of her crimes, “and at school was popular.”)

The summer in which Betty goes missing is a liminal one for her too: a period in which she has shaken off the supervision of formal education but has not yet begun to be subdued and constrained by employment. Her freedom is subversive in all sorts of ways - not least because, while she’s frittering away her days with aimless bus-riding and trips to the flicks, The Franchise is literally falling apart for want of servants to maintain it, and Marion, outrageously, is exhausting herself with housework. “It’s - it’s obscene,” spits Nevil, “that she should be wasting her vitality on household drudgery, a woman like that.” The drudgery should rightly be Betty’s, the novel implies - an issue rather brilliantly exploited in the girl’s own abduction fantasy, which sees the Sharpes attempting to persuade her to become their maid. During her supposed imprisonment in their attic, she is even given “an armful of bed-linen” and told to sew it: “No sewing, no food,” she is warned by the witchy Mrs Sharpe. Domestic service has become a thing of Grimm-like horror for the postwar working girl, a spectre fully as abject as that of prostitution for a virtuous maidservant in the 18th-century world of Elizabeth Canning.

The predicament of the suddenly servantless middle-class house was a very real one in the 1940s, when the exigencies of war, and changes in female employment generally, took working-class women out of gentry homes and found them shorter hours, better pay and more independence in factory work and clerking. The Franchise is a smaller version of the dilapidated mansions described in the diaries of the architectural historian James Lees-Milne - places such as Uppark in Sussex, which after the war had “no servants … at all”, and whose aristocratic owners served up luncheon to guests in the basement; or Gunby Hall in Lincolnshire, where the 75-year-old Lady Massingberd was forced to polish her own stairs every morning, “on hands and knees”. It is impossible, I think, to underestimate the impact of this sort of thing on a class of people who had grown up taking servants for granted, and whose sense of entitlement and purpose was intimately bound up with their capacity to command. To those still traumatised by a postwar election that had thrown out Churchill’s government and replaced it with socialists, the Britain of the late 1940s seemed a baffling and hostile place. Lees-Milne quotes Ian Anstruther, who in August 1947 had just returned to Britain from Washington: “He is shocked by this country and says for the first time in its history the upper classes are not wanted … ‘To be a gentleman today,’ he says, ‘is a disadvantage.’” Popular novelists seemed to agree with him. “Our kind is dying out. We’re becoming sterile,” says middle-class Geoffrey Osborne to his childless wife Helen, in Barbara Noble’s Doreen (1946); while for Angela Thirkell in Private Enterprise (1947), the once benign Barsetshire locals have become “conceited, half-educated oafs and louts”, the new Labour government is plotting “the deliberate extinction of the upper middle class”, and the gentry are stranded, gazing sourly at the lost comforts of the past.

It is this almost apocalyptic mixture of loss, rage and peril that underpins the conservative agenda of The Franchise Affair. For Tey, Betty Kane represents everything that’s wrong with postwar life: no wonder the passions she provokes in the novel are so vastly out of proportion to her actual narrative presence. And no wonder, perhaps, she continued to linger on in my mind, long after I had first put Tey’s book aside. I found myself returning to her yet again, in fact, when I had finished writing The Night Watch. Having looked at the war’s impact on sexuality and gender for that novel, I wanted to begin another 40s story exploring the decade’s transformation of class relations, and it seemed to me that Betty Kane might somehow provide me with a starting point. Her story, when looked at objectively, is a rather pitiful one. There’s the unloving mother, the orphaned childhood, the “extraordinarily good-looking” adopted brother, Leslie, whose engagement so dismays her; above all, there’s the disturbing precocity with which, at 15, she “picks up” a married man and passes herself off as his wife. Tey’s bilious, bigoted vision fails to recognise the poignancy of all this, but I’ve always wondered how Betty would speak to us if she were allowed a voice of her own, and for a while I thought seriously of trying to write a novel that would dovetail with The Franchise Affair, to give us its back- or under-story. Then I considered rewriting the book altogether. It was itself, after all, a rewriting, and one that had done a fair amount of narrative violence to its 18th-century model. Suppose, I thought a little headily, Marion and her mother really had abducted Betty, stripped her to her slip and thrashed her with a dog-whip? What kind of novel would that story produce?

What I kept coming back to, however, was not so much Betty herself as the burden of menace she is obliged, by Tey, to shoulder. The Franchise Affair is a phobic novel - one might even say, a hysterical novel; and it was somewhere in that hysteria, I started to think, that the germ of my next novel might really lie. I kept turning Tey’s story over and over in my mind, until at last - as if, by repeatedly fretting at the fabric of its narrative, I had succeeded in wearing a hole in it - something seemed to seep out of the text and take on a new shape, all of its own. I began to see a crumbling country house, rather grander than The Franchise but sharing its isolated Midlands setting. I began to imagine the fading gentry family who might, in the late 1940s, inhabit such a house: an elderly mother, Mrs Ayres, still in thrall to a lifestyle that was slipping away from her; an unmarried daughter with few resources; a war-damaged son. In a mischievous nod to Tey, I gave them a teenage maid named Betty, and a bland local ally, Dr Faraday, who would find himself caught up and transformed by the coils of their increasingly unnerving story. Finally, I gave them something like a ghost. For what I knew above all was that their house had to be haunted, even if I wasn’t yet sure what form the haunting would take. But only an actively supernatural presence, it seemed to me, could do justice to the Gothic shrillness of Tey’s novel, and to the postwar British middle-class panic that novel enacts.

The story I ended up writing in The Little Stranger was not the one I’d imagined at the start: it became a very different sort of narrative, with a pull and excitement all its own. But just as the Elizabeth Canning case lingers suggestively beneath the surface of Tey’s text, so - to my eye, at least - The Franchise Affair will always be there, the faintest of shadows, just below the surface of mine.

Sarah Waters’s ten best ghost stories

“The Monkey’s Paw” by WW Jacobs
This is one of the most anthologised of all ghost stories, and its “be careful what you wish for” message has become one of the clichés of the genre. Every time I read it, I realise how economical it is: we never see the son who, summoned up by the diabolical power of the monkey’s paw, has dragged his mangled body out of its grave and back to his parents’ house; we only hear his baleful knocks at the door. But it’s the anticipation that makes it so hair-raisingly good.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
This story of a beautiful revenant and her fascination with teenage girls is about a vampire rather than a ghost, but it can’t be beaten. Most memorable is the “very strange agony” into which her voluptuous wooing plunges the story’s unworldly narrator: “Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat . . .”

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
As far as I know, none of Ishiguro’s fiction is actively supernatural, but his novels have a brilliant strangeness to them, which makes reading them always an unnerving experience. Here his Nagasaki-born narrator has become so detached from her own traumatic past, she has effectively turned it into someone else’s life. As in many great ghost stories, the result is a tightly controlled narrative surface, with half-glimpsed, terrifying depths.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This is a brilliant depiction of a woman’s decent into insanity. But the room in which its unnamed protagonist slowly loses her wits is definitely a “haunted” one: the ghosts are other women, trying furiously but fruitlessly to “shake the bars” of the claustrophobic patterns in which they are trapped.

“The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link
All of Link’s stories are wonderfully odd and original. Some are also quite scary - and this, from her collection Stranger Things Happen, is very scary indeed. It’s the story of 10-year-old twin girls in a haunted American mansion, being instructed by an enigmatic babysitter just what it means to be “dead”.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The definitive haunted house story, and one of the novels that inspired a fabulously scary film, the 1963 The Haunting (1963).

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
I’m not really much of a James fan, but I think this has to be on my list, if only because the story - of a lonely governess whose charges may or may not be being haunted by the ghosts of wicked servants - has been such an influential one. As far as chills go, I actually prefer the two films for which it provided the inspiration: the 1961 The Innocents, with a fragile Deborah Kerr, and The Others (2001), with a demented Nicole Kidman.

“The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen
In many of her novels and stories, Bowen beautifully captures the eerie atmosphere of wartime London, with its blitzed, abandoned houses. In this story, a middle-aged woman tries to evade an assignation with the sinister soldier fiancé, lost to her many years before.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Watching a BBC adaptation of this several Christmases ago, I got so frightened, I was sick. Admittedly, I had eaten a lot of Christmas pudding - but Hill’s story is terrifying, a classic of the genre. The “woman with the wasted face”, made so malevolent by the loss of her own infant that she destroys the children of others, is a fantastic creation.

Beloved by Toni Morrison
“Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief,” one of the characters points out, when Sethe, the novel’s protagonist, suggests fleeing from the spiteful spirit inhabiting her home. One of the great fictional studies of slavery and its scars, Beloved is also a sublime literary ghost story: a meditation on the ways in which individuals and communities - an entire nation - can be haunted by the violence and injustice of the past.

Charlotte Higgins on Desmond Tutu’s warning over the Middle East, poet laureates Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke trading rhymes, and the ticket-price pecking order at the Hay festival

Publisher forced to increase first print run as book goes on sale in Japan

Five years of pent-up anticipation found release in bookstores across Japan this morning with the publication of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, 1Q84.

Murakami, whom many consider one of the greatest living novelists, had refused to reveal the plot of the two-volume work after criticism that leaked details about his 2002 bestseller, Kafka on the Shore, spoiled its novelty value.

The strategy worked and tens of thousands of his Japanese fans were happy to put their faith in the title and author alone. The book’s publisher, Shinchosha, said it was forced to increase its first print run by 100,000 to 480,000 copies amid a flood of advance orders.

“The secrecy surrounding the work has made customers desperate to get hold of this book,” Toshiaki Uchida, assistant manager of a bookshop in central Tokyo, told the Associated Press.

Judging by the agency’s brief review – one of the first to appear – 1Q84 is classic Murakami, It is described as a “complex and surreal narrative” that “shifts back and forth between tales of two characters, a man and a woman, who are searching for each other”.

The novel “explores social and emotional issues such as cult religions, violence, family ties and love.”

The Millions, a widely read online book review site, reported that Amazon Japan had deleted five-star reviews posted before the book had even appeared.

The debate over the novel’s title has yet to be settled, however. Some believe it was influenced by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, since the letter Q, when pronounced in English, is a homonym for the number nine in Japanese, pronounced “kyuu”.

Others insist that the title is a tribute to The True Story of Ah Q, a novella by the Chinese writer Lu Xun, whose work is said to have influenced Murakami.

Shinchosha has yet to decide whether to release an English version, but judging by the overseas success of Murakami’s previous works, the clamour for translations will be difficult to resist.

The intensely private 60-year-old – an obsessive runner, jazz addict and cat lover – has attained iconic status among many young Japanese for his treatment of the themes of loss and alienation, as well as for the humour and surrealism of his earlier novels.

In recent years, his books have explored sensitive social and political events. In Underground, his first work of non-fiction, he interviewed 60 survivors of the sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway in 1995; and in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, he addresses Japanese war crimes in occupied Manchuria.

In February this year, Murakami was accused of falling for Israeli propaganda after he went to Jerusalem to accept a literary prize during the country’s bombing campaign in Gaza.

Murakami said he had decided to thank his Israeli readers for their support. Three of his novels – Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – made it on to Israel’s bestseller lists.

“I gave it some thought,” the Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying at the award ceremony. “And I decided to come. Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told.”

Poet Ruth Padel, who stepped down earlier this week from the post of Oxford professor of poetry after just nine days in the job, reads ‘Survival of the Fittest’ from her latest book, Darwin: A Life in Poems