My Best Books

It was the year when poetry made the front pages - for good and bad reasons - when Dan Brown broke publishing records and when everyone from Mark Twain to Vladimir Nabokov brought out books from beyond the grave. We take a look back at the literary events that hit the headlines in 2009

January

2009 was the year of Dan Brown, e-readers and poetic spats. Thankfully, Dan Brown is still a few months away, but the other two hit the ground running right at the start of the year. The first sales figures for the Sony e-reader are released and show that Waterstone’s sold almost 30,000 of the readers since the launch in September, while downloads of electronic books from the chain’s site passed the 75,000 mark. And the Oxford professor of poetry contest kicks off. Names under discussion at this stage include British poets Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage, Jon Stallworthy, JH Prynne and John Wilkinson, along with Australian poet Les Murray, US poet Jorie Graham and New Zealand native Fleur Adcock. There is nary a mention of Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott. If only it was to stay that way …

Meanwhile, Wendy Cope rules herself out of the running for the poet laureateship, calling it a poisoned chalice that should be abolished. In other, less fraught, poetry news, Jen Hadfield wins TS Eliot prize for poetry with her second collection, Nigh-No-Place. Sadly, the poet Mick Imlah, who was also shortlisted for the prize, dies this month, aged 52. We also say goodbye to Pulitzer prize-winning poet WD Snodgrass, Rumpole of the Bailey creator Sir John Mortimer and Rabbit writer John Updike. Neil Gaiman makes a start on what will be a vintage year by winning the Newbery for The Graveyard Book while Sebastian Barry wins the £25,000 Costa book of the year award. Joseph O’Neill only won plaudits for his novel about cricket and post-9/11 New York, Netherland, but it does turn out to have been the literary critics’ read of choice last year.

2009 is also set to be the year of intriguing library news and it gets underway this month with the jailing, for two years, of an Iranian academic who stripped pages out of ancient books from the British Library.

Overseas, there’s strife in Asterix world as Albert Uderzo’s daughter, Sylvie, accuses the Asterix co-creator of betraying his hero, selling out to the businessmen and denying “all the values” she was brought up with - “independence, fraternity, conviviality and resistance” - after he authorised the series to continue after his death. He responds by calling her accusations “undignified” and an insult to Asterix readers. Turkey restores the citizenship of its most famous 20th-century poet, Nazim Hikmet, over 50 years after it branded him a traitor. And finally, Mills & Boon and the Rugby Football League team up to publish a series of books featuring tall, dark and handsome rugby heroes - minus cauliflower ears - and their glamorous love interests. They promise “jet-set locations, hunky alpha male heroes and hot sex, but in a rugby context.”

February

James Patterson remains Britain’s most borrowed author, with the top three positions unchanged from last year - Patterson is closely followed by children’s author Jacqueline Wilson and the author of the Rainbow Magic series, Daisy Meadows. She may not get much in the way of public lending rights dosh, but JK Rowling can bask in with the adoration of the French – this month the country honours her with the title of knight of France’s prestigious Legion of Honour. She also wins Stephen King’s approval, albeit in comparison with Twilight’s Stephenie Meyer. “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good,” opined the horror writer, for whom it’s a busy month: King also writes a novella, Ur, exclusively for the new version of Amazon’s Kindle.

It’s a good month for protests, too: Margaret Drabble lets rip about about WH Smith’s new deal with BAA, which will see it running all the bookshops in BAA’s seven UK airports and Margaret Atwood pulls out of the Dubai literary festival over the ‘blacklisting’ of Geraldine Bedell’s The Gulf Between Us, before declaring that she had been misled, and agreeing to take part in a debate on censorship by video link. It is, as she herself puts it, a “dog’s breakfast”.

In poetry, Ruth Padel emerges as frontrunner for the prestigious post of Oxford University professor of poetry and Carol Ann Duffy is now odds-on favourite to get the laureateship.

In library news, the British Library spends £83,000 on The Tin Book, the futurist manifesto co-authored by a fascist-sympathising Italian artist who, 100 years ago, said all libraries should be destroyed.

There are wins for Julia Gregson with the romantic novel of the year award for East of the Sun and Naomi Klein with the inaugural Warwick prize for The Shock Doctrine.

We say a sad farewell to one of the best-known Arabic novelists of the 20th century, Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, and Whitbread-winning author Christopher Nolan.

March

This month’s controversy comes courtesy of Julie Myerson and her book, The Lost Child, which deals with the author’s decision to lock her 17-year-old son, Jake, out of the family home over his use of cannabis. In a battle played out in the national newspapers, Jake describes his mother as “insane” and “obscene” and the book is published two months early due to the uproar. And uh-oh - Derek Walcott joins the Oxford professor of poetry race.

There is plenty of unexpected publishing news: lost Mark Twain stories are to be released, two new Roberto Bolaño manuscripts are found among his papers in Spain, and an unfinished David Foster Wallace novel, The Pale King, will be published. However, distinguished Russian scholar Orlando Figes’s latest book on life under Stalin won’t be published in Russia due to “political pressure”.

This month’s British Library story reveals that the library has “mislaid” 9,000 books with some not having been seen in well over half a century; the Bodleian, meanwhile, moves millions of books from dreamy Oxford to Swindon.

Matt Haig wins the Blue Peter award for Shadow Forest, controversial Egyptian novel Youssef Ziedan’s Beelzebub wins the International Prize for Arabic fiction and Seamus Heaney wins the £40,000 David Cohen prize. The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais wins the Diagram prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year.

Ben Okri releases a new poem on Twitter and 65% of those polled in a survey admit lying about reading classic novels with Nineteen Eighty-Four coming top in a poll of the UK’s guilty reading secrets. Finally, novelist Colm Toíbín tells it like it is when he says that the only aspect of the writing life that gives him any pleasure is getting paid.

April

Fancy living in Peach Pie Street? Wincanton in Somerset, twinned with Ankh-Morpork, names streets on a new housing estate after Terry Pratchett’s fantasy series Discworld.

Birmingham plans the UK’s largest ever lending library, and the earliest-known book jacket is discovered at the Bodleian.

Amazon finds itself at the centre of a censorship row after a number of gay and lesbian titles, by authors including Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson, were taken off the online sales charts. It was “embarrassing and hamfisted” said a shamefaced Amazon in a suitably grovelling apology. A Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ‘mash-up’ becomes an unexpected bestseller, and the Espresso Book Machine, which can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait, is launched in Blackwell’s in London. Margaret Drabble announces that she will not write another novel because she is worried about repeating herself.

There are SF wins for Ursula K Le Guin, who gets her sixth Nebula, while the Arthur C Clarke award goes to Ian R MacLeod’s Song of Time. The SF world has a big loss with the death of JG Ballard and we also say goodbye to poet UA Fanthorpe. There are no poetic barneys this month but don’t worry – May is a biggie.

May

It all starts decorously enough in the poetry world, with near-universal support for the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the first female poet laureate. And then that pesky poetry professorship contest has to go and ruin everything. As the fiasco reaches its climax, Derek Walcott resigns from the race after earlier sexual harassment claims made against him were brought up via an anonymous letter campaign. Oxford refuses calls to postpone the election and Ruth Padel is elected the first female Oxford professor of poetry. She spends the next week fighting to keep her post after it emerges that she tipped off newspapers about claims of sexual impropriety against Walcott, but finally resigns, at the Hay festival, less than 10 days after her election. Oxford university calls for “a period of reflection” and accepts that it is unlikely that it will have anybody in the post by October when the current incumbent steps down.

The tawdry affair rather overshadowed Alice Munro’s well-deserved win of the £60,000 Man Booker international prize, and a Hay festival which saw Rowan Williams and Desmond Tutu call for quiet and tolerance, Sarah Waters apologise for not putting any lesbians in her new novel, The Little Stranger, Kamila Shamsie make connections across the whole of the 20th century and Joan Bakewell return with her first novel.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Ross launches a Twitter book club and sends his first choice soaring up the bestseller charts (but it all seemed to have petered out by the summer), Geoff Dyer wins the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction with Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and we bid farewell to novelist Marilyn French.

June

Poetry continues to generate controversy, as Carol Ann Duffy chooses as her first subject for a poem as laureate - the MPs’ expenses scandal and the corrosiveness of politics on politicians. However, there is also the discovery of Timmy the Tug, a 40-page children’s poem written by Ted Hughes in the 1950s. Two unpublished Poirot short stories are also found in Agatha Christie’s holiday home.

JD Salinger launches legal action against an author who has purportedly written a spinoff “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

This month’s library news is fun - the British Library’s head of modern manuscripts agrees to help with haymaking on John Berger’s French farm in return for the donation of the author’s literary archive.

Anthony Browne becomes the children’s laureate, the Carnegie Medal is posthumously awarded to Siobhan Dowd for Bog Child, Marilynne Robinson wins Orange prize and Philip Hoare’s study of whales, Leviathan, wins the Samuel Johnson prize. Debut novelist Michael Thomas beat authors including Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates to take the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin prize.

We said goodbye to fantasy author David Eddings.

July

A quiet month in the books world, but a “sad day for the world of smut” as the women’s erotica imprint Black Lace stops commissioning new titles. All is not lost, however: Playboy acquires the first serial rights to The Original of Laura, the unfinished novel Nabokov wanted to be destroyed.

Ernest Hemingway is unveiled as a failed KGB spy.

There were goodbyes to Frank McCourt, father of the misery memoir, novelist Gordon Burn and Booker-winner Stanley Middleton.

August

Much summer silliness on offer as the literati try to guess who inspired Sebastian Faulks to create an embittered literary reviewer whose only joy in life is to destroy the careers of authors by writing excoriating reviews of their books in national newspapers, in his novel A Week in December. But the novelist also has to defuse a row after he is quoted in an interview dismissing the Qu’ran as “just the rantings of a schizophrenic” with “no ethical dimension”. Bloomsbury also lands in hot water after Australian author Justine Larbalestie’s new novel, Liar, about a short-haired black girl called Micah, is published with a photograph of a long-haired white girl on its jacket. The news that William Golding’s private papers, which he gave to his biographer John Sunderland, reveal that he tried to rape a 15-year-old girl as a teenager, is met with shock. Travel writers are furious as the Office of Fair Trading decides against investigating WH Smith’s deal to stock only Penguin’s overseas guides at its travel stores.

Dan Brown may have topped Oxfam’s list of most donated books but there are no Robert Langdon adventures on Obama’s holiday reading list which, we learn, contains the rather more high-powered Thomas L Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded – subtitled Why We Need a Green Revolution, and How It Can Renew America – and Pulitzer prize-winner David McCullough’s biography of the second US president, John Adams. Wuthering Heights tops the classics bestseller lists after it is repackaged as the  ‘favourite book’ of Stephenie Meyer’s Bella and Edward with a cover styled on her Twilight series.

Neil Gaiman’s run of success with the Graveyard Book continues with a Hugo award, and Michael Holroyd wins the James Tait Black prize for his book about 19th-century Shakespearean actors, A Strange Eventful History, 42 years after his wife Margaret Drabble won it.

September

September sees the announcement of the Man Booker shortlist, which pits Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt and Sarah Waters against JM Coetzee, Simon Mawer and Adam Foulds, but it’s fair to say that the month belongs Dan Brown. The Lost Symbol is published and becomes the best-read adult novel in publishing history, setting adult fiction sales records despite being a steaming pile of clunk. Thankfully, one poll Brown doesn’t top is “the piece of writing that has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years”: Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude gets that one.

A Google doodle honours HG Wells in a mysterious way but the search engine’s $125m deal agreement with US publishers to digitise millions of books is postponed by a judge after widespread criticism. Some upbeat library news: readers can now borrow books from more than 4,000 public libraries regardless of where they live.

Simon Van Booy wins the €35,000 Frank O’Connor award for Love Begins in Winter, Graham Joyce wins the British Fantasy award with Memoirs of a Master Forger and poet Tony Harrison is awarded the first ever PEN/Pinter prize for a writer following in Harold Pinter’s footsteps. We bid farewell to Keith Waterhouse.

October

The Booker goes to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall and she briefly pushes Dan Brown into second place on Amazon’s sales charts.

The Google digital library row rumbles on with the German chancellor Angela Merkel coming out against it, while Amazon launches the Kindle.

A Winnie the Pooh sequel sees Christopher Robin back in Hundred Acre Wood, and a film adaption of Where the Wild Things Are that leads the book’s author Maurice Sendak to tell parents worried that is too frightening for children to “go to hell”. Also going to hell, as far as the US religious right are concerned, are readers of And Tango Makes Three. The story of two male penguins raising an orphaned chick tops the US banned books list but also races up the Amazon charts.

The familial upsets of earlier in the year are put to one side as Asterix turns 50 and France celebrates in style.

Don Paterson wins the Forward prize for poetry with his collection Rain, TS Eliot is named the nation’s favourite poet, Herta Müller wins the Nobel prize for literature and Mal Peet wins the Guardian children’s fiction prize.

November

More poetry shenanigans as Andrew Motion defends his use of ‘found’ material in a poem against a charge of plagiarism and Nicolas Sarkozy provokes the French left by mischievously suggesting he bestow the country’s greatest posthumous honour upon Albert Camus - transferring the Algerian-born author’s remains to the Panthéon, the resting place for heroes of France, on the 50th anniversary of his death in January.

The new Nobel laureate comes under fire from a former member of the Romanian secret police who admits spying on her but claims that the writer “has a psychosis and has no contact with external reality.” There’s much excitement as upmarket callgirl blogger Belle Du Jour unmasks herself as a research scientist, and some potentially cheering news as Stephenie Meyer admits to Oprah that she is “a little burned out on vampires” and may not write another Twilight novel.  The latest move in the Google books battle sees the search giant offering some concessions.

This month we learn that Roberto Bolaño would rather have been a cop than an author, that Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue has actually managed to sell quite a few copies and Stephen King is plotting a sequel to The Shining.

More library loveliness as a former telephone box is transformed into a mini village library. It’s happy 30th birthday to the London Review of Books and more celebrations for Neil Gaiman as The Graveyard Book picks up yet another gong, this time the Booktrust teenage prize. Su Tong’s political fable The Boat to Redemption takes the Man Asia literary prize, Evie Wyld’s debut After the Fire, a Still Small Voice beats Aravind Adiga and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and Philip Ardargh’s Grubtown Tales wins the Roald Dahl funny prize. The American winner of the Prix Goncourt, Jonathan Littell, wins the Bad Sex award for such inspired lines as “I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg” in his novel The Kindly Ones.

And it’s goodbye Borders, as the bookstore goes into administration.

December

Petina Gappah wins the Guardian first book award with her collection of short stories about Zimbabwe, An Elegy for Easterly, and poet Kate Clanchy wins the BBC National Short Story award.

Otherwise, the year ends as it starts – with poets, Dan Brown, Google and e-books. Oxford university announces that it will reform voting rules for the poetry professor post, but it’s too late for Derek Walcott: he’s already accepted the post of professor of poetry – at Essex. Dan Brown is Christmas number one, Ursula K Le Guin accuses the Authors Guild of ‘deal with the devil’ over its Google settlement, and Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day.

New words this year included jeggings, tweetups, staycation and the absolutely splendid snollygosters.

All in all, 2009 was quite a year. Fasten your seatbelts for the sequel …

A documentary on the American author triggered a memory of a disturbing night at the writer’s apartment that had been suppressed for 40 years

In 1998, at the Edinburgh Film Festival, I was happily watching the documentary Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, when the weirdest thing happened to me. While the 87-year-old author was being interviewed in his apartment in Tangier, I had a strange feeling of deja vu. An African mask on the wall triggered the sense that I had been in that apartment before. Was that possible? Maybe I had seen a photo of it somewhere. I had come to the film without any pre-conceived notions, nor did I know much about Bowles, merely that he had written The Sheltering Sky, a book I had not read. I had seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s film adaptation of it, which I had not much liked. That was the sum of my knowledge of Bowles.

The more the documentary continued, the more I became convinced that I had been in Bowles’s apartment in Tangier and not just seen photos of it. It was too potent a sensation. While I watched the film, I struggled to understand why I had this certitude. Gradually, some images started to emerge from my unconscious mind, and then the whole story came flooding back. I had what I can only call a flashback to an incident that had taken place more than four decades earlier.

When I was 17 years old, a friend of mine, known as Frog, and I had decided to take a year off between school and university to travel around Europe very cheaply, hitch-hiking, staying in youth hostels and getting odd jobs where we could. We had managed to hitch rides down through Spain and had crossed on the ferry from Gibraltar to Tangier.

On our first night, after getting a room in a run-down hotel, we sat at an outdoor cafe nursing glasses of beer. After a while, two middle-aged men sat down at the table next to us. I immediately recognised one of them as Richard Wattis, a supporting actor in dozens of British films and TV shows, mostly playing officious civil servants. I caught myself staring at him. He smiled at me, and introduced himself as Dickie and his friend as Monty. They offered to buy us more beer and asked if we would like something to eat. As we had been living mostly on bread for the week, we accepted gladly.

After our meal, and a couple more beers, Dickie and Monty asked if we would like to visit the famous author Paul Bowles, of whom neither of us had heard. We could hardly refuse. Now rather tipsy, we followed our newfound friends through endless back streets, then climbed some winding stairs. Dickie rang the bell of an apartment. A young Moroccan dressed in a djellaba opened the door. There were a few other young men lounging on sofas and a strange smell in the air.

My friend and I were introduced to a tall, thin man in his late 40s. He was sitting in a cane chair and smoking a pipe. An African mask was on the wall above him. Ignoring Frog, whose looks had engendered his nickname, he asked me some questions and seemed to take an unusual amount of interest in my naive answers. Then he offered us some peculiar-looking cigarettes. Though neither of us smoked, it would have been impolite to refuse. I took a few puffs, not knowing then that the cigarettes must have been kif, as hashish is known in Morocco.

The next thing I knew was that I woke up in a bed wearing a djellaba with nothing underneath. I looked around and saw Frog, fully dressed, dozing in a chair. My clothes were at the foot of the bed. It was early morning. I remember feeling more confused than shocked. I just knew I had to get dressed and out of there as fast as possible. I woke Frog and we made our way quietly out of the bedroom. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Luckily, the front door was open. We ran out into the street and tried to find our way back to our hotel.

I had no recollection of what had happened between my taking the kif and waking up. I asked Frog if he knew, but he didn’t, having fallen asleep after smoking the kif. I still wonder what took place during those few hours after I blacked out. Who had undressed me and put me in a djellaba, and why? Had I been abused? I think I would have known if I had. All I felt on waking up was a rather nasty headache.

It was curious, however, that I had eliminated the episode from my conscious mind until it had been aroused by the documentary more than 40 years later. I had heard about repressed and recovered memory, but had always been rather skeptical about it. There was another peculiar side-effect. Ever since the memory came back, I struggle to remember Bowles’s name.

Incidentally, I’ve since read everything I could by him in the vain hope that I would appear somewhere in his writings where the mystery would be solved. Bowles’s best writing drew me into an exotic, perverse, nihilistic world in which one of the dominant themes was the destruction of innocence. What impressed me and disturbed me most was his second novel, Let It Come Down (1952), set almost entirely in Tangier among the louche ex-pat community. It ends with the main character, Nelson Dyar, a soulless American high on hashish, hammering a nail into the ear of his sleeping Arab friend.

It’s been another busy year in books, but were you paying proper attention? Find out with our fiendish quiz of 2009

Selling more than double the number of books shifted by her closest rival Roger Hargreaves, Harry Potter author dominated the tills throughout the noughties

No prizes for guessing which writer takes the top spot on the bestselling authors of the decade list – JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series sees her out front by a wizarding mile – but some of her companions in the top 10 are less predictable. With the list sorted by volume sold rather than value, Mr Men author Roger Hargreaves is a surprising second, having sold a whopping 14m volumes of his low-cost children’s tales. Hargreaves and Rowling are joined by two and a half other children’s authors in the top 10 – former children’s laureate Jacqueline Wilson of Tracey Beaker fame at number four, the perennial Enid Blyton at number 10 and Terry Pratchett, author of both children’s and adult fiction at number five.

With Dan Brown at number three and John Grisham, Danielle Steel and James Patterson also in the top 10, the first literary, or non-genre, author doesn’t emerge until number 37 – Ian McEwan with sales exceeding 4m books. He is just ahead of Sebastian Faulks, the only other literary novelist in the top 50. They are both well behind the celebrity cooks Jamie Oliver at 13 (and whose sales value is second only to JK Rowling), Delia Smith at 26 and even Jeremy Clarkson (29). The first non-fiction author comes in at number 11 – the author of light-hearted travel and science books Bill Bryson.

Crime, children’s books and chick-lit are the main winners in the top 50, which features such household names as Ian Rankin, Patricia Cornwell, Maeve Binchy and Marian Keyes. Horrid Henry author Francesca Simon is ahead of Roald Dahl and Philip Pullman, while Stephenie Meyer, of Twilight fame, might seem a surprisingly low ranker at number 23 but the first book in her vampire series was not released until 2005.

Longevity does not always guarantee a high placing, however. William Shakespeare just creeps into the top 50 at 45, only one ahead of Carol Vorderman.

Author Books Sold (Value)
1 JK Rowling 29,084,999 (£225.9m)
2 Roger Hargreaves 14,163,141 (£26.6m)
3 Dan Brown 13,372,007 (£74.1m)
4 Jacqueline Wilson 12,673,148 (£69.9m)
5 Terry Pratchett 10,455,397 (£77.2m)
6 John Grisham 9,862,998 (£65.9m)
7 Richard Parsons 9,561,776 (£49.2m)
8 Danielle Steel 9,119,149 (£51m)
9 James Patterson 8,172,647 (£53.8m)
10 Enid Blyton 7,910,758 (£31.2m)

11 Bill Bryson 7,409,656 (£61.2m)
12 Patricia Cornwell 7,355,180 (£49.8m)
13 Jamie Oliver 7,244,620 (£89.5m)
14 Daisy Meadows 7,149,788 (£24.1m)
15 Ian Rankin 6,848,039 (£44.3m)
16 Julia Donaldson 6,621,594 (£33.7m)
17 Alexander McCall Smith 6,609,779 (£40.6m)
18 Francesca Simon 6,564,681 (£31.6m)
19 Bernard Cornwell 6,297,911 (£45.5m)
20 Roald Dahl 6,169,406 (£33.8m)

21 Martina Cole 6,021,960 (£41.7m)
22 Philip Pullman 5,544,376 (£35.8m)
23 Stephenie Meyer 5,487,313 (£32m)
24 Maeve Binchy 5,476,134 (£37.6m)
25 J R R Tolkien 5,280,406 (£50.6m)
26 Delia Smith 5,269,783 (£58.7m)
27 Stephen King 5,268,577 (£38m)
28 Marian Keyes 5,029,363 (£31.7m)
29 Jeremy Clarkson 4,913,989 (£35.1m)
30 Josephine Cox 4,651,166 (£24m)

31 Sophie Kinsella 4,528,095 (£27.7m)
32 Jodi Picoult 4,514,620 (£24.1m)
33 Terry Deary 4,495,655 (£21.6m)
34 Anthony Horowitz 4,304,041 (£23.6m)
35 Lemony Snicket 4,220,508 (£23.9m)
36 Andy McNab 4,123,633 (£30.4m)
37 Ian McEwan 4,040,887 (£27.7m)
38 Wilbur Smith 3,871,484 (£30.1m)
39 Michael Connelly 3,785,330 (£23.5m)
40 Sebastian Faulks 3,782,665 (£27.5m)

41 Kathy Reichs 3,514,087 (£22.2m)
42 Helen Fielding 3,473,003 (£22m)
43 Cecelia Ahern 3,422,899 (£19.5m)
44 Joanne Harris 3,392,198 (£21.2m)
45 William Shakespeare 3,333,670 (£17.8m)
46 Carol Vorderman 3,315,641 (£11.2m)
47 Chris Ryan 3,289,855 (£21m)
48 Lee Child 3,274,928 (£20.2m)
49 Dave Pelzer 3,217,905 (£20.2m)
50 R L Stine 3,096,584 (£13.1m)

51 Catherine Cookson 3,020,751 (£16.8m)
52 Dean Koontz 3,010,242 (£17.5m)
53 W Awdry 2,991,572 (£9.9m)
54 Michael Morpurgo 2,989,161 (£15.1m)
55 Jeffery Deaver 2,972,145 (£16.9m)
56 Khaled Hosseini 2,957,026 (£21.1m)
57 Nick Hornby 2,956,544 (£19.6m)
58 Ben Elton 2,907,294 (£20m)
59 Katie Price 2,856,697 (£21.8m)
60 Jill Mansell 2,798,518 (£14.2m)

61 Mark Haddon 2,783,600 (£16.8m)
62 Lucy Daniels 2,768,332 (£11.2m)
63 Dr Seuss 2,760,156 (£14.8m)
64 Tess Gerritsen 2,745,556 (£14.7m)
65 Tony Parsons 2,731,436 (£17.3m)
66 Alan Titchmarsh 2,707,834 (£27.5m)
67 Harlan Coben 2,672,713 (£15.1m)
68 Lauren Child 2,632,369 (£13.4m)
69 Darren Shan 2,617,959 (£14.4m)
70 Nigella Lawson 2,616,955 (£39.2m)

71 Robert C Atkins 2,591,073 (£17.3m)
72 Philippa Gregory 2,577,235 (£17.4m)
73 Jane Green 2,498,100 (£14.8m)
74 Clive Cussler 2,435,718 (£16.5m)
75 Fiona Watt 2,431,376 (£14.1m)
76 Cathy Kelly 2,391,540 (£13.2m)
77 Penny Vincenzi 2,358,041 (£14.6m)
78 Charles Dickens 2,341,980 (£9.3m)
79 Eric Hill 2,334,612 (£12.1m)
80 Joanna Trollope 2,333,337 (£14.5m)

81 Meg Cabot 2,309,844 (£12.1m)
82 Jackie Collins 2,295,308 (£14.4m)
83 Lesley Pearse 2,261,007 (£12.6m)
84 A A Milne 2,255,346 (£14.5m)
85 Paulo Coelho 2,229,564 (£16.3m)
86 Eric Carle 2,225,336 (£12.1m)
87 Louis de Bernières 2,221,481 (£15.3m)
88 Jack Higgins 2,207,100 (£12.4m)
89 Anita Shreve 2,198,899 (£13.4m)
90 Karin Slaughter 2,196,031 (£12.6m)

91 Louise Rennison 2,172,395 (£11.9m)
92 Sheila O’Flanagan 2,162,811 (£10.8m)
93 Robert Harris 2,150,818 (£16m)
94 Paul McKenna 2,114,476 (£16.6m)
95 Alice Sebold 2,106,630 (£13.2m)
96 Gordon Ramsay 2,094,376 (£23.4m)
97 Roderick Hunt 2,077,092 (£7.3m)
98 Frank McCourt 2,055,939 (£14.9m)
99 Dav Pilkey 2,051,622 (£9.4m)
100 Lyn Andrews 2,027,382 (£9.2m)

Data supplied by Nielsen Bookscan

The Lost Symbol gives author second Christmas number one in five years, as celebrity memoirs sink

Dan Brown and his debonair professor of “symbology” Robert Langdon have broken the stranglehold that celebrity autobiographies have held over December book sales in recent years to take the Christmas number one slot.

A last minute sales rush propelled Brown’s long-awaited novel The Lost Symbol – in which Langdon takes on the Freemasons – to the top of the charts, giving the author his second UK Christmas number one in five years after The Da Vinci Code was the Christmas bestseller in 2004.

Brown just pipped the second-placed Guinness World Records – a perennial Christmas bestseller – to the post with such gems as “‘Actually, Katherine, it’s not gibberish.’ His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. ‘It’s … Latin”’, and “Is there life after death? Do humans have souls? Incredibly, Katherine had answered all of these questions and more” helping propel him to pole position in the busiest week for book sales.

In recent years celebrity memoirs by the likes of Peter Kay, Russell Brand and Dawn French have dominated the Christmas book charts, which are compiled by book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan. But this year only two celebrity autobiographies – a joint memoir by Ant and Dec, and Frankie Boyle’s My Shit Life So Far – scraped into the top 10, in ninth and 10th place respectively.

The public appetite this Christmas was, instead, for fiction, with two titles from Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire series, a new novel from Jodi Picoult and the first title in late Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, all making the top 10 ahead of a host of celebrity autobiographies.

Kay’s second volume of memoir, Saturday Night Peter, missed out on the top 10 despite high expectations, as did Jo Brand’s autobiography. Memoirs from Sheryl Gascoigne, Justin Lee Collins and Leona Lewis failed to even make the top 100, while Ozzy Osbourne and Jack Dee’s contributions both trailed in in the late 80s. In 2005, Osbourne’s wife Sharon’s autobiography Extreme was one of the bestselling books of the year.

“This year there is very definitely a much stronger end-of-year Christmas fiction market,” said André Breedt at Nielsen BookScan. “The autobiography and biography market overall peaked in 2007 [when Brand's My Booky Wook took the number one slot], and ever since then it has been slowing down.”

Brown began the autumn as William Hill’s favourite at 5/2 to top the Christmas charts, just ahead of Saturday Night Peter at 3/1, but slipped back into fourth place behind Meyer, a festive cookbook from Delia Smith and Guinness World Records as the months progressed.

“We were expecting a victory for Guinness World Records judging on the last couple of weeks of sales,” said Jon Howells at Waterstone’s. “[But] Dan Brown has broken every record I can think of, and has driven every other book out of its way. [The Lost Symbol] has been a juggernaut of a book. It has taken number one because it’s been ubiquitous. People shopping this week and last are the people who are looking for a safe bet, and Dan Brown is a safe bet.”

William Hill, which took bets on the number one book, said that Brown was “well backed early on” and that it had “lost a small sum” on his win.

The Christmas top 10 books

1 The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

2 Guinness World Records 2010

3 Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

4 Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

5 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

6 Where’s Stig?

7 Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

8 Delia’s Happy Christmas by Delia Smith

9 Ooh! What a Lovely Pair by Ant and Dec

10 My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

On the shortest day of the year, with scant shopping hours left to Christmas, the comedian recommends books that won’t detain you long

Tim Key is a 33-year-old who works in the broad arenas of poetry, comedy, general, film and bookwriting. His first book sold out almost immediately (small print-run) and led to him becoming the resident poet on BBC4’s Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe (ever so cool). He also became resident poet on Mark Watson’s radio show (Radio 4) and had his poetry published in Vice magazine (niche) and Reader’s Digest (different niche). He then went back to the café and wrote a second, altogether less coherent book. Instructions, Guidelines, Tutelage, Suggestions, Other Suggestions and Examples etc concerns descriptions of photographs and maps, and the possibilities that may be contained in a fiddler’s noggin.
 
This year Key has co-penned and starred in Cowards and We Need Answers (both BBC4) and a Christmas Special of his much-loved Radio 4 comedy drama All Bar Luke. Key is a mess.

Buy Tim Key books at the Guardian bookshop

“A list of books which should be easily accessible around the house, to pick up, poke your beak into for a couple of minutes, and put down again.”
 

1. Incidences by Daniil Kharms

Daniil Kharms was a Russian loon who scribbled in the 1930s. His material is dark and loopy in equal measure, full of repeated actions and plenty of death. It’s troubling – there’s a strong impression the guy had a number of screws extremely loose – but it is also compelling and hilarious. The Tale of the Plummeting Women is an obvious highlight.

2. Anthropology by Dan Rhodes

Rhodes writes short stories which are 101 words long. He writes 101 of them. Every single one is beautiful, funny and impressive in equal measure. The pieces in Anthropology are all about flawed relationships; all flawed in eccentric and delicious ways.

3. 100 Facts About Pandas by David O’Doherty, Claudia O’Doherty and Mike Ahern

Everyone loves a panda fact. This cheeky little hardback exploits this; plonking 100 of them next to each other – all spurious; all beautifully illustrated; all funny. Panda Fact 24 claims that panda milk is deadly to any animal other than the panda. So it’s a useful book, too.

4. Elephant by Raymond Carver

Just short stories. But the best short stories ever written. Carver’s a master of the genre. Carver writes with incredible economy. Nothing much happens. And yet we watch the character’s lives change irreparably before our eyes. American, too, so he uses phrases like “he fed it some gas”. Nice.

5. Schott’s Miscellany by Ben Schott

Bit of an obvious one. It’s Schott’s Miscellany, innit. Everyone got one for Christmas in 2005. But it is, still, essential to have round the house. Google’s only realistic competitor these days, it’s important not to allow our attitude to Schott to be destroyed by all these other books with similar covers but about the minutiae of, say, food or Harry Potter.

6. The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol

Another spot of Russian. Russian short stories are mental and Gogol wrote some real humdingers. This is the saddest and my favourite. About a titular clerk (obviously) who saves up his money to get a new overcoat and turn his life around. It goes quite well for him for a bit. But then Gogol leaves us all devastated.

7. This Book Will Change Your Life by Benrik

Clever lunatic combo Benrik stick the best bits of This Diary Will Change Your Life together to create a big thick selection of things to do. Watching Someone Sleep is one of them, as is Freelance as a Traffic Warden. So there’s an argument for enjoying the bitesize entries rather than using it as a basis for sweeping lifestyle changes.

8. Facts and Fancies by Armando Iannucci

Iannucci’s brain is clearly as big as a fridge so he is capable of making eye-popping televisual satire and feature films. But you can’t put a feature film in your bog so this book plugs a gap. Iannucci lets his hair down and has a lot of fun with the English language as he gets his head round things like queues and noise.

9. The Timewaster Letters by Robin Cooper

Deranged, misguided Cooper writes speculative letters to people with far less time on their hands than himself. Often they are provoked into using some of this time to reply to Cooper. Cooper then writes back himself. And so it goes on. Cooper’s an astonishing, dreadful man and his targets are imaginatively picked. Sometimes you feel for the poor man who’s wasted an hour writing back but only between volleys of cruel laughter.

10. The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd

This was always on my old man’s desk. A real dip-in-and-out-of classic. Adams and Lloyd have found some funny place names. Adams and Lloyd have assigned some funny definitions. Adams and Lloyd have evidently had a lot of fun. A warm, very English book.

He is the ultimate pessimist, a reclusive soothsayer who makes even Hemingway look touchy-feely. Now, his apocalyptic novel, The Road, is coming to the big screen, bringing his bleak vision to a wider audience

There are men who look down at their peacefully sleeping children in the middle of the night and feel safe in the knowledge that all is right with the world. Cormac McCarthy, America’s hermitic prophet, now 76, is not one of those men. When his novel The Road was published in 2006, he described how it had come about thus :

“Four or five years ago, my son (John, then aged three or four) and I went to El Paso, (in Texas) and we checked into the old hotel there. And one night, John was asleep, it was probably about two in the morning, and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town. There was nothing moving but I could hear the trains going through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years… fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy. So I wrote two pages. And then about four years later I realised that it wasn’t two pages of a book, it was a book, and it was about that man, and that boy.’

That book, about that man and that boy, won McCarthy the Pulitzer prize, among others, and has been variously selected as the greatest novel of the decade now ending. A film version will be released at the uncertain dawn of the decade now beginning, starring Viggo Mortensen as the man and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy.

The Road is, McCarthy has claimed, in his rare interviews, a story “about goodness”, but since it features a post-apocalyptic America, ruled by vicious cannibalistic tribes, beset by pestilential disease and atmospheric meltdown, this is true only in relation to McCarthy’s other books – Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men in particular – where horror and death have no rival.

It has been said in recent days, about the latest failure of the politicians at the Copenhagen summit to agree a substantial response to the worst nightmares of climate scientists, that they lack the imagination to envisage that future. Perhaps, prior to the summit, they should all have been required to read The Road.

McCarthy, who often seems to be channelling the Old Testament, has no trouble with imagining the worst. The specific event that has drained all colour from his American world and left it reeking of blood and covered in ash, a deforested “scabland”, is never detailed in the book, though in the film, by Australian director John Hillcoat’s account, it becomes more a tale of “the revenge of nature: we are certainly heightening the environmental threat”.

McCarthy spends a lot of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, near his home in New Mexico, a multi-disciplinary institution set up by the Los Alamos physicist Murray Gell-Mann to study “complex systems”. McCarthy lunches there and counts a number of the scientists among his friends. When asked recently, in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, about the nature of the catastrophic event in The Road, he answered by saying: “I don’t have an opinion. It could be anything – volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who’ve gone diving in Yellowstone lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people, you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday…”

By nature, you can’t help feeling, McCarthy tends toward the latter timeframe. He is the great pessimist of American literature, using his dervish sentences to illuminate a world in which almost everything (including punctuation) has already come to dust. He once argued that he could see no point at all in literature that did not dwell on death. His touchstones are Dostoevsky and Melville; he hasn’t much time for Henry James.

His morbid visions, however, are so elemental in their telling that they have long won over those who have staked out more nuanced territory. Saul Bellow, peerless observer of the vivid comedy of American hope, sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded McCarthy a MacArthur Fellowship, the “genius grant”, and noted his “overpowering … life-giving and death-dealing sentences”.

There is generally no such thing as society in McCarthy’s books – or much in the way of family or domesticity – just as there has frequently been none in his adult life. It didn’t start out that way: he was the eldest son of an eminent lawyer from East Tennessee. They had a big house, acres of land and servants.

McCarthy rebelled against his father early; he saw no value in school, preferring the dedicated pursuit of his own curiosities. “I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies,” he has recalled. “I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was… name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.”

He was kicked out of the University of Tennessee and drifted in and out of jobs for a long time afterwards. He joined the air force for a couple of years and started reading books only when posted to Alaska, where there was little else to do. Though he has married three times, (the second time, in the 1960s, to a British cruise-ship singer), and had two sons, he has spent much of his life on one road or another, living in cheap motels (by 1992, when the first of his breakthrough Border Trilogy about the American west appeared, he was still travelling with a 100-watt bulb in his bag, so he could see to read in his roadside lodgings).

He cut his own hair, bathed in lakes and affected the frontiersman stare of the Marion Ettlinger author photographs that were used to sell his books. In an age of American excess, McCarthy carved himself an image as the last Depression-era stoic. “Three moves are as good as a fire,” he still says, of his method for dislocation.

Despite making an awkward appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s book club for The Road, McCarthy has never had any interest in the “literary world” or even in coming face to face with his readers (he is, perhaps, the man least likely to tweet); he is thus thought of as a cultish outsider with a near-religious following. Like all seers, he comes complete with relics: his clapped-out Olivetti typewriter, on which he has written all of his books, sold earlier this month for $254,000 (£156,670) at auction, 20 times its estimate.

Though he has dwelt in his writing on unpicking the founding myths of America, and giving them a bloody retelling, he captures, in his person, another of the sustaining archetypes of the nation, namely, that of the resourceful loner, telling it like it is.

Critics of McCarthy, of his King James rhetoric, of his red in tooth and claw masculinity (he can, at times, make Hemingway sound like an ardent feminist), sometimes charge him with being absent from his novels, suggesting they lack any autobiographical stake. The Road, though, is a powerful argument against this view.

On one level, it is a science fiction fantasy of a future hell; it can just as easily be read, however, as this particular (ageing) father’s wee-small-hours paranoia for his child, of not being there to protect him from the world.

McCarthy stated in his Wall Street Journal exchange that “a lot of the lines [in The Road] are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. John said, ‘Papa, what would you do if I died?’ I said, ‘I’d want to die, too’ and he said, ‘So you could be with me?’ I said, ‘Yes, so I could be with you.’ Just a conversation that two guys would have.”

With this in mind, you wonder a little about some of the other exchanges that fall to father and son, as they make their hopeless quest across the devastated continent with their shopping trolley of belongings. Hiding from cannibals, the boy, who takes on – in his father’s eyes – something of the mantle of humanity’s saviour, asks his dad at one point: “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?”

“No. Of course not.”

“No matter what?”

“No. No matter what.”

“Because we’re the good guys.”

“Yes.”

It may not be much to go on – that maybe some children are born with the instinct not to eat other humans in extremis, but that is where McCarthy places his hope. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he believes. “The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

At 90, Frank Kermode remains our finest literary critic. Two more incisive volumes cement his reputation, says Rónán McDonald

Frank Kermode recently celebrated his 90th birthday with the addition of these two books to his sizable corpus. In Concerning EM Forster, Kermode tells the reader that Forster “lived to be old and still active, an achievement that almost always impresses the public”. The self-deprecation contained within this remark is characteristically subtle, dry and imbued with gentle exasperation. Kermode knows that the reviewers will once again acclaim him as Britain’s greatest living literary critic, pointing to his erudition and astonishing output, his calm authority and easy eloquence. Kermode, born on the Isle of Man in 1919, is the last survivor of a golden age of postwar public criticism, though in some ways he is atypical of the earlier generation.

What differentiates him from FR Leavis, William Empson and TS Eliot is the mildness of his persona, an absence of fervour or mission. This is not to suggest a lack of faith in his own judgment, but, rather, that his voice is marked by a certain caution and tact. Kermode is tellingly fond of Lionel Trilling’s remark about Forster: “He refused to be great.” Perhaps this is because Kermode did not reach Cambridge until his 50s, arriving via grammar school and a string of provincial universities. It is not accidental that his 1995 memoir was called Not Entitled. His 10-minute encounter with the “great man” in 1955 was time “well spent” for Kermode, but Forster, “understandably tired and bored”, would “probably have judged it differently”.

To what extent this humble and self-effacing persona is a performance is a moot point. Kermode’s voice is slow to anger, balanced, fair-minded and discreet, but this affords its own authority. He persuades us to listen by speaking quietly. This humility, the lack of an air of entitlement and hauteur, is one reason why the nonagenarian does not seem dated or out of time in a way which, arguably, a more mandarin and high-cultural figure like George Steiner now does.

Deriving from Kermode’s 2007 Clark Lectures (which Forster had delivered 80 years previously), Concerning EM Forster is laced with submerged identifications between author and subject. Forster was also something of an outsider or marginal figure, simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the avant-garde experimentalism of his contemporaries. He had a dislike of system or theory and felt that Henry James’s ruminations on the novel form were overly abstract and prescriptive. Likewise, the elasticity of Kermode’s critical discrimination favours variety of effect rather than predefined artistic purpose. In their differing ways, Kermode and Forster embody the virtues of a liberal-minded Englishness, open-minded and capacious in sensibility, suspicious of over-abstraction, eager to be true to lived experience, including, crucially, the reality of death. For Forster, the recognition of death was an urgent necessity for the novel to achieve greatness.

Kermode is often at his best when giving into the occasional irritation, such as the snobbery he detects in Forster’s depiction of Leonard Bast in Howards End. Among the richest pieces in Bury Place Papers are those where he finds fault with William Empson, who he prizes as the greatest critic of the last century, for attempting to shoehorn John Donne into his own anti-Christian belief system.

This selection of 29 essays – mostly reviews that Kermode contributed to the London Review of Books, the journal he played a key part in founding – gives a sense of the breadth of his learning. It starts with a piece on millenarianism from 1979 and, following a chronological sequence, ends with a 2007 review of Helen Small’s book on old age. On the way, it takes in Flaubert, Wilde, Shakespeare, Raymond Carver and Kazuo Ishiguro, to say nothing of Howard Hodgkin, Noël Annan, Harold Nicolson and Donald Winnicott. An elegant introduction by fellow LRB regular Michael Wood precedes the whole. These pieces comprise a cornucopia of Kermode’s critical acuity but also a history of modern letters.

There are memorable vignettes, such as the 74-year-old AE Houseman, ailing and tired of life, running up the stairs to his college room in the hope that he might expire on arrival. Occasionally I felt that Kermode pulled his punches. His review of John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? leaves him wondering if there is not “surely more to be said”, while parts are “probably over-simplified”. Perhaps the big beasts of criticism should not review each other. Yet his critical asides can be gloriously arch, even when wrapped in a compliment. “Martin Amis has always wanted to be a good writer and he has got what he wanted.” This sentence economically evokes an image of the warrior against cliché rifling through the thesaurus, and Kermode gives us a choice selection of Amis’s “recherché adverbs”.

The judgments and reflections here are sound and wise. The final piece on old age is characteristically generous, reflective, layered and nuanced. It includes the wistful recognition that we cannot shape death into the reassuring pattern of narrative, cannot imbue it with the sense of an ending: “Death may be, is likely to be, a little too early or a little too late.”

Simon Callow is enchanted by a lively biography of the greatest clown of the 19th century

Joey Grimaldi, the greatest clown of the 19th century, made his debut at the age of four in The Triumph of Mirth. The triumph was hard-won. His father, a fine and original clown himself, was a monster Dickens would have been proud to have invented, a savage brute (known as the Signor, but more generally referred to as Grim-All-Day) whose idea of training children for the theatre was to put them in the stocks or suspend them in a cage 40ft above the stage. He routinely beat his wife and terrified the household with his obsession with his own death. The devil had informed him in a dream that he would die on the first Friday of the month, whereafter the Signor kept vigil on that day, every month, in a room filled with clocks, gibbering till dawn. His favourite reading was The Uncertainty of Signs of Death; his dread of being buried alive led him to stipulate in his will that when he died his children should sever his head from his body, a task duly performed by his daughter, who kept a hand on the saw worked by the surgeon hired for the purpose.

Anyone who could survive Grim-All-Day could survive anything, you might think. Andrew McConnell Stott, in this great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life, notes the cost to Joey of his upbringing, but also observes that it was at the core of his work. If you wanted to breed a clown, the Signor was perhaps the perfect parent, whose “arbitrary justice and irrationality had led him to understand the world as a shifting plane of ambiguities, void of the anchors of reason and authority a parent conventionally provides”. Well, yes, but was he funny? The answer, for his contemporaries, was ear-splittingly in the affirmative. He was so irresistibly comic “as to put dullness to flight and make a saint laugh,” said one. “His acting and manner leave all competition at a very humble distance.” The appeal was across the board: the famously severe lord chancellor Lord Eldon remarked that “never, never, did I see a leg of mutton stolen with such superhumanly sublime impudence as by that man” – impressive expert evidence.

His first great triumph was Mother Goose, with which, in true theatrical tradition, he saved a failing season by reinventing a moribund genre: pantomime. In one of the set-pieces at which he excels, Stott recreates it: a non-stop variety show of surreal brilliance, in which live ducks flew out of pies, chairs and tables hovered 8ft in the air, huge balconies suddenly disappeared, hats turned into bells that started to chime, bottles became buzzing beehives. In one climactic sequence, the Vauxhall pleasure gardens were created on stage in all their opulent beauty, only for this vision of loveliness to be rudely disrupted by Joey starting a serenade on a tin fish kettle. He gets all the gentlefolk up on their feet to dance a crude sort of hoe-down, whips off the tablecloths and juggles the crockery. “Waiters charge frantically from side to side, as plates smash and live birds splutter skywards from beneath the dinner platters, confusion that increases its speed and intensity until it reaches a crescendo of pandemonium” – at which point a cheesemonger steps forward and explains that he’s the set designer; he is duly – and rightly – applauded to the rafters. It was clearly an early 19th-century Hellzapoppin’, mad, inventive and, in that final touch, almost postmodern. The last line of Stott’s book is “you had to be there”, and in passages such as these, he makes you feel you were.

The centre of it all was Joey, the Lord of Misrule. Stott gives a fine description of how, after long years of apprenticeship, Grimaldi created the figure who was, he says, one of the most significant theatrical developments of the 19th century. First the costume: bold patterns, vivid colours and “a kaleidoscopic medley of circles, stripes and hoops . . . the costume of a ‘great lubberly loutish boy’”. Then the face, a startling mask: “a blood-red wound, a mile-wide smear of jam, to form the gaping, gluttonous cavern of a mouth”, eyes ringed round and arched with thick brows, cheeks daubed with red chevrons, topped with a bizarre pyramid of wigs: red mohicans, blue plumes, and orange and green thistle – “half plumber’s plunger, half fox’s brush”. Then gloves and slippers, so that by the end, not a millimetre of flesh was visible: it was a total transformation.

Grimaldi’s contemporaries were instantly entranced by this “part-child, part-nightmare”, Stott writes. “A countenance,” said one, “that is a whole pantomime in itself.” The mask obviously released Grimaldi physically into hyper-expressiveness: “a thousand odd twitches and unaccountable absurdities oozed out of every pore.” Each eye “carried on without the aid of the other”; his “oven-mouth” had a never-ending power of extension, his chin touching the buttons of his waistcoat; even his nose was “a vivacious excrescence, capable of exhibiting disdain, fear, anger and even joy”. The impression, according to one commentator, was of “a grown child, waking to perception, but wondering at every object he beholds”. Stott calls it a retreat to childhood, after the shattering blow of the double loss of wife and baby son in childbirth: “every aspect of his Clown, from his manic energy and schoolboy clothes, to his insatiable appetite for sausages and larcenous will, was suggestive of pre-adolescent desire.” Possibly; or possibly it is an assertion of innocence, native desire unmediated by morality or manners, like Papageno in The Magic Flute, which sits so clearly in this tradition. It certainly released unbridled delight in its audience. It cost him dear, physically.

The extraordinary demands he made of his body as he devised ever more extravagant business took a terrible toll, occasionally compounded by the state of warfare that existed between management and stage-hands, who would occasionally “forget” to secure a trap door, sending him plunging 20ft below the stage. He found it increasingly difficult to move: masseurs were standing by in the wings to ease muscles gathered up into huge knots.

Finally, at the age of 43, he was diagnosed with “premature old age”. In the second of two rather redundant introductions which create something of a false start to the book, Stott tells us that he himself has endured bouts of depression; it is this, one presumes, that leads him to emphasise the melancholy in Grimaldi’s temperament, seeing him as the prototype of all sad clowns, a proposition not entirely proven in the book. If there is an archetype to be found in Joey Grimaldi, it is here, in the image of the artist who destroys his body in the cause of his art: Merce Cunningham, Rudolf Nureyev, Laurence Olivier. His son took over his roles, but the hugely gifted boy, desperately mollycoddled – no doubt as a reaction to Joey’s own upbringing – abandoned himself to drink and high living, and died, possibly poisoned, at the age of 30, the last of the Grimaldi dynasty of clowns.

Stott brings him to vivid life, as he does his vile old grandfather. Joey, in many ways a man out of his times – sober, decent, uxorious, professional to a fault – is harder to resurrect; sometimes the foreground is swamped by the background. But what a background! Stott’s pages are bursting with the unruly and madcap theatre of the late 1700s and early 1800s: aquadramas, reindeer shows, infant prodigies; the young Edmund Kean as a child actor terrifying audiences and actors alike at the head of a band of feral juveniles; the saturnine figure of John Philip Kemble, opium-crazed and vengeful; Sheridan in a pub calmly watching his Drury Lane Theatre go up in flames and murmuring “a man may surely enjoy a glass of wine by his own fireside”. Stott’s pages close sombrely with the inexorable advance of Victorian propriety and middle-class morality. How one longs to have seen Grimaldi’s theatre. And how grateful one is not to have been a performer in it.

Simon Callow is appearing at the Riverside Studios, London, in Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, two one-man plays by Charles Dickens.

A new short story by Hilary Mantel

When Cinderella had been married for more than 20 years, and was designing in her mind the engraved invitations to her silver wedding, she resumed the habit of early rising which had served her as a young girl. On autumn mornings, when a mist lay like a veil over the lake, she would climb down the fire escape from the ballroom floor, her coat flung over her nightdress, to catch the day when it was new, the air pure and unbreathed by the ever-expanding city. She would walk the squelching lawns, feet sinking beneath her, and sometimes note beneath the trees clusters of spotted toadstools and the innocent domes of amanita virosa; bone-white, they shone like baby skulls, the spade-turned refuse of some atrocity in the foreign news. She would mark their position with her eye, to tell the weedkillers later; wear gloves, she would advise them (always a thoughtful employer) in case poison seeps through the pores.

At this hour the hum of traffic was still subdued. If within the palace precincts she could find a shaft of weak sun, she stood still, eyelids fluttering, the liquid pleasure of birdsong lapping over her. If the prince saw a bird, he shot it; that was his training, of course, it was his class and, these years on, she knew better than to try to change him. She would pull her coat about her and hurry in, imagining the fig scent of strong coffee and the curls of fresh butter in their chilly monogrammed dish.

But then, just as her wet slippered foot gained the steps of the fire escape, up popped the snappers from the laurels: FLASH! Coarse voices called out to her “Over here, darling”, and “At me, Cindi!”. Irate, she would blow her whistle for the security patrol, but it was too late. Once again they had trapped her, eyes vague and full of dreams, her face doughy without her makeup: FLASH! And there she’d be next day, spread over three columns of the Daily Intruder: looking angry, looking desperate, her eyes raking the shrubbery for the next source of shock.

Under her breath she said, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat: you’re all dead. She did not like herself for it but that was what she said.

❦

By this time she was a plump, comfortable woman, largely impervious to public opinion: and just as well. It has started with the “Fright of the Night” votes in the society listings, crept downward to the cheap gossip magazines; they laughed at her way of getting lipstick on her teeth, pointed out every pound she gained, and ran make-over features: “Oi, Cindi! What Would The Fairy Godmother Say Now?” When you have been made over once in your life, and as thoroughly as she had, further advice was not only superfluous but spiteful. What, did they think she could arrest the hands of time?

She knew her duty; she swathed herself with ermine for the opening of parliament, and on gala nights at the palace she wore her official bosom, an expanse of mottled nakedness swagged with rubies. Private, creamy flesh which she’d once displayed to the prince now seemed tired, creased, unfit for view. She preferred, always had, twill shirts and sensible corduroy skirts with pockets, into which she could thrust a duster or a packet of wet-wipes. Sometimes when taken to tour the homes of the humble people, she had given offence by blurting out, “Look, you haven’t got a dustpan, have you?” Even in the palace, under its sparkling domes, her glance would flinch from the dust particles swirling gold in the light; they must settle somewhere, mustn’t they? In the long gallery, her fingernail would surreptitiously scrape the underside of a gilded frame; she liked, above all paintings, those Dutch masters in which women with bare forearms are planted foursquare on black-and-white tiles, and a sequence of rooms, newly scrubbed, stretches away from the viewer to a window opened on a clean vista, a neat courtyard with herbs in tubs.

The tabloids had idolised her once. She’d been the people’s princess, though in truth her background wasn’t poor, only dysfunctional. The prince didn’t seem to care much about her old life, and she liked that. “Used to shut her in the broom cupboard, didn’t they, poppet?” he would say, to the respectful press men who (in that respectful era) came to write up their romance. “Or was it the bread-bin?” She was slight in those days; he’d pick her up and wheel her around in the air, to the delight of What Wand? or Cinders! magazine. She liked it that he didn’t probe and pry; what she had taken for tact, she now knew to be indifference. The truth is, even in the early days he had more of a relationship with her shoes than with herself; and especially with that discarded slipper, the one she’d left behind in her haste and panic, when the clock struck midnight and the ballroom shivered about her like a mirage in a heat-haze. She would see him, in absent moments, caressing the glass heel, which would seem to grow higher under his fingertips.

She never wore the shoes afterwards, not in public: not even at her wedding, when the car with matched ostriches drew her to Stonehenge to be married by the rites of the prince’s self-designed church. She could never recapture the graceful carelessness of that single night, her feet scarcely skimming the palace floors; though sometimes, in the early days of the marriage, at his request, she would sit on the edge of their bed, her feet in the glass shoes stuck out stiffly in front of her; and at the unbuttoning of his flies she would fall backwards, and stare up at the monogrammed crown into which were gathered the silken draperies of the bed. Her lashes would flutter, her eyes close, as if in ecstasy; but really, she was squinting up to see if there was any dust trapped in the folds.

Since those days, the romance had gone out of their union. As she said to him, what do you expect if you marry a woman for her foot-size? In recent years, she would find shoe-boxes about their suite – badly concealed under piles of shooting magazines, or wrapped in sweat-soaked tweeds – and she would know the prince was on the hunt for a mistress. A more determined wife might have closed down the glass factory, but they’d only bring in clear resin imports from Asia. “I never,” she once said frankly to the prime minister, “expected any of this to last. It was too sudden, you see, too sudden and too simple. Pumpkin: coach. Mice: horses. Rat: coachman. Lizards: footmen. Rags: ballgown.”

“And after that, just the dancing, I’d suppose,” he said, with sympathy. “Just the dancing, and losing track of the time. It could happen to anybody.”

Really? she thought. The fact is, it happened to me. She never ceased to recall the stroke of midnight: the terror that shot through her like the bolt from a stun-gun, the shame as her borrowed finery vaporised and her gold-dusted skin shone through her rags. Almost a quarter of a century and she could still feel it, and regret that it was impossible, however much she wished, to stipulate that official functions ended at five-to-midnight. She would, if she could, have passed it off as the custom of the country; but you can’t snatch the brandy glass from an ambassador’s hand and boot him into the night. She never ceased to feel an inner tremor as the palace clocks crept to the vertical and the chimes rang out over the rooftops. When they were abroad on state visits, the first thing she did, when she came into a ballroom, was to check the exits: in case she had to make one, quick.

Time passed, as time will. She tried not to introspect. As the prince always said, what’s the bally use? After she quit her father’s house on the prince’s arm (both glass slippers dangling from his free hand, a grin plastered across his perspiring face) she’d never actually been back, and it was years since she’d thought about her family. Her wicked stepmother was long dead and trampled under; her father the baron a smear of grease in a cremation urn. Belinda, the elder stepsister, had passed away after years of painful bunion operations which had never yielded a pleasing result. Jemima, the younger and more ugly of the pair, still lived in the ancestral home; they said she was dementing gently in a downstairs annex, a martyr to chilblains and that general brain-fog that overtakes women who’ve thought of nothing all their lives but how they look. She expected, in due course, to send a brisk, bristling sort of wreath to Jemima’s funeral: and be done with her.

❦

And so the morning paper shocked her: draped across the starched cloth, its sections adrift because the prince had picked out the racing pages. She scooped it up, irritably shaking out the main news: Who’s Ugly Now? the headline asked. Beneath: “Palace sources offered no comment last night to claims that Jemima, only surviving sister of Princess Cinderella, is living in squalor.”

Cinderella put down the paper and wiped her fingers; the prince had basted one corner with marmalade. “Stepsister,” she said. “Oh, this is worse than usual.”

“Yerss,” the prince said. She used to find it endearing, his drawl.

“They say the roof is falling in. But it always was. ‘Speaking, shoeless, from her damp wheelchair, the Hon Jemima claimed, She just waltzed out of our lives and left us in poverty and want.’ Do you think I should go and see? It’s do it sooner or do it later, I’m afraid. I know Jemima. She just wants money. You know what the press is like these days. They won’t let it drop.”

“Yerss,” said the prince. He himself was going fishing. Besides, he had never visited her old home.

❦

A day later, dismissing her official car, she walked up the path. “A decayed baronial pile,” the press had called it. Decayed, certainly, but the family had made its money in glue, and the title was a new one, bought from Lloyd George, and with a money-off coupon at that. The house was no better than stockbroker Tudor, just with more teetering storeys than any Tudor would have indulged; the staircases grew meaner, the rooms more pen-like and useless, as you slogged your way to the top.

Dirty nets hung at the leaded lights, the front garden was overgrown. Digressing from the mossy path, and placing her gloved hand against the latticed iron of the side gate, she gazed into a scene of wind-blown devastation, the orchard unpruned and its trees bowed under a weight of rotting, wormy fruit. The vegetable plots had run to seed; the paths, where she had once raked the gravel twice weekly, were now barely distinguishable from the couch grass that impinged on them.

She pressed her gloved fingers to her mouth; she returned to the porch, and took into her hand the lion-head knocker, feeling its familiar contours; how many times, as a little girl, had she polished it up! It was a sad tarnished object now; it didn’t seem likely Belinda or Jemima had bestirred themselves with the Brasso. She heard the echo of her knock in the hollow of the house. She waited. Nobody came; by all accounts, nobody would. She pushed the door; she thought it was bolted, but it was only swollen with damp.

The first thing she saw was that, as she expected, the papers were exaggerating. Those bristling industrial-sized rat-traps had been there in her day; the place was vermin-ridden, the hill behind it riddled with passages where they bred. She sniffed: rat-wee, unmistakable. The hearth in the hall was cold, and a wind-up scrubbing brush was making its desultory way over the flagstones. As she watched, it wound down, flipped itself on its back, and lay there like some toothed alien, whirring uselessly at the ceiling. This kingdom’s not made much progress with housework, she thought, despite my personal interest. They can find water on the moon, but they can’t invent the self-filling bucket, never mind the self‑scrubbing floor. “Women into Engineering!” That would be my manifesto. If I had a manifesto.

It wasn’t squalor, at least not by the standards of her early life. It looked just the way it had when she used to battle to cook and clean each day, single-handed, for her father and her stepmother and the ugly sisters. She’d lay fires and the breakfast table last thing at night, and dawn would find her cracking the ice on the back step, strewing the paths with salt, with cinders, so that no one would slip; in those days, she really didn’t want them to slip, orthopaedic emergencies were a thing she dreaded, the ugly sisters were bad enough when ambulant, so imagine them in traction! On a hunting morning, Father would be up and roaring for his Eggs Benedict at 6am, and she’d find that the girls, coming in late and drunk, had playfully coiled their silk stockings in the teapot. An interval for sweeping, scouring and wiping the spiders from the windows, churning the butter and tipping any elf-vagrants or wandering gnomes from the back porch. Three couples of hounds would limp in around 10, muddy from the chase and hungry as wolves. After they were sated they sprawled by the drawing room fire, muddying the Chinese carpet, and if she tried to move them on with a nudge of her toe they snarled at her, flattening their ears; she saw their yellow fangs, reeking with fox blood. The baron lolled the while in his clubman’s chair, the leather creaking under him, flicking through wine-merchants’ catalogues and barking out his orders for claret by the case. Sometime after 11, Belinda and Jemima would trail down, yawning, wrinkling their noses at the scent of wet dog, and demanding she drop everything and make waffles. Lunch she never managed – not for herself – afternoon found her teasing stepmother’s bonnet frills with the goffering iron, running upstairs with her hot chocolate and her pills and her scandal magazines, and always as she reached the foot of the stairs, her mind moving ahead to the next task, she would hear that shrill voice calling out again. “Girl! Girl!” In her leisure moments, she black-leaded the range.

This was her life, year after year: till that astonishing winter when the prince gave the ball, till the sudden migraine flash that was the fairy godmother, a light breaking through her life; and that night of stars and snow, the mice-horses leaping ahead into the gloom, the rat-coachman whistling a patriotic air, the lizard-footmen in their livery clinging to the back of the coach, hallooing and blowing their silver bugles: on, on, through the blizzard and into the palace forecourt blazing with torches, and up the sweeping staircases into the dazzle of candelabra, the glass shoes crunching at every step, so she thought they would splinter and pierce her veins: always climbing, always upwards, until she found the prince himself, ashen inside braided scarlet, his throat working and an empty oyster shell in his hand: his medals chiming as, at the sight of her, he trembled with lust from the top of his plumed head to the tip of his tasselled boot.

Now, back in her old home, she remembered this and felt cold. She stood by the cheerless hearth, which it had been her duty to light; she was just patting herself down for matches, when a slovenly looking girl in a plastic apron burst through from the kitchens. She skidded to a halt and stood staring rudely; “Who you? What want?”

“Just a look around,” Cinders said, “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Trouble?” the girl said. “I got trouble by the basin-full. Milady Jemima won’t shift her fat arse on to the commode.”

She spoke with the accent of the country people, their lurching contractions: “You came in with commendable alacrity,” the princess said.

“Thought you might be me eff gee.”

“Fairy godmother? How quaint of you. Still, I suppose I am that generation, now. Have you been expecting her long?”

The girl grunted. Her legs and feet were bare, her stringy arms were laced with tattoos; still, I shall not judge her, Cinders thought. She turned on her heel and clipped over the flagstones, entering, before the girl or her own good sense could check her, the body of the house. The girl trailed her, sniffing: suspicious still. Surely, though, she knew her by now? Her picture was in the papers every day, in one demeaning context or another.

The dining room seemed disused, the long mahogany table sombre as a coffin. “Gets her slop on a tray,” the girl explained. The heads of long-dead stags loomed from her father’s walls; as she hesitated in the doorway, a shaft of sunlight crept in from the lancet window above, and their antlers threw, for one wavering moment, a sinister, plaited pattern on the opposite wall. How she had hated the polishing of their glass eyes!

“‘Ighness, you want a cuppa?” the girl asked. Sweet little thing! Is it possible – and now the first niggle entered her mind, a maggot – is it possible that she once, that she herself, that she with this country accent, that she with bare feet and no manners but willing and kind, her skin roughened from pegging out wet washing in the wind, her hands boiled, her accent uncouth . . . “What do you get paid for this?” Cinders asked. “Minimum wage?”

The girl nodded.

“More than I got.”

The girl shrugged.

“I have a real urge to scrub this floor,” Cinders said. “Could you oblige me with the necessary?” Seeing the dubious expression on the girl’s face, she said gently, “That would be a pail, dear. A brush, and a source of suds.”

Oh, right you are, the girl said.

❦

She rose, puffing from her exertions, a half-hour later; the boards were white beneath her, and her face was red. If the exercise had taught her anything, it was that she was not 18 any more; well, I knew that, she thought, but I thought I was good for a floor or two. “Perhaps I am your eff gee after all,” she said to the girl. “Nobody should be doing this for a living.”

For while she was labouring on her knees, she had heard a piercing, familiar cry: “Girl! Girl!” In shock, she had dropped her brush in the water; dammit, a ghost! But the girl cried, “I’m on it, Miss Jemima,” and sped away; and Cinders realised that her ugly sister had simply learned to imitate her deceased stepmother. Damage rolls down the generations, she thought, names are forfeited: first they call you Cinderella, then just “girl”. Roles are played out, empress and scapegoat, passed down the years; grudges flourish, duty goes undone.

“What’s up?” the girl said, clumping back with a stone hotwater bottle in her hands.

“Nothing.” I’m just squatting here on my haunches, prosing on to myself, she thought, while I could be changing a life. She looked up, “Look, why don’t I give you a scholarship to Harvard?”

The girl gaped at her. “I take it very kindly, but what would I do for a brain?”

“Go to the rat trap,” Cinders said grandly, “and fetch me a white rat.” She giggled. “There can be magic,” she said. “It strikes all in a moment.”

“She’m calling again,” the girl said. “Hark.”

“I’ll go.”

Cinders straightened up; a pain shot up and down her spine. Smoothing out the spare plastic apron the girl had lent her, and dusting her wet hands on the backside of her tweed skirt, she made her way to her stepsister’s room.

Jemima was hunched into an invalid chair, wearing a shawl that she recognised as one she had crocheted herself, under duress. Her stepsister was, if possible, uglier than ever; a pang pierced the princess, as she remembered how she had prepared Jemima for evenings out, affixing over her warts with spirit gum a thick sprinkling of black velvet patches cut in the shape of moons and stars. The Sky at Night, Belinda used to call her, sneering; there was no solidarity in their ugliness, these sisters. Women beware women.

At first she thought Jemima was asleep. She stood, drinking in the scene; then her stepsister’s chins quivered upwards from the shawl. “Well, look who the firk it is! Old Cinderbum, as I live and breathe.”

“You barely do either,” said the princess.

“Thrown you out, has he?”

“Mind if I sit down, Jem? My back aches.” She shoved a pile of unironed laundry to the floor. “You’ve been talking to the press.”

“Got to talk to somebody. Only got that slut of a girl.”

“She seems a very good type of girl. In fact I’m sending her to Harvard.”

Jemima didn’t even blink. “How’s the prince? Leaving him, are you? Belinda said it’d never last.”

“We’ve managed 20-odd years. What would you call lasting?”

And yet, did it not flit through her head sometimes at the breakfast table, when he was bespattering the TV guide with sticky crumbs, that a little chopped amanita, seethed in cream, would rot his liver even quicker than those peaty malts he favoured? “I used to be good,” she said, realising it. “Charitable unto all. That’s why my fairy godmother came through for me. I deserved her. But my fear is, Jem,” and as she spoke, she understood it, “I don’t deserve it any more. Rat-tat-tat, I think. Bang, you’re dead. I have provocation. But even so.”

“Life gets you that way,” Jemima said. “C’est la bloody vie. How do you think we felt, oppressing you year on year? We’d have subbed you the odd shilling. It was only loyalty to our mother, that’s all. You wear down the shoes of your morality, but they’re the only sodding shoes you’ve got. You slop about with the heels squashed down, and floodwater leaching through the soles. Well, so Belinda always said. You know what you’ve got to do now. Make way for younger talent.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said sharply. “You’re not younger than me, nor do you look it.”

“You’ll get some sort of pay-off, I reck-on. I don’t suppose he had a pre-nup.”

“No. Too romantic. He used to swoon with passion every time I . . .” She broke off, for decency’s sake. Now was not the time to be boasting to Jemima about her feet and their abilities. They ached now, even snuggled into the kid-soft loafers made on her own last.

“Where will you go?” Jemima sniggered. “No use thinking you can use this as a bolt-hole. Belinda sold off her half before she died. Mine’s mortgaged to the hilt. When I go, the estate will just about cover the debts. What the chancellor doesn’t swipe, that is. Let’s hope the Tories get in next, eh?”

“They told me you were gaga. You sound all right to me. Sitting there, tax planning, like some evil spider.” She stood up. “I’ll be back. Just going up to the garrets.”

Jemima’s laughter, in fancy at least, followed her up. As she paused on the first landing, where the principal chambers were, she thought she inhaled the scent of camphor and cologne, of spot cream and cheap deodorant, that had characterised the closets of her stepsisters. Another flight, and she had to stop and catch her breath . . . Would I, she thought, give it all to be young and lovely again, to float up here on my cloud of hope? Because I was lovely, because I never gave up hope . . . She laboured on, to the very top floor. The very room she used to sleep in, the sliver of a room under the stars . . . she pushed the door.

The straw pallet in the corner was the same, the cracked boards that supported it, with their mouseholes: the sparse cold rays were the same, filtering through the smeared skylight. There on the wall was her dear dead mother’s picture: veiled, as it always had been, at her stepmother’s insistence, with a dirty dishcloth. Stepmother had kept it moist with old tea-leaves from the dregs of the pot, with unmentionable wipings from her lavatory, but now the rag was stiff as an old corpse; and, like an old corpse, persistently stinky. Cinders twitched it aside. The sweet, dead face, faded now, smiled into hers, and – an involuntary twitch of the facial muscles – she smiled back.

She heard the feet of the slut on the stairs. She stood, absently rubbing the small of her back, till the girl’s head butted into view from the narrow staircase. “There you be,” the girl said. She nodded to the picture on the wall. “I give the old lady a wipe from time to time. Herself insists on the dishcloth, though.”

“I think you’ve almost scrubbed her out. She looks blurred, or is it me? Still, you meant well. Look, about Harvard –”. She hesitated, twisting her foot on the floor, examining her polished toe. “I realise it’s a bit sudden. You probably haven’t even got a passport, or a scholar’s gown? You should come on our preparatory scheme. The prince’s scheme, I should say. He’s very proud of it. It brings out your potential and fits you for a destiny.”

“It fit you for what?”

“Oh, good God, girl, have you no concept of a destiny? You improve your literacy, if any. You go white-water rafting.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure. The prince thinks it character building.” What am I doing, she thought: selling it to her, as if I were one of his employees? Habit, I suppose. “You don’t get a wage, but you get spending money. It’s just for a year. We can do Harvard later. We just need to coach you a bit . . .” The girl turned down the corners of her mouth. She heard her own voice rattling on. “You get a cardigan every Christmas. I knit them myself.”

“Very nice,” the girl said flatly. Oh, Cinders thought, the underestimated tact of the lower classes!

The girl turned aside, as if to galumph downstairs. Then, as if struck by a thought, she turned: “Wait – you say I get coached. Would I get to meet the prince?”

“If you want,” Cinders said dubiously. “I warn you to abandon any romantic fantasies. He’s quite bald nowadays, and always with an unheeded dew-drop at the end of his royal nose.” She saw herself, year upon year, patiently passing a handkerchief, linen folded and stiffly embroidered with his coat of arms. “Besides,” she sighed, “he wouldn’t like your feet.”

The girl looked down: toes calloused, ankles puffy, nails broad and ridged under peeling scarlet polish. “Things can be done,” she said.

“Don’t go down that road. Not surgery. It killed Belinda.”

“I wasn’t thinking surgery.”

She sped away. Amazing how fast feet like that can carry you.

Cinders turned back to her dead mother. Let’s be truthful, she thought, she’s flaking in her frame. But she stood before the painting (never more than an amateur daub), framing it with her hands; she looked at close range, she stared, till the ridges of the paint, the image itself, lost resolution. Unsighted, she felt it with her fingertips, reading it like a blind woman, from the brushstrokes and their traces; I am searching, I am searching, maman, chère maman, for any clue as to how to lead my life from this point on.

A catch in her throat. She took a deep breath. Trouble with tears, somebody has to wipe them up. Come on, Cinders, she said to herself. The room, now she thought of it, smelled: a whiff of desperation from her early self. She walked to the little window. There was a web, which she blew away; she could not blow away the cracks in the glass. She took out her handkerchief, spat on it, and polished a circle in the grime. Below, in the neglected vegetable plots, she discerned a pattern of activity. She could see tattoo girl, her back bent, pushing and nudging along the path a certain object, striped and stippled, solid and elliptical. She blinked, as if to unweb her own eyes, as if to dismiss her fog of nostalgia, the accumulated illusion of the years, but this was no illusion. The slut had got hold of a pumpkin somehow; puffing, effortful, grimly determined, she was rolling it over the rough ground, and up the path towards her future.