This week I've been working hard on a new project. The last four months I've been immersed in research, and the new book is just at that critical stage when it stops being notes on a page and starts becoming the fragile beginning of a story. Often when writers document the writing process, it ends up sounding rather mystical and elusive. But it strikes me that the objects that we keep around us are concrete things which can illuminate the process. So this week, I thought I'd show you what my desk looks like (at least right now)...

On the desk you can see the basic tools I use every day. I write on computer (mostly), but I also keep a writing notebook in which I record everything by hand - what I'm planning to work on that day, what I have worked on already, my hopes for the project and any problems I'm having, fragments of sentences, character ideas, location maps, lists of books to read for research and notes from the books I'm currently reading, and my own reflections on the way a project is progressing. This notebook goes with me everywhere, and is the first thing I open each morning. I also keep a diary on the desk, and occasionally the year planner that you can see in the top left corner. If the year planner is out, it means it's a busy week and I'm checking that the progress of the project is on track! When I write by hand, it's mostly with the kind of plastic fountain pens that cost a couple of euros from a newsagent. On the desk you can also see an outline for the new book, which I printed out at the start of the week and which I have been going through by hand, annotating, to check how the shape of the story is crystallising.

All of which might sound very organised and straightforward. But what I haven't yet mentioned are all of the things that I'm superstitious about. For instance the desk itself, which I've brought with me through three or four house moves (in one case dismantled and disguised as a box because the removal company didn't ship furniture) despite the fact that it only cost £20 or £30 to begin with. Or the fact that I feel compelled for unknown reasons to always use the same exact size, shape and design of writing notebook until a project is finished, which means that I hoard a stack of notebooks at the start of every project, just in case. Or the talismans on the windowsill, objects with particular meaning which remind me of the book I've just finished and encourage me with the one I'm just starting. Or the odd rituals that I follow - for example the fact that I have to clear my desk every evening, which is why everything useful like the lamp and the printer are relegated to other tables. Unless a computer breaks, I won't change it, because I get uneasy even about that!

Which I guess is to say that writers are superstitious. Maybe it's because there are so many things about the process of writing that we can't control. Publication is, to a large extent, governed by fortune - by lucky meetings, random salvages from the slush-pile (which is where my own first book was discovered), collisions of stories and moments which might have been quite different another day, another time. Which is not to say that the wrong books are published. But that many of the right ones aren't. Even good, brilliant, important stories. Which is a fact that I think every writer is constantly aware of. There are so many aspects of the process that aren't really in our hands that perhaps it's natural to be a little superstitious about the ones that are!
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Do you have any writing and reading rituals or particular objects that you keep around you? I'd be interested to know...

I was reflecting the other night, as I finished yet another excellent book, that 2016 has been a very good year in reading so far. Between new releases by favourite authors, a string of spot-on recommendations and a streak of good luck, I've found myself reading not one bad novel since Christmas. This week I thought I'd share some of the highlights.

January

The year got off to a good start with one old favourite writer, Anne Tyler, and one new favourite writer, Elena Ferrante. In January I read Tyler's latest book, A Spool of Blue Thread. I had heard very polarised responses to this book. Both those who loved it and those who were disappointed seemed to be saying the same thing: this is just more classic Anne Tyler. Which led me to wonder whether a writer has some kind of moral duty to vary their books. Isn't the continuity sometimes the point? To me this book, when I read it, seemed to be a variation on old themes not because Tyler couldn't think of anything else to say but because, like all good writers, she is preoccupied with questions which seem to her too complex to answer in one book, and therefore she returns to them over and over. And it isn't just Tyler who does this - most of the writers I love intentionally say the same thing all their lives, refining only the words in which they say it. So yes, stepping into this book requires you as a reader to be willing to inhabit a world with the same air and light, the same texture, the same characters, as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant or Saint Maybe or many of the other classic Anne Tyler novels of twenty or thirty years ago - and perhaps it has a slightly smaller frame of reference than those novels offer. But in returning to familiar themes Tyler also adds new rooms to the house of her work, and for me, that makes the book worthy of its good reviews and prize nominations. She isn't just reworking old ground; there is also a lovely and understated new story here about family and aging and love.

January was also the month that I continued reading Elena Ferrante, a journey that has been rather longer for me than for most Ferrante fans because I've been trying to read her work in Italian. I completed Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) in January. Here in Italy, the third volume of the Neapolitan novels seems to be the one everybody likes the best, because of the way the canvas opens up to deal with some of the most complex aspects of post-war Italian history while keeping its tight focus on the psychology of the female characters and their ongoing struggle to integrate their inner worlds with the demands of the world outside. I think this volume was also my favourite so far, partly for that insight into late twentieth-century Italy and partly because by now, three volumes into the series, my Italian is getting good enough to appreciate the books much more deeply than I could when I started out!

Also read in January: Ada Gobetti's Partisan Diary, translated by Jomarie Alano, which is the memoir of a female partisan and political thinker in Turin in World War Two, Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende, Pure by Andrew Miller (one of my very favourite historical fiction writers)... And I officially became the last person with a British passport to have read Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train. Better late than never I suppose!

February

In February I picked up the last of Elena Ferrante's books, Storia della bambina perduta (Story of the Lost Child), and surprised myself by barely putting it down again until I'd finished. I've developed a lot of affection for these books, and I could write pages about the ways in which I'm profoundly grateful to Ferrante for this series and what it has to say about being a woman and a writer and a human being, but for now I'll just say that due to the subject matter of this particular book it was gripping in a way that was one part enjoyment and one part horror. Ferrante focuses on the relationship between Elena and her daughters, and the nature of motherhood, and there's a twist related to this theme which jarred with me when I first read it because it is so awful, but which I ultimately came to understand as the direction the whole story had been leading from the moment Lila threw Elena's doll into the cellar about two thousand pages previously. The Atlantic reviewer compared it to Oedipus - unexpected and yet inevitable - and I think that's true. And the very ending is profound with the kind of understatement few other authors can do as well as Ferrante, in any language. I'm planning now to read these books in English to find out what I missed.

In February, I also read In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri. In Other Words is a kind of essay or memoir, written in parallel English and Italian, about Lahiri's inexplicable love affair with the Italian language - an odd, obsessive impulse which she struggles to explain even to herself, and which leads her to take years of Italian lessons, to impose on herself an ascetic period of reading and writing only in Italian, and finally to move her whole family to Rome. Writing in Italian forces on Lahiri a style which is not really her own, in the sense that the complexity of thought belonging to her short stories is gone, replaced by a rather spare, halting style. But what interested me most was what was between the lines, the question of what compels someone to begin to systematically shape her whole existence around a language which has no claim on her, which - objectively - she has no 'sensible' reason to learn? 'I believe that what can change our life,' Lahiri writes at one point, 'is always outside of us.' I find any book in which a writer sets themselves an experimental challenge in an attempt to make a breakthrough in their work fascinating. It's like watching a painter make a series of sketches in a new style, and then - perhaps a few years later, if you're lucky - you will look at the next piece of work they produce and see the traces of those sketches in it and understand something about the process of creation. So what I'm interested to see now is whether the protracted Italian experiment enables Lahiri to make a leap in her English-language work. I expect it will.

And in February I also reread Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales, plus several research books which I will mention in a later post because they relate to the new book I've just started writing and I'm superstitious about saying more...

March

The only book I've finished so far in March is Vanessa and her Sister by Priya Parmar. This book embodies what I love about historical fiction and the work of writers like Andrew Miller, and incredibly it's only Priya Parmer's second novel (having said that, Ingenious Pain was Andrew Miller's first, so maybe historical fiction writers are just exceptionally gifted - who knows?). Vanessa and her Sister is that rare kind of historical novel, an act of ventriloquism that succeeds so well that it reads like a found document from the past. Parmar imagines the inner life of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister, through pages from her fictional diary. What I loved about this book was that it not only added to the sometimes rather overworked Bloomsbury vein but also made the whole subject itself more interesting and profound, by rewriting the familiar story from the point of view of a character often thought of as somehow plainer, duller, more ordinary than the sparkling friends and relatives who surrounded her. Parmar reinstates Vanessa as an artist, mother, sister, carer and thinker in her own right, and by the end you are convinced that in many ways she was the most fascinating of them all. And Parmar's Vanessa is also funny. Humour is a massively underrated skill for a writer to possess so effortlessly as Priya Parmar does.

And I'm currently reading: the beautiful Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki, which follows three young sisters in early 20th century Greece, which my good friend Thomai gave me, The Madonna of 115th Street, a study of Catholic popular religion in New York in the early 20th century, Cold Comfort Farm, which I'm reading for a long-distance Skype book club I do with a few of my friends back in England, and Infinite Jest. Of which much more could be said, but I'll wait until I've finished it...

Which books have you enjoyed in 2016 so far? I'd love it if you let me know in the comments. My to-read list is always about five hundred books long, but that doesn't seem to stop me from looking for more books to add to the pile.

I just got back from New York, where I went last week to visit my US publishers, Random House, and attend a special event for The House at the Edge of Night. It was an intense week full of meetings, preparations, jetlag, burritos, conversations about reading and writing, and many great people, some of whom I already knew, and lots of whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time. Here are five pictures that, for me, sum up the trip…

1. Day One. On the way from the airport to the city.

This is the first photo I took after landing in America. I didn't realise until I arrived just how American everything would be. By which I mean that every time that I read an American book in the past, I would be puzzled by certain references, always imagining them - without realising it - in terms of Europe, unable to map them onto the real thing. And then, on the train from the airport, several things made sense to me all at once when I saw a vacant lot and a clapboard house and a station wagon, and I snapped this (totally unremarkable) picture in pure excitement at finally being able to understand a little of what those writers I loved had actually been describing. It's very odd to finally visit a place like New York that already exists in fictional form in all our heads, and to overwrite that imaginary New York, street by street, with the real place.

​2. Day Three. Meeting the Random House book club.

On the third day of my trip, I went to visit my American publishers, Random House. I was really struck by everybody’s passion, enthusiasm and love for all things book related. People talk about the future decline of the book, but with publishers this passionate I can’t see it happening soon. Random House have set up a book club for The House at the Edge of Night, and I loved meeting them and hearing all the insightful, profound and inspiring things they had to say about books and writing. I think this picture shows what a warm and welcoming group they were and what writing and publishing are at their best – a community of readers getting together to talk about books. And they all seem to love Elena Ferrante as much as I do.

3. Preparations for the House at the Edge of Night event.

That evening, I went on an expedition to the Italian market with my agent Suzanne and her assistant Clio to get supplies for the House at the Edge of Night event the next day. We filled three huge bags with Italian delicacies, and here is the beautiful display that the two of them made. I particularly love the top left picture. In this one, you can see boxes of Leone violet pastilles, which we decided to give away to the guests because they are mentioned several times in the book. These are tiny old-fashioned candies which are made in Turin, just round the corner from where I live, and they are sold like this in many bars in Italy, including the House at the Edge of Night. And the beautiful Castellamare postcards were made by the Random House book club. Very weird to see things you've written about coming to life like this...

4. Day Four. The House at the Edge of Night event.

And after all those preparations, here's the event itself.

​5. Presenting the book.

And lastly, a moment of pure relief! Part of the event involved me presenting The House at the Edge of Night to the guests, most of whom didn’t know about the book yet. I was unexpectedly nervous about this. It wasn’t that I had no public speaking experience – more that all of it involved large groups of eleven-year-olds, and as such was of limited use when speaking to bloggers, magazine editors and journalists. And I was also divided for a long time between various different ways to introduce the book, wanting to present it in a way that was true to the story and the subject matter but without being too controversial or too personal in what was after all a general introduction. In the end, and with a lot of help along the way (my husband Daniele can probably give the speech himself without notes!) I decided to take the most honest approach and speak about what I felt was at the heart of the story, the 2008 financial crisis and how that led me to write about small places in Europe and the impact of the big history beyond their shores. It went down well, and in this photo you can clearly see how relieved I was about that… Lucky I had my lovely editor, Kate, cheering me on so kindly from the sidelines.

And to bring me back down to earth, I came back with a few unexpected souvenirs – some of them great, like a stack of book recommendations and Castellamare postcards – and some decidedly less great, like a bad case of the flu. New York is cold. Even compared to the mountains of North Italy it’s cold. My one piece of advice, if you’re planning to visit this beautiful city, is to bring thermal underwear and a hat and scarf…

The photos in this post were taken by the brilliant Danielle Siess from Random House, and you can see more of them here.

Thanks for reading, and all the very best,

Catherine