Sometimes, as a writer, the ways in which readers discover your book will surprise you. Some books do well with book clubs, or with libraries, or with a certain demographic who weren't expected to like them. Or else they become bestsellers in countries where no one had thought they would (my first young adult book was apparently a hit in Estonia, for instance). This has also been the case with The House at the Edge of Night. It turns out that audio books are having a surge in interest at the moment, and The House at the Edge of Night is proving popular with listeners. This is thanks in major part to the narrator, Edoardo Ballerini, whose recording is so good that I ended up listening to the whole 24 hours of it despite having read it at least a couple of times already. But it's still been exciting, and unexpected, to discover that a large number of The House at the Edge of Night's readers are actually listeners.

This makes me happy partly because of how fitting it is. A book like The House at the Edge of Night, which draws inspiration from a tradition of oral storytelling as diverse as Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and some man at the local bar, is meant to be 'heard' or 'listened to', even if the only voice narrating is the one in the reader's head. And it has also got me thinking about what it means to 'read' a book. In a world where books are constantly lamented as being at risk of extinction, I find it oddly comforting to think that someone could be accessing The House at the Edge of Night through a bookshop or free at a library; through printed pages, on an e-reader, a computer or a smartphone; in US English, British English, Russian, Czech, Danish or translated back into Italian - and, now, also, on a CD, read aloud. Which, in a way, is the oldest way of reading a story of them all.

Last month I was invited to do an interview for a magazine called AudioFile about the audio book. It brought up some interesting things: the oral storytelling tradition, what makes a good narrator for a cross-cultural novel which draws on more than one language, and my own long-standing love of audio books (which mostly has to do with being a teacher, a two-hour commute and insomnia, but is no less heartfelt for all that!). If you want to read more about how a reader can also be a listener, and how the audio book version of The House at the Edge of Night got made, the full AudioFile interview is here. And I also wrote an essay for the Books on Tape blog over the summer, which you can read here.

That's all for now, but thanks, audio book listeners, for surprising me over the last few months by embracing the book!

This week, I heard the exciting news that The House at the Edge of Night is going to be published in Italian. This is also the twentieth language in which the book will be published, which seems fitting, since it's a particularly important one for me. When I began writing this book, it was set in Italy, it was in Italian that I did much of the research, and since writing it, Italy has also become my home. So I'm thrilled that, thanks to TEA Libri who will be publishing it over here, readers in my adoptive country will now be able to read the book too.

Meanwhile, there are a few international editions already out in the world. First was the Danish edition, Huset ved Nattens Ende, translated by Alis Friis Caspersen, which came out in August. Next the German edition, Die langen Tage von Castellamare (Long Days on Castellamare), translated by Marion Balkenhol. And then, at the beginning of October, this beauty, Dom Na Skraju Nocy, appeared in Poland, translated by Hanna Pasierska.

​Translators, like cover designers, don't always get a lot of credit or thanks, but I'm very grateful to these gifted women for bringing The House at the Edge of Night to the non-English speakers who are, after all, most of my readers. And I'm also quite impressed with how quickly they have managed to translate it! I'm always fascinated by how different a book looks in each language in which it is published. More creative international cover designs to come soon...

​Earlier this week, an Italian reporter claimed to have uncovered, through a rather bizarre and intrusive piece of investigative journalism, the identity of one of my favourite writers in the world, Elena Ferrante. This was probably bound to happen sooner or later. Ferrante is female, and Ferrante is a great writer, and there are people in this world who believe the coincidence of those two facts is so rare as to require some kind of biographical explanation. Nevertheless, Elena Ferrante’s real name is big news, and is causing some bitterness and controversy. The debate, principally, is between those who believe this is a matter of public interest, and those (like me) who feel the writer has been compromised, who believe this wasn’t a ‘mystery’ to be solved at all but an issue of privacy and respect, and who would rather Ferrante hadn’t been ‘unmasked’ in the first place.

I have always believed, in a world obsessed with images of writers, with ‘knowing’, ‘seeing’ and ‘encountering’ writers, particularly female writers, that Ferrante was a last testament to the anonymous power of the written word. With the unmasking of her identity, that last pillar has fallen. But in another sense, it strikes me that what we talk about when we talk about Elena Ferrante has always, rather tiresomely, been her identity. Her anonymity – perhaps because of its femaleness – has always been a space into we have projected our speculations. Often, these speculations have been irrelevant, or even offensive. Might she be married? A mother? Neapolitan? Divorced? Might a man have written her work? This is odd. Why is the main conversation we have been having, over the years, about such an important world writer, one in which the writer herself is forced into the limelight, discussed in terms of issues such as marital status, appearance, social background, finances and family life, while the work goes unmentioned? Does this help us appreciate her writing? Or does it rather (given the sensitive subject matter she deals with) jeopardise that very writing – its realism, its intimacy, its specificity? Would such insistence on ‘unmasking’ and ‘exposing’ and ‘revealing’ happen if the pseudonym were, instead, Mario Ferrante or Edoardo Ferrante, and the books centred on male characters? Troubled by such questions, I have always – like many fans – preferred the conceit with which Ferrante herself presented us: that the name ‘Elena Ferrante’ was a fictional construction who should stand in for the writer, allowing the work to speak for itself.

Therefore, this week I want to do what no one else is doing and talk about Elena Ferrante’s work: what it is, and what it means to me, and why it is worth reading, without reference to her ‘identity’ at all.

I first discovered Elena Ferrante while I was learning Italian. Like many language learners, I came to this language through necessity. My husband is Italian, and I knew that at some point sooner or later I was probably going to be an immigrant in this country, required to understand, to communicate, to integrate myself, in a place in which I had the distinct disadvantage of not having grown up. So I learned as much Italian as I could by ear, and then I turned to books. At the time I discovered Ferrante’s work, I was looking for books that were accessible to someone like me, keen to learn the language better but still limited. I bought a copy of L’Amica Geniale chiefly because I understood the first paragraph. At the beginning, I read with a dictionary, mirroring the diligence – a fact which struck me as amusing, at the time – of the studious character of Elena in the book, with her spectacles and second-hand textbooks, keen to get ahead but with mountains of missing knowledge, always instead limping behind. The books, in a way, became in my own mind a mirror for my journey towards fluency in Italian – at first they are written in the simple prose of childhood, then the more impassioned run-on sentences of Elena’s teenage voice, until the adult woman bursts forth, articulate and intelligent and more certain of herself.

Within a few chapters, however, I had put the dictionary away and was merely reading. The language of the book pulled me in – simple without ever being trite, violent and urgent without ever being graphic, unafraid to mimic the plain speech of childhood or the self-educated (useful for a second-language reader with a limited Italian vocabulary) without ever being childish or dull. In these words, I also found something immediate and real which I had not found before in any language. Ferrante wrote in a way I had never seen before about childhood, about womanhood, about education and social background and violence and aspiration – even about writing. On a deeply personal level, the passage where the young writer first sees herself in a newspaper, posing self-consciously in the familiar locations of her hometown, is the only realistic evocation of this experience I have ever found. Ferrante is not afraid to plumb the depths of every experience – the humiliating, exposing, unadmirable aspects of our consciousnesses, and our selves. For this reason, the books felt to me like something entirely new.

When the books began to achieve success in translation, therefore, I was delighted, but also a little surprised. Often, the images of Italy which filter into the English-speaking world are one-sided ones. So many of the English-language books I had encountered about Italy previously were written by British and American writers who had spent less time in the country than I had, who did not speak the language, and whose project was principally a touristic one, of chronicling the country from the outside in a way that portrayed only certain aspects of the place. Now, here was an Italy that felt like a real place, characters who embodied aspects of the country I recognised. And it was with this Italy that English-language readers fell in love, despite its dirt streets, its poverty, its violence, its dusty alleyways, and the most unglamorous, and probably truest, depiction of the small-time mafia I have ever found in any novel. Because, I realised, Elena Ferrante’s Napoli was a place, like the settings of all truly great literature, which through its specificity opened up great vistas of human nature, and became everywhere.

I read Storia del Nuovo Cognome in a couple of months, and Storia di Chi Fugge e di Chi Resta in a week or two. Storia della Bambina Perduta took me 48 hours. Then, immediately, I went back and read the books in English to find out what I had missed. By that time, I was, as I had predicted, an immigrant in Italy. And an odd thing happened during these post-Ferrante months: I found myself continuing to refer to the writer as I went about my daily life, as though she were a kind of ministering angel. When discussions of Italian politics began among my extended family or in the local bar, I navigated my way by Ferrante’s books, using them as a kind of social history of the twentieth century by which, as an immigrant who had spent her formative years elsewhere, I could ground myself. Ah yes, I would think, as though I had actually lived it. The period when everybody was communist. The building boom after the war. I know those things, because Ferrante wrote about them in her books. Since the character of Elena in the books lives in Torino, and this is the city where I also live, I developed a private theory that the writer lived here too. I imagined her somewhere genteel but faded, close to the river Po. When, sometimes, I was lonely here during my first months, I imagined that Ferrante might be walking the streets I walked, going in and out of the squares and palaces, and I found that oddly comforting. Strangely, I knew nothing about her, and yet I felt that I knew her better than any writer I had read.

I hesitated to write this essay, knowing that it would be a personal, not a critical appraisal of Ferrante, with very little new, in a literary-critical sense, to say about her work. But then it strikes me that the measure of a great writer is this: how far a reader distant from them in time and space can still discover themselves, intimately, in the work. So I want to say this: what we talk about when we talk about Elena Ferrante shouldn't be her earnings, her husband, her age, her looks, her ‘real name’. It should be her books. Elena Ferrante already exists – she is inscribed in every word she writes. This week, I discovered, like many people, that I don’t want to know anything else about. So, if you are considering reading the article which ‘unmasked’ her, I don’t recommend it. Instead, pick up one of her books. To read her work is to inhabit the mind of a great master of literature and life, a connection far more intimate than any poring over biographical details and superficial clues can give you. And I promise you won’t be disappointed with the real Elena Ferrante, who is no one else but the brave and gifted self already present in every word.

So this isn't really news, since I've been working on it on and off for more than a year, but over the past couple of weeks it has finally become a real thing rather than a vague collection of notes and sketches. It's official: I am working on a new book.

The strange thing that no one tells you about writers is that those of us who work for publishers (as opposed to self-published or uncontracted ones) work to an odd, time-shifted schedule. While readers are just in the process of discovering your new book, you are usually already working on something new. This is mainly because of how the publication process works. In an ideal world without unexpected illness, family emergencies, other jobs, kids, writer's block or procrastination, writers would deliver a book every two years. This rarely happens, but it's the aim. Since it takes over a year for a publisher to prepare a book for publication, to keep to this schedule you actually have to hand in your new book around 9-12 months after your previous one has been published. This means writers are always looking two ways simultaneously (think of it sort of like a parent with one kid preparing to leave home and one just starting pre-school). Commercial and genre writers have a harder job, because they are often trying to hand in a second book before the first one is even released, to keep to a one-book-a-year schedule. All of this is really to say that I haven't spoken much about this new project yet, because most people - understandably - want to talk to me about the current book, not some awkward future one which is still in note form on my desk. But it has been happening, invisibly, alongside the work I've been doing for The House at the Edge of Night. And for the next year, the plan is to work on it more or less full time. As a writer, your projects are not as separate as they might seem. They are actually chain-linked together by theme and purpose, part of a body of work which goes beyond one particular book, so it's been a relief to finally start some serious work on this new one, which picks up a lot of what I started, creatively, with The House at the Edge of Night.

So far, the process of working on the new book has involved many things. Among them, library research...

And home research...

And more research (this late-night reading session got a bit creepy when I realised I was reading about my own apartment building, which was built in 1937 and is apparently part of a new social housing development built by the Fascist government)...

And, you'll be pleased to see, some actual writing...

I'm looking forward to telling you more about the project over the coming months. What I can say is that it's another historical story, following a small community over a period of twentieth-century history towards the present day, and it involves the Italian partisan movement, a small town, its factory and one extended family with an extraordinary history, two world wars, and a weird miracle which no one knows what to make of.

Meanwhile, I am chronicling a year of my writing life via an Instagram story in 365 chapters. I started the project mainly as an experiment to see what a year of a writer's life looked like, but I think this next few months will actually be one of the most interesting parts. If you want to see how a book gets made (I hope it's going to be a chronicle of that, rather than of writer's block, but you never know!), you can follow here: www.instagram.com/catherinebanner. Now back to the new book.

I

Writing is an odd profession, and people have plenty of theories about why we do it. Some think writers write for fame, or money. Some think that they write to create something beautiful that will outlast them. Some think they do it for critical acclaim, or for prizes. To a writer, by contrast, most of these theories ring false. No writers are famous, and no fame is a pleasant thing to have in any case (just look at Hollywood celebrities). Posterity too is an odd, insubstantial reward, more theory than practice. No writer who has thought about it for five minutes can seriously think their work will outlast them in any way that will make much difference to them once they are gone. The world is 4.5 billion years old. We’ve managed to preserve Shakespeare’s plays for four hundred. A book is essentially a glossy magazine with a hardback cover. In relative terms, it is likely to be gone just as fast. And critical opinion is notoriously fickle: acclaim is by and large a matter of luck, of creating the thing which is just the right combination of new and familiar, while many serious writers are more interested in creating something entirely new which critics will possibly hate. There must be other reasons, then.*

*apart, obviously, from all the excellent ones these first-graders have already come up with

II

When I first became a writer, I wrote for the love of writing. I accepted payment for my work for the pragmatic reason that it helped me make my work better, and it funded me to continue to write. And it’s true that a lot of writers begin to write full-time, if they get the chance, because they love the day-to-day process of developing their craft. But without a clearer sense of mission, even this can become meaningless. How can I know in which direction to take my work, unless I know what I’m trying to achieve with it, and in whose footsteps I follow? Recently, talking to my agent about one of the writers I most admire, he said, ‘It’s an odd thing to be a writer, though: your life’s work essentially adds up to seven or eight books lined up on a shelf.’ Which, if you think about it one way, is utterly dispiriting. And yet, if you think about it another way, is a warning to make sure that work counts, to make sure the sense of purpose at the heart of it is substantial enough to sustain a writing life.

III

Here are some real reasons writers write, which I’ve heard over the years.

1. Because it makes them happy. Because, day by day, they want to sit at their desk and make up stories, or entertain people, or create art. And according to their philosophy of life, the job that makes you happy is the one worth choosing.
2. Out of a kind of curiosity, to see how far they can push the creative experiment they are engaged in, to see if they can make something which is formally new, or – occasionally – something singular and bizarre that they felt like creating anyway.
3. In order to get better at writing: these writers, akin to an Olympic athlete, or an artist, see themselves as engaged in a lifelong struggle to master a craft. Warning: writers are usually rather solemn about this, but it's probably a necessary coping mechanism if you're going to write for a living.
4. To bear witness to something, in themselves or in the world. Or, in the words of the first-graders, 'to tell about important events'.
5. To connect with others, to communicate, to say something and to see that story resonate with the readers who encounter it, and hear those readers reply, ‘Yes, I have felt that too.’ Perhaps to make readers laugh. Perhaps, indirectly, also to help them feel a little less alone somehow.
6. To return to certain themes which they wrote about a long time ago but which they don’t think they’ve yet plumbed the depths of; these writers write out of a kind of obsession, a feeling that they’ve still left something uncreated, or unsaid, and are usually partly motivated and partly annoyed by their inability to lay that obsession to rest.
7. To write something which hasn’t ever been written before. As Milan Kundera put it, to attain ‘beauty in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said.’ As the first-graders put it: 'to express thoughts'.
8. And probably, most commonly, some combination of all the above, coupled with a separate mission which is their own.

IV

A few years ago, when I was still a young adult writer, I attended a panel discussion at a literary festival in London. The first question was the usual first question: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ This is a hard question for most writers to answer, and I’ll admit we struggled. Still, each writer took the question literally and did their best. The first said something like, ‘I often overhear conversations on the bus and that sparks something in my mind.’ The second said something like, ‘When going for long walks.’ Another talked about a real-life story she had read in the newspaper. Still others, including me, talked about the moment when they first began to sense that they had stumbled upon the spark for their novel: a conversation, a chance coincidence of events, the persistent voice of their main character. Then a fellow writer from a minority background spoke up. She got her ideas, she explained, from the fact that the folktales of her home culture weren’t ever written about in English. She wanted to put that tradition and its literature on the map. She wrote from that position of marginality, with a sharp sense of her own place in literature and her purpose as a writer: not just to be part of literature but to change it, to widen its borders. The rest of us, I realised all at once, had misunderstood the question. We were getting it all wrong. You get your ideas, your motivation to keep writing, from those things that preoccupy you, that consume you, that keep you awake at night. All the rest is just incidental.

V

After that day, this fellow writer’s clear-eyed sense of purpose kept coming back to me. Here was a writer who knew what she was doing and why. And, what was more, couldn’t all the writers I most admired say clearly what their mission as a writer was, too? It was already encoded, rather unsubtly, in their work. Derek Walcott: ‘we would never leave the island / until we had put down, in paint, in words… / all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines’. Virginia Woolf: ‘I have had my vision’. And practically all of this interview with Gabriel García Márquez, which is basically one long, sometimes hilarious, mission statement.

VI

So now, when people ask me where I get my ideas from, I answer differently. I say, from the fact that I didn’t see many European writers of my generation writing about the financial crisis, and being young, and coming from a small town. Or, because I feel there’s an interesting story still to be told about how big historical events affect small places. Or, from a wish to write differently about the past. Or, because I felt that European history contains undiscovered stories about small communities which have something to say about our present circumstances. I say these things unashamedly, because that’s the real answer to the question of where our ideas come from. Out of a common wish that all writers share, not just to create literature, but to change literature, to widen its borders, and in doing so to widen all borders, just a little, perhaps.

VII

On the notice board beside my desk, I keep a rotating stock of quotes about writing. They are there to remind me of the spirit in which I should sit down to work each day, and rather than being inspirational, they are mostly rather discouraging and pragmatic. Here’s the first, from Robert D. Hamner on Derek Walcott:

‘His ability to renew himself, to revitalise his imagination, to rediscover the myth of his life and his culture, places him among the greatest poets of our century – poets who write out of their obsessions without repeating themselves.’

A writer’s aim: to write out of your obsessions without repeating yourself.

And here’s the second, the last verse of the poem ‘Curriculum Vitae’ by Samuel Menashe, which contains possibly the least glamorous portrayal of the writer’s life in the history of literature:
​
Time and again 
And now once more 
I climb these stairs 
Unlock this door— 
No name where I live 
Alone in my lair 
With one bone to pick 
And no time to spare
 
With one bone to pick, and no time to spare, seems to me a pretty accurate portrayal of a life spent writing. Every day you climb the stairs, unlock the door, and return to the same themes, hoping to advance a little only in your ability to explore them. So if you’re going to spend your whole life picking the same bone, obsessively, over and over, it helps at least to be able to say what bone you’re picking, and why.

So I'm just back from US and Canadian publication week for The House at the Edge of Night, and thought I'd share some reflections. This has been an extraordinary two weeks, for many reasons. In no particular order, here are some of my thoughts, now that I'm back at my desk and normal writing life has resumed again.

I
Firstly, publicity is daunting - and it is pretty much a hundred times more daunting than standing up in front of a room full of children as I used to do in my other life as a teacher, or making a speech at a wedding, or any other public speaking that we do in our normal lives - but it is also a privilege. To be given a platform to talk about your work, despite the fact that you are an emerging writer or come from thousands of miles away, can, in fact, be transformative. During this fortnight, I found an open-minded, generous community of readers and writers which had space for writers like me in it, and the importance of that to my morale as a writer cannot be overstated. The first photo above is from an event that my Canadian publishers, Doubleday, organised for The House at the Edge of Night and The Hopefuls by Jennifer Close (which I encourage you to read because it's excellent!). I also did my first bookstore event while in Canada, at Novel Spot Bookshop in Toronto (see second photo), and about ten heroic early readers actually showed up. And the third photo is with other debut writers Imbolo Mbue, Emma Cline and Martha Hall Kelly at Random House's twice-yearly reader event, Open House. Here's a link to another of my favourite things: discussing the book on Canadian TV. I think Canada must be one of the only countries in the world where the national media spends so much time talking about writers and books. When I asked the producer how many writers they featured, he said: 'As many as possible.' Therefore they are my new literary heroes, and you can find the link here.

​II
Miraculously, shortly after I arrived in the States, people also began reviewing the book. It was featured by People, The Dallas Morning News, NPR, the Star-Tribune, the National Post, Interview Magazine and New York Magazine, which named it one of their 100 Best Beach Reads Ever (a little bit ridiculous given that, in my opinion, you can read anything on the beach like Marquez or Tolstoy or George Eliot or Shakespeare, but I'm not going to split hairs here...). I'm incredibly grateful to all of these critics for reading and engaging with my work. As a writer, you're often advised not to read reviews. Critical opinions are the obvious exception. To have your work reviewed by a newspaper or magazine is a rare opportunity to see how a serious, informed reader reacts to what you have written, and it always leads to interesting conclusions. For instance, from reading these reviews of my work, several things came up which I'll take back with me to inform my future work. Firstly, that people are still overwhelmingly willing to read magical realism, and to read about small places and alternate versions of history, which kind of gives me a license to keep doing it. Also that all those hours I spent honing my sentences were probably worth it. And that there is an interesting split between readers who see my writing as serious, realist (although in a different tradition to the dominant realism of English-language literature) and focused on historical issues, and those who see my work as escapist and romantic. Obviously, I hope it can be different things for different readers, and I believe that there is no rule that says a writer cannot both celebrate beauty and seek truth, but it's interesting to see that division, and that both kinds of readers can like my work. Because I can't see Italy or Europe from the outside since I live here, and because most of the early readers with whom I checked my work are actually from small islands and small towns, like me, so were focused on the accuracy of how I depicted the small place, it is interesting to me that outsiders from great cities have such overwhelmingly strong cultural associations with the idea of Italy that they might automatically see the island on the book as more 'romantic' and 'escapist' than I do, or than it is for the characters. And that is actually pretty interesting and important to discover. Also, I have learned that there are a million different ways of interpreting the words 'beach read', but New York Magazine's, which encompasses Tolstoy, Marquez and F. Scott Fitzgerald with the definition 'a beach read needs narrative momentum, a transporting sense of place, and, ideally, a touch of the sordid', is pretty much perfect.

III
Now that The House at the Edge of Night is out everywhere in English, the book is no longer mine, and that's a good thing. Writing a book is always a slow process of losing. As you edit, and then watch the publicity process unfold, and then see the book in shops and reviewed in newspapers, the book becomes less and less yours and more and more the world's, until you bid it farewell and it goes away from you. So, honestly, I feel a little bit like a parent on their child's first day of school who has packed their lunch, dressed them in their new uniform, walked them to the gates and is now, finally, ready to let them go out into the world on their own. Very soon I'll be working intensively on the next one. This is right and proper, but the fact that I feel The House at the Edge of Night couldn't be in better hands is a big part of what makes me willing to let it go in the first place. And this is mainly thanks to the way in which my publishers, Hutchinson UK, Random House US and Doubleday Canada, as well as booksellers, librarians and readers, have supported, championed and advocated for the book so that I no longer feel I have to.

IV
I didn't realise until this fortnight that when you write a book, people will also let you write other things, and that this takes ages and is really difficult because you are not a journalist but is something you should probably say yes to. So I wrote this essay for LitHub, about how we support emerging writers through the long apprenticeship necessary to the craft, which I've wanted to speak about for the longest time. As writers of long-form work, I think we often feel powerless to engage in short-term debates - to write a book takes me two years, so watching events like Brexit or the sinister rise of Donald Trump unfold and not being able to say something coherent about it the way a talented journalist can is sometimes frustrating. But writing this essay has persuaded me that there are ways we can engage more immediately with the world, as writers of novels, and that we should probably do so more often. 

V
And finally, for one of the first times in my life, I also met some other writers. In particular, meeting Jennifer Close, Imbolo Mbue, Emma Cline and Martha Hall Kelly during this trip - four very different women writers, all of whom were kind and supportive - was a high point of the whole process. So, to finish, here's a link to one of my favourite moments, a panel discussion at Random House's Open House day with three of those writers. We found many points of connection and solidarity, and that's something I've carried with me back across the sea.

​I will keep you updated via my Twitter and Facebook page about what is going on this week, but for any readers who are already reading the book, I wanted to share a few special extras that my publishers have made to celebrate publication day. The House at the Edge of Night, to me, has always been a book about community, so from the beginning we wanted readers to feel like they were part of that community, as though we were all participating in a virtual book club where we could sit down together (or, via social media!) and connect across distances and borders over a shared love of stories.

First of all, this is a map of Castellamare, the island where the story takes place. It was quite uncanny for me to see this, because I'd spent so long picturing the island that to see it as a real, full-colour map was like watching it come to life for a second time. Castellamare is five miles off the coast of Sicily, south-east of Siracusa, in the Strait of Messina where the legendary Scylla and Charybis once stood, and these are some of the physical places where the story takes place.

This beautiful map is all the more remarkable given that this was the original map that I drew in my writing notebook three years ago when I first began writing the book, so my publishers really didn't have a lot to go on...

And secondly, if you are already reading the book and want to join the Castellamare community via social media, here's one way: with this Ambassador of Castellamare button. The story of the Ambassadors of Castellamare is genuinely one of the most remarkable things that has happened to me in the two years since writing this book. When my publishers first decided to publish The House at the Edge of Night, way back in winter 2014, only a very few people in the world had read it. First of all, I was a new writer, and publishing houses are big - not everybody reads or knows about every book, so word of mouth starts slowly. But in the case of The House at the Edge of Night something amazing happened: those first few readers began to share it with a few others, then Edel Rodriguez and Robbin Schiff's beautiful cover design got other people curious, and soon people in Penguin Random House who weren't working directly on the book had started reading it too and had begun to share it with with family and friends outside the publisher. A little while after that, this growing group of the book's very first readers decided to create a book club. Spontaneously, the Ambassadors of Castellamare were born. One of the highlights of my year was getting to meet the first Ambassadors in February, and I'm looking forward to seeing them again this week. As a writer, I believe and have always believed that to commit to reading a book is a huge act of generosity and open-mindedness on the part of a reader, and so the discussion which forms around a book should be a democratic one, which offers something to the reader beyond the story on the page: a group of people sharing a love of writing, reading and books in an open and kind environment, which is exactly what the Ambassadors of Castellamare are about. If you want to be part of the discussion, we'd love to have you!

I am very pleased this week to be able to share the first finished copy of the House at the Edge of Night to arrive with me from the US! I think it is absolutely beautiful. Books are so different when they arrive, finished, in your hands at the end of the publication process from the messy, incomplete manuscript which you hand in at the beginning. So much work and love has gone into this finished copy, and that’s mostly been the work of other people, who picked up where I left off, at the end of the writing process, and carried the book to the finish line*.
*Or else start line, depending how you look at it!

As you will have noticed by now, we have two separate but equal covers for the English-language edition of the book. This is intentional; usually each publisher will try to design something which fits with the culture of their country and which will be meaningful to their readers. So this beautiful design is the book's cover for the US and Canada. As soon as it arrives, I’ll show you the Canadian edition too. (A note here about international publishing: As a writer, my publishing ‘home’ is split pretty much equally between Random House US, Hutchinson UK, and Doubleday Canada, for different reasons. It’s a testament to each of those publishers that this approach actually seems to work, and work better than if I were published only in one country by one publisher).

As soon as I saw this cover, I knew it was the right one for the book: just like with the UK design, it was almost as though the book had existed somewhere out there in the past, and this was already its cover. At least, that’s the best way I can describe it: as feeling kind of inevitable, like déja vu. With both designs, it was almost uncanny to see the images for the first time and feel that the designer had captured something about the book which I couldn’t have expressed myself. For a long time, therefore, I assumed that this meant that the idea for the cover had come to the designers fully formed, in a stroke of inspiration. Instead, as I discovered, this cover, like the UK one, was the result of a very patient process of development over several weeks and months. It’s like writing, I guess – if you’ve done your work correctly, you will have covered your traces and made it look effortless, but worked incredibly hard along the way…

This beautiful design is by Robbin Schiff and the illustration by Edel Rodriguez. You can read more about Edel’s work here. I think this cover is completely unique and beautiful, and I hope you like it too.

And finally, in the spirit of sharing beautiful images, my publishers have launched a Pinterest board this week, where we are collaborating to create a collection of pictures related to The House at the Edge of Night: the places in the book and the research and writing process. It’s a very fun and creative idea, and you can find it here if you want to take a look at what I’m posting each day.

All very best,
Catherine

PS: An unrelated word about this week in news, and why I’ve chosen not to write about it. Like anyone British or partly British, uppermost in my mind at the moment, of course, is the misguided and worrying Brexit vote which occurred last Thursday. As well as this, there are many other things to make us feel sad and angry as European and world citizens right now, not least the very recent attack in Turkey. On this blog, I alternate between update posts where I tell you news of what I’m doing in my life as a writer, and short essays where I talk about reading, writing and how these intersect with the outside world. Occasionally, these intersections demand a response from us as writers. So I did think about writing an essay which would attempt to tackle the topic of Britain’s exit from the EU and the current situation more generally. But the truth is it takes me more than 48 hours’ processing time to engage with something meaningfully in words, and therefore I want to leave that for now. I hope you’ll understand. For British readers, if you want to discuss these issues directly, Twitter (@BannerCatherine) seems to me at the moment a more appropriate way of doing this because it is a space which seems to favour a plurality of voices, and there I am trying to share essays by various writers who have discussed these issues already much more eloquently and meaningfully than I can right now. Fellow Brits and fellow Europeans, please take care of yourselves and each other meanwhile. - CB

I

No writer begins a book out of a wish to dig over difficult, painful issues. Or at least, not for that reason alone. Books arise, usually, from one particular, personal conviction: we want to bring something to light, to illuminate characters and stories and places which we feel deserve to be written about - simply put, to tell a story. It is only much later in the process that the story finds its themes. Therefore, when I set out to write The House at the Edge of Night, I didn’t think that it would involve my writing about one of the darker moments in Europe’s history. Instead, I wanted to tell a story about a particular family and their bar. It was only as I traced the various threads of the story back to their roots that I became aware that the story dictated that at a certain point my characters would wake up in 1922 in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, and would be compelled to live in this Italy for the next twenty years. These are some thoughts about what it’s like to write historical fiction: about what it’s like to do the writer’s job, which is and should properly be the breaking of new ground, when that ground is problematic, contested, sensitive, or better left unturned.

II

Writing fiction about history is a strange enterprise. As the historian Antony Beevor has put it, ‘The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.’ My books aren’t exactly historical fiction – they are alternate stories of the past, most similar to the magical realist tradition or to family saga or to those British novels typical of the 1990s where the history is secondary and the characters central, like Birdsong or Atonement or Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Not about history, but about people living in it. And yet an encounter with history is an inevitable part of the writing process. The initial research alone takes me four months, and all of that is historical research. The past is where I find most of my ideas, and where the story begins.

III

And yet, historical research brings you face to face with the inadequacy of our accounts of the past. The times that came before us are mostly foggy and contested territory. To find a reliable account of life on Fascist prison islands, at a time when all the Italian newspapers were censored, I had to turn to American newspaper accounts from the 1920s and 30s, written in English, by survivors who had escaped to the States. To find this solution took a week of searching. And even when you’ve found a source, there are a hundred doubts about how representative that source really is. How much freedom were these voices given by the news editors who published them? Did the writers translate their own work? Did the editors? Were others with different views also given a platform? And so on. History is a battleground where conflicting stories struggle to be heard, and the narrator’s voice, problematically, can only represent one version of events. And yet fiction, implicitly, is also expected to be representative. The story that a writer chooses to tell about the past is assumed to illuminate some greater, transcendent truth. A fictional account is never just one story, as a factual account can be. It is also a story about what it means to be human.

IV

When I try, as a writer, to wrestle with history, it divides itself into three parts. Firstly, the part nobody is alive to remember, broadly speaking pre-1918. Secondly, recent history, the part of history I have personally lived through, which isn’t really the past at all but a sort of backwards continuation of the present. For some writers this is a decent stretch of time, but in my case it’s impractically short for research purposes, beginning in 1989. Then, third, comes the hardest part of all to write about: the years, roughly spanning 1918 to 1989, that I haven’t lived through but other people, still living, have, and about which, therefore, they have more authority than I do. These years are also, in many ways, the most interesting. They are close enough to be, as Eric Hobsbawm has put it, ‘the road that led us here’, the cause-and-effect backdrop of our present situation, and yet far enough away to also be an allegory, a mirror, a useful prism through which to examine present times. Because that, I have discovered, is why we write about the past at all, because it is the only reliable light by which we can illuminate our current predicaments. Except, it turns out, it’s not a reliable light at all but a light which flickers and changes aspect depending on how you behold it.

V

In Italy, not many writers, not even Italian-language writers, write directly about Fascism – it’s a topic which is often addressed subtly rather than head on. So to write about characters living through the Fascist era, in English, was to tread ground across which few other, more experienced writers had yet blazed a trail. To attempt to write about this time was to navigate a space whose main atmosphere was silence. At some point early in the writing process, therefore, doubt set in. Was I really going to write about this time about which, as an outsider, I could only ever hope to have an imperfect, clumsy understanding? There was a lot at stake here. Many of my extended family have lived through these years first hand. It was not an account I could afford to get wrong, to misrepresent, to alter – it was too important for that.

VI

In the end, however, the voices of the past have their own authority. I uncovered a multiplicity of sources as I researched, and gradually my priorities changed. Gradually, the aim became not to capture and understand but to evoke and represent, to step back and bring the disparate voices of the past to light – those who resisted, those who conceded and those, probably most of us, who trod some uneasy ground in between and waited for it all to be over. There was no need, I realised, for the narrator to pass judgement or attempt to summarise, to know everything about what happened. The very openness of the past is its great strength, because it already contains all possible stories.

VII

This week I received one of my favourite reviews of The House at the Edge of Night. It wasn't from a newspaper or critic; it arrived via WhatsApp, it was only a couple of sentences long, and it was from my father in law. He wrote that the way I had portrayed the mood of the Fascist era in Italy – its dilemmas, its conflicts, its ambiguities, its open-endedness – seemed to him exactly right. This, really, is a compliment not to the work but to the sources. It honours the first-hand accounts, the memoirs, the historical studies, the diaries written by those who lived through those remarkable times, which I discovered along the way. As a writer, that’s the most you can hope for in life and work. To step back, and to write about the inhabitants of the past in a way that effaces the writer as much as possible, which allows the voices of history to speak for themselves.