The book of the summer

The audience listened with rapt attention as Alan Hollinghurst read an extract from his wonderful new novel, The Stranger’s Child.

Sitting in the wood-panelled Assembly Room at Oxford Town Hall, we all hung on his every gravelly-voiced word. Everyone, from the Waterstone’s chap charged with interviewing him (who'd read the book twice) to the two students sitting next to me, knew that we were hearing something special.

The Stranger’s Child, a vast tome stretching to nearly 600 pages, follows the lives of two families from the eve of the First World War, when aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance visits his Cambridge friend George Sawle, to the end of the 20th century. It was only published last week but it’s already been dubbed “the book of the year.” Every book reviewer worth their salt has put it on their summer reads recommendations, me included.

Hollinghurst, who won the Man Booker prize seven years ago for The Line of Beauty, told us that he began working on A Stranger’s Child in the summer of 2006 and it took him four and a half years to complete. He said he likes to get a “pretty clear architecture” of a book before he begins writing and never shows anyone a word till he’s finished. “I’ve never been a great one for research,” he added, although he spent a freezing cold afternoon stomping around Stanmore to get a feel for Two Acres, the country house that features in the book.

When Hollinghurst began his career as a novelist he had a day job at the TLS and wrote The Swimming Pool Library in the evenings. “There was a joy in writing it that I don’t always feel now,” he said. “I felt that I had a very good idea and that kept me going during the two and a half years of writing. My old friend Andrew Motion was an editor at Chatto & Windus so I showed it to him when I’d finished. He rang the next morning and said he wanted to publish it.”

Asked where his elegant writing style came from he admitted modestly: “It’s awfully difficult for a writer to say anything about their own style. I am not conscious of having a style. I try to write as well as I can, to write precisely and musically. To be too self-conscious about one’s own style would be fatal.”

PS: The festival season is well underway and my teenage son’s just got back from Cornbury (see above). He managed three hours’ sleep in three days, lived off a diet of burgers and pancakes (definitely nothing green) and arrived home looking exhausted and distinctly muddy. He wasn’t convinced about Cornbury’s headline acts before he went but has now turned into a firm fan of Status Quo. “Except they did sort of shuffle up and down the stage like old men,” he said. Which, I suppose, is precisely what they are these days.

My royal reporting career

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s 11-day tour of Canada and California has got me thinking about my own brief sojourn as a royal reporter.

Apparently more than 1,300 journalists are covering Kate and Will’s visit, including hacks from as far afield as China and India. My sympathies are with them. For a start, they’re having to be more fashion writers than newshounds. Knowing their Issa from their Erdem and their Mulberry handbag from their Anya Hindmarch clutch is absolutely key. But not only that, with the media showing endless images of cheering Canadians and beams from Will and Kate (see above), it’s tricky to fulfil the demands of rolling 24 hour news and be fascinating at the same time.

I spent a couple of years following the royals for the Evening Standard back in the 80s. Princess Diana was splashed across the tabloid front pages virtually every day – for dancing onstage with Wayne Sleep as a birthday surprise for Charles (he clearly wasn’t impressed), dressing up as a policewoman for Fergie’s hen night and taking William to his Notting Hill nursery school for the first time.

But my most vivid memories are from Charles and Diana’s Middle East tour of 1986. As the royal couple progressed through Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, lunching in the desert, going to the races and attending endless banquets, it was hard to come up with new stories to file. Daily Express columnist Jean Rook (the only other woman reporter in the press pack) even resorted to dressing up in a burka to see what women’s lives in Saudi Arabia were like. Meanwhile the rest of us got worked up about whether the Saudis had been offended by Diana wearing a dress that showed her ankles when they flew into Riyadh.

For a lot of the tour they both looked utterly miserable. But at that stage even seasoned royal-watchers didn’t realise the rot had set in. Most of us simply assumed the tour was too long and gruelling, that Diana was missing William and Harry and that once you’ve seen one falconry display you’ve probably seen them all.

The latest Lynda La Plante novel

Crime has never been my favourite fiction genre. I’m absurdly squeamish and hate reading anything gory.

But over the last three years I’ve become hooked on Lynda La Plante’s compelling Anna Travis stories. I was gripped the moment I read the first one, Above Suspicion, and have snapped up the rest the instant they’re out.

I’m in luck because the seventh in the series, Blood Line, was published last week and soared straight to the top of the hardback fiction charts. And yet again, despite the gruesome crime scenes, I can’t put it down.

This time round, Anna Travis has been promoted to DCI and is taking charge of an investigation into the case of a clean-cut young man who’s been reported missing. On the surface Alan Rawlins sounds like a loving son, dutiful boyfriend and kind-hearted friend, but when Travis begins to investigate she discovers a sinister web of lies and secrets. Blood Line is chilling, scary – and like the rest of the series, utterly compelling. I’m not always convinced by her dialogue but La Plante is a consummate story-teller.

La Plante made her name with ITV’s highly-acclaimed Prime Suspect, starring Dame Helen Mirren, but she’s also a highly-skilled novelist who weaves the horror of Travis’s day-to-day work with the machinations of her tangled love life.

Much of the success of the Anna Travis series hinges on the on-off relationship between the young copper and her charismatic boss, Detective Chief Superintendent James Langton. The two were briefly an item, but now Langton’s remarried, with two children, and Travis is mourning the devastating loss of her fiancé. Even so, there’s still a spark between them (Langton secretly admits he’d rekindle their affair like a shot) and their scenes are the best in the book.

It’s a mark of the Anna Travis books’ success that three of them have been adapted for ITV, with Kelly Reilly starring as Travis and Ciaran Hinds as Langton, and a fourth has been commissioned. The TV dramas aren’t half as good as the novels but they’re a sure-fire sign that La Plante is on to a winner with Travis and Langton. Hopefully there'll be more on the way.

PS: I don’t want to be a spoilsport about this but why is everyone being so ridiculous about the Duchess of Cambridge’s arrival in Canada? Today’s Daily Mail talks about how she’s “won the hearts of a nation” while a 14-year-old girl who turned out to see her said “this is a moment that will never be erased from my memory – not ever.” All Kate has done is look stylish (in three designer dresses) and smile charmingly. Surely our heroines in life should be women who have achieved a little bit more than this?

Game, set and... yawn

Am I the only person who’s bored rigid by Wimbledon?

It may be the world's greatest tennis tournament but I couldn’t care less about Andy Murray’s quest to snatch the men’s title or Rafael Nadal’s foot injury.

The two-week championships were ruined for me when I covered them as a news reporter. Instead of watching matches that kept me on the edge of my seat I regularly spent Wimbledon fortnight chasing news stories. The sillier they were, the better show you got in the paper. One year an American player called Anne White dominated the front pages of the tabloids for days. Not for her serving prowess or backhand skill, but because instead of wearing a modest white dress she wowed the crowds in a skin-tight white cat-suit. The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club were not at all impressed.

When nothing much else was happening, the press pack would resort to old favourites like royal visitors, ticket touts, corporate hospitality (yawn), rain (this was before that swanky new sliding roof) and the price of a punnet of strawberries.

If three or more journalists requested a post-match interview with a player the tennis stars had to talk to us. They'd pitch up at an unprepossessing bunker beneath the Centre Court and while the hacks from the red tops quizzed the players about their sex-lives, the more serious-minded American press retaliated with questions about why they’d hit a volley at break point in the third set.

After four or five years of this I was so exasperated with the game that I pleaded for a change of scene and got switched to court reporting at the Old Bailey instead. I’ve never watched a single Wimbledon match from that day to this, and I don’t intend to in the future. The rest of the country may be glued to action on the Centre Court, but count me out.

Sticking up for Liz Jones

Columnist Liz Jones is a mass of contradictions.

She’s forever complaining she’s broke, yet buys Prada, Bottega Veneta and most recently a top-of-the- range facelift. She splashes out on a rambling Victorian pile on Exmoor, complete with 46 acres, then gets fed up and puts it back on the market, saying: “It’s too big. I’ve got seven bedrooms and six bathrooms and about 400 animals.” She finds the men in her life exasperating, especially ex-husband Nirpal Dhaliwal, but is now canoodling with an ageing rock star. Incidentally, she refers to him as RS but he’s widely thought to be Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr.

As a result of her foibles (chronicled meticulously each week in You magazine) the 52-year-old writer comes in for more stick than virtually any journalist on the planet.

But even though she’s definitely high maintenance and at times slightly flaky, I’m a big fan. I’ve cut down massively on the Sunday papers over the years (just too much to wade through) but I turn to her page before anything else.

I occasionally get fed up with accounts of her huge menagerie of animals but even so, she writes so well and with such disarming frankness that her diary is a must-read. Apart from India Knight and Caitlin Moran, I can’t think of any other women columnists I can say that about these days.

PS: It was my birthday last week (coughs quickly when asked which one) and my lovely teenagers cooked an amazing family lunch. “I’d love Ottolenghi sort of food,” I told them beforehand, but never thought for a moment that they’d take me literally. My 16 year old son cooked chilled red pepper soup and my 19 year old daughter did roast chicken with saffron, hazelnuts and honey. Afterwards they turned to Nigella and made me these Happy Birthday cupcakes (above). They looked – and tasted – amazing.

Finishing novel number five - a work in progress

Jess Barker trudged purposefully up the footpath. It was seven-thirty on a chilly April morning and the new summer term was due to start in less than an hour. But before the frantic onslaught of lessons, meetings and marking, she needed time to think.

At least it was Thursday, so she had 7B, her favourite class, first lesson. Unlike some of the older children, the eleven and twelve year olds she took for English were a pleasure to teach. They still hung on her every word. And handed in their homework on time. In a year or two they’d no doubt be back-chatting, texting under the desk and mumbling “whatever” when she quizzed them about Romeo and Juliet. But right now they were lovely – all bright-eyed and eager to please. As opposed to classes 8D and 9E, who were – and she knew teachers weren’t supposed to say this – a complete and utter pain in the ass.
 
Jess barely noticed the stunning landscape as she walked. The hike across the fields to majestic Pendle Hill was usually enough to banish all her worries instantly but right now she was too deep in thought to appreciate its beauty.
 
These are the first three paragraphs of my new novel, which I'm halfway through writing. For the last few years the day job - freelance journalism - has taken precedence, but I'm determined to finish it by the end of the summer.
 
What really spurred me on was meeting novelist MG Harris - http://www.mgharris.net/ - in Oxford this week. She's the author of The Joshua Files - the hugely successful children's series about a boy searching for a lost Mayan codex. With their tightly-plotted storylines and distinctive covers, MG's books have sold all around the world. The first in the series, Invisible City, was the UK's fastest-selling children's fiction debut for 2008. As we chatted I told MG I'd had four novels published but hadn't finished my fifth. "Why not?" she asked. "You need to get on with it." So that's exactly what I'm doing. And if anyone's got any comments, I'd love to hear. 
 
PS: The first chapter is set in one of my favourite places in the world - Pendle Hill, in the wilds of Lancashire. It looks gorgeous in summer (see above), but in winter it's windswept and desolate. For three years we lived in a farmhouse on the side of Pendle and were snowed in on a regular basis. There was no central hearing, a temperamental solid fuel stove that went out if we left it for more than a couple of hours and a biting north wind that whistled round the eaves all year round. And yes, I was happy as Larry.