The Village of Wall is a wall between England and the kingdom of Stormhold. On the Stormhold side of the wall, the laws of faerie tales prevail; on the English side, those of physics do. Crossing the wall is forbidden, but young Tristan Thorne does it and discovers his true self, fi nds love and uncovers what happens when stars fall. Reading Stardust made me realise that the sparkling, frightening magic of fantasy could be brought into a straightforward historical novel, and that faerie- tales could be for adults. It inspired me to write a novel in which there would be not only a gate to faerieland, but in which faeries seemed to physically coexist with country squires and rationalist thinkers in the supposedly human world of 18th-century Oxfordshire.
Jack Wolf ’s debut, T e Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, is out now, published by Chatto & Windus
AMBER DERMONT ON DESIRE
The summer before I started university, I stumbled across Susan Minot’s Lust & Other
Stories at a bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard. Assuming that the book was a tale of naughty erotica, I picked it up as a joke to show to a friend. When I opened it,
I noticed an epigraph from Ovid: “Ah, I have asked too much, I plainly see.” Clearly this was serious literature. I sat down and began to read, hungrily consuming the entire collection. The title story ‘Lust’ is a detailed list, a catalogue really, of all the boys a young girl has dated during her time at boarding school. Though there is plenty of desire, there is little love or intimacy. This was the fi rst book that made me realise that writing about sexual misadventures at a boarding school could feel contemporary, fresh and true. The Starboard Sea is
set at a New England boarding school in the late 1980s. The bizarre love triangle that exists between the main character Jason Prosper and his best friends Cal and Aidan is informed by Minot’s fearless consideration of the dangers and heartbreak of adolescent romance.
Amber Dermont’s debut, T e Starboard Sea, is out now, published by Corsair
OUT NOW IN PAPERBACK AND EBOOK
love. MurDer. tiMe travel.
‘Ambitious and innovative… If you like your fiction tidy and predictable, look elsewhere.’ WASHINGTON POST