This has been a busy and exciting month for me and Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves. On 1st March, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction longlist was published* [* I have since been short-listed and the winner will be announced in the middle of June]. I’m thrilled that Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves is on it and in such fine company. A long time ago, I went to university to study history but changed to English Literature in my final year. I have long given up feeling either the original choice or the change was a mistake – I definitely needed both. But writing Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves, which starts in 1940, travels back to 1913 and forward into the 1950s, definitively fused my love for writing fiction and reading history.
We had a lovely blog tour to mark the paperback which came out on February 1. I’ll post the reviews up soon on the reviews page. For this I wrote a number of blog posts about the novel and its contexts: the 1940 opening and the struggles over land in wartime Britain; Cornwall as a key setting; the black sheep family history behind the book; and my fascination with literary trials and how they impacted on the murder trial in Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves. 
I also did two interviews for the blog tour about the writing and research processes. With Cathy Johnson at WhatCathyReadNext I talk about an incredibly lucky meeting with someone who knew the real life characters on whom the novel is based. With Katherine Sunderland at Bibliomaniac, I share a trip I made to the Uffington White Horse (a key location), accompanied by my then young son who thought it a very long walk indeed.
Cathy was the first reviewer of the book when it came out last year and she has really rooted for it. I met Katherine live before I met her online at an event she was organising and she has been so generous with her excellent advice. Thank you to everyone else who participated in the blog tour or posted or reposted their views over this time.
I’ve given two very different kinds of talk about the book in London this month. The first was at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute or HLSI. I also teach a literature course there so it was nice to see familiar and friendly faces in the audience. One of the nicest things they do if you’re giving a talk is put your book in a beautiful display case – see below.
Second, I did a Q&A at Waterstones in Crouch End with my editor Juliet Annan. I was extremely anxious about both events (would anyone turn up, would I have anything to say etc. I also had a repeating anxiety dream where no one would tell me what I was supposed to be talking about and I couldn’t find the room where I was supposed to be speaking- incredibly boring and familiar but so vivid at the time! In the end, I enjoyed both but I don’t think my anticipatory self is ever going to learn this.
Last Thursday, 1st March, made a great change of focus. I got to interview Claire Fuller about her wonderful second novel Swimming Lessons and ‘A Book That Inspires Me’. Claire chose Shirley’s Jackson’s 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (of which I’m also a big fan) at Waterstones in Islington. It was unbelievably cold and very good fun just talking about books.
A quiet March now I hope, while I get on with book two and prepare for my residency at Gladstone’s Library. I’ll be staying there in April, reading, writing and giving a talk on 10 April called The Historical Novel – A Very Slippery Genre. So slippery that right now, I don’t where I’ll begin…
And finally, I’ve just changed the banner on my Twitter account to a photo of a letter sent to the ‘real’ Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves from the Ministry of Agriculture in 1941. They’re named together at Starlight Farm and everything seems so simple. It wasn’t of course, but I like it all the same.
