I first discovered Aly Monroe’s thriller, The Maze of Cadiz, back in the halcyon days of buying fiction titles for BCA. The rights team at John Murray, her publisher, were so keen to get more support for the first title in the Peter Cotton series of espionage-thrillers that I was lucky enough to read her novel in manuscript form.
That you may not have heard more about Aly says a lot about the stranglehold that one chain of bookstores currently holds over new writing in Britain than any in-depth analysis on the BBC’s business news. We have three branches of Waterstones in Edinburgh and so introducing Aly, a local author, to an Edinburgh audience just as her second novel is published, felt like we were breaking new ground.
The role that we hope to play in Edinburgh’s book-loving community in the future was perfectly encapsulated by an evening where Aly felt encouraged to be reading from her work to an audience who not only understood the historical context of Aly’s writing but who appreciated thrillers more intent on characterisation and narrative than the whizz-bang effects of lesser writers.
Aly’s second novel, Washington Shadow, sees Peter Cotton accompany Keynes’ post-war mission to the United States. Cotton has completed his term of National Service and is now a civil servant. His wartime experiences have changed him, his youthful naivety is beginning to turn to mature cynicism and now he must watch the century’s great economist beg for aid from the new master of the world even as others attempt to derail the democratic partnership. It is a time of new fears: the decline of empire, the rise of communism and the threat of perpetual war. Through solid research and a sure sense of time and place, Aly’s books capture a period of history with a fraught tension not seen since Eric Ambler.
Just a week later, we welcomed back the first author to appear at our shop, Edward Hollis.
Our first event with Ed, back in October, sold out very quickly and as we had more than enough people on the waiting list to sell-out again, we invited Ed back to give another talk. When you consider that Ed’s book, The Secret Lives of Buildings, is a book on architecture, then you may share our pleasant surprise at how popular his book has proven.
The Secret Lives of Buildings was long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award – but really, it should have gone on to be the eventual winner. The prose is so rich and so finally-tuned that it compares to the folk tales of Italo Calvino.
Ed is one of those extraordinarily gifted people who is able to share his passion for architecture in a way that audiences find infectious. Some in the audience found some of Ed’s opinions controvertial but Ed made an impassioned argument that rather than memorialise old buildings, we should celebrate when new or contemporary cultures adapt ancient places to modern uses. Buildings are nothing so much as the people in them and it is the magical heart at the centre of Ed’s book to which readers are responding so eagerly.