In the third of our encounters with authors shortlisted for the Guardian first book award, we whisk Alexandra Harris off to Cookham, the Berkshire village immortalised by artist Stanley Spencer, and ask what this famous eccentric had to do with the thesis of her book, Romantic Moderns. We visit the river where Spencer's Swan Upping at Cookham was painted, and the church cemetery which was the setting for The Resurrection, Cookham. Along the way we discuss the aesthics of villages, the importance of the parish to the English imagination and what cabbage had to do with modernism.
Plus we snatch a rare interview with the New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones whose new novel Hand Me Down World is published this week, and was the subject of our first Twitter book chat. He tells us how his title inspired the novel's unconventional structure, with Ines's story told from many different points of view, and why his protagonist doesn't really own her own story.
Reading List
Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson)
Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
Follow our Twitter book group on #HMDWchat
