Although crusted in Scottish blood and sea-salt, this poem found its way into the world one afternoon over Christmas in a rented boat-house on the Norfolk Broads.

At Roane Head

for John Burnside

You’d know her house by the drawn blinds –
by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall,
the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry.
You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it
from the sea and from the brief light of the sun,
and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door
where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap.

A fork of barnacle geese came over, with that slow
squeak of rusty saws. The bitter sea’s complaining pull
and roll; a whicker of pigeons, lifting in the wood.

She’d had four sons, I knew that well enough,
and each one wrong. All born blind, they say,
slack-jawed and simple, web-footed,
rickety as sticks. Beautiful faces, I’m told,
though blank as air.
Someone saw them once, outside, hirpling
down to the shore, chittering like rats,
and said they were fine swimmers,
but I would have guessed at that.

Her husband left her: said
they couldn’t be his, they were more
fish than human,
said they were beglamoured,
and searched their skin for the showing marks.
 
For years she tended each difficult flame:
their tight, flickering bodies.
Each night she closed
the scales of their eyes to smoor the fire.

Until he came again,
that last time,
thick with drink, saying
he’d had enough of this,
all this witchery,
and made them stand
in a row by their beds,
twitching. Their hands
flapped; herring-eyes
rolled in their heads.
He went along the line
relaxing them
one after another
with a small knife.

It’s said she goes out every night to lay
blankets on the graves to keep them warm.
It would put the heart across you, all that grief.

There was an otter worrying in the leaves, a heron
loping slow over the water when I came
at scraich of day, back to her door.

She’d hung four stones in a necklace, wore
four rings on the hand that led me past the room
with four small candles burning
which she called ‘the room of rain’.
Milky smoke poured up from the grate
like a waterfall in reverse
and she said my name
and it was the only thing
and the last thing that she said.

She gave me a skylark’s egg in a bed of frost;
gave me twists of my four sons’ hair; gave me
her husband’s head in a wooden box.
Then she gave me the sealskin, and I put it on.

• Read another Henry James novel. Each year, I read a Henry James novel, so that eventually I’ll have read them all. 2010 is going to be the year of The Ambassadors. (Last year was The Bostonians.) 

• In the same vein, I’d also like to start reading a novel by Joseph Conrad each year. I’ve read Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Heart of Darkness. I didn’t really finish Lord Jim, though. So time to return to Conrad, and I think I’ll begin with Under Western Eyes in 2010.

So far, so good – more classics for me. But I also want to make sure that I’m reading in new genres. One of the resolutions from Twitter was: @paulineppp To read lots of different genres – and I can only agree with her.

• Inspired by Annie Murray’s recent post, I’m going to try a regional saga this year – I think A Hopscotch Summer is a good place to start.

• For most of my life, after being terrorized by a film called The Cat and the Canary, I’ve avoided the horror genre (I think the film is technically comedy horror, or one version is, but I was six years old and it was just plain scary). But I think it’s time to step into the dark, so I’m going to read a horror novel – can you suggest something? I’d like something that’s more of a chiller, perhaps with a supernatural element, rather than anything too bloody.

Another resolution from Twitter was: @john_gilchrist read a better balance of fiction and non-fiction, perhaps 50:50 for this year.

• I’m not sure I’ll manage a 50:50 split but I’ll aim for it. Recently, I’ve read a lot of English history, mainly biography. I think 2010 is the year to go on a Grand Tour of the Continent, so I will seek out more about France, Germany and central Europe. Having read and (mostly) enjoyed Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, I’m now interested to learn more about Czechoslovakia, before and after its formation.

Finally, one of my Christmas gifts this year was the collected poems of Philip Larkin, so I think the next resolution is:

• Read all Larkin’s poems this year, and perhaps a Larkin biography too.

@readandbreathe said she was going to read Anna Karenina and Proust this year. A very admirable resolution, and I wish you luck! I think I’ll save Tolstoy and Proust for another year.

What are your new year’s reading resolutions? Please do add them in our comments or tweet us @picadorbooks.

All right, let's give publishers a break - these are selling categories, a kind of shorthand. Unpack them a little and the picture is not simple. London and other cities are often called "centres" - but their centrality only seems in reality to consist of select pockets of a certain culture that considers itself in the loop.

I have spent the last couple of years writing about Nechells - the Birmingham neighbourhood also captured in Catherine O’Flynn’s Costa-winning novel, published by Tindal Street Press, brilliantly titled What Was Lost. Nechells, an old neighbourhood just east of the city centre, has long been poor, but people born there remember what used to be a solid working-class community. What was lost in Nechells? Houses, whole streets and neighbourhoods, people, industries, meaningful work. It has the biggest local-history society in the region and the older residents seem obsessed with preserving their memories of it - probably because so little remains. They seem delighted that anyone might want to write about it. Now it is a heart-sinking place of ring ways and tower blocks, centrally located but with an utterly marginal feel. Regional indeed - like parts of London. Regional seems then simply to mean somewhere in particular, whether Tower Hamlets or the Isle of Mull.

Where once there were streets... Nechells today (photo by Annie Murray)

Contrast Thomas Hardy’s evocation of place with J. L. Carr's strange novel What Hetty Did, which is set in Birmingham but provides such a vestigial sense of place that it might as well be almost anywhere. "It might as well be anywhere" is the antithesis of regional fiction, rather like expecting Heathcliff to break out in a cockney accent, or Edwin Clayhanger to wander into a shopping centre in St. Ives.

Someone once asked me whether my novels - "regional sagas" as the trade describes them - were Birmingham novels, or novels that happened to be set in Birmingham but which (it was implied) could easily be set anywhere. I quickly realized that the sense of place is non-negotiable. While it is true that many human stories are to an extent transferable between different settings, in regional fiction, the particular details and evocation of place, speech (a whole regional writing problem in itself), the air that is breathed, the rise and fall of the land, character of housing and work available are inextricably part of the atmosphere of the story. I have never heard a whisper of a clog in Birmingham. Mention metal-bashing, St. Martin’s in the Bull Ring or back-to-back houses and we are, unmistakeably, in the Brum of a certain era.

And that is what many people seem to hunger for, perhaps as a corollary of globalization: finding tell of the local, the particular, of our place. I have learned not to imagine that anything one writes is representative. Names evoke - of streets, neighbourhoods, parks. The local reader clothes these with their memories and associations. For the non-local there needs to be a touch more detail. But while the place is geographically real, it is also a site for the writer's imagination. Would anyone else have described the north-east and Jarrow quite as Catherine Cookson did, via the particular lens through which she viewed the world? Or the south, the real and imaginary Wessex of "Hardy country", his Christminster/Oxford overlaid with the doomy fatalism of Jude? The writer of regional fiction brings their individual inner world to this place, these people, in the hope that resonance and involvement might be found for the reader from anywhere.

Annie Murray's website is at www.anniemurray.co.uk

In January, Stephen Sartarelli gave us an insider's view on the challenges and delights of translating Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano.

February saw Michael asking why nominations for sci-fi literary prizes were looking more and more like the Man Booker shortlist.

We were very busy bloggers in March, including a week's focus on books from China. But the top post was all about food.

In April we had fantastic blogs from some of our authors and friends, including Anna Richards, Ellen Feldman on Scottsboro (shortlisted for the Orange Prize) and William Rycroft.

Six Oranges - our Orange Prize shortlist reading - happened in May. And Jonathan Ross picked his first Twitter book club selection.

Wossy's second Twitter book club pick, in June, was also a Picador book, Shalom Auslander's Foreskin's Lament, and Naomi Berwin posted three generations of her family's views of the book: part one, part two, and part three. 

In July, Travis Elborough lifted the lid on 3-for-2s: "Books, like disasters, wishes and forms from the HM Revenue and Customs come in threes these days. Or more precisely three for twos."

The Man Booker longlist was announced in August, and Sophie shared her thoughts on one of the contenders, The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.

In September, Michael drew a line in the sand and told us his new rules for reading. We all obeyed.

October saw Sandra wandering off down memory lane...again, and Maxine from Petrona shared her passion for translated crime fiction.

Things went a bit quiet in November, but we did still manage to note the turning of the tables. 

And now, December is nearly over. This month has been all about Cormac McCarthy on the blog: his typewriter, the film of The Road, and our gorgeous new covers for his books.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to everyone!

Photo: Santa Wreath by MwaO

For anyone who's not familiar with them, these novels tell the story of the Cazalet family and their lives during World War 2. Much of the story takes place in East Sussex, in the family home, Home Place, but London is a regular setting too. The series begins before the outbreak of war, and the first book, The Light Years, introduces the cast of characters and the overall situation to us, as the older Cazalets gather their family in Home Place and prepare to weather the war. Books two and three, Marking Time and Confusion, follow the story of the three teenage girls in the family - Louise, Polly and Clary - more closely. And then the final volume, Casting Off, draws all the family's strands of story back together again.

Howard's writing is simple but elegant, and her pacing and sense of drama are superb - the pages whizz past, and you just can't help starting that next chapter, or moving on to the next book, no matter which other books of the reading pile are calling out for attention.

In discussion with my wife, who was ultimately responsible for me reading this series, I decided that the dominant themes of the series were love and parenting. The story revolves around love affairs - in and out of marriage, requited and not - and parents being lost and found. Howard has a wonderful ear for children's speech, and it is the younger characters, particularly in the first book, who add great humour to the books; and they feed the main themes, as they are born, grow up, relate to their parents, and become parents themselves.

So, a true family saga that I think makes a very interesting contrast to John Updike's Rabbit series, which is another family saga with love and parenting as main themes (for this reader, anyway). A comparison is worth further exploration, I think... perhaps in 2010.

John Glenday reading poems from his stunning new collection, Grain.

Kim Edgar performing one of John's poems set to music.

Copies of Grain in the process of selling out at the packed reading.

Photographs by Ian Taylor

Secondly, I was concerned that casting Charlize Theron as the woman would give her character too much presence in the film. However, on reflection I think this was balanced fairly well. She was very convincing and her exit is just as cold as it was in the book.

Lastly, I wasn’t sure about how the ending would work. I was surprised to read that many had found the ending was hopeful and that the story had uplifting moments in the small fragments of humanity that remained. This was not my experience of the book at all as I found it incredibly nihilistic. I thought the book was a meditation on death and the way that individual survival instincts are destructive and are contradictory to the idea of humanity and moral values. Without giving too much away, the ending of the film was perhaps a little more hopeful than my reading and I would have preferred that it had been a little more ambiguous.

Overall, I found the film very moving and powerful. I don’t think the film will disappoint fans of the book and I’m sure that whilst it may be a little too dark to become a massive box office hit, it will receive the acclaim that it deserves come the award season.

Flora Reddaway is a film buff and all round good egg.

The Reading Fly by Evy Jokhova

Dulwich Dictionary by Finlay Taylor

Dictionary Story by Sam Winston

Read Between the Lines by Samantha Huang

Unique Artists' Books at KALEID editions, Unit 2, 23-25 Redchurch Street, London, E2 7DH
2-24 December 2009

Palin is as divisive a figure as it gets. Maggie Thatcher? George W. Bush? We thought we knew the script when it came to politicians splitting countries in half. Somehow Palin has conspired to take this polarising effect to a whole new level, with the opposing camps not seeing eye to eye so much as existing in totally exclusive space-time continuums.

Anyone keeping watch on the US book world cannot have helped but notice Palin's book, in the same way that anyone keeping watch on Earth couldn't fail to notice an inter-planetary collision with Venus. It's huge; America hasn't seen a tour like it since Led Zeppelin went nuts in their private jumbo jet in the 1970s.

All of this amounts to a big fat opportunity. The company making the most mileage however is a small start up, OR Books.

OR Books sell only direct to the consumer. They don't do bookselling in the ordinary sense. They do the web. They do ebooks, print on demand and already printed in various combos at differing prices. They don't do conventional marketing; they innovate online. They don't do retailers; they do their own shop, so they don't do returns or discounts or anything else that usually gives publishers a headache.

They don't publish many books. But they aim to time those books well.

So far it seems the formula is working. Their cheekily titled first book, a series of articles on Palin called GOING ROUGE (Palin's book is GOING ROGUE and has a remarkably similar cover) has, as one suspects was planned, received the kind of press coverage that only a political "traffic stopper" can generator (and I am not even talking Tony Blair).

Bold, innovative, brave and exciting publishing. What's not to like?