Our studio-mate David Pearson spent a large chunk of last year working on a frankly fantastic series of covers for Cormac McCarthy's books, which have recently been published. They're a distinctly visceral set of typographic designs, reflecting the novels' frequently dark content.

Read on...

First set >

Second set >

Why am I going on about all this in February though? Well, working in theatre there is something that happens before a show opens called The Tech. I’m putting it in capitals because it’s not only an incredibly important part of the process, where all technical aspects of the show - lighting, sound, costume, scenery, special effects - are put into place, but because it can last one, two, three or even more days during which the whole company is effectively imprisoned in a darkened theatre (I might be being a little dramatic there). In those circumstances a good read, or four, is essential and what can be really important is to find something that has nothing to do with the show. I’m about to tech, for the second time, a show set during the First World War. What did I choose to read the first time? Nothing topical but something a million miles away, Tim Winton’s coming of age surf novel Breath. Sun, sea and sex brightened up my day no end whilst we fought in the trenches. With the second tech approaching I’m wondering what I should chose as my companion. Any suggestions?

William Rycroft is an actor and is currently appearing in War Horse in the West End and blogs at www.justwilliamsluck.blogspot.com

Waiting for Columbus began as an exploration of the idea of obsession. Columbus, the delusional, wine-loving patient, first knocked on my door about 15 years ago. I was looking for a fictional way to explore the idea of obsession – a story hook. I opened the door of my apartment and there he was – disheveled, lost, desperate, and most importantly, obsessed. So I let him in. I started to write about this fictitious Columbus. I mean he had to be obsessed right? All the best minds of his day said it was too far to sail west to Japan and India but he was determined to go anyway. All the experts said he'd die out there. But I want to see what's out there, he replied. His venture was a long shot. If he hadn’t accidentally run into the West Indies, we wouldn’t know about Columbus – he'd just be a blip on the historical radar. He’d be a guy who got some boats, sailed west, and died somewhere between Spain and Japan. I wound up writing about 30,000 words. I would read the history books on Columbus at night, and then write in the mornings. I began to understand just how many books there were out in the world on Christopher Columbus and also, how many of them that disagreed. The scholars can't even agree on where he came from. Was it Italy, Spain, Portugal? To have this sort of myth and mystery around this historical figure is the perfect scenario for a fiction writer – there's a freedom and latitude. And I wanted to make it clear that my Columbus, and what would become the novel Waiting for Columbus, were works of fiction – not history, and not historical fiction. That's why inside the story Columbus tells to Consuela, the 21st century (at the time, 20th century) artifacts started showing up in the 15th century. Hairdryers, cell phones, cars, handguns all got dropped into the 15th century because the history was only the vehicle for the story, a way to unravel the obsession, a love story, and as it turns out, a narrative with a tragedy at its heart. Just past the 30,000-word mark, I hit the wall. I really liked what I’d written but I had no idea what to do with it. There was no narrative arc to it. Not yet. So, I created a new folder on my computer, saved the Columbus file, and moved on.

While Waiting for Columbus was gestating, I wrote and published short stories, poems, and two pretty fine novels – The 52nd Poem and Doubting Yourself to the Bone. I also met and married my wife and we have a daughter – currently "the-daughter-of-a-thousand-questions."

Three years ago, while driving to a poetry event, the narrative of Waiting for Columbus came. The story was there, at the top of a hill and around a corner. I knew how to tell the Columbus story. I pulled over, called my wife on my cell phone and asked her to write down everything I was about to say. Well, I probably barked at her and she wrote down everything I said. And then I was off…I’d like to think the book came out of me because it was the right time…and this may be true. The 15th century was a time of anxiety with constant wars, the Inquisition, the plague and so on. And the 21st century is, as far as I can see, equally anxious with the terror threats, wars, and pandemic scares and so on. It wasn’t so hard to shift back and forth those 500 years, at least emotionally.

When I write, I produce 1500 words every day for about four months. Admittedly, some days it's difficult but it's usually the days I struggle that I produce the most interesting stuff. After the four months I lift my head up and begin to weave the narrative together.

While I know my Columbus is no hero, he certainly has courage and I think a dogged and determined spirit. He is undaunted. It's this Columbus spirit of temerity and adventure – not the revisionist villain who inadvertently starts a genocide – that most interests me. My Columbus narrative ends with the acquisition of his ships. There are hints about the genocide that follows the Spanish discovery but for the most part, my Columbus is done once he gets his ships.

I want to end this blog with my thoughts on this Columbus spirit. If readers take one thing away from Waiting for Columbus, I would hope that it's something of the Columbus spirit of adventure and willingness to risk – especially in matters of the heart. Columbus is the perfect metaphor for a love story – and there are many love stories in this book.

When we meet our other, our husband, or wife, or partner we embark on a Columbus adventure. We invite this other person to come along on this journey with no real map, or compass, or clear end-point. We only hope that we will arrive safely, together, at some destination. That leap of faith is a Columbus leap. That's what made me fall in love with my delusional Columbus, and with his nurse, Consuela – because she was so willing to go there too.

And it's also there when a reader picks up a book. We open the book to its first page and begin to read with the same spirit of adventure, and curiosity. Every time we pick up a book and start to read, it is with that "Columbus" question:  I wonder where this is going to take me?

You can find out more about Thomas Trofimuk on his website - link >

It features our own Aleksandar Hemon talking about editing a collection of short European fiction. (His own most recent short story collection is Love and Obstacles.)

Anthea Bell also discusses her own translation work and is so interesting that I was inspired to buy Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday translated by Anthea Bell (and recommended by her)!

I've also caught up with all the wonderful design stuff on It's Nice That, watched James Geary talking about metaphor at TED, and looked at a few doppelganger covers.

What are your favourite things to look at the on the web? I'm always keen to find something new.

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 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.