And I’ll be doing an event at the festival with my brother Oliver just before that. 5:30pm. Please come along to that too if you can.

50 copies of Addlands turned up in the post this morning. 50! That qualifies as News, I think.

Sultry does not cover it.

Here’s a post about The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner for Emma Balch’s A Book a Day in Hay blog. The post is one thing, The Stone Book Quartet quite another. That you really do have to read.

2nd to 7th of May this year Sanjida O’Connell and I will be running a Course in Historical Fiction at The Hurst Arvon Centre. The guest is Rupert Thomson, which is also great. Please mention it to anyone who might be keen to come, or come yourself, of course. Grants are available to help with the fees. The Hurst is lovely. Its pond is icy.

And from Horatio Clare:

This is the book we have been waiting for from Tom Bullough, a complete work of art, astonishingly beautiful, deeply moving and gripping from first to last. Addlands appears to be a tale of the Welsh borders, told through the battles, loves and losses of its Heathcliff hero, Oliver, but it is much more – the story of how the land made us all, and how the last century has changed us. Zola would have saluted it, and pressed copies on his friends.

Which is very very civil of him.

Niall Griffiths on Addlands:

Marrow-deep in its connection to place yet global in its thematic exploration and significance, Addlands does what literature should unstintingly aspire to do: make individual lives the essential stuff of epic. In crystalline, perfect, and stunning prose, Tom Bullough sites, convincingly and movingly, the entire history of these islands in a small section of Radnorshire. The presence of this book – in shops, in libraries, in homes, in the minds of its readers – will improve the broken, atomised world. It’s an astonishing work of words.

Million thanks to him…

Can’t help posting a pic of the Granta catalogue:

Here’s a proof of Addlands – and a wondrous thing it is too. Hats off to Granta; they do things properly. I will have to post something lengthy about this soon, but in the meantime, let’s just say that this is EXACTLY what it ought to be: cover, type, photos, genius editor/s. I want to dispense copies of it to passing walkers.

Six months now till ADDLANDS puts in a proper appearance, though proofs have been around now for a few months. I am coming to like long lead times. They give you a chance to draw breath and look around and start to get a sense of what your book looks like to other people. It always takes some adjustment, this bit – discovering that your characters exist now in others’ heads. Recently some writers I (greatly) admire have taken the time to read and comment on ADDLANDS, so I thought I’d put up their comments while I fiddle with a proper page for this site…

‘Addlands is a gorgeous and painstaking evocation of the land and those who work it. Bullough’s writing is a joy – disciplined, observant and musical, blissfully free of cliché’
Andrew Miller

‘Addlands is a mesmerisingly beautiful experience, a haunting fusion of person, place and history. It is a really important contribution to the literature of the Welsh borders.’
Gerard Woodward

‘Tom Bullough’s story of one family’s struggle in a world of continuity and change is beautifully imagined and exquisitely told – passionate, lyrical, profound, sad, and sometimes, too, when you least expect it, very funny’
Carys Davis

‘I greatly admire his writing, which both requires – and generously rewards – close reading. Its visionary intensity is always thrilling, often moving.
Through a succession of brilliant word-paintings a group of interrelated characters evolves over seventy years. He handles a complex narrative with seemingly effortless skill and evokes circumscribed lives without condescension.
Few sheep-farmers in my valley – not so far from Tom’s – have children willing to continue the way-of-life he celebrates. He bravely chronicles ancient patterns of living whose future is insecure…
The English-Scottish border had that great novelist Sir Walter Scott to map its history : the English-Welsh March is imaginative territory Tom Bullough in his turn is making into his very own magical kingdom. What will he write next ?!’
Peter J. Conradi

Many thanks to them all! TB