Laura Beatty’s debut novel, POLLARD, is now published in a beautiful hardback by Chatto, and I’m overjoyed that this entrancing yet unyielding book is lauded with the highest possible praise from Justine Jordan in The Guardian: “Beatty has a wonderful ear for voice, especially the voices of children, and the characters she constructs through Anne’s skewed perception are funny and heartbreaking by turns; but what is really impressive is how she weaves her human comedy with the most powerful nature writing…In Pollard, Beatty beautifully conveys the loneliness and the ecstasy of an unknowable character, and the charged, complex presence of the natural world around us. Both are too often only in our peripheral vision; she looks at them directly. This novel heralds an exceptional talent.”
And Olivia Laing in The Observer: “Like Nicola Barker, who she occasionally recalls, Beatty is drawn to the margins of society and to the misfits who congregate there…Pollard is the precise opposite of escapist literature, because it gives the reader back the world. This is just the sort of generous, provocative novel the Booker judges should cherish.“
Even though this year’s Booker judges did not choose to cherish POLLARD, I think it’s now undeniable that Laura Beatty, represented by Caroline Dawnay, has confidently grown from a biographer into a novelist of prize-deserving calibre. I hope this brave and moving story of a homeless woman who as a teenager runs away from her family to live by herself in a forest will now seize the attention of European editors.
I’ve just found out there are also amazing reviews for POLLARD in August 7th The Economist, which rarely reviews fiction at all: >”This is a moving novel, delicate yet powerful, whose unusual heroine charms absolutely… Anne, like a Swiss Family Robinson child picking up Pepsi cans, feels like an anachronism, and yet the environmental message is highly relevant.”
and also The Literary Review: “An enchanting debut… Beatty is a writer of extraordinary power, able to paint, in subtle colours of green and gold, the journey of our heroine, Anne, from her noisy wasteful family into the depths of the wildwood where she returns to nature…The other characters are shown in exquisite and shifting layers…Beatty is alive to every nuance of behaviour, and makes her simple heroine into an endlessly fascinating character whose affinity with the world around her is an example to us all.”
Meanwhile, a very different, but similarly stunning novelist, Beatrice Colin, is drawing strong praise from both sides of the Atlantic for her breakout novel, THE LUMINOUS LIFE OF LILLY APHRODITE, now out in the UK from John Murray and in the US from Riverhead/Penguin as THE GLIMMER PALACE. This was the first manuscript I read when I started working last year with Beatrice’s agent, Simon Trewin, and it still stands out as one of the most intelligent and dazzling historical novels I’ve ever read. There have already been pre-empts in Italy (Neri Pozza), Holland (Q/Querido), and Greece (Oceanida), and hopefully there will be more as these first fantastic reviews are trumpeted around the world!
The Sunday Times (UK): “The storytelling is masterful and the language magical. The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite is a rich book, in both its prose and in the strength of its characters, whose lives cross in the chaos of war and its brief, glittering aftermath.”
Book Page (US): “Captivating…Beatrice Colin’s irresistible novel, The Glimmer Palace, follows the eventful life of a Berlin orphan who becomes a rising star in the brand-new medium of the cinema…20th Century Berlin is just like Colin’s engaging main character: anything it wants to be and full of promise to be more… This is Colin’s third novel, and with a plot and setting so captivating, we can only hope it draws more notice than her first two.”
You can read more about Beatrice Colin, Lilly Aphrodite, and Beatrice’s earlier two novels, published by a small US publisher Toby Press, on her excellent website.
